BlueHost vs Small Orange - Which Is Better in 2021?

With more than a decade’s experience in this industry, both A Small Orange and BlueHost are reliable and affordable web hosting providers. Now, the two companies host a lot of websites and receive numerous awards. Under this condition, people may wonder which one is more cost-effective. To find the answer, our professional editors have in-depth reviewed the two company in regard to their reputation, price, features, performance, and customer service.

According to real customer feedbacks, both companies achieve good reputation. However, when compared them in detail, BlueHost is more reputable. For intuitive reading, we have made a reputation comparison table in below.

Price

A Small Orange offers 5 plans including Tiny, Small, Medium, Large and Super. All of them are featured differently with various prices, ranging from $2.92/mo to $30/mo. On the other side, BlueHost only provides a single all-in-one package that is pricing at $6.99/mo regularly. Now, the company offers a 44% discount that cut the price down to $3.95/mo. All the customers can get this privilege by visiting this exclusive promotion link.

Both companies provides 100% money back guarantee. However, the difference lies in the refund duration. BlueHost provides anytime money back while A Small Orange only offers 90 days’ time. Compared the two, the former is more worry-free and risk-free. Moreover, both credit cards and PayPal are acceptable for both company which endow the purchase with freedom and security.

Features

To be honest, the two companies provide rich-featured hosting solutions. For example, customers can get unlimited MySQL databases, FTP accounts and subdomains. Besides, Perl, Python, Ruby on Rails and many other features are also provided. In order to help webmasters popularize their websites, they offer advertising credits including Facebook, Google AdWords, Yahoo and many more.

Both BlueHost and A Small Orange choose to apply the user-friendly cPanel which is welcomed by millions of people whereby its graphical icons and easy-to-use interface. To simplify the installation process of many useful scripts such as WordPress, Drupal and Joomla, both companies invest a lot of money to develop their 1-click installer, which can help people set up their websites within several minutes with ease.

However, when concerning some important features like storage and monthly bandwidth, A Small Orange offers the limited ones. For those who need more space and bandwidth, they need to upgrade their plan and accordingly pay additional fees.

Performance

Both BlueHost and A Small Orange are confident enough to guarantee at least 99.9% uptime. The reason they achieve this is because both companies utilize quality servers and state-of-the-art data centers. For instance, BlueHost uses 100% Dell branded web servers operating CentOS 6 to make sure a high level of reliability and security. Besides, the company also utilizes the special I/O CPU segregation technology to eliminate the possibility that websites influence each other negatively.

To know the true situation of the companies’ performance, our editors have set up two new websites hosted with them for a month. As a result, the server response time of BlueHost is 320ms on average while A Small Orange achieves 593ms. Note that both websites are filled with pictures and plugins.

Customer Service

BlueHost and A Small Orange put a lot of importance on technical support for this is an essential component of excellent hosting service. Both companies offer support 24 hours a day and 7 days a week which gets people out of trouble whenever problems appear.

Besides, the two companies provide their support through various channels such as toll-free phone call, live chat and email. People with emergent problems can get instant help by phone calls while people with sophisticated ones can get help through live chat and email.

What’s more, they recruit support staffs with caution and strict criteria. As a result, all of these people are professionals in this filed. With outstanding employees, anytime support, and multiple channels, the companies is able to solve problems in an efficient way.

Conclusion

According to the factors we have reviewed, both BlueHost and A Small Orange are reliable and reputable web hosts. However, when concerning budget-friendly price, unlimited bandwidth and unlimited space, BlueHost is a better choice.