Bluehost vs. Heroku Platform

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Bluehost
Score 4.8 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
Heroku Platform
Score 8.3 out of 10
N/A
The Heroku Platform, now from Salesforce, is a platform-as-a-service based on a managed container system, with integrated data services and ecosystem for deploying modern apps. It takes an app-centric approach for software delivery, integrated with developer tools and workflows. It’s three main tool are: Heroku Developer Experience (DX), Heroku Operational Experience (OpEx), and Heroku Runtime. Heroku Developer Experience (DX) Developers deploy directly from tools like…
$85
per month
Pricing
BluehostHeroku Platform
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
Production
$25.00
per month
Advanced
$250.00
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
BluehostHeroku Platform
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
Features
BluehostHeroku Platform
Platform-as-a-Service
Comparison of Platform-as-a-Service features of Product A and Product B
Bluehost
-
Ratings
Heroku Platform
8.1
43 Ratings
1% below category average
Ease of building user interfaces00 Ratings7.626 Ratings
Scalability00 Ratings8.243 Ratings
Platform management overhead00 Ratings7.642 Ratings
Workflow engine capability00 Ratings8.329 Ratings
Platform access control00 Ratings7.042 Ratings
Services-enabled integration00 Ratings8.041 Ratings
Development environment creation00 Ratings8.738 Ratings
Development environment replication00 Ratings8.637 Ratings
Issue monitoring and notification00 Ratings8.241 Ratings
Issue recovery00 Ratings8.438 Ratings
Upgrades and platform fixes00 Ratings8.443 Ratings
Best Alternatives
BluehostHeroku Platform
Small Businesses
Cloudways
Cloudways
Score 9.5 out of 10
AWS Elastic Beanstalk
AWS Elastic Beanstalk
Score 9.1 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
WP Engine
WP Engine
Score 9.3 out of 10
IBM Cloud Private
IBM Cloud Private
Score 9.5 out of 10
Enterprises
AccuWebHosting.Com
AccuWebHosting.Com
Score 8.9 out of 10
IBM Cloud Private
IBM Cloud Private
Score 9.5 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
BluehostHeroku Platform
Likelihood to Recommend
5.0
(19 ratings)
6.9
(47 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
-
(0 ratings)
9.5
(6 ratings)
Usability
9.0
(2 ratings)
9.2
(17 ratings)
Availability
4.0
(1 ratings)
8.0
(1 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
8.1
(6 ratings)
8.7
(19 ratings)
Online Training
-
(0 ratings)
6.0
(1 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
9.0
(3 ratings)
Product Scalability
3.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
BluehostHeroku Platform
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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Salesforce
Heroku is very well suited for startups looking to get a server stack up and running quickly. There is little to no overhead when managing your instances. However, you'll need a background in basic DevOps or system management to make sure everything is set up correctly. In addition, it's easy to accidentally go crazy on pricing. Make sure you're only creating the server instances you need to run the base application and set up an auto-scaler plugin to handle peaks.
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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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Salesforce
  • Heroku has a very simple deployment model, making it easy to get your application up-and-running with minimal effort. We can focus on our efforts the unique aspects of our application.
  • The robust add-on marketplace makes it easy to try out new approaches with minimal effort and investment -- and when we settle on a solution, we can easily scale it.
  • Heroku's support is quite good -- their staff is quite technical and willing to get into the weeds to diagnose even complicated problems.
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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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Salesforce
  • Large price jumps between certain resource tiers (2x Dyno for $50 per month versus Performance Dyno for $250). Free Postgres next jumps to $50 per month.
  • Marketing/Branding to non-technical stakeholders. As the years pass, I've had to fight more to convince stakeholders on the value of Heroku over AWS.
  • Improve Buildpack documentation. This is one area where Heroku's documentation is fairly confusing.
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Likelihood to Renew
Newfold Digital (Endurance + Web.com)
No answers on this topic
Salesforce
Heroku is easy to use, services a ton of functions for you out of the box, and provides a means to get a software product off the ground and managed quickly and easily. The tools provide allows a small to medium size org to move very quickly. The CLI tools provided make managing an entire technical infrastructure simple.
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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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Salesforce
Easy to use web based console and easy to use command line tools; deployment is done directly from a GIT repository. What more could you ask for? The one thing that keeps me from giving it a 10 is that custom build packs are almost incomprehensible. We used one for a while because we needed cairo graphics processing. Fortunately, I was able to figure out a different way to do what we needed so that we could get off the custom build pack.
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Reliability and Availability
Newfold Digital (Endurance + Web.com)
No answers on this topic
Salesforce
Heroku availability correlates pretty strongly to AWS US EAST availability. We had a couple of times where there was a Heroku-specific issue but not for the last 7-8 months.
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Performance
Newfold Digital (Endurance + Web.com)
No answers on this topic
Salesforce
The only issue that I ever have is that about 1 out of 20 deployments (git push) will hang and need to be cancelled and done again.
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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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Salesforce
I've used it for many years without facing any major problem. It's not hard at all to get used to it, it's documentation is outstanding and simple. We are close to 2020 and I don't think most of the existing companies or startups should still face old problems such as wasting time deploying code and calculate computing resources.
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Implementation Rating
Newfold Digital (Endurance + Web.com)
No answers on this topic
Salesforce
Be ready to pay a bit more than expected in the beginning if you're migrating from a big server. The application is probably not ready for the change and you have to keep improving it with time.
It's also important to consider that you can't save anything to the disc as it will be lost when your application restarts, so you have to think about using something like S3.
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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.
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Salesforce
Heroku is the more expensive option for hosting compared to some of the cloud platforms we investigated, but it's worth it for us because of the plug-and-play nature of Heroku deployment. We can be up and running in a few minutes and know with precision how much it will cost us each month to run the application, unlike Amazon Web Services where you have to go to great pains to configure it correctly or else you might end up with a shocking monthly bill. Overall, spending the time to configure Amazon Web Services or one of its competitors is likely the more affordable and powerful choice, because you have control over so many specifics of the configuration. But it also requires the burden of continuing to maintain and update your AWS instance, whereas with Heroku they take care of security fixes and platform upgrades. It's a great service and we are happy to pay the extra cost for the value-adds Heroku provides.
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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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Salesforce
No answers on this topic
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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Salesforce
  • It has been critical in seamlessly operating our platform with runs all of our programs.
  • It has been impressive with its ability to scale quickly which results in the growth of our work.
  • It allows for tracking of different features which allows for quick problem solving which saves us time.
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ScreenShots