NameCheap vs Bluehost: Complete walkthrough
In this article, I’ve done a detailed comparison of NameCheap vs BlueHost so that you can easily identify which one is good for you!
Currently, BlueHost is a leader of hosting and domain registering companies on the internet that is serving millions of websites and it’s the most trusted hosting company.
However, NameCheap is another great company that provides good hosting and domain servers for your website. Compared to BlueHost, it’s not much big; but it’s great for a start-up websites.
Both companies are good for small and large-scale websites, but you must be confused when choosing one of them, as both have almost identical packages and features.
BlueHost Intro
BlueHost Company was started in 2003 by Danny and Matt in the USA. Later this company was purchased by EIG Company in about 2008. The EIG Company already owns some other small-scale hosting companies like FatCow, HostGator, and iPage.
For the past few years, BlueHost has increased its prices massively, but this price increase hasn’t affected its sales, and BlueHost stills the biggest hosting provider on the internet.
The company offers a massive range of hosting packages like VPS, shared servers, WP, and other dedicated servers for multinational websites.
However, their shareable servers are relatively affordable as compared to other branded hosting providers.
Moreover, this company provides one of the best integration with WordPress, and WordPress itself recommends this hosting company for better speed and quality.
When it comes to customer support, their customer support department consists of more than 750 agents that are available 24/7 for resolving any problem caused in the servers.
NameCheap Intro
NameCheap is another popular hosting provider and domain registration company which has been in the market since 2000. The company has also been approved by ICANN.
Name cheap has been serving since the year 2002 because, in the first 2 years, they were setting up their servers for launch.
NameCheap is mostly known for its low prices and advanced up-to-date security protocols that make it the best fit for new and intermediated websites.
Unlike BlueHost, NameCheap isn’t completely US-based. Their customer support departments are located in Ukraine and most of the operations are happening in Europe.
NameCheap is ranked over the top 10 hosting providers and domain registration companies that have more than 10 million registered domains.
Furthermore, NameCheap also provides SSL Certificates and Whois guard Privacy Protection on your website so that you’ll have top-notch security on your website.
BlueHost User Interface
After signing up, the first thing you’ll notice and see is the User Interface of BlueHost. The UI of every website matters the most and it’s the first thing that customers see on the website.
Bluehost is well known for the most minimal and easy-to-use UI for the user.
When it comes to the WordPress site, BlueHost has dedicated optimization with the WP sites. Therefore, you can install your WP with one-click in the BlueHost dashboard.
After the installation, the homepage and all the sidebars will be the same as you do in a typical WP site.
You can write new posts, edit your site, track audience and visitors, and everything same as you do in a normal WP dashboard.
BlueHost also enables you to install different kinds of themes and plugins from its digital store to make your website more SEO optimized and to lower your efforts as well.
NameCheap User Interface
NameCheap also provides a very minimal and easy-to-use UI for its users. However, its design and UI isn’t similar to BlueHost, but both have a great UI and we should not compare their UI with each other.
After the sign-up, you can easily view all the main data like hosting, domain, packages, expiration, and email domains on the homepage of the site which is known as dashboard.
However, you’ll need to use Softaculous App Installer to install the WP in your NameCheap account.
I know unlike BlueHost it’s not that easy, but I’m sure enough that you’ll not require any kind of expert for this task.
NameCheap automatically installs the W3 cache plug-in. The plugin works by caching your site’s basic data in servers that improve the loading of your website.
The main thing that I like about NameCheap is they offer a free website migration.
It means if you have a website hosted by another company, NameCheap will migrate that site towards NameCheap hosting for completely free.
Whereas, the same service is paid in BlueHost. All you need to require is the permission from your previous hosting, and it’s all done. NameCheap supports most of the hosting servers from where you can easily migrate your website in one click.
If the server isn’t supported, then still you could do that just by installing the new hosting address of your NameCheap on the previous existing server.
NameCheap vs Bluehost: Customer Support
Customer support in every business plays a really important role in the satisfaction of customers.
No business can ever succeed without good customer support and we would never recommend any hosting company that doesn’t have a good support center.
In the case of BlueHost and NameCheap, both have excellent and rapid-response customer support centers.
BlueHost and NameCheap both provide 24/7 e-mail and live chat support where you can report for any issues you face in the package, hosting, server, domain, or any kind of issues or queries related to the product.
However, BlueHost even provides a live telephone support call while NameCheap doesn’t offer any kind of real-time telephone support.
I’ve tried both companies support and both impress me with their fast and interactive customer support.
BlueHost and NameCheap, support agents, listen to your problems and do their best to resolve your issue as fast as they can.
NameCheap vs Bluehost: Performance
Speed and performance are two major things that play an essential role in the quality of servers that you’re using for hosting.
Your visitors will never want to surf a website that is incredibly slow as a tortoise. Also, a slow website reduces your SEO score to a large extent, because search engine trackers are always de-ranking slow loading sites.
It’s because SEO only works based on user experience. A fast-loading site will increase the number of your visitors, search engines like Bing, Yahoo, and Google will rank your site on top of the search results and hence, more leads and conversions.
When it comes to the server’s quality and performance of BlueHost VS NameCheap, it’s obvious no company will ever tell you the truth neither any promotional nor paid review.
However, as it’s a completely honest and non-paid review by both companies, I’ll tell you the real truth: which company offers the best performer through practical tests.
I tried both of them, and tested their performance. However, it’s possible that the site itself has bugs and may not show actual results due to that bug. That’s why I’ve used the most basic theme of Blogger without any changes, just a white background.
Page Loading Time | BlueHost
The term page loading time refers to the time taken by the website to load in the user’s browser performed at the speed of 1 Gb/s.
I know the speed is much higher, so that we can easily identify the actual speed from the back hosting server without including the delay from our side.
The loading time of a page is extremely important to know when choosing any hosting company; it shows the quality and performance of the hosting servers. I performed the test for both companies, BlueHost took the position.
The BlueHost got an A grade in the results, which means their servers are well optimized and provides better speed without any bugs.
However, we’re not saying that their servers will be the same all the time, some minor bugs and errors could cause the server to slow down.
But currently, in our tests, it’s showing us the A-grade, which means they are completely SEO well optimized so far.
However, there’s nothing perfect in this world. It may be possible sometimes the servers crash or the grade decreases, but all I can assure you is that it will be temporary.
I can guarantee you the maintenance quality and response to the errors is unbelievable fast in BlueHost.
Page Loading Time | NameCheap
When it comes to the loading speed of NameCheap, it shows a B grade. I did it again, but the same grade appears.
However, after digging deep into the results, I found that the server was giving us the speed of 90 Mb/s which is relatively fast if compared to other private hosting companies.
According to my experience, it should not affect your SERP ranking, especially on Google. Many Search Engines require a minimum speed of 50 Mb/s of loading speed.
If your site loads at the minimum speed of 50 Mb/s, then you’re good to go and your website’s SERP will not be affected.
Therefore, according to the price, it is one of the best hosting deals you could find on the internet.
Bluehost vs NameCheap: Time To Interactive (TTI)
Have you ever noticed, in slow network speeds, whenever you open the website or forum the written content of the website shows first, and the graphical loads later? Did you know why?
It’s a human consciousness that our brain doesn’t like to wait for anything. Loading a full page at once could take a lot of time if the user’s internet connection is slow or unstable.
In this case, you would have an incredibly high bounce rate and most probably he would close your website’s tab. But a TTI based server helps you to get rid of this problem.
Most of the hosting servers work on the TTI term that refers to the loading speed of interactable content first and the rest of the graphical content later in the background.
If you visit any popular forum or blog, you’ll notice that the written content loads at first and graphical stuff later.
It’s because a user doesn’t need graphical stuff to interact with the site, most probably they need your written content, that’s why the majority of the hosting servers are optimized to show the written content first and then the images or videos.
BlueHost TTI
When it comes to the TTI of BlueHost, it usually plays around 98-100% of the score, which means the servers of BlueHost are completely optimized for TTI and show the interactable content much faster than the graphical one.
It usually provides the TTI of 1.5 seconds, so that you would have an extremely low bounce rate if you use BlueHost serves.
NameCheap TTI
If we talk about the TTI of NameCheap, amazingly it’s much close to BlueHost with the same speed of 1.5 seconds. However, in terms of score, it plays around 97-99% that is almost the same as BlueHost with a little difference from it.
In the case of speed, both show the same figure, but in the score, NameCheap gets behind with some small differences like latency lag and TTFB. Overall, these small errors will not affect user experience nor your website’s SEO rankings. Therefore, both are good to go!
Real-time Users Load Test | BlueHost
There will be thousands of people who will be accessing it in real-time. It’s important to know how both servers of BlueHost and NameCheap work under the pressure of many requests by users.
To test this, I sent huge bots traffic to my test website to check how both servers perform under the pressure of many real-time requests.
Below, I’ve created a graph according to the data so that you can easily see how BlueHost servers performed when you send them and get huge traffic at once in real-time.
Getting slow down by the servers in such load is common, and of course you can’t expect a stable speed in the shared hosting, because the same server is also serving many other websites as well.
If you have a large audience, then you should purchase a dedicated server for your website to avoid delays.
A dedicated server is specifically designed for your website and is only responsible for serving your website’s requests. That’s why a dedicated server never gets slower.
I’ve created this custom graph to let you understand the server’s performance more easily.
On the Y-axis, those are the number of users and on the X-axis, those figures are the speed of servers providing X pressure.
As the load (users) increases and accesses your website, the average loading time of your website increases (see the rising line.)
Real-time Users Load Test | NameCheap
I also did the same thing with NameCheap servers. The results were quite matching to the BlueHost, but there were very small differences, and even in some cases NameCheap did better than BlueHost.
On the first 500 users, the NameCheap servers were getting slower than BlueHost, but unexpectedly the rate of slowing down got lower when we crossed the line of 650 users.
It may be possible that they shift the server to the fastest one to avoid the delay.
If your website has a large audience base or visitors, then it would be recommended to purchase a dedicated server to avoid delays and slowing down of your website.
NameCheap vs Bluehost: Pricing
Pricing | NameCheap (shared server)
Here comes the main point that is the price comparison between both companies. Both have different prices and work in different ways.
In the case of NameCheap, the most basic and cheap package will cost 2.88$ monthly which includes the domain name, 20 GB SSD space, and could hold up to 3 websites at a time.
This package is ideal if you’re an entirely new set-up, but tighter on the budget.
On the Stellar Plus package, you’ll get unlimited SSD storage and unlimited websites for just in 4.88$. Moreover, you’ll even get the Auto-Backup feature of your site. Stellar one is the highest-selling package according to NameCheap.
In the Business package, you’ll get 50 GB SSD storage, unlimited websites, and Auto-Backup features. The most impressive thing about this package is that they provide Cloud Storage.
Pricing | BlueHost (shared server)
When it comes to the pricing of BlueHost hosting, it’s quite different and little bit expensive than NameCheap.
Unlike NameCheap, you can’t pay for the hosting charges every month; instead, you’ve to pay for a complete year.
The most basic plan will cost you about 6$ monthly (billed for a complete year). It includes hosting for 1 website, CDN and SSL Certificate, 50 GB SSD and custom themes for your website.
The plus package will cost you about 7.95$ (billed for a year). It includes unlimited websites, unlimited SSD space, and custom themes. Moreover, it provides a free domain for one year, CDN, SSL certificate and Office 365.
The pro package is the most expensive package among all the shared packages. It comes with all the features of plus. The additional services include optimized CPU resources, free domain privacy, and automated backup services. Plus free dedicated IP for your website.
In my opinion, I would highly recommend you to purchase the Choice Plus packages, and it’s also the most selling package of BlueHost. The Choice Plus feature comes with all the necessary features and securities that you may need in your website.
You can say it’s a mid-range package that offers all the basic and some flagship features for your website. However, if you are in a tiny budget, go ahead with the basic plan.
Final Verdict | NameCheap vs BlueHost?
If we come to the conclusion between both BlueHost vs NameCheap that which one is good and provides the best quality then both companies are great.
In my case, I always preferred Bluehost because they are trustier and their servers are based in US. While my targeted audience is US based, the speed and the performance are better with Bluehost.
BlueHost vs NameCheap: both provides top-notch security, extremely fast loading speed, and a maximum of 0.5% of crashes in a month.
NameCheap provides all these features at prices almost similar to local hosting providers, but with certified security protocols and fast loading speed.
NameCheap is great if you’re just starting a new website and need a domain and hosting for your website at a cheap price.
So, if you have an extremely tight budget, but need almost the same performance as BlueHost, then you should go towards NameCheap.
BlueHost is best if you have a higher budget and need top-notch security and performance for your site. The servers that BlueHost uses in hosting have a higher loading speed than NameCheap.
Did you know many other hosting providers copy the security ideas from BlueHost? Now, you can understand the standard of BlueHost servers.
Moreover, they provide some of the best security protocols in their servers, so you’ve nothing to worry about when using BlueHost hosting. That’s why it’s great for high-budget websites that focus on security and performance.
