DreamHost vs GoDaddy vs BlueHost - Shared Web Hosting Comparison 220

DreamHost and GoDaddy are 2 famous web hosting companies in the industry. Both of them offer the reliable shared web hosting with the high exposure in communities. Therefore, many customers have no idea how to choose the most suited one among them.

In the comparison, our editors have carried out a thorough and comprehensive comparison among DreamHost and GoDaddy, based on price, performance, features, and customer service, helping you to make the right decision.

DreamHost

DreamHost is a veteran on the market, hosting a large number of domains all over the world. Recently, however, we have received some negative feedbacks about the inconvenience of DreamHost customer support. The company only provides e-mail support which is not very efficient. Our editors have sent an enquiry about how to disable CloudFlare caching for a single sub-domain, and received the response after a couple of hours with a complicated answer. If customers want to contact support staffs via toll-free phone call and live chat, they need to pay $9.95/mo extra.

GoDaddy

GoDaddy has done a good job on domain name registration service, but not good to offer a reasonable hosting package with is balanced between cost, features and performance. The company has 3 shared hosting plans named Economy, Deluxe, and Ultimate. The Economy Plan is the cheapest one, but only allows 1 website on 1 account, 10 database, 100 e-mail addresses, and 100GB disk space. The Ultimate Plan is rich-featured, but charges customers as high as $ 14.99/mo.

In fact, the shared web hosting service from both DreamHost and GoDaddy are not the best cost effective choices. DreamHost is expensive, while GoDaddy is offering too many services and the focus is not completely on shared. In this case, we include another branded web host BlueHost in this comparison.

BlueHost

BlueHost has been in the shared web hosting industry for more than 10 years, serving more than 2,500,000 users worldwide. It utilizes the latest advanced technologies to ensure website uptime and speed, such as dual quad performance servers, first-class datacenter, Resource Protection, CPU and I/O Segregation technology, etc. Besides, the company offers a group of professional technical support staffs who are accessible 24/7/365 through hotline, e-mail and live chat.

Price & Value

The effective price of DreamHost is much more expensive than GoDaddy and BlueHost as the following table.

The price of DreamHost is not very budget-friendly, starting at $8.95/mo with some common features. As the shared web hosting is starting around $5/mo averagely, DreamHost is a little bit expensive for individuals and small businesses.

GoDaddy has introduced a 50% discount which allows customers to purchase starting at $2.99/mo instead of the original price of $5.99/mo. This rate is 100% cheaper than the rate offered by DreamHost and BlueHost. However, the price value of GoDaddy is very low for many of the useful features are limited or come with additional charges.

Compared with the other 2 web hosts, BlueHost is cost effective. The company sets the price starting at $3.49/mo after a compelling discount using this promotional link, with a large number of attractive benefits, such as unlimited domain names & bandwidth & disk storage, free domain registration, free $150 adverting credits, anytime money back guarantee, etc.

Performance

The uptime and page loading speed are essential for success and popularity of a website. Therefore, our editors have tested the performance of WordPress sites hosted with the 3 companies. As a result, BlueHost guarantees a 99.9% hosting uptime, and is 56% faster than DreamHost and 145% faster than GoDaddy. Read the server response chart as below.

Usability

Both DreamHost and GoDaddy provide an own custom control panel which is not as user-friendly as cPanel, because the expensive cPanel license costs $425/year/server. Some new beginners with these 2 companies may feel complicated to manage their websites and online data.

BlueHost offers the powerful and easy-to-use cPanel control panel which provides an understandable graphical interface and automation tools. Besides, the company has developed a 1-click auto installer called SimpleScripts, allowing customers to install more than 150 scripts by simply filling a web form, including Joomla, Drupal, and WordPress.

Conclusion

It is true that all of the 3 companies are well-known and specialized in offering web hosting service, but we highly recommend BlueHost for the affordable price, rich features, 100% uptime, fast page loading speed, and helpful support staffs.

Since 2010, the sister site BestHostingSearch.NET has received 359 BlueHost customer reviews. Based on the statistics, 99.7% of the customers are happy with the overall hosting service at BlueHost.