Here’s the Deal

Amazon S3 vs Bluehost

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When comparing Amazon S3 vs Bluehost, the Slant community recommends Amazon S3 for most people. In the question“What are the best website hosting providers?” Amazon S3 is ranked 11th while Bluehost is ranked 32nd. The most important reason people chose Amazon S3 is:

The free tier will cover most personal home pages.

Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking

Common Questions

What are the best website hosting providers?

Pros

Pro
Free for small sites

The free tier will cover most personal home pages.

Pro
Easily scalable

There's no cap in storage or traffic. Cost is based on usage.

Pro
Super cheap with a year's worth of free service

S3 storage costs $0.03 per GB and gets cheaper the more is stored, PUT, COPY, POST, or LIST requests are $0.005 per 1,000 requests and GET and all other requests are $0.004 per 10,000 requests. And with some restrictions is available for free for a year.

Pro
Fast setup

You can provision a S3 bucket, upload files, setup the DNS, and go live in under 10 minutes.

Pro
Fast

S3 is fast even without a CDN.

Pro
Easy to setup with CDN

Simple to set up with Amazon's CloudFont CDN.

Pro
Supports custom root domains

To set up a custom domain, Amazon Route 53 has to be configured as the DNS provider with the domain registrar, two buckets have to be created and configured with the name the same as the domain - one including, one excluding www. A more in-depth explanation can be found here.

Pro
No security risks

There's no server to manage, so no security issues to patch or keep watch.

Pro
Recommended by Wordpress.org

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Cons

Con
Credit card needed

Amazon will try to retrieve the money every month after one year trial. If you have no money you will be banned.

Con
Setting up automatic public permissions is confusing

By default, S3 sets uploaded files to private. You can configure your S3 bucket to auto-apply public permissions by copying and pasting a template. But the template might be intimidating to some users.

Con
Confusing web interface

Amazon S3's web interface is quite confusing, especially for first-time users, but there are many tutorials online that help beginners to set up a static site on S3.

Con
No SFTP support

Amazon S3 does not have SFTP support, instead the S3 web interface has to be used.

Con
Has Been Hacked

BlueHost has suffered security breaches before and was hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army in 2015, along with other EIG-owned hosts.

Con
Owned by EIG

Endurance International Group (EIG) is notorious for buying out web hosts and customers often notice a drop in quality and support. They also own BlueHost.