Bluehost vs Godaddy vs InmotionHosting Shared Hosting- My Honest Experience

It becomes really hard to decide which Web Host is the best when there are so many veteran Web Hosts like Bluehost, Godaddy, InmotionHosting, etc. It might be beneficial to look into reviews of Godaddy hosting, Bluehost, and so on, but that on its own may not be enough. If you are in the same dilemma, this article might help you to get through. Building a website is no less than building a house. Like a house needs a physical address, every website has a domain name that acts as an address to help people find your website. But one of the most important things is the foundation on which your house is to be built. Foundation for a website is the “WebHost”. A solid web host makes sure your visitors would never have a problem reaching your website.

To avoid paying expensive renewal fees, I move my website from one web host to another each year. I’ve tried Bluehost, Godaddy, and InmotionHosting shared hosting over the past three years. As a beginner, you usually go with hosting that is reasonably priced and has a lot of positive reviews. I paid $58 for the first year when I had only a few hundred visitors, while I am currently paying only $25/year for thousands of visitors. This is only possible because I now know how much to spend on what I need.

In the article, I am going to compare 3 popular hosting websites – Bluehost, Godaddy, and InmotionHosting. Rather than comparing hosting based on uptime, speed, performance, UI, Support, and a lot of graphs, I would simply try to explain one thing – For what money each web Host can handle what no. of visitors without going down. This article is going to be more relevant to those who are planning to start a new blog or looking for a reliable host to migrate an existing website having less than 100k Visitors per month.

So Let me share my honest experience with you about Bluehost, Godaddy, and InmotionHosting Shared Hosting –

1. Bluehost Shared Hosting

The blog you landed on right now was first hosted on Bluehost in 2015. Because it was my first time and I was reading a lot of reviews. Every other blogger was recommending Bluehost so I gave it a try paying $58(Basic Plan) for the 1st year. But was it worth paying this much?

Incomopedia.com never went down during that year. But it might be because I only got a few hundred hits a day. Let’s see what they are currently offering –

Bluehost Shared Hosting Plans –

Bluehost Special Offer: Only Rs. 160/ Month

2. Godaddy Shared Hosting

I was not sure if the ‘Starter Plan’ of Godaddy’s shared web hosting would be able to handle my traffic, so I went for the ‘Economy’ Plan, paying around $55. The first month of Godaddy was horrible. Those red-colored warning emails were really scary- “You’re at your resource limits. Visitors might have trouble accessing your site”. My blog was getting around 1200 visitors per day. I removed some plugins and optimized the site. Still, I was getting those emails occasionally throughout the year. Always felt like I should buy and add some resources.

Godaddy Shared Hosting Plans

Godaddy WordPress Hosting

WordPress hosting is entirely different from Linux/Window Shared hosting. Last year I purchased Godaddy WordPress hosting basic plan to host one of my blogs. I was not happy with their Linux shared hosting but since I was hosting a WordPress website, I gave WordPress hosting plan a try. WordPress hosting is supposed to be specially optimized for WordPress websites and Godaddy’s WordPress hosting performance was beyond my imagination. The basic plan can handle up to 25000 unique visitors per month but there was a time when I was getting more than 4000 visitors per day still my blog was up all the time. So I would say you should always go for WordPress hosting to host a WordPress blog.

The only downside of Godaddy WordPress hosting is that they don’t provide a CPanel like other hosting but software like Filezilla is always there to access all hosting files.

WordPress Hosting With Godaddy @ Rs. 239/Month

Next year(2017), I moved my website to InmotionHosting.

3. InmotionHosting Shared Hosting

I ended up paying around $55 for the Launch plan at InmotionHosting which included free domain transfer. The user interface was a little dated, but with the assistance of online chat support, I was able to easily move my blog to Inmotion shared hosting. Honestly speaking, I never had a problem with them. The website was smoothly working even with 1800+ visitors per day. Although the loading time of the website was slightly increased if I compared it with the time when I was with Bluehost and Godaddy.

InmotionHosting Shared Hosting Plans

Inmotion Special Offer : $2.95/Month

Bluehost Vs Godaddy Vs InmotionHosting

A quick comparison based on Support, Uptime, Performance, Money Back Guarantee etc.

Support

Bluehost is better when it comes to support. If you are not comfortable with phone calls, then it’s going to be very hard for you to reach Godaddy support. I have contacted InmotionHosting several times, especially via chat. They are good. Ranking goes as-

Bluehost > InmotionHosting > Godaddy

Usability

Bluehost and GoDaddy provide almost similar CPanel/backend while InmotionHosting Cpanel/AMP looks a little outdated. I had to contact Inmotionhosting via chat to unlock my domain name. I mean things are a little less user-friendly there.

Bluehost=Godaddy>InmotionHosting

Price

It’s hard to beat Godaddy at Price. You can start a blog with GoDaddy as low as 99 Rupees per month. InmotionHosting comes in the second position.

Godaddy>InmotionHosting>Bluehost

Uptime/Speed/Performance

All three web hosts offer 99.9% uptime guarantee. I got a little lower page speed on the Google Pagespeed tool when I was using InmotionHosting because of the low server response time. Godaddy and Bluehost are almost the same. WordPress hosting on Godaddy was the best in terms of performance.

Bluehost=Godaddy>InmotionHosting

Money Back Guarantee

If you are not happy with a hosting company, you can get your money back. InmotionHosting offers you 90 days to decide, GoDaddy gives 45 days, and Bluehost 30 days. 30 days might be too early for someone to judge a hosting service so InmotionHosting is a clear winner. You are always advised to read the terms and conditions regarding the money-back guarantee because in some cases you might only recover partial money.

InmotionHosting > Godaddy > Bluehost

Why Shared Hosting Enough for a New Blog?

Some bloggers might recommend managed, VPS, or dedicated hosting for your blog. Of course, with such specialized hosting, you are given a lot of resources (Ram, Bandwidth, processing power, etc.), but I genuinely don’t think a new blog needs this. Since the blog is new, you shouldn’t anticipate seeing a lot of visitors in the first year. A little more time is needed to get there. So go with the basic plan and focus on optimizing your website. Reduce the number of unused plugins and scripts to ensure that your website doesn’t require a lot of computing power to function properly. Hosting alone can’t make you fast; you have to put effort into optimizing your website at your end.

Say if you are lucky enough and shared hosting is not enough to handle your blog, there is always an option to upgrade your hosting plan. You can upgrade to a higher plan any time in between.

Conclusion – Which Web Host is the Best?

Well, most of the time it depends upon your requirements. Price has always been a bigger factor for me. Considering the overall reliability + Price of a web hosting plan –

1. If You Want to Host a WordPress Website

If you need a host for your WordPress blog, go with WordPress Hosting of any reliable host. But since Godaddy is the cheapest, I would recommend it. I personally have tried it on 2 blogs and never had a problem. Without a Cpanel, some people might not feel comfortable. I didn’t either, but it only took me ten minutes to learn the basics of filezilla, an FTP client that allows you to access, edit, and upload any hosting file.  Here is my ranking –

Godaddy WordPress Hosting>>Hostgator WordPress Hosting>>Bluehost Shared Hosting>>InmotionHosting Shared Hosting>>Godaddy Shared Hosting

2. If You Need a Web Host for a General Website (Joomla, Wix, WordPress, or Others platform) 

Then I would rank the 3 web hosts as –

Bluehost>InmotionHosting>Godaddy

Overall if you have less than 2000 visitors per day, you can go with WordPress Hosting and shared hosting plans. So this was all for now. Share it if you find it useful. Looking forward to hearing your experiences with these Web Hosts via comments.