Are you a small business owner looking for the best Bluehost plan for small a business to start hosting your site?
The answer is simple:
The Basic Plan, Standard VPS Plan, and Standard Dedicated Plan are the 3 best Bluehost plans you should consider for your small business website depending on your needs.
I’m in the best position to recommend this to you because I have been hosting my site on Bluehost since 2019.
Below is my proof:
I’m a small business owner that runs a marketing blog and this blog you are reading is hosted on Bluehost.
I have explored Bluehost to the last and have reviewed Bluehost shared hosting, and dedicated hosting and even recommend to my fellow bloggers the best Bluehost plan they need.
Now, I want to help you as a small business make the best choice as you plan to buy Bluehost hosting.
I will explain why I recommend the 3 Bluehost plans mentioned above as the best for small businesses.
Bluehost Basic Plan: Best for beginner small business owners
If you’re just starting, the Basic Plan which is one of the plans you get on Bluehost shared hosting is suitable.
Why do I say so?
It’s affordable and with just $2.95/month, you can host your small business website. Also, it’s optimized for WordPress which many small businesses use as their content management system. So you can set up your site and manage your content without any assistance.
And since you aren’t expecting much traffic for now, and you want to host a single site, it is better instead of going with the Choice Plus plan, which costs more but allows you to host unlimited websites.
I use the Basic plan for blogging and only intend to upgrade to a higher plan once my traffic gets to 10k per month.
The only downside is that since it’s a shared hosting, you share a server with another site and this might impact your small business website in the event of a sharp traffic spike.
Your pages may load slowly, but that shouldn’t worry you at this initial stage because you can always move to VPS or dedicated hosting where two of the other best plans I recommend for small businesses fall under.
Another is that the renewal price is higher because the discount you enjoyed in your first year of hosting won’t apply again.
For example, I paid $97.08 to renew my Basic Plan hosting for one year in 2020. This is higher than the $35.4 I paid in 2019 for my first year of hosting.
What are the features of the Bluehost basic plan?
- You get free SSL to protect your domain and hosting ( only for the first year)
- Free CDN ( Content Delivery Network) to ensure your target audience can access your content faster from any location around the world. Bluehost partners with Cloudflare, a top-rated CDN to bring this free to you.
- You can only host one website or blog for your small business
- You get 10 GB SSD storage for your hosting.
- You can make use of free custom themes from WordPress to design your business site pending when you have the budget for premium themes.
- Automatic WordPress updates
- Secure login details that allow you to change your credentials from the default WordPress to whatever you want
- You can include add-ons that attract additional fees to your Basic plan hosting package.
For example, you can add CodeGuard which creates a copy of your site, backs it up, and stores it in a secured location.
So if you’re a small business on a tight budget and want an affordable Bluehost host plan to host your sites, use this link to start your Basic plan hosting.
Standard VPS Plan: Best for small business owners that want full control over resources in their server
I recommend the Standard VPS plan if you want full control of resources within your server. Although it costs $29.99/month which might be expensive, the features are worth it especially if you plan to scale your website within the shortest possible time.
Unlike Basic Plan where you share a server, Standard VPS Plan partitions the server to you. So you have control over how to allocate resources, plus issues that affect sites you share servers with don’t affect you. It’s also suitable if you plan to drive massive traffic to your site within the shortest possible time. In that case, you need a VPS hosting that has the resources in terms of a high CPU core, RAM, SSD storage, Bandwidth, and advanced security features to protect your sites and the traffic that comes to them.
What features does Bluehost’s Standard VPS Plan offer?
- It offers 120 GB SSD
- You enjoy unmetered bandwidth, so you can transfer data within your server faster to a user
There is a Cpanel where you customize things and allocate resources within your server - 2 Core CPU
- 2 GB RAM
- Root Access – allows you to create unlimited file transfer accounts to download, upload and customize files in your server
- Access Control – create a master password for everything within your server. It can be a password to access server administration or ownership information
- Multi-server management – add more VPS hosting services to your account and manage them from a single dashboard
- You host unlimited websites and domains without issues. You can even allocate resources to each site to ensure optimal performance.
So if you plan to scale your small business website as fast as possible, use this link to start your hosting on Bluehost Standard VPS Plan
The Bluehost VPS hosting has other plans like Enhanced and Ultimate plans. They cost more and are suitable for large businesses that want the best in VPS hosting and can also afford the cost.
Standard Dedicated Plan: Best for businesses that want unlimited advanced hosting feature
If you’re a large business with a huge audience and customer base, the Standard dedicated plan which costs $89.98/month is your best bet. Although it’s expensive, you’re guaranteed the top-notch experience you can get on a small business site.
Here, a server is dedicated to you – that’s bye to sharing servers with other sites in any form. And there are no limits to how you can customize, optimize and allocate resources to your server. You enjoy an improved Cpanel which allows you to manage your websites, domains, emails, and resources from a single location.
Let’s look at the features Bluehost Dedicated Server offers
- 4 core / 8 thread
- Intel Xeon – D CPU
- 8 GB RAM
- 1 TB HDD Storage
- Unmetered bandwidth
- Linux
- Cpanel included with Root Access
- Fast provisioning – to custom build and rack your server, connecting it network within 24 – 74 hours
- Storage upgrade – increase the available storage on your server in real-time without any server admin
- RAID storage to mirror your data for improved security and protection
- Extreme speed – each server is custom-built using the latest open source technology in web hosting to continuously improve site speed and performance
- You have full control of your server from the operating system to Apache
Apart from the Standard dedicated plan, there are plans you get under Bluehost dedicated hosting package. They are Enhanced and Premium Bluehost dedicated plans which cost $119.88/month and $139.99/month respectively.
So if you want to have dedicated hosting for your small business website, use this link to start hosting on Bluehost Standard dedicated plan.
Things To Consider Before Choosing Bluehost Plan For Your Small Business
Type Of Website You Need
Ask yourself the type of you need for your small business. Is it a single-page website or a complete small business website with a homepage, about, contact, resource page, and blog? The answer to this question will help you determine the type of Bluehost plan you need.
Bluehost Basic Plan is enough for a single-page website or a website with fewer pages. The Standard VPS plan will be suitable for a full-fledged website since it will require customized resources and more processing power.
Budget
Your budget for web hosting will determine the Bluehost plan that suits your small business website. You may like the Standard dedicated plan while your budget places you at the Basic plan. So you should go for the plan your budget can carry, so you can renew it monthly or yearly pending when you can upgrade to a higher hosting package.
Scalability
Think of scalability when you want to choose a Bluehost plan for your small business website. Remember your site will grow in traffic, then you will need more resources to keep it running optimally. The Standard VPS and Standard supports scalability. You can increase the storage on your server on the fly without it affecting the performance of your site. You can add and manage third-party applications to the server, leverage the root access to perform custom installs, and much more.
Easy Management
Consider how easy it’s to manage your hosting otherwise, you may end up hiring web hosting experts to set up your server if you aren’t tech savvy. Bluehost Basic Plan is easy to manage – thanks to automatic WordPress installation. The Standard VPS and Standard Dedicated Plans require you to be tech-savvy to allocate resources, customize and make custom installs.
FAQs on best Bluehost plan for small business
Let’s look at key questions you ask about Bluehost’s plan for small business websites
What is the cheapest Bluehost plan?
The cheapest Bluehost plan is the Basic Plan which costs $2.95/month and is suitable for small business owners that are just starting with website hosting.
Do you pay monthly or yearly on Bluehost?
Bluehost has a monthly, 12-month, or 36 months subscription. It’s up to you to choose the duration that suits you. It offers discounts for 12 and 36 months subscriptions. That’s a way of saying thank you for sticking to them for a long time.
Is there a cheaper alternative to Bluehost?
Yes, there is a cheaper alternative to Bluehost and that’s Namecheap. Namecheap’s shared hosting plan starts at $1.98/month. I have also reviewed Namecheap VPS which I also recommend to small businesses.
Final thought on best Bluehost plans for small businesses
Choosing any of the 3 best Bluehost plans I recommend for a small business depends on your needs. I explained their features above, so you can decide which suits you better.
The Basic Plan is best for small businesses on a low budget, and the Standard VPS plan is for small businesses that plan to drive massive traffic in a short period and as such will need more hosting resources.
Standard Dedicated Plan is for large businesses that want a dedicated server in which they need to customize resources in their server.
And for them to handle high-volume traffic and requests on their site and at the same time guarantee optimal performance.
