They dominate every "best hosting" list on the internet. They also happen to pay the highest affiliate commissions. Coincidence? We tested both for 12 months and followed the money. Bluehost edges GoDaddy, but the honest answer is: pick a third option.
You probably shouldn't choose either. That's not clickbait -- it's the conclusion we reached after 12 months of testing both. Bluehost loads in 1.35 seconds, GoDaddy in 1.8. Hostinger hits 0.85s at $1.99/mo and SiteGround hits 0.65s at $2.99/mo. The math doesn't favor either household name.
That said, if someone is holding a gun to your head and the only two options on earth are Bluehost and GoDaddy: Bluehost wins. It's cheaper ($2.95/mo intro vs $5.99), faster under load (2.1s vs 2.8s with 100 concurrent users), includes free SSL on all plans (GoDaddy charges $7.99/mo on Economy), and its WordPress onboarding wizard is genuinely the best in the industry. GoDaddy's only real edge is domain management -- 500+ TLDs, auction marketplace, bulk tools -- but you can buy domains at GoDaddy and host somewhere else. Most experienced webmasters do exactly that.
Let's address the elephant in the room. Bluehost and GoDaddy aren't on every "best hosting" list because they're the best hosts. They're there because they pay the most to be there.
$65 per signup (base). Top affiliates earn $100-150+ per referral. One of the highest-paying programs in web hosting.
Competitive commissions on domain + hosting bundles. Brand recognition makes conversions easy, which means high earnings per click.
This creates a feedback loop that has nothing to do with product quality: high payouts attract more "review" sites, which generate more brand recognition, which drives more signups, which funds higher payouts. Rinse, repeat for a decade.
A reader emailed us last year: she'd started a food blog, Googled "best WordPress hosting," and picked Bluehost because it was the #1 recommendation on seven different review sites. Six months in, her load times were 2+ seconds, support couldn't help, and she discovered her renewal price would triple from $2.95 to $11.99/mo. When she looked into why every site recommended Bluehost, she found they all earned $100+ per referral.
"I felt like I'd been advertised to, not reviewed," she wrote. Her experience wasn't unusual.
To be clear: neither Bluehost nor GoDaddy is terrible. Both are serviceable hosts that will keep a basic site online. But neither is the best value in their price range. Hostinger, SiteGround, and InterServer all outperform them at comparable or lower prices. The difference is those hosts don't pay $150 per referral, so you see them recommended less often.
| Category | Bluehost | GoDaddy | Winner |
|---|---|---|---|
| Intro Price | $2.95/mo (36mo) | $5.99/mo (36mo) | Bluehost |
| Renewal Price | $11.99/mo | $11.99/mo | Tie |
| Renewal Increase | 306% | 100% | GoDaddy |
| Load Time | 1.35s | 1.8s | Bluehost |
| TTFB | 380ms | 420ms | Bluehost |
| Uptime (12mo) | 99.93% | 99.90% | Bluehost |
| Under Load (100) | 2.1s | 2.8s | Bluehost |
| Control Panel | cPanel (standard) | Custom panel | Bluehost |
| WordPress Setup | Best-in-class wizard | Basic one-click | Bluehost |
| Free SSL | All plans | Deluxe+ only | Bluehost |
| Free Domain | Yes (1 year) | No | Bluehost |
| Free Backups | No ($2.99/mo) | No ($2.99/mo) | Tie |
| Domain Tools | Basic | Excellent (500+ TLDs) | GoDaddy |
| Website Builder | WordPress-focused | Proprietary (good) | GoDaddy |
| Phone Support | Yes | Yes | Tie |
| 3-Year Cost | ~$324 | ~$396 | Bluehost |
Score: Bluehost 9, GoDaddy 3, Ties 4. Bluehost dominates on WordPress and performance.
Bluehost starts at $2.95/mo and GoDaddy at $5.99/mo, both requiring a 36-month commitment upfront. At renewal, both land at an identical $11.99/mo. The intro savings are real -- about $109 over three years -- but the hidden costs are where the story gets interesting.
Bluehost's first-term cost works out to $106.20 for three years ($2.95/mo x 36). Add CodeGuard backups at $2.99/mo since Bluehost doesn't include them free, and your effective rate climbs to about $5.94/mo. GoDaddy starts higher at $215.64 for three years, and if you're on Economy, SSL costs $7.99/mo extra -- pushing your effective cost to roughly $13.97/mo for what should be table-stakes features. Pile on email and backups and GoDaddy's true monthly cost exceeds $23.
Here's the part that should bother you: think about what $6-14/mo buys you elsewhere. Hostinger's Premium plan is $2.99/mo with 100GB storage, free SSL, free backups, free email, and a 0.85-second load time. InterServer charges $2.50/mo with a price-lock guarantee -- what you pay today is what you pay at renewal, forever. No 306% renewal shock like Bluehost, no nickel-and-diming for SSL like GoDaddy. At $11.99/mo renewal, you could be paying for Cloudways' entry-level cloud plan ($14/mo), which delivers performance that embarrasses both hosts on every metric. You're not just overpaying -- you're overpaying for a slower product.
Neither impressed us. Bluehost loads in 1.35 seconds with a 380ms TTFB; GoDaddy in 1.8 seconds with a 420ms TTFB. For context, SiteGround loads in 0.65s and Hostinger in 0.85s. Both of those cost the same or less.
Under stress testing with 100 concurrent users, the gap widens: Bluehost degrades to 2.1 seconds, GoDaddy to 2.8. Uptime over 12 months was 99.93% for Bluehost and 99.90% for GoDaddy -- both acceptable but not impressive. Summer months were rough for both: Bluehost dropped to 99.85% in July, and GoDaddy hit 99.78%, which translates to about 1.6 hours of downtime in a single month.
A 1.35-1.8 second load time doesn't sound catastrophic until you consider what it costs you. Google's own research shows 53% of mobile visitors abandon a page that takes longer than 3 seconds. Your load time isn't the whole story -- add render-blocking CSS, unoptimized images, and a few plugins, and that 1.35s baseline quickly becomes 2.5-3.5s in the real world. On GoDaddy, you're starting from 1.8s, which means real-world loads routinely hit 3-4 seconds after you add WordPress themes and plugins.
Core Web Vitals matter for SEO now, and both hosts make it harder to pass Google's thresholds out of the box. With SiteGround or Hostinger, you have headroom -- a 0.65s baseline means your fully-loaded WordPress site might land at 1.5-2s. With Bluehost or GoDaddy, you're already using up that budget before your site even renders.
Strip away the brand names and marketing budgets, and you're left with two hosts that have stopped competing on product quality. Here's what should bother you about both:
Let's Encrypt made SSL free in 2016. Every major competitor -- Hostinger, SiteGround, InterServer, A2 Hosting, even budget hosts -- includes free SSL on all plans. GoDaddy still charges $7.99/mo on Economy. That's $96/year for something that costs them nothing to provide.
A fresh WordPress install with a starter theme uses ~1GB. Add WooCommerce and a few hundred product images and you're hitting that cap within months. Hostinger gives 100GB on their comparable plan. InterServer gives unlimited.
Buy your domain and hosting together at GoDaddy, and migrating away means dealing with DNS transfer friction, nameserver changes, and a 60-day transfer lock on new domains. It's not accidental -- it's designed to make leaving painful.
SiteLock Security ($2.99/mo), CodeGuard Backup ($2.99/mo), and SEO Tools ($1.99/mo) are pre-selected at checkout. If you don't manually uncheck them, you're paying an extra $95/year for services you didn't ask for. That's a dark pattern.
Both still run Apache on shared hosting while competitors moved to LiteSpeed (Hostinger, A2 Hosting) or custom Nginx stacks (SiteGround's SuperCacher) years ago. This directly explains why both load in 1.3-1.8s while modern hosts hit sub-1s.
None of these are deal-breakers in isolation. Together, they paint a picture of two companies that have prioritized marketing spend over product improvement -- because when your affiliate program does the selling, you don't need to be the best product.
Bluehost was built around WordPress. Its setup wizard walks you through theme selection with live previews before your site even goes live -- no other shared host does this as smoothly. You get cPanel with phpMyAdmin, one-click staging on Choice Plus and Pro plans, and automatic core updates out of the box. The WordPress.org recommendation since 2005 is a paid partnership (not an independent editorial pick), but Bluehost does meet the technical requirements and the onboarding experience genuinely earns its reputation.
GoDaddy treats WordPress as an afterthought. You get a basic one-click install and that's about it -- no server-side caching, no staging on shared plans, no SSH access on Economy. If you want GoDaddy's actual managed WordPress product, that's a separate $6.99+/mo plan. The company would rather steer you toward their proprietary website builder, which is decent for simple sites but comes with a catch that should give anyone pause: there is no export function whatsoever. Choose GoDaddy's builder and you're locked in permanently. The day you want to leave, you rebuild from scratch.
Bluehost gives you cPanel, and that's actually a meaningful advantage. cPanel is the industry standard -- if you've managed a website before, you already know where everything is. GoDaddy replaced it with a custom dashboard that looks cleaner on the surface but buries advanced settings behind multiple clicks and peppers you with upsell prompts for email, SSL, and marketing tools at every turn.
Where GoDaddy genuinely excels -- and this is the one area where the comparison isn't close -- is domain management. As the world's largest registrar, their tools are in a different league: 500+ TLD extensions, a domain auction marketplace for buying premium names, bulk management for portfolio owners, global anycast DNS, and a brokerage service for acquiring domains someone else already owns. Bluehost gives you a free domain for the first year on annual plans and basic DNS management, but domain tooling was clearly never a priority.
The practical takeaway: buy domains at GoDaddy, host elsewhere. There's no rule that says your registrar and your host need to be the same company, and decoupling them actually makes future migrations painless.
Both offer phone + chat support. Quality is mediocre on both sides. Bluehost is slightly better for WordPress; GoDaddy slightly better for domain/DNS issues. Both push upsells during support interactions.
| Metric | Bluehost | GoDaddy |
|---|---|---|
| Wait Time | 15-20 min | 10-15 min |
| WordPress Help | Adequate | Poor |
| Domain/DNS | Basic | Good |
| Free SSL | All plans | Deluxe+ only |
| Free Backups | No | No |
| Upsell in Support | Moderate | Aggressive |
Neither host includes free backups. GoDaddy doesn't include SSL on Economy. Both charge $2.99/mo for backups that SiteGround, Hostinger, and InterServer include free. Use UpdraftPlus (free) + Google Drive instead.
If you're a WordPress beginner who has already decided it has to be one of these two, go with Bluehost. The onboarding wizard, cPanel access, and free SSL on all plans make it the less painful choice. It's not our top recommendation for WordPress -- that's SiteGround -- but among these two, there's no contest.
If you're managing a domain portfolio, GoDaddy's registrar tools are legitimately best-in-class. Use them for domains. Just don't let the convenience of "everything in one place" convince you to host there too. Buy your .com at GoDaddy, point the nameservers elsewhere, and save yourself the headache.
For non-WordPress sites where you want a drag-and-drop builder, GoDaddy's builder is functional -- but understand the trade-off before you start. Zero export capability means your site exists only inside GoDaddy's ecosystem. If that doesn't bother you today, imagine how it feels three years from now when you've outgrown their hosting and realize you can't take your site with you.
If you're budget-conscious, neither of these is the answer. Hostinger at $1.99/mo is faster than both with free SSL, backups, and email included. InterServer at $2.50/mo locks your price forever -- no renewal surprise. Both outperform Bluehost and GoDaddy on every benchmark we run.
For a business or revenue-generating site, the recommendation is even clearer: neither. SiteGround ($2.99/mo) gives you staging on all plans, sub-second load times, and support staff who can actually troubleshoot WordPress issues instead of reading from a script. When your site makes money, the difference between 0.65s and 1.8s load time isn't academic -- it's revenue you're leaving on the table.
If you're reading this to decide between Bluehost and GoDaddy, the honest answer is: pick a third option. Hostinger ($1.99/mo, 0.85s load), InterServer ($2.50/mo, price locked forever), and SiteGround ($2.99/mo, 0.65s load) are all better in every measurable way.
But if it absolutely has to be one of these two, Bluehost is less bad. It's cheaper at renewal, has better WordPress integration, and at least includes daily backups on higher plans. GoDaddy's strength is domains, not hosting -- and you don't need to buy hosting from your domain registrar.