It’s time to face the unavoidable: you need a proper website, mailing and a place to host both. If you want to succeed in your business online, you need a professional site for your brand.
However, when it comes to hosting, things can be quite confusing for beginners. There are so many ways to host your site, not to mention so many hosting platforms!
Today, in this post, we’re going to make it easier for you.
We’ll dive into two popular hosting providers: Fasthosts and Bluehost. We’ll compare their key features, pricing, pros and cons while explaining a bit of how everything works. At the end, we’ll find out which one is best for you.
Fasthost VS Bluehost
Fasthosts
Fasthosts was founded by Andrew Michael in 1999 and it’s currently based in Gloucester, England. Interestingly, the company was launched by then-17-year-old Andrew Michael as a part of his school project.
Nowadays, they have more than 10,000 servers hosted across their UK data centers and over 1.1 million domains registered.
Bluehost
Bluehost is a big website hosting provider that has worked closely since 2005 to create a hosting platform ideal for WordPress websites. It has data centers in the US and worldwide to meet regional needs for top performance.
Like most host providers, its support availability is great, they answer 24/7 via phone, chat and email.
Key features
Hosting a website
Fasthosts and Bluehost offer WordPress hosting and web hosting plans. If you already have a website, you don’t have to worry, since the migration is free.
Bluehost’s default web hosting plan includes shared hosting services which means your website will be on a server with other sites.
However, like Fasthost, they also have cloud hosting, dedicated hosting and VPS. We’ll talk more about them in a minute.
Bluehost is also prepared for sellers. You can host your WooCommerce store with them for only $26.99 per month. You’ll be able to host up to 50 websites and access the AI tools.
Domain Registration
Both Fasthosts and Bluehost offer a free domain for the first year on all their plans. Plus, buying a domain with them is a breeze: you can search for it and purchase it within minutes.
Dedicated hosting
If your hosting services are falling short of managing high traffic, processing or storage capacity, it might be time to purchase a dedicated server. Dedicated hosting gives your website an entire server for itself and can handle large amounts of traffic.
Fasthosts lets you choose between four data center locations: the UK, Germany, Spain and the United States. Bluehost, however, doesn’t let you choose, although they have data centers across the globe.
On the other hand, Bluehost gives you multiple cPanel accounts. Standard plans come with 5 cPanel accounts, while our Premium plan comes with 50 cPanel accounts.
VPS
VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. This means you’ll have a website hosting environment that allows for resources such as RAM and CPU to be dedicated to your account.
Both Bluehost and Fasthosts offer VPS hosting, but overall, Fasthosts is much more cost-effective.
Bluehost focuses on big plans that go from 100GB to 450GB of NVMe storage and range between $65 per month and $140 per month.
In contrast, Fasthosts’ highest plan costs £46 and includes 480GB of NVMe storage.
Email Hosting
Probably one of the main differences between Fasthosts and Bluehost is their email plans. While Bluehost offers Google Workspace hosting, Fasthosts supports Microsoft Office 365.
Moreover, Fasthosts only has one plan for £12.49 per month, which includes 1TB of OneDrive cloud storage.
In contrast, Bluehost gives you three plans. The closest in pricing to Fasthosts’ is $12 per month and it has 2TB of Drive cloud storage per user.
Artificial Intelligence
Like most website builders, Bluehost offers AI website creation, which allows you to accelerate the setup, publish faster and get the exact site you want. Simply answer a few questions and watch your site take shape.
Fasthosts, on the other hand, doesn’t offer any sort of AI. If you want to create a website with them, you’ll have to do it the old-fashioned way. That is, choose a template, add your content and photos and launch it.
You can start building for £11 per month. If you need unlimited storage, you’ll have to go with the £15 per month plan.
Languages
Fasthosts is only available in English, while Bluehost’s dashboard is multilingual.
Eco-friendly hosting
Now, I don’t know about you but climate change worries me so it’s relieving to see companies taking some action to reduce their carbon footprint.
In this case, both Fasthosts and Bluehost pride themselves on offering green hosting services. According to Fasthosts, their data centers are powered by 100% renewable energy. Plus, over the past 5 years, they’ve reduced their energy consumption by more than 15%.
Meanwhile, Bluehost saves energy by using outdoor air to cool its data centers.
Other features
Fasthosts has a Partner Program that allows you to advertise your products, services and skills to a whole new audience. Their Gold Partners get a named dedicated account manager who will be there to work with them and help them get the most out of their products.
Bluehost doesn’t offer anything similar. On the contrary, instead of providing you a platform to advertise your brand, they offer you different ways to hire professionals to help you in your digital marketing journey.
You’ll need to request a consultation to learn about their costs.
Support and resources
Fasthosts has guides, a blog with weekly updates, a business hub and a YouTube channel, all to help you get started with the platform and succeed in your business. Support is available 24/7 via live chat, phone or by submitting a ticket.
Similarly, Bluehost has a knowledge base, webinars, an Academy, a blog and a YouTube channel updated weekly. You can get in touch with them 24/7 via live chat or phone.
I can say from firsthand experience that both customer support teams are excellent, quick and kind.
Pricing
Fasthosts has three paid plans for WordPress hosting:
- WP Go: £6 per month. It includes 1 WordPress site, 25GB of storage and a free domain for a year.
- WP Plus: £8 per month. Get malware scanning and 99.99% SLA uptime.
- WP Advance: £19 per month. Host up to 10 WordPress sites and join the partner program.
Fasthosts also has a referral scheme that allows you to earn credit by referring its services to your friends. When they use the referral link, they also get a 1-month free trial on one of Fasthosts products.
Bluehost has four premium plans:
- Basic: $11.99 per month. It includes AI site creation tools, 10 websites and a free domain your first year.
- Choice plus: $21.99 per month. Access daily website backups and build up to 50 websites.
- Online store: $26.99 per month. It includes automated real-time backups with Jetpack and a WooCommerce auto-install.
- Pro: $28.99 per month. Get 100 GB SSD of storage and build up to 100 websites.
Fasthosts Pros and Cons
Pros
Fasthosts is a very affordable option, not only you can do a lot with it for only £6 per month but they also help you save money with their referral scheme. Plus, they have Reseller Hosting, which allows you to make money selling their products.
Cons
A big con of Fasthosts is the absence of Artificial Intelligence tools. Nowadays, even WhatsApp has AI features for free, it’s kind of odd Fasthosts doesn’t include some level of website builder assistant to make customers’ lives easier.
Bluehost Pros and Cons
Pros
WordPress recommends Bluehost as its number one web hosting provider, which is no small thing to say.
It also provides AI technology inside the WordPress hosting plans to easily create a wonderful site. You can also access Yoast in your WordPress dashboard and boost your traffic instantly.
Cons
When compared to Fasthosts, many plans end up being more expensive for fewer features.
Verdict
As you can see from this head-to-head comparison, Fasthost and Bluehost are two very similar web hosting platforms. Which makes the choice extra hard.
However, we’ve also seen some differences. Overall, although Bluehost is WordPress.org’s longest-running recommended host, it doesn’t have a big leverage over Fasthosts.
In fact, once Fasthosts gets updated to today’s trends and includes an AI tool, everyone will be running in Fasthosts’ direction. And even now, due to costs, I believe is the one you should consider.
That is, of course, if you are not conditioned by email, since Fasthosts and Bluehost provide different email hosting options.
Anyway, which one did you choose?
Fasthosts or Bluehost?
Tell us in the comments!
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