iPage vs Bluehost

Ready to host your own website or blog, but not sure which hosting company to use? We've compared iPage and Bluehost, two of the top hosting companies, to breakdown the differences so you can make an informed decision. Both offer a variety of hosting solutions including shared hosting, VPS hosting, dedicated hosting and hosting optimized specifically for WordPress. Each company also offers a 30-day money back guarantee, so you can cancel your plan within the first month and get a refund (less the domain registration fee if you registered a domain). Given that these are two of the biggest names in online hosting, you will get pretty much the same level of customer support from both iPage and Bluehost, and that includes 24/7 phone, live chat and email support, online tutorials and a plethora of self-help resources. Bluehost goes a step further to offer one-on-one consulting sessions and site migration assistance, but these benefits aren't free – it'll cost you $99.99 a pop to take advantage of either one of these services.

The main differences come down to price and what you get for your money. Below are some cost comparisons to give you a quick overview of what you'll pay* for the various hosting plans at Bluehost and iPage.

*Costs shown are up to date as of the publish date of this article, and some prices may only be available through the affiliate links on this page.

Shared Hosting: These are great, affordable plans for beginners who are building their first websites or customers who just want basic website templates that are easy for anyone to use.

The iPage Essential Plan – Regularly $8.99/month; currently on sale for $1.99/month. After your initial term is over (either 1, 2 or 3 years), your hosting plan will renew at the standard rate. This includes one year of free domain registration (normally $15/year). All plans include a wide variety of add-ons that can quickly drive up your final cost, so it's important to figure out which are essential to your website and which you can do without. Some of the more popular options include Domain Privacy ($9.99/year), Automated Daily Backup ($12.95/year), Site Protection and Performance Accelerator ($19.95/year), and Google Apps for Work ($5.00/month).

Bluehost Starter Plan – Regularly $5.99/month; currently on sale for $3.95/month. After your initial 3 year term is over (1 and 2 year plans are $5.95/month and $4.95/month, respectively), your hosting plan will renew at the regular rate. This includes one year of free domain registration (normally $14.99/year). Bluehost also has scalable shared hosting options, so you an upgrade to Bluehost Plus or Bluehost Business Pro and get more websites, email accounts, storage, and many other perks. Like iPage, Bluehost also offers plenty of extras once you make it to the checkout page. Their prices tend to be a bit higher than iPage for similar features such as Domain Privacy Protection ($11.88/year), Site Backup Pro ($23.88/year), and SiteLock Security ($23.88/year).

VPS Hosting: These plans give users more control over their websites, added security, and a bigger percentage of resources from the server compared to shared hosting plans.

iPage Basic VPS – Regularly $24.99/month; currently on sale for $19.99/month (or $16.99/month for a 24 month contract). Their most basic plan offers 1 CPU Core, 1GB of RAM, 40GB of storage, and 1TB of bandwidth. They also offer Business VPS ($47.99/month for initial term) and Optimum VPS ($79.99/month for initial term).

Bluehost Standard VPS – Regularly $29.99/month; currently on sale for $14.99/month for the first month only. The Bluehost Standard VPS hosting plan gets you twice as many CPUs and RAM as the iPage Basic VPS plan, but includes 10 GB less storage. Users can upgrade to the Bluehost Enhanced, Premium, or Ultimate VPS plans and get additional server resources, but it can get pricey, as their most robust VPS plan costs $119.99/month after the initial monthly price of $59.99.

Dedicated Hosting: For customers serious about their web hosting, dedicated hosting gives users access to all of the resources of their very own server. This provides a greater level of security and allows webmasters the ability to fully customize and control pretty much every aspect of their website. However, it does require quite a bit of IT knowledge to fully utilize all of the benefits of dedicated hosting, and be prepared to pay quite a bit more for the additional resources and autonomy.

iPage Startup – Regularly $149.99/month; currently on sale for $119.99/month(or $103.99/month with a 24 month contract). Customers get the speed of 2 CPU cores, 4 GB of RAM, 5 TB of bandwidth and 500 GB of storage. iPage offers two higher tiers of dedicated hosting plans (iPage Professional and iPage Enterprise) that come with additional resources at your disposal. These are useful for established businesses with large volumes of traffic that need fast website performance and excellent online reliability to succeed.

Bluehost Standard – Regularly $149.99/month; currently on sale for $74.99/month for the first month only. Bluehost is currently offering a free upgrade on their Standard dedicated hosting plan that doubles the speed from 2 to 4 CPU cores and storage from 500 MB to 1 TB at no additional cost. The Bluehost Enhanced and Premium dedicated plans offer pretty much the same features as the equivalent iPage plans, and the prices are pretty comparable after the initial introductory rates are over.