Bluehost vs. Heroku

I like clear-cut winners as much as the next person, but when it comes to Bluehost vs. Heroku, it would be silly for me to pick one for you. Why? Because the two companies specialize in very different things, although you can technically host websites with both Bluehost and Heroku.

Bluehost runs on a SaaS (Software as a Service) model and offers straightforward hosting plans that anyone can use to run a website. Heroku, on the other hand, is a fully managed PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) aimed at app creation and hosting, which is an entirely different affair. Although more versatile, Heroku is not beginner-friendly. You can learn more about the difference between SaaS and PaaS by reading our guide to public cloud hosting.

You can theoretically use Heroku to host a static website, but you have no incentive to do so, especially since it’s so complicated. In this respect, Bluehost is a much better service. It’s affordable, it comes with a free domain, and it’s one of the most beginner-friendly hosting providers out there.

Don’t have enough time to dive into the full comparison? Here’s a summary of our research:

Bluehost

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➜

4.80 / 5 Overall Rating

Pricing 4.9/5

Support 4.8/5

Features 4.7/5

Performance 4.8/5

Best Overall

Visit Bluehost

Heroku

See Full REVIEW

➜

4.50 / 5 Overall Rating

Pricing 4.6/5

Support 4.5/5

Features 4.6/5

Performance 4.3/5

Best for Apps

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Meanwhile, if you ask me whether Bluehost or Heroku is the better choice to host an app, I would definitely go with the second. You can use Bluehost’s AppMachine to create and publish mobile apps without seeing one line of code, but this feature is only suitable for lightweight apps at best.

Heroku lets you create and publish a small app for free, and the company has an unmatched list of integrations. Its platform supports a wide range of programming/scripting languages, and offers to do the heavy lifting for you in terms of updates and maintenance.

Furthermore, if you eventually decide to scale your app, Heroku gives you a lot of options. You have to pay for them, of course, but they are easy to implement and will help you keep up with increased traffic and usage.

Find out the full story below.

Performance

Regardless of what you want to host, performance is a fundamental aspect you should always take into account. For both websites and apps, better performance means faster loading speeds and more uptime. Why should you care about it in the first place? The answer is user experience.

According to Google’s own SEO (Search Engine Optimization) reports, site/application speed is crucial towards user retention. When your page or application takes more than two seconds to load, you risk losing incrementally higher numbers of visitors. Fewer visitors mean fewer leads and, naturally, fewer conversions and sales. In retail, a one-second delay can cost you up to 20% of your conversions.

It’s not uncommon for digital marketers to equate performance to revenue. If you want to be able to monetize your application or website, you should too.

So, do Heroku and Bluehost guarantee the performance you need for optimal user experience? Let’s take a closer look.

Bluehost vs. Heroku: Server Infrastructure

Heroku’s platform runs on AWS’s compute engine, the EC2. In most cases, when you purchase hosting from Heroku, you are provisioning a virtual container, which is an isolated section of a virtual machine. You can think of containers as lightweight silos that give you access to a small section of an operating system.

Heroku calls these containers dynos. The great part about dynos is that they allow developers to instantly build, deploy, and scale apps in the cloud. Higher tier plans give you access to your own private virtual machine (VM), but they don’t come cheap.

With Heroku, you can host your application in a European or US-based Amazon server, while higher-tier dynos also give you access to Asian and Australian locations.

On the other hand, Bluehost uses its own infrastructure, which consists of one data center in Ohio, United States.

Bluehost’s shared hosting plans are similar to Heroku’s dynos – you share the resources of your hosting environment, including CPU (central processing unit), bandwidth, and RAM (random-access memory), with other users. However, there are VPS and dedicated solutions that offer better isolation and more control of your hosting environment.

The main difference is that Heroku works with a cloud type of platform, whereas Bluehost does not. There are certain advantages to the cloud, including better redundancy, easier scaling, improved uptime, and cost-savings. While somewhat rare, there are certain companies that offer cheap cloud hosting services that will only cost you a bit more than traditional shared hosting. However, the cloud is usually more expensive than regular hosting, so it might not be worth it if you’re not a large enterprise.

Page Loading Speed

Which is more likely to offer better page loading speeds: Bluehost or Heroku? The answer depends on the type of hosting you purchase. Although a bit more expensive, Heroku’s Standard 1X dyno is likely to offer similar, if not slightly better performance than Bluehost’s Pro Shared plan.

This is because 1) you can choose your data center location, which can bring your app closer to your audience and 2) you know exactly how much RAM and CPU you have access to at all times.

Another thing to consider is the fact that performance on Bluehost’s shared plans depends on other websites hosted on the same machine. Unlike Heroku, which enforces hard limits for CPU and RAM, Bluehost does not. When a neighboring website on your server exceeds the boundaries of acceptable usage, Bluehost will ask the client to upgrade to a superior plan. However, until the issue is detected, you might have fewer resources to work with.

It is possible that a website hosted on Bluehost will see a higher variation in performance than one hosted with Heroku. But this is only the case when we talk about Bluehost’s shared hosting. A prime example of this is our Bluehost vs. iPage comparison where the former crushed the latter in the performance department while testing their respective shared hosting plans.

Bluehost’s VPS offers better resources than Heroku’s plans at a much better price. If you run a mid to high-traffic site, choosing Bluehost VPS will likely guarantee better page loading speeds at a lower cost. Unlike shared hosting, the resources included in your VPS plans are your own to do with as you please. Nor will you have to worry about other websites hogging your bandwidth.

Uptime

A single hour of downtime is likely to cost businesses an average of $100,000. And this is just labor and revenue. There’s no telling what impact the lack of availability will have on your brand’s trustworthiness or overall image. The only way to avoid such losses is to work with reliable hosting providers.

Although Bluehost has no uptime SLA, third-party data indicates that the company provides a minimum of 99.9% service availability over extended periods of time. Our own data backs this claim as we never saw Bluehost’s uptime dip under 99.9% while testing its services over long periods of time. This is pretty much the industry standard for companies like Bluehost.

Heroku is in a similar situation where it doesn’t offer an uptime SLA, but manages to provide excellent service availability due to the fact that its infrastructure is basically managed by AWS. If and when Heroku goes down, it will likely be due to an outage at Amazon, which does not happen very often.

Bluehost vs. Heroku – Which Host Has Better Performance?

Overall, Bluehost and Heroku offer similar levels of performance. I would recommend Bluehost if you want host a website, whereas Heroku is more suitable for application hosting.

Even if Heroku might offer slightly better performance than Bluehost’s shared plans, you are likely to encounter a lot of problems when trying to host a website using Heroku, mainly due to its ephemeral storage system. More on that in the Ease of Use section.

Another thing to consider is that Bluehost’s VPS is a more cost-effective solution than Heroku’s higher-tier plans. I’ll get into that in the next section.

Pricing and Value

Bluehost is widely acknowledged as being one of the cheapest web hosting providers on the market. Its plans come with tons of benefits, whether you’re a small business looking for an online presence or a web hosting beginner.

In addition, Bluehost’s pricing model rewards long-term commitments. There are a few upsells along the way and the renewals tend to run high, but even so, it’s still (much) more affordable than Heroku.

Heroku is a more expensive and niche choice compared to Bluehost. The platform focuses on giving advanced users access to a secure, pre-configured developer environment where they can build, test, and deploy applications.

Although performance plans on Heroku come with a lot of integrations and tools, you’ll be paying more for the same server resources.

If you’re on a budget and you’re looking to get the most value out of your hosting service, Bluehost’s Plus has everything you’ll ever need to host a secure website and then some. When your website’s traffic exceeds your shared resources, you can easily upgrade to a more accommodating VPS plan.

Free App Hosting with Heroku

A great feature from Heroku is the free plan. This subscription lets you try out the platform within certain limits, completely free of charge. Unfortunately, you won’t be able to run more than two simultaneous process types and the instance will automatically sleep after half an hour of inactivity.

If you’re looking for free web hosting services that are a bit more generous don’t hesitate to check out this article.

You can also try out the Postgres and Redis services without having to pay. Although you get unified activity logs for your dyno, as well as the possibility to deploy using Git and Docker, you won’t be able to use free SSL certificates for custom domain names. This basically makes it impossible to host a secure website using Heroku’s free plan.

Meanwhile, you can try Bluehost’s services for 30 days and get a full refund within this timeframe, no questions asked. Just keep in mind that the money-back guarantee only applies to hosting services. If you purchase a domain name or any add-ons (like CodeGuard or SiteLock), their costs will be deduced from your refund.

Freebies aside, let’s see how Bluehost and Heroku compare with one another head-to-head.

Bluehost Plus (Shared Hosting) vs Heroku Hobby

Bluehost Plus is the cheapest shared plan with the exception of the Basic. The reason why I decided to go with this one is the value purchase. For a couple of extra dollars, you get unlimited storage, bandwidth, email accounts, domains, and websites.

Don’t mistake unlimited with infinite, though. There’s an acceptable use policy that all shared customers agree to when signing up, which means that excessive use of server resources is not permitted. If your website poses a threat to the overall stability of the server, the company will ask you to either upgrade to a different plan or reduce your usage.

Bluehost’s Plus is an excellent choice for new websites since it comes with $200 worth of advertising credits and premium spam protection via Spam Experts. Basically, it has everything you might need for a secure new site.

On the other hand, Heroku’s first paid option, the Hobby, is nearly 50% more expensive than Bluehost Plus. Although this is quite the jump from the free plan, the resources aren’t much better. In fact, you get the same share of CPU, compute, and RAM.

There are some pros too. The Hobby comes with the possibility to run 10 simultaneous process types and your hosting environment won’t be put to sleep after 30 minutes of inactivity. In addition, you can activate free SSL certificates for custom domain names, and you have access to application metrics for the past day. To be fair, this can be more frustrating than helpful.

Note that Heroku’s price disadvantage is only applicable for the first term since you get a significant discount with Bluehost the first time you sign up. Upon renewal, Bluehost will be slightly more expensive. Even so, because of the unlimited resources and the other features you get, Bluehost offers better value. Not only when compared to Heroku but also many of the other Bluehost alternatives we’ve tested in the past.

Bluehost Standard (VPS) vs Heroku Standard 2X

Because of the hard cap on resources, Bluehost’s VPS plans more closely resemble the type of hosting environment you get with Heroku. So, what do you get for Bluehost’s entry-level VPS plan, dubbed the Standard?

The resources are as follows: 2 vCPUs, 30GB SSD, 2GB RAM, 1TB bandwidth, and 1 IP address. As is the case with shared hosting plans, there’s a 30-day money-back guarantee that lets you cancel your service for a full refund.

Unlike shared hosting, the VPS does not have unlimited resources. Although fixed, these server specs offer a more reliable hosting experience since they’re not shared with anyone else. In addition, you have more control over your hosting environment

Heroku’s Standard 2X is roughly triple the Bluehost’s Standard initial price. Even though Bluehost’s renewals and monthly charges tend to run quite high, Heroku is still 70% more expensive than Bluehost’s highest rates. What does it have to show for it?

Well, the Standard 2X comes with 1GB RAM, an unlimited number of process types, and a lot of extra features in addition to what’s included in the Hobby plan. Detailed application metrics are available for up to 7 days, and you’ll be able to horizontally scale your hosting environment (add more dynos to handle increased traffic or load).

The CPU share is also twice the size of the Hobby/Free instances, which means your applications will not only load faster, but also perform better overall. Unfortunately, this is still a far cry from what you can get with Bluehost. The bandwidth is slightly better, but the CPU and RAM are much worse.

If you’re still on the fence you can check our our VPS hosting guide to find how to choose the ideal virtual private server for any project.

Bluehost Ultimate (VPS) vs Heroku Performance M

If you want to host or test an application that sees a decent amount of load, you’re better off with Bluehost’s Ultimate VPS plan. Server resources are up to 4 vCPU cores, 8GB RAM, 3TB bandwidth, and 2 IP addresses.

On the other hand, we have Heroku’s Performance M, which gives you 2GB RAM and the same benefits as Standard 2X in addition to autoscaling and dedicated environment. Bluehost’s Ultimate may not be a dedicated solution, but it’s more than 50% cheaper than the Performance M.

You can install Git on Bluehost and run as many process types as your environment can handle. The downside with Bluehost is that there’s no autoscaling feature yet. Although this isn’t a great loss for applications or websites with small to medium traffic, handling traffic spikes without load balancers can be a chore.

For three-year terms, Bluehost is no less than four times cheaper than Heroku. Over a long enough period of time, these costs accumulate to a handsome total sum.

Enterprise-Grade Solutions: Bluehost Dedicated vs Heroku Private S

To build a secure, private application or website, dedicated hosting is highly advised. Although Bluehost is not known for its dedicated service, there are three plans you can choose from to guarantee high performance and security for your project.

On the Standard Dedicated plan, Bluehost includes 500GB of mirrored storage, 4GB RAM, 5TB bandwidth, 3 IP addresses, and 4 vCPU cores. Heroku’s Private S offer is the one that most closely resembles this dedicated option from Bluehost.

Unfortunately, Heroku’s pricing is custom-made for each use case scenario, so you have to contact them for a quote. Nevertheless, it would be safe assume it’s somewhere in the range of three to four times more expensive than Bluehost.

That said, Heroku does offer a private dedicated network, trusted IPs, and a range of network access controls in addition to everything included in the Performance plans. The problem is that just 1GB RAM doesn’t cut it for a medium to high traffic app. It’s enough to deploy and run low-traffic platforms, but that’s pretty much it.

While the developer environment is certainly easy to work with and the privacy is near-identical to a dedicated solution, the fact is that the value offer is quite poor from Heroku from the standpoint of hosting resources.

If you want a platform with a similar level of granular control that’s more affordable, we suggest you try out DigitalOcean. For more information on the service, you can read our DigitalOcean review.

Which Is Cheaper, Bluehost or Heroku?

There’s no question that Bluehost is the superior value choice for hosting websites. Heroku’s plans are tailor-made for application hosting, while Bluehost is aimed at the web hosting niche.

Ease of Use

As a niche hosting provider designed to make developers’ lives easier, Heroku is not exactly easy to use for hosting beginners. That said, if your company or business relies on developing and deploying apps, Heroku is one of the best hosting providers out there. Among others, the Toyota Motor Europe company relies on Heroku.

Heroku Makes App Development Easier

In a nutshell, Heroku allows your devs to skip the entire process of setting up the environment necessary for writing code, hardware plus software. Your IT department also doesn’t have to worry about security since the company handles patching, threat monitoring, and maintenance round the clock.

Heroku doesn’t stop there, though. There are managed data services and over 170 add-ons to expand the functionality of your environment. One of the most important ones is the Salesforce integration, which I’ll get to in the Features section.

The major problem with Heroku and the reason why it’s difficult to host a website on it is the ephemeral file system. Like any other container type of storage, the files you use in your dyno are there only temporary, like a scratchpad.

The moment you restart or stop your Heroku VM, any written files are deleted. When you boot a dyno, it gets a fresh copy of the most recent filesystem you’ve used. To host a website on Heroku, you have to use an external type of storage, such as Amazon’s S3 or Google’s Cloud Storage.

There are some CMS solutions in Heroku’s marketplace, such as the free Elegant CMS, but there are a lot of development limitations involved with the free tier. It’s complicated, to say the least, which is why Heroku shouldn’t be your first choice for hosting websites.

Bluehost Is Far Better for Websites

While Bluehost does not have the advanced integrations that come with Heroku, the company does make it insanely easy to create, launch, and manage a website. For shared plans, Bluehost’s dashboard brings together the most important aspects of running a website.

If you want a web host for beginners, Bluehost is one of the best services of its kind. There’s even a to-do list for setting up a website. This is a highly-underrated ease of use improvement that makes it easier for anyone to create a beautiful site without any knowledge of code.

For busy professionals, Bluehost offers managed WordPress hosting. The WordPress CMS (content management system) comes pre-installed, while the company’s tech squad takes care of updating it and backing up your website on your behalf. That said, advanced users might find some of Bluehost’s advertised features useless, a case in which its plans lose some of their value and appeal.

Features

Bluehost’s features are closely aligned with the needs of web hosting. For example, all shared plans come with free SSL certificate, unlimited bandwidth, plenty of disk storage, and multiple domains.

Although this didn’t use to be the case, SSL certificates have become mandatory for all websites. These simple pieces of software encrypt the connection between your website and your visitors, which makes browsing safer overall. Because search engine algorithms penalize sites without padlock protection and most browsers warn users not to visit them, SSLs are a must-have.

Bluehost Focuses on Website Performance and Security

Another useful feature on Bluehost’s plans is the Spam Experts filter. Available on all plans with the exception of the shared Basic, this is a best-in-class email filtering solution that protects your network and users against malware and spam.

If you own or want to create a WordPress website to monetize it, Bluehost’s WP Pro plans are worth considering. The entry-level subscription comes with the Marketing Center add-on, which offers more in-depth stats on your visitors. Higher plans include SEO and business review tools, not to mention specialized WordPress support.

The specialized support offered by Bluehost is fantastic and is often considered superior even to the support found at WordPress (.com)’ own hosting service. You can read more about that in our Bluehost vs. WordPress.com comparison.

What About Developer-Friendly Features?

For advanced users, Heroku’s add-ons and platform might prove more valuable than Bluehost’s features. For instance, business owners can benefit greatly from the Salesforce integration. Heroku was bought by the Salesforce platform back in 2010, and if there’s one thing that Salesforce does best, that’s CRM (customer relationship management).

With Salesforce, your Heroku hosting environment will be able to store and leverage crucial customer data, from sensor information, to product and application metrics. This data is invaluable for growing businesses, since it effectively shows what you can do to bring in more sales and elicit higher levels of customer satisfaction.

In addition, with Heroku, your devs won’t have to worry about data management whatsoever. Provisioning and scaling the databases they need is now an instant task. Complex processes like forking, data clips, automated health checks, and rollbacks are also available with just a couple of clicks.

Customer Support

Even though customer support is often brushed aside, the service is an integral part of a complete hosting provider. In addition to difficulties specific to each client, there may be malfunctions with the infrastructure, the operating software, or a combination of the two.

And when you encounter problems with your hosting environment, will there be someone there to help you out? If you don’t know why your platform or online store is down, downtime can cost you invaluable business leads. What’s worse, your reputation as a business will suffer.

Heroku’s Customer Support Is Scarce

Knowing you can rely on specialized tech support when you need it the most is an integral part of the services offered by a premium web host.

So, what’s included in the free support tier with Bluehost and Heroku? With Heroku, your support channel is pretty scarce. In fact, you’re more likely to get help from the community than you are from the host provider. There’s no guaranteed response time, no live chat option, and the service is limited to business hours during week days.

Bluehost Is Readily Available at All Times

On the other hand, Bluehost offers 24/7 live chat and phone support. Anytime something is wrong, you can jump straight into the messaging window and find a solution instantly. Whether the person on the other end is qualified to help you is a matter of debate. You can read our in-depth Bluehost review if you’re curious about our past experiences with the company’s support agents.

Issues related to billing, account resources, and simple troubleshooting will definitely fall in the scope of Bluehost’s live chat agents. However, more complicated questions might not, but even so, the agents will find someone to lend a hand. Another minor downside is that, on occasion, Bluehost’s representatives try to upsell add-ons or more expensive plans.

If you’d like to pay more for support, you can do so with both Heroku and Bluehost. The problem is that advanced support on Bluehost is only related to WordPress-specific sites and it’s offered through its BlueSky service.

On the other hand, Heroku’s Premium and Enterprise tiers give you access to top tier engineers that can troubleshoot any hosting problem on your behalf. If you can afford it, this is the kind of support that drives success.

Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization or SEO for short is the process of growing the quality and quantity of your website’s traffic through unpaid search engine results. Two-thirds of all people who use search engines click on the first 5 listings. If you’re not one of those, chances are small that your audience will visit your website.

Because of this, SEO has become a vital and significant part of successful digital marketing strategies. However, if you’re trying to manage your budget, you won’t be able to hire an SEO expert for your websites.

Bluehost’s infrastructure makes it more compatible with website SEO, but there are a few powerful tools you can leverage on Heroku as well. Since setting up or migrating a WordPress website to Bluehost is so easy, you can use any of the myriads of free WordPress SEO plugins (like Yoast or SEMRush) to help boost your site’s traffic with minimal expenses.

Is Heroku Any Good for SEO?

Unfortunately, Heroku’s temporary filesystem will likely cause your SEO WordPress plugins to behave erratically. At times, this can even slow down your website, which can cause your website to rank lower than those of your competitors.

Still, there’s a free application SEO add-on on Heroku called SERP Scan. This neat tool will give you an in-depth view of your app’s current SEO practices, keep track of your SEO rank and local rank, competitors, and more.

In addition, the Salesforce integration through Heroku Connect will give you significant information on your visitors, which, if interpreted appropriately, can provide further search engine optimization leads. Although more complicated, this is what SEO actually means and, if you invest the time to get to know the system, you stand to gain a lot from it.

Security

Unless you purchase a higher-tier shared or VPS plan with Bluehost, it’s likely that your website’s security will need a bit of a boost. After all, shared hosting is this affordable only because your resources are… well, shared with those of other customers.

Nonetheless, Bluehost’s top tier shared plan, the Pro, includes excellent security tools. You get a dedicated IP address, domain privacy, and site backups. You’ll be able to install a premium SSL certificate (although there’s a free one you can use as well), while your domain information will be hidden from potentially malicious agents.

You can get these additional protection layers on cheaper plans as well, but only if you purchase the SiteLock and CodeGuard add-ons.

The free backups guarantee that there’s a failsafe you can rely on if your website breaks down completely. This is a solid value offer from Bluehost, and one that will help you fend off most security threats when hosting a website.

On the other hand, Heroku’s container-based software infrastructure is designed to offer excellent protection regardless of the plan you choose. While it is true that even the slightest of misconfigurations can cause important security gaps in virtual containers, Heroku has some of the most proficient software engineers on its side.

You can rest assured that your Heroku dyno is configured to offer enterprise-grade, multi-layer protection for your application and/or files. Higher-tier plans come with trusted IP ranges, network access controls, and even HIPAA compliance, should you need it. That said, all of these security perks will cost you extra.

A great free service you get with any Heroku dyno is Secure Key. This lets you create an automatic key rotation system that guarantees secure access at any point within your applications. In terms of paid add-ons, you can purchase anything from premium SSLs to Web Application Firewalls (WAF), automatic security scanners, and more.

Overall, both Heroku and Bluehost have a good range of security features that are likely to keep you safe. However, due to Heroku’s architecture and add-on services, you can achieve a much higher level of protection with its dynos. This is also the reason why the hosting provider can offer HIPAA compliance, which is not something you can get with Bluehost. Just remember that it’ll cost you.

Scalability

Thankfully, both Bluehost and Heroku give you a way to scale your hosting resources to meet the needs of growing websites or applications. If you can’t scale to better server resources, you’ll stunt the growth of your platform and potentially lose a lot of business and/or traffic.

Heroku Has Built-In Scalability for Apps

Heroku’s dynos can be scaled on demand or, if your platform experiences uneven traffic spikes, automatically.

While Heroku’s Adept Scale add-on does come with a monthly subscription, you’re likely to save money in the long run by releasing the resources you don’t use and then adding them just-in-time. On the front end, your application or website will run just as flawlessly.

Higher plans let you duplicate your Heroku dynos to achieve easy horizontal scaling.

Bluehost Also Gives You Room to Grow

In what concerns Bluehost, you can upgrade to higher-tier plans to accommodate your website’s growth. If you’re on the entry-level shared subscription, there are three other shared options you can go through before purchasing a VPS environment.

Bluehost promises to introduce easy CPU and RAM scaling on its VPS plans in the near future, and this will make it possible to better adjust your hosting plan to your current needs.

Scalability is not a problem for either Heroku or Bluehost, so you can easily focus on growing your website, without worrying about resource bottlenecks.

Key Differences

Given how different Bluehost and Heroku are, it can be easy to lose track of the main factors that set them apart. One thing to keep in mind is that both hosting providers are good at what they do, although they’re designed to work in different ways:

• Website or Application Hosting. Bluehost is primarily designed as a web hosting SaaS platform. It’s my go-to service for websites of all sizes.
• Customer Service. Bluehost offers 24/7 live chat and phone support even with its basic shared plan. In other words, someone’s always there to help you.
• Useful Add-ons. Bluehost’s features focus predominantly on websites. Their purpose is to help you build and optimize your site for performance and security.
• Heroku is a PaaS best suited for web applications. The tools, resources, and services included with its plans are less suitable for websites.
• Heroku has premium support plans, but these are subscription-based services only suitable for large-scale enterprises. Why? They cost a lot.
• Heroku’s marketplace includes hundreds of turnkey applications designed to help you do anything from storing data to testing, metrics, content management, and more.

Based on these differences, you can clearly see that Bluehost is completely web hosting oriented while Heroku is a service more suited for web applications and developers.

Bluehost vs. Heroku: Our Pick

Which is better, Bluehost or Heroku? Overall, Bluehost is the winner of this Bluehost vs Heroku comparison because it’s a better web hosting service than Heroku, especially for beginners on a budget. This hosting provider will not only help you get online fast, but it’ll also help keep your costs down.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that you should completely discard Heroku. Although feature-rich, Heroku is intended for hosting web applications, rather than websites. When you do choose Heroku, it comes with managed databases, in-memory data storage, and tons of useful add-ons.

Still haven’t decided? Here’s a summary of our comparison:

• Performance: Our tests show that you can get excellent performance with both Bluehost and Heroku. Slow loading pages or applications are likely caused by improper software or inappropriate user configurations. Bluehost is particularly well-suited for WordPress websites, as it is one of the recommended hosts by the WordPress foundation.
• Pricing and Value: Bluehost is much cheaper than Heroku and its affordability only becomes more noticeable as you look at VPS and dedicated hosting solutions. If you sign up for long-term plans, you can get an even better deal with the help of our discounted offer.
• Ease of Use: For the purpose of hosting and/or building a website, Bluehost is much easier to use than Heroku. The service is designed with beginners in mind, and there’s a to-do list for site building that can make your life much easier. However, if you want to build an application, Heroku’s dynos and services are more suitable for the task.
• Features: Bluehost’s features make it easier to host websites on its platform, particularly if you intend to use WordPress to build it. The more expensive the plan, the better the value offer. On the other hand, Heroku’s tools are aimed at application development, launch, and management.
• Customer Support: With Bluehost, you get 24/7 customer support through phone and live chat starting with the basic shared plan. For websites built with WordPress, there are dedicated support plans. While Heroku’s basic support doesn’t match that of Bluehost, its premium support plans put you in touch with real hosting engineers.
• Search Engine Optimization: Bluehost is a hosting service that facilitates website SEO, while Heroku enables application SEO. On higher-tier plans, Bluehost offers useful marketing add-ons that help guide your SEO strategy.
• Security: Bluehost provides basic website security, but you either have to pay extra for proper security or purchase a higher-tier plan, to begin with. Heroku’s infrastructure, on the other hand, has a better level of built-in protection, not to mention a lot of useful add-ons that you can use to achieve high levels of compliance.
• Scalability: Although you can easily upgrade to higher plans on Bluehost once your website picks up steam, Heroku’s infrastructure is easier to scale when application traffic and usage demands it.

Despite being more versatile and easier to use for building websites, Bluehost is no match for Heroku when it comes to application hosting. However, Bluehost is one of the best services for hosting WordPress websites, as it offers excellent performance, security, and value. Whether one or the other is better is entirely up to you and your needs.

Enjoyed our comparison? We have plenty of others where this one came from and you can check them all out by visiting our dedicated comparisons hub.