Bluehost vs IONOS
Bluehost and IONOS compared on measured uptime, response time, pricing and features from our own tests. Bluehost scores higher overall.
By Jennifer T. · Updated
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Verdict
BluehostWins overall
Newfold's WordPress-recommended host: three shared tiers on 36-month terms, weekly backups, a 5 percent SLA coupon
The former 1&1: unlimited sites and traffic from $8 a month at renewal, with a free domain and wildcard SSL
Bluehost wins 4 of the six sub-scores and comes out ahead overall (7.6 vs 7.1).
How do the scores compare?
Bluehost leads on 4 sub-scores, IONOS on 0. Higher is better.
Which one is faster and more reliable?
Which one costs less?
On renewal, Bluehost is cheaper ($9.99/mo vs $14.00/mo). Intro prices need the listed term.
What does each include?
| Bluehost | IONOS | |
|---|---|---|
| Free domain | First year, with a 12-month or 36-month term | One domain free for the first year on every plan: .us, .ca, .com, .net, .org, .info, .me, .biz or .online |
| Free SSL | Let's Encrypt | One DV wildcard certificate on Essential, Starter and Plus; unlimited wildcard certificates on Ultimate |
| Backups | Weekly website backups on every shared plan | Daily backup of storage and databases with data recovery, every plan |
| Staging | WordPress staging site on every plan | No |
| Free migration | Site migration tool | No |
| CDN | Yes | Not stated |
| Caching | Advanced static content caching and object caching | Server compression and HTTP/2 listed; no caching layer named on the plan page |
| SSH and WP-CLI | Yes | Not stated |
| Security | Malware scanning on Starter; AI malware removal, web application firewall and DDoS protection from Business | Daily malware scanning (basic, or advanced with automatic removal on Ultimate), DDoS protection, geo-redundancy |
| Phone support | Business and above; Starter has chat only | 24/7, with a personal consultant |
| Uptime guarantee | 99.99% SLA; at most one coupon per month for 5% of the monthly hosting fee | 99.99% in the general terms, with a credit for the month proportional to the downtime, on request and at IONOS's discretion |
| Choice of data center | Region selected at checkout (North America, South America, Europe, Asia) | Not stated |
| Windows hosting | No | No |
| Free CDN | Not stated | Starter, Plus and Ultimate; not on Essential |
| SSH, SFTP, WP-CLI and Git | Not stated | Every plan, with 200 SFTP accounts, Perl and Python |
| PHP versions | Not stated | 8.4, 8.3 and 8.2, with paid extended support for 5.6 and later |
| Resource limits | Not stated | CPU priority 1x, 3x, 5x and 10x by plan; 262,144 inodes on every plan; cron jobs 10, 25, 50 and 100 |
| Websites and traffic | Not stated | Unlimited websites and unlimited traffic on every plan; 5,000 subdomains |
| Not stated | 1, 2, 4 or 5 accounts of 2 GB by plan, with forwarding, webmail and anti-spam | |
| Data center choice | Not stated | No |