Bluehost is one of the most popular hosting platforms worldwide thanks to their affordable pricing and an affiliate program that is enticingly generous. Google Cloud Platform (GCP) on the other hand is quite well-known for cloud hosting on an enterprise level. Bluehost currently powers more than 2 million websites. This is a quite impressive number. However, as it will become evident soon enough, popularity doesn’t necessarily mean overall better performance. We are going to compare these two platforms in depth below according to such facets as pricing, features, performance, support, security and storage.
- Pricing
Table of Contents
Bluehost plans and pricing
Bluehost has 3 plans. These plans are priced as shown below:
- Basic- Starts at $5.95 per month. This plan includes 1 website, 50 GB storage and unmetered bandwidth.
- Plus- Starts at $7.95 per month. Plus has among its many features unlimited bandwidth, SSD storage and websites.
- Choice Plus- This is the plan that is recommended by Bluehost and starts at $8.95 per month. It has everything that Plus has and an additional CodeGuard Basic for site backup.
- Pro- starts at a monthly price of $16.95. It has everything that Choice Plus has and an addition of 2 spam experts and Dedicated IP.
NB: This pricing is on a 12 months basis.
Google Cloud Platform pricing
Google Cloud Platform starts you off with a $0 upfront fee and then you pay as you go. This means that you can sign up and get a free trial period that includes a $300 credit that you get to spend on their services for a period of 12 months. After the free trial period, you can opt for any of their two plans. These plans are:
- Silver- This is priced at $150 and includes unlimited storage. The Ram, however, is 0B.
- Gold- Gold is priced at $400 and also comes with unlimited storage and 0B RAM.
GCP also offers you with interesting price innovations. With their VM instances (preemptible), you are likely to get up to 79% off workloads that are susceptible to interruptions. These workloads include data processing and data mining. And just as a cloud is supposed to work, you can get per second billing which means your payment will be based per second of usage. On top of this, you are likely to get an automated 30% discount on any of your workloads that run for a significant part of the billing month. This billing month is determined on Cloud SQL and Compute Engine.
Last but not least, on GCP you will be able to get a fast estimate of your likely expenditure on usage. This is easily done using the GCP pricing calculator which is shown in the screenshot below.
You can contact the Google Cloud Platform sales team for more info on the pricing of Google Cloud Platform services by using this link https://cloud.google.com/contact.
Conclusion
Based on the pricing models of both Bluehost and Google Cloud Platform, Bluehost is undeniably the cheaper option. For instance, Google Cloud Platform WordPress will cost you approximately 4 times the monthly charges from Bluehost. And with Bluehost triennial billing, you are more likely to get amazing features at a much lower price.
Features
Bluehost offers a wide array of features that are worth their pricing plans. Top among these features are:
- 99.99% uptime
- User friendly and customizable cPanel
- Free domain for starters (First year)
- Fast loading speed supported by up-to-date technology
- SSL certificate at no cost
- Free website builder
On top of these features you get unlimited website plans on all of Bluehost shared plans except Basic. The paid plans also include a paid add-on for backup known as CodeGuard and their managed WordPress includes Cloudflare CDN.
Google Cloud Platform also includes a variety of interesting features. Top among these features are:
- Virtual machines
- Daily Automatic backups
- Local SSD that is resizable and equipped with faster speeds
- Rapid instance networking
- Virtual machines
- Incorporated Containers
- Google Cloud Platform Console that is based on browser
Conclusion
Although Bluehost offers features that may seem user-friendly to most beginners, the features offered by Google Cloud Platform are far more superior and most suitable for enterprises and developers.
Performance
As we have already mentioned before, Bluehost is well known for bragging a decent uptime of 99.99%. They, however, do not guarantee this and evidently from complaints they’ve received time and again, the loading speeds tend to be slow in some parts of the world. For much better performance with Bluehost, you can integrate with Cloudflare.
Google Cloud Platform also offers some pretty decent uptime to match at 99.9% with uptime guarantee. And in case I experience any downtime from Google Cloud Platform, you ask? Well, here is something to soothe your nerves: Google Cloud Platform offers you 10-50% credits for downtime. Sweet.
Google Cloud Platform tops the guaranteed uptime with redundancy, a connectivity with high bandwidth, 130 presence points and a 61-zone footprint.
Conclusion
Bluehost has a pretty decent uptime percentage but one thing that makes us not trust this kind of performance from them is how adamant they are not to guarantee this. One thing that we love about Google Cloud Platform is that they can “put their money where their mouth is. On top of this, you also get redundancy and wide coverage. So, based on performance, Google Cloud Platform is the best option.
Support
Bluehost offers 24/7 expert customer support service. This might be true from their point of view but from some users’ comments, Bluehost customer support is far from satisfactory and a bit slow in responding.
Below is a snippet of Ben Sarid’s thoughts on Bluehost customer support.
Google Cloud Platform on the other hand offers a diverse array of support options. These options include a free trial support, community support of developers and a no-charge basic billing support. You can also opt for paid support which you may find falls between expensive and exorbitantly priced. Again, Google Cloud Platform is not that great if you’re working from a tight budget.
Below is a screenshot of the paid tiers on GCP support.
Conclusion
In spite of the exorbitant prices on the support tiers, Google Cloud Platform tops the support category without a shadow of doubt.
Security
Bluehost is quite impressive when it comes to security. You using this platform means that you’ll get Apache Spam Assassin, Spam Experts and Spam Hammer. That is a three layer anti-spam protection system. You also get an access known as secure shell (SSH) and Cloudflare (paid). Plus, hey, free SSL!
Google Cloud Platform on the other hand offers you security that is top-notch and compliant with international standards. From encryption to multi-layered security, GCP is trusted worldwide to offer protection 24/7/365.
Conclusion
Google Cloud Platform once more bags the security category.
Storage
Bluehost web hosting servers use SSD (Solid State Drive) for storage. As a matter of fact, you’ll get an inclusive and free SSD with their lowest tier – the Basic plan, which comes with a 50GB SSD. The other higher tiers include an unlimited SSD allowance for storage.
Google Cloud Platform also offers storage allowance though on a more complicated and diverse scale. The GCP free tier conditions stipulate that you,as a client, will get an inclusion of 30GB-months HDD with a “f1-micro VM instance”. However you should note that this is only possible if you sign-up for a Free trial using the $300 credit offered by GCP for new sign ups. This $300 credit is available for your use on any of GCP’s resources until it is consumed and then you’ll have to make a subscription to continue using GCP.
You should also note that when using GCP’s instance creation, you will be prompted to choose “standard persistent disk” or ” SSD persistent disk”. The standard persistent disks are backed by standard hard disk drives(HDD) whereas SSD persistent disks are backed by SSD (Solid State Drives). You can only use SSD persistent disks if you are using the Free trial account with $300 credit to spend.
Conclusion
Bluehost takes this category. The unlimited storage capacity offered in all their plans except basic is a definite winner.
Evidently from the performance of these two platforms in the categories we have provided above, Google Cloud Platform is an obvious choice if you have the bucks to spend. However, if you are a beginner who is currently budget-restricted and lacking in technical know-how it would be much better and easier for you if you started off with Bluehost.
My name is Nate Reiner and I am the editor here at 10Webtools. I have 8 years of experience using 50+ different web tools ranging from podcast, web hosting, email marketing, and much more. I previously managed a team offering support services to a large conglomerate that utilized tens of software solutions. I now run this blog full-time and when I am not reviewing or testing software, I enjoy riding bikes and supporting my clients achieve internet success. You can reach me directly at [email protected]