Website performance, speed, content quality, and user experience plays a pivotal role in the overall success of an online business.
To run a business efficiently, you need to invest in the right resources — you need to hire quality writers to write useful content, you need to hire good designers and developers to build a website which looks great and loads fast. You need to invest in the right tools to get competitive intelligence over your competitors.
From my experience, I have seen that most website owners struggle with choosing the right hosting plan for their business. I have struggled myself until I realized the mistakes I’ve made and how costly those decisions were back then. Most independent businesses start with shared hosting and somewhere down the road, they don’t upgrade to a better hosting plan as their traffic increases. This is when the website becomes slow, unresponsive, sluggish and creates a bad user experience which ultimately results in loss of Google search rankings and eventually, sales and revenue goes for a toss.
So with time, you need to consider moving from a shared hosting plan to VPS hosting for faster performance, reliability, more resources, speed, and higher bandwidth caps.
In this article, I have reviewed the shared hosting plans of Bluehost with VPS Hosting plans of Bluehost so you can make an informed decision on whether you should choose VPS hosting or continue with a shared hosting plan of Bluehost.
What is Shared Hosting? Benefits and Limitations of Bluehost Shared Hosting Plans
Shared Hosting is similar to having roommates, just that you aren’t sure how many of them are going to share the room with you. In a shared hosting plan, the web hosting companies allocate a certain number of websites to a server, based on their internal protocols. Now, this isn’t something that you can question (you can only crib about it!).
This arrangement makes sense when you don’t have much traffic, but as it grows, the resources become scarce and you literally begin to wish that you knew exactly how much of the server’s resources were yours. Well, this isn’t going to be possible with shared web hosting, and now you know why shared hosting plans are so cheap.
Usually, most start-up websites and new ventures do just fine with a shared hosting plan, but not unless you hire the services of a reputed web hosting company. That’s because there are a ton of web hosting companies out there that offer dirt-cheap shared web hosting. The trick here is that these service providers overburden their servers with more websites than it can handle.
As the server is overburdened, your website’s page load time increases and so does the bounce rate because nobody likes slow sites. Now, this should explain why you need a reputed and reliable web hosting company to host your website. At the time of writing this article, we are on Bluehost and highly recommend it. However, Hostgator, Dreamhost, Siteground, Kinsta and Wp Engine are also great choices for VPS or managed hosting plans.
Bluehost is one of the most relied-upon web hosting company and is a part of EIG, a large conglomerate that has access to a multitude of resources. Now that explains how this company manages to offer more storage, blitz speed, and several other freebies.
Let us now dig into the advantages and disadvantages of Bluehost’s shared hosting plans.
| Benefits of Bluehost Shared Hosting Plans | Limitations of Bluehost Shared Hosting Plans |
|---|---|
| Cheap and Pocket-Friendly for a newbie or start-up | Low Performance, cannot take traffic beyond a certain cap |
| Does not require Technical Know-How of setting up and managing servers | Not Scalable. You cannot scale a shared hosting plan as your business grows, you have to either move to a VPS or dedicated plan eventually |
| Suitable For Low Traffic Sites who don’t have bandwidth and usage issues | Unreliable Speed, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t depend on who else is using the same server and how much resources they are consuming. |
| No administration, maintenance, routine upgrades of software, servers or backend is needed | Non-transparent allocation of resources. You don’t know how much RAM or server resources are provided to your website. |
| Some monitoring and technical help is provided by the provider through Live chat | Less Secure and More prone to Hacking attacks. It takes one mistake for another website hosted on the same server and your site may be at risk of hacking or phishing attempts |
| Simple to get started, use and throw if found not suitable, test an idea quickly at the least investment of cost and time | Fewer choices of using software or frameworks. You are limited to your choice of software and frameworks which your web hosting company provides. |
Given below is the pricing of Bluehost Shared Hosting Plans
What is VPS Hosting? Benefits and Limitations of Bluehost VPS Hosting Plans
Just in case you don’t know what the term Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting means, then here’s some clarity. Under a VPS web hosting plan, you are allocated a specific measure of a server’s resources. It is ideal for those who have steady traffic coming in but can’t really invest in a dedicated server. VPS hosting helps bridge the gap between shared web hosting and having a dedicated server.
Watch the following video to clearly understand what is VPS hosting and how it works
To gear-up your website’s performance and to be able to handle additional traffic, you need to have more clarity about your resources. This lets you analyze how much of it you have exhausted. To be able to do that, you must consider a VPS hosting or choose to invest in a dedicated server. Now dedicated servers don’t come cheap and aren’t something that most growing businesses can afford.
Let’s see some of the advantages and disadvantages of Bluehost VPS Hosting Plans
| Benefits of Bluehost VPS Hosting Plans | Limitations of Bluehost VPS Hosting Plans |
|---|---|
| Scalable | Expensive |
| Powerful Hosting | Resources Continue to be shared |
| Better Control | Need some degree of Technical Know-How |
| Clear Allocation of Resources | Limitation |
| Provides Root Access | Limitation |
Bluehost VPS or Shared Hosting – Which Option is Right For You?
Should you choose Bluehost Shared hosting or Bluehost VPS Hosting? Which plan is suited for your business? We have given some possible scenarios for choosing Bluehost shared hosting plan and Bluehost VPS hosting plan below.
You should choose Bluehost Shared Hosting Plan when
- You are just starting off with a brand new website and the world is yet to figure out that you exist. This is usually the period when you don’t have much traffic coming in.
- You have a website with just the basic features and your daily traffic is under 500 visitors. Most shared hosting plans can deal with that sort of traffic. Also, in the initial stages bandwidth isn’t going to be a concern for most websites.
- If you haven’t monetized your website and are on a really small budget. So the traffic shouldn’t really matter to you.
- Your website is a side-hustle and you cannot afford to spend more time or money on it. When you aren’t really posting enough content, then investing in a super-fast website makes no sense.
- You don’t understand the technical aspects and can’t afford to hire experts to do that for you.
You should choose Bluehost VPS Hosting Plan when
- You don’t want to compromise on the speed and performance of your website or application and don’t mind investing in a VPS to deliver a better user experience.
- Your website’s popularity is steadily increasing and you are apprehensive about the possible surge in your website’s traffic.
- You are about to launch an aggressive ad campaign which is likely to boost your traffic. So before it slows down your website, you want to take the necessary measures.
- Your website or application has slowed down due to an increase in traffic. To manage the crisis, you don’t have enough funds to invest in a dedicated server.
- Your page load time and bounce rate have spiked up considerably, and you just discovered that your traffic is increasing at a rapid pace.
- You run an e-commerce website or information portal, which is regularly visited by several users.
- You have a mid-sized e-store on your website, which is gaining more traffic.
Bluehost VPS Pricing – Which Plan You Should Choose?
Bluehost’s VPS Hosting currently runs millions of websites and applications and is best suited for flourishing e-commerce websites, blogs and information portals with traffic above 8000 visitors per day.
Bluehost offers its VPS Hosting through 3 web hosting plans — Standard, Enhanced, and Ultimate. The Standard and Enhanced plans offer 2 cores, while you get 4 cores with Bluehost’s Ultimate VPS Hosting plan. If you have advanced features and a lot of regular users, then consider the Ultimate plan as you are going to need the power of all the 4 processor cores to manage it.
The Standard plan is priced between $19.99 and $29.99 per month and is great for growing portals and small e-commerce businesses that have limited operations. The Enhanced plan is best suited for mid-sized e-learning and e-commerce websites. This plan is priced between $29.99 and $59.99.
Finally, we come to the most powerful VPS hosting plan offered by Bluehost, the Ultimate plan. Although powerful, this plan isn’t the most affordable and is priced between $59.99 and $119.99 per month. Depending upon the duration of your purchase, the prices drop for each plan. Also, you can always start with one plan and then upgrade to another, as and when your business grows.
| Features | Standard | Enhanced | Ultimate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pricing | $19.99 to $ 29.99 per month | $29.99 to $59.99 per month | $59.99 to $119.99 per month |
| Cores | 2 | 2 | 4 |
| Storage | 30GB | 60GB | 120GB |
| Bandwidth | 1TB | 2TB | 3TB |
| IP Addresses | 1 | 2 | 2 |
If you are a small business or have recently started a new website, then shared hosting should be okay. Due to limited bandwidth and other performance-related concerns, shared hosting plans aren’t suitable for larger businesses like e-commerce websites or information portals. And don’t worry about search rankings if you avail a shared hosting plan, because shared hosting won’t affect your search rankings negatively.
Attention spans have gone down, and readers don’t really have the patience to wait forever for your website to load. Unless you deliver outstanding user experience, readers may pursue other similar blogs or websites. With a steady increase in website or blog traffic from search engines and social media, you are under constant pressure to deliver nothing but the very best.
If your website traffic is beyond 8000 visitors a day and you feel shared hosting isn’t quite fitting the bill in terms of speed, performance, bandwidth, and other things, we recommend upgrading to Bluehost’s VPS hosting plans. We have had a smooth experience with Bluehost VPS plans and never had to worry about the website going down when there is a surge in traffic.