Bluehost vs SiteGround vs Hostinger: The Limits Nobody Compares

Three hosts selling three different theories. Bluehost sells hand-holding and cPanel familiarity. Hostinger sells allowance per pound. SiteGround sells speed and support — at a price that makes people flinch.

The usual comparison stops at the price table. But the thing that actually decides whether your site survives its own growth isn’t the monthly rate — it’s the resource limits, and there the ranking looks nothing like the price ranking.

Quick decision

• Fewest sites, tightest budget, willing to re-shop at renewal → Bluehost, cheapest over four years.
• Multiple sites, want the most allowance per pound → Hostinger, 100 sites and 100 GB on the entry plan.
• One site that matters, and you want to know your ceilings in advance → SiteGround, and you’ll pay 78% more for it.
• A site already hitting 508 errors → none of these. You’ve outgrown shared hosting; see our VPS comparison.

The 48-month cost

Assuming twelve months at the introductory rate and thirty-six at renewal — introductory terms vary by promotion, but the renewal rate is where most of the money goes:

SiteGround’s renewal is the number to sit with. $2.99 becomes $17.99 — a six-fold increase, and roughly $300 more than Bluehost across four years. Its GrowBig tier goes from $4.99 to $29.99.

That is a genuinely large premium, and the rest of this article is about whether it buys anything.

The column nobody compares: resource limits

Shared hosting is sold on storage and sites. It is governed by limits that mostly don’t appear on the pricing page: CPU allowance, entry processes, I/O, and inodes — the count of files, which is what “unlimited storage” is really capped by.

Here’s what a typical mid-tier shared plan looks like industry-wide: 1–2 GB of RAM from a shared pool, 100–200% CPU throttled aggressively at the limit, 1,024–2,048 IOPS shared across hundreds of accounts, 20–30 entry processes, and “unlimited” storage capped at around 250,000 inodes.

Two failure modes follow, and they look completely different:

• Exceed CPU → throttling. Pages still load, but slowly. Nothing obviously breaks, which is why this one goes undiagnosed for months.
• Exceed entry processes → visitors get a 508 error, “Resource Limit Is Reached.” Abrupt and visible.

Now the finding that reorders these three.

SiteGround publishes its ceilings. StartUp states roughly 10,000 monthly visits; GrowBig around 100,000. GrowBig allows 2,000 script executions per hour, double StartUp’s. Whatever you think of the price, those are numbers you can plan against and measure yourself against.

Hostinger explicitly declines to publish them. Asked directly about the per-hour CPU seconds quota, support responded that “the CPU limit is managed dynamically based on fair use, and we do not publish specific numbers as these can vary based on server load conditions.”

That’s a defensible engineering position — dynamic allocation genuinely does vary — and it’s also the same pattern we found in unmetered bandwidth: the limit exists, you simply can’t see it until you hit it.

For a hobby site none of this matters. For a business site expecting to grow, a published ceiling you can plan against is worth real money against an unpublished one you discover through a 508 at your busiest hour. That is the single strongest argument for SiteGround’s premium, and it isn’t the one SiteGround leads with.

Find your own limits in two minutes

Whichever you’re on, the numbers are usually visible in the panel:

• cPanel hosts (Bluehost, SiteGround) — look for Resource Usage or CPU and Concurrent Connection Usage. It shows CPU, entry processes, I/O and physical memory against your limits, with a fault count for the last 24 hours. Any non-zero fault count means you hit a ceiling.
• Hostinger (hPanel) — the resource-usage view shows the same categories against your plan’s dynamic allocation.
• Inodes — check the file count in cPanel’s stats sidebar. Sites with large media libraries, heavy caching plugins or old backups routinely accumulate hundreds of thousands of files without the owner noticing.

Check this before you migrate, not after. A site with a rising fault count is telling you it has outgrown the plan regardless of which logo is on the invoice.

What each one is actually for

Bluehost — the cheapest of the three over four years, cPanel, phone support, and a genuinely gentle path from shared hosting. Its entry plan is thin at 10 websites and 10 GB, and daily backups come via CodeGuard as a paid add-on at roughly $36–48 a year — a detail we costed in the Bluehost vs Hostinger head-to-head, where it flips the comparison.

Hostinger — 100 websites and 100 GB of storage on the entry plan, roughly ten times Bluehost’s allowance for about a dollar more per month at renewal. Best value if you host several sites. The trade is that its ceilings aren’t published, and its renewal is a 340% step up from the introductory rate.

SiteGround — the expensive one, and the only one that tells you where the walls are. Strong support reputation, published visit and execution limits, and a renewal that will genuinely surprise you if you don’t plan for it.

Who each is wrong for

Bluehost is wrong for you if you host more than a handful of sites — 10 GB and 10 websites is restrictive — or if you want daily backups without a separate line item.

Hostinger is wrong for you if you need to forecast capacity precisely, or you need phone support. The unpublished-limits position is fine for a personal site and awkward for a business that needs to know when it will outgrow the plan.

SiteGround is wrong for you if your site is small and stable. Paying $17.99 a month to serve a brochure site with 500 visits is spending $300 over four years on headroom and support you won’t call on. It’s also wrong if you were attracted by $2.99 and haven’t looked at the renewal.

All three are wrong for you if you’re already seeing 508 errors, sustained throttling, or a rising fault count. Those are signals to move to a VPS, not to move sideways — our VPS hosting comparison and cheapest VPS index cover where to go.

Why there’s no speed benchmark here

The standard move in this comparison is a table of load times from five global locations. We haven’t run one, and we’d treat anyone’s with caution.

Shared hosting performance depends on which physical server you land on and what the other accounts on it are doing that hour. A measurement taken on one account in one datacentre on one afternoon doesn’t predict yours, and the difference between these three on a well-cached WordPress site is usually smaller than the difference between two accounts on the same host.

What does transfer is the structural stuff: published limits, what happens when you hit them, and the four-year cost. That’s what this comparison is built on.

The CTAs

Check Hostinger pricing → · Read our review

Check Bluehost pricing → · Read our review

Check SiteGround pricing → · Read our review

How we picked

Pricing, renewal rates, storage and site allowances come from provider pricing pages and published pricing breakdowns read in August 2026. SiteGround’s visit and script-execution limits are its own published figures. The Hostinger support quote about unpublished CPU limits is reported by a third party who asked directly, not our own correspondence.

The 48-month totals assume twelve months at the introductory rate followed by thirty-six at renewal. Introductory terms vary — some require 48-month prepayment to reach the advertised figure — so treat the totals as a like-for-like comparison rather than a quote.

Industry-typical resource limits (entry processes, inodes, IOPS) are general figures for mid-tier shared plans rather than confirmed per-provider values, because two of the three don’t publish theirs. That’s the point of the section.

All three links are affiliate links. The cheapest option over four years is Bluehost, and we’ve put that in the first table rather than burying it.

FAQ

Which is cheapest: Bluehost, SiteGround or Hostinger?

Bluehost over four years, at roughly $384 against Hostinger’s $426 and SiteGround’s $684. That’s on renewal pricing, which is where most of the money goes — comparing introductory rates gives a very different and misleading answer.

Why is SiteGround so much more expensive?

Its renewal is $17.99 against $9.99–10.99 for the other two, and GrowBig renews at $29.99. What the premium buys is a strong support reputation and — unusually — published resource ceilings, so you can plan capacity instead of discovering limits through errors.

What is a 508 error on shared hosting?

“Resource Limit Is Reached” — you’ve exceeded your plan’s entry-process limit, so visitors are turned away. It’s the visible failure mode. The invisible one is CPU throttling, where pages still load but slowly, which is why it often goes undiagnosed for months.

What are inodes and why do they matter?

The number of files in your account. “Unlimited storage” is typically capped at around 250,000 inodes, so a site with a large media library, aggressive caching or old backups can hit the ceiling with plenty of gigabytes free. Check the file count in your panel’s stats sidebar.

Does Hostinger publish its CPU limits?

No. Asked directly, support said the CPU limit is managed dynamically on fair use and that it doesn’t publish specific numbers because they vary with server load. That’s reasonable engineering and awkward capacity planning — fine for a personal site, less so for a business that needs to know when it will outgrow the plan.

Which is best for WordPress?

All three run it well and all three carry WordPress.org recommendation badges, so that isn’t a differentiator despite being cited as one. Choose on allowance (Hostinger), price (Bluehost) or published limits and support (SiteGround).