BlueHost Vs 1and1 – Affordable Hosting Comparison

As I’ve just got my BlueHost account lately, I’ve decided to compare it side-by-side with some other well know web hosts.

I’ve got a handful for web hosting accounts I like to try out and see which one delivers the best experience and value. To this day I’ve got some hosting accounts with BlueHost, HostPapa, HostGator, GoDaddy, 1and1 and InMotion Hosting.

Today we’re going to see how BlueHost and 1and1 compare side-by-side.

BlueHost Overview

A web hosting veteran based in Orem, UT, BlueHost has been a leader in the affordable web hosting industry since 1996. They offer a single shared hosting plan with lots of features. BlueHost is a good choice for the personnal blog or  small business website.

1and1 Overview

1&1 is one of the largest web hosting company in the business. With more than 2,400 employees and over 37,000 servers, 1&1 serves near 6 million customers.

1and1 offers a really wide range of products and services. From shared hosting, VPS, dedicated hosting, mail hosting, domain name registration, ecommerce hosting and sharepoint hosting, they’ve got it all. Most of their hosting products are available on both Linux and Windows platforms.

1and1 Vs BlueHost – Shared Hosting Plan Comparison

Since BlueHost has a single Linux-based hosting plan, we’ll compare it to 1and1’s Linux shared hosting plans only.

Obvisouly you’re going to get more resources with BlueHost since they offer unlimited hosting. You shouldn’t base your decision on this factor though because there are a lot of web hosting oversellers who will go to the extent of degrading their server’s performance by hosting too many websites on a single box. The point is, as long as a web host offers enough disk space and bandwidth for your website it’s ok, there’s no need to have unlimited resources if you ain’t gonna use them.

One feature I found interesting is BlueHost’s Ruby On Rails support which isn’t offered by 1and1. Ruby On Rails is quickly gaining popularity and web hosts are slowly adding support for this programming language.

As far as statistic tools goes, I found 1&1’s custom stats sort of useless. They do not provide as much detailed information as AwStats does. AwStats is really my website statistic software of choice. I don’t use Webalizer much although a lot of people seem to find it easy to use.

BlueHost also gives you the choice of four (4) shopping cart with an SSL secure server. They’ve also partenered with some of the major online transaction websites to make your ecommerce experience as smooth as possible. On 1and1’s side you can still have the same ecommerce features but with the Business and Developer plans only.

More experienced users will appreciate having SSH (Secure Shell) access which is available on BlueHost’s hosting plan as well as 1and1’s Business and Developer plans.

Extra Features

Both web hosts offer a good free website builder. BlueHost’s site builder is particularly easy to use with its drag-and-drop interface.

With any 1&1 hosting plan, you get DynamicSiteCreator to add Flash animations to your website. And with their Home, Business and Developer plan, you also get SpeadShirt Merchandising to design and brand your own products for sale on your website.

1and1 gives you some nice vouchers. You can get up to $200 in Microsoft adCenter credits, up to $100 in Google AdWords advertising, up to $75 of Yahoo Search Marketing credits and a $100 voucher for Citysearch.

BlueHost also gives you some marketing vouchers but they are worth a little less than 1and1’s: $50 Yahoo Search Marketing voucher, $50 Google AdWords voucher and $50 of Miva ad credits.

If you’re concerned about spam, you’ll be happy to find out that BlueHost not only offers the great SpamAssassin antispam but they also offer Postini, a great premium email filtering service. Both antispam are easy to use and very efficient.

Control Panel

I found 1and1’s control panel very easy to although it’s very slow. I’ve also found numerous reports about the speed of their control panel. Other than that, I can’t complain about it. I’d rather have a user name than account number to log in 1and1’s control panel, it would be a lot easier to remember.

BlueHost is a little more conservative and decided to stick with the great cPanel control panel. cPanel is by far my favorite control panel because it’s so fast and easy to use. The interface is very intuitive and the changes you make are instant. For example, creating a database with cPanel takes seconds whereas it takes a few minutes to process with 1and1’s control panel.

BlueHost Control Panel

1and1 Control Panel

Performance & Reliability

While my website on 1and1 never seemed to go down (or at least I didn’t notice), I found it to be much slower than BlueHost’s hosting. I don’t have any statistics to prove that but the performance difference was obvious.

On some occasions I’ve had problems accessing my BlueHost control panel through their homepage but my website was still up during this time.

I can’t complain much here, both web hosts have been quite reliable but BlueHost is much faster than 1and1.

Pricing

I’d like to see BlueHost waive their setup fee on their 3 months and 6 months contracts. It makes these billing cycles worthless. On my part, I’ve signed up for the 12 months plan which is the best value in my opinion. If you want to save money, you can go with BlueHost’s 24 months plan although I’d recommend 12 months if it’s the first time you’re trying out a web host. At only $4.95 for unlimited hosting and a ton of features is pretty cheap.

As for 1and1, their Beginner and Home plans are indeed some of the cheapest hosting packages available from a major web hosting company. If you’re just starting out in the online world, this could be a good option. The Business and Developer plans are too expensive for what they have to offer. I mean why would I pay $19.99 for a shared hosting account when I can get a cheap VPS for about $10 more?

Conclusion

Personally I’d go all the way with BlueHost here. cPanel is a much better control panel and you’ll easily find a lot of help on it if you need to. BlueHost’s statistic tools are also much better than 1and1’s custom stats software.

While 1and1 has some very cheap hosting plans, those are very targeted toward beginners and if you’re one of them, then you better make your first hosting experience as enjoyable as possible so go with BlueHost, it’s the best choice.

Links

• 1and1 Website
• BlueHost Website (get your BlueHost Coupon!)
  
• 1and1 Review & 1and1 User Reviews
• BlueHost Review
  

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