Bluehost vs. DigitalOcean

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Bluehost
Score 5.5 out of 10
N/A
Bluehost, headquartered in Orem, Utah, offers website hosting. Bluehost also offers managed WordPress hosting, with optional SEO and marketing tools for WordPress plans.
$19.95
per month for 36 month term
DigitalOcean
Score 8.3 out of 10
N/A
DigitalOcean is an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform from the company of the same name headquartered in New York. It is known for its support of managed Kubernetes clusters and “droplets” feature.
$5
Starting Price Per Month
Pricing
BluehostDigitalOcean
Editions & Modules
Shared WordPress Hosting
$3.95-$16.99
per month
Shared Web Hosting
$3.95-$26.99
per month for 36 month term
eCommerce - WooCommerce Hosting
$15.95-$49.95
per month, 1 month to 36 month terms available
Managed WordPress (beta)
$19.95
per month for 36 month term
VPS Hosting
$19.99 - $119.99
per month
Blue Sky Live WordPress Support
$29.00-$149.00
per month
Dedicated Hosting
$79.99-$209.99
per month
1GB-16GB
$5.00
Starting Price Per Month
8GB-160GB
$60.00
Starting Price Per Month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
BluehostDigitalOcean
Free Trial
NoNo
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
BluehostDigitalOcean
Considered Both Products
Bluehost
Chose Bluehost
Bluehost's VPS offering gives me full control over my container which I don't get with DreamHost. The size of the container is much more desirable for hosting multiple products, over and above DigitalOcean, and the control panel for Bluehost is far more intuitive than AWS'.
DigitalOcean
Chose DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean is an inexpensive product as compared to other products available in the market. The UI is easy and the beginner can also understand the UI with the step by step guide. It provides a lot of custom features and the user needs to pay only for what they are using. …
Chose DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean and ServerPilot work extremely well together. As for other hosting solutions I feel like I have moved on to the best choice available with DigitalOcean. Times change, and DigitalOcean just feels like the next step in the evolution of hosting providers and I for one …
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
BluehostDigitalOcean
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS)
Comparison of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) features of Product A and Product B
Bluehost
-
Ratings
DigitalOcean
8.2
31 Ratings
1% above category average
Service-level Agreement (SLA) uptime00 Ratings9.026 Ratings
Dynamic scaling00 Ratings8.228 Ratings
Elastic load balancing00 Ratings7.220 Ratings
Pre-configured templates00 Ratings9.325 Ratings
Monitoring tools00 Ratings7.730 Ratings
Pre-defined machine images00 Ratings8.729 Ratings
Operating system support00 Ratings7.729 Ratings
Security controls00 Ratings7.728 Ratings
Automation00 Ratings8.02 Ratings
Best Alternatives
BluehostDigitalOcean
Small Businesses
Cloudways
Cloudways
Score 9.5 out of 10
Linode
Linode
Score 9.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
WP Engine
WP Engine
Score 9.2 out of 10
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.1 out of 10
Enterprises
Pantheon
Pantheon
Score 8.4 out of 10
SAP on IBM Cloud
SAP on IBM Cloud
Score 9.1 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
BluehostDigitalOcean
Likelihood to Recommend
5.0
(19 ratings)
8.6
(31 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(2 ratings)
Usability
9.0
(2 ratings)
8.6
(6 ratings)
Availability
4.0
(1 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
8.1
(6 ratings)
8.8
(9 ratings)
Product Scalability
3.0
(1 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
BluehostDigitalOcean
Likelihood to Recommend
Newfold Digital (Endurance + Web.com)
Bluehost is a decent all-around choice for web hosting with professional web development and domain management features that are particularly ideal for WordPress websites and blogs. They have a good reputation within the industry as a company that invests heavily in new technology and platform innovation. Bluehost has made a lot of improvements to customize their back-end administration (AMP & control panel) by working to improve the usability and design of the browser interface. Bluehost is primarily focused on customers who use WordPress and we would recommend either their hybrid cloud or managed WordPress platform, which provides everything that you need to build and maintain a popular website. All in all, Bluehost is a well-established brand that continually improves its hosting products, regularly upgrades their data center hardware, and is generally considered a leader in the development of new cloud hosting platform services.
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DigitalOcean
DigitalOcean is a powerful tool with respect to the services and pricing that it offers. It is easier than other products and also provides servers that are inexpensive with great performance. DigitalOcean also offers additional add-ons such as additional IP addresses, scheduling of backups, etc. One of the best advantages is that it is efficient and is open source. Although, it is suited for a firm that is looking to cut down cost. Also, it is not suited for an organization where the dev/platform/DBA team is less experienced.
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Pros
Newfold Digital (Endurance + Web.com)
  • Customer service/tech support is simply top-notch. Being able to pick up the phone, get help, and not get charged for it is rare in the tech-support world.
  • Their Dashboard/C-panel has a wide selection of popular tools and options to make website design and all that goes with it very easy. Lots of choices; they are more than a simple hosting service.
  • Keeping their tools up-to-date. I never have to worry about upgrades or having the latest features; it just happens automatically!
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DigitalOcean
  • DigitalOcean provides some of the best cost-to-value services available
  • The DigitalOcean cloud console is very intuitive and easy to navigate
  • DigitalOcean has great support for Docker and other dev ops tools like Terraform.
  • DigitalOcean iterates quickly and provides cutting edge features for organizations that want to keep up with the latest and greatest dev ops tooling
  • DigitalOcean has a great developer community and numerous support docs/tutorials
Read full review
Cons
Newfold Digital (Endurance + Web.com)
  • Setting up wasn't difficult but I think for some having tutorial videos would have been better than screenshots.
  • Provide more than one free domain on the Plus plan.
  • Offer site migration - not an option I saw when I signed up.
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DigitalOcean
  • Some products/services available on other Cloud providers aren't available, but they seem to be catching up as they add new products like Managed SQL DBs.
  • While they have FreeBSD droplets (VMs), support for *BSD OSs is limited. I.e. the new monitoring agent only works on Linux.
  • There are no regions available on South America.
  • They don't seem to offer enterprise-level products, even basic ones as Windows Server, MS SQL Server, Oracle products, etc.
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Likelihood to Renew
Newfold Digital (Endurance + Web.com)
No answers on this topic
DigitalOcean
I've been very happy with it for my purposes and I plan to continue to use DigitalOcean for the foreseeable future!
Read full review
Usability
Newfold Digital (Endurance + Web.com)
I use Wordpress for my website on Bluehost, so I already know how it works and happy with it. I gave it this rating as I love the fact that If you do plan on creating multiple websites on Bluehost you'll be able to create specific login access for each website sites making it less likely to enter into the wrong website accounts. Which makes it even easier to manage client websites if you plan to create and host websites on behalf of your clients.
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DigitalOcean
I honestly can't think of an easier way to set up and maintain your own server. Being able to set up a server in minutes and have fully control is awesome. The UX is incredibly intuitive for first-time users as well so there's no reason to be intimidated when it comes to giving DigitalOcean a shot.
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Reliability and Availability
Newfold Digital (Endurance + Web.com)
No answers on this topic
DigitalOcean
Have not found a single second of down time myself. Superior availability.
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Performance
Newfold Digital (Endurance + Web.com)
No answers on this topic
DigitalOcean
Very quick response and high performance, you have to fine tune configurations on your machines though.
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Support Rating
Newfold Digital (Endurance + Web.com)
They are quick, easily reached, and can usually solve problems on the first try. However I noticed I had to go to customer support more often than with other providers, whether that was things breaking more often or if their customer support couldn't fix things on the first try. But in most scenarios, they are fine.
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DigitalOcean
They have always been fast, and the process has been straight-forward. I haven't had to use it enough to be frustrated with it, to be honest, and when I have an issue they fix it. As with all support, I wish it felt more human, but they are doing aces.
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Alternatives Considered
Newfold Digital (Endurance + Web.com)
Bluehost did not stack up against HostGator; in fact, HostGator was where we ended up migrating after we realized Bluehost was not for us. Bluehost is not geared toward businesses, especially ones like ours that have a very customized site. HostGator allowed us the customization that we needed, and their prices were terrific.
Read full review
DigitalOcean
Amazon has a very complex UI and many products to offer. They haven't polished up their UI and it has a much greater learning curve compared to DigitalOcean. However, Amazon Web Services (AWS) does have more comprehensive cloud computing services, which forces some companies to migrate their backend and other services to AWS as they scale up.
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Scalability
Newfold Digital (Endurance + Web.com)
The website is slow. The speed is not reliable. Sometimes, sites would go down without warning. You would have to get a VPS to get consistent speed. If you have small website as a hobby, then Bluehost will be sufficient. Otherwise, I recommend looking for something more fast. Storage is good, but speed is lacking
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DigitalOcean
Great scalability, you can start with small plans and move up to premium features at a very good price.
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Return on Investment
Newfold Digital (Endurance + Web.com)
  • It allowed me to get my website up and running and sell services.
  • It is fairly low cost, so it was easy to recoup my investment.
  • Having to pay for a whole year upfront made it take a little longer to get the return on my investment.
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DigitalOcean
  • With DigitalOcean, I've been able to move all my sites to https using my own implementations of SSL with LetsEncrypt.
  • Since moving my sites to DigitalOcean, my hosting plan costs less than 40% of what I paid for similar hosting from Site5.
Read full review
ScreenShots