You have decided to build niche sites as a blogger and have settled for Bluehost as your web hosting service.
Your question now is: which Bluehost plan is best for niche sites?
The answer is simple: The Bluehost Choice Plus plan which costs $5.45/month is the best for niche sites.
Why should you trust my recommendation?
I’m a blogger in the business software niche, and I’ve been hosting this blog you’re reading on Bluehost since 2019.
Here’s my proof:
I also understand what building niche sites is all about.
On top of that, I have explored Bluehost features, recommended to my fellow bloggers, the best Bluehost plan for them, and reviewed Bluehost shared hosting and dedicated server hosting.
I have also shown small businesses Bluehost plan that suits them.
Now, I’m here to explain to you why Bluehost Choice Plus plan is your best bet for niche sites.
And before I proceed, let me answer a common question beginners ask about web hosting for niche sites.
What is the best hosting for a niche site?
Bluehost is the best web hosting for a niche site. It’s affordable, easy to set up, and optimizes WordPress the most which is the CMS many niche site owners prefer.
Even WordPress has been recommending it since 2005 as the best web hosting. It automatically installs WordPress in your hosting account and ensures all WP plugins you use to manage your niche sites are up-to-date.
Another interesting thing about Bluehost is that it supports Joomla and Drupal. So you can use them as your content management system if you don’t like WordPress.
Now back to the Bluehost Choice Plus plan.
Why is Bluehost Choice Plus plan the best for niche sites?
It supports unlimited website hosting. As a blogger that specializes in building niche sites, you are likely to have multiple niche blogs.
For example, you can start your first niche site on camping. Once you begin to make money from it, you can decide to start another niche site on fishing or dog food.
So, instead of paying for another hosting, you can leverage the unlimited hosting that Choice Plus offers. Another is that it allows you to have your sites under one hosting which makes it easier to manage them from a single dashboard.
Choice Plus plan which costs $5.45/month offers more hosting resources than the Bluehost Basic Plan which costs $2.95/month.
It offers 40GB SSD storage which will need to store your web hosting files and make your site content available to your audience at a faster rate.
The 2GB RAM helps the server to process requests from users at a high speed. This means your audience won’t wait long for your pages to load. Also, you won’t experience downtime with servers which costs you traffic, and potential leads that can convert to sales.
Now let’s look into the features of Bluehost Choice Plus plan properly.
Features of Bluehost Choice Plus plan and how they benefit your niche sites
Free CDN – Bluehost partners with Cloudflare to provide you with a free CDN – content delivery network. This makes it easier for your audience to access your content faster irrespective of their location around the world. Let’s assume the data center of your website is in the US. With CDN, an audience in Australia will access it as fast as someone in the US where the data center will.
Once you buy Bluehost hosting, you can create a Cloudflare account and connect it to your hosting.
Unlimited Websites – You can host unlimited sites on the Choice Plus plan and this is one of the main reasons I recommend it for niche sites. Bloggers that specialize in niche sites often start another niche site once their first site begins to make money. So unlimited website hosting will save you the cost of another hosting and the stress of having your hosting on different web hosting companies.
Free Domain For First Year – Just like the Basic plan of Bluehost, the Choice Plus plan offers you a free domain for the first year. This means you won’t be charged for a domain in the first year. Domains on Bluehost costs $19/month, a bit higher than what you get on Namecheap. However, keep in mind you will pay for the domain in subsequent years.
Free SSL – Apart from free domain for the first year, Bluehost Choice Plus also offers you a free SSL certificate.
What do SSL certificates do to your hosting?
It ensures sensitive details such as credit card numbers, social security numbers, and other personal details your audience may enter in your niche site are safely transmitted. Thereby blocking hackers from forcefully gaining access to them. Once you activate this, you see a key 🔒 icon on the address bar when your pages load. As a niche blogger, you may want to sell a product on your site, and you wouldn’t want to put the credit card details of your customers at risk. That’s why Bluehost Choice Plus provides your site with SSL certificates.
WP Custom Theme – The Choice Plus plan offers you a WP custom theme. Once you buy Bluehost and install WordPress, login to your dashboard and navigate to appearance, and click themes.
There you see different WordPress custom themes you can activate and use to design your niche site. The interesting thing is that most of these themes are free to use. If you’re on a tight budget, you can get started with any of these themes until you can afford a premium WordPress theme.
Ist Year Daily Website Backup – On Choice Plus plan, Bluehost will backup your niche sites daily for one year. This is a guarantee that your sites can be restored to the original version in the event of a crash or any code issues. And if your site is hacked for any reason, the backup will help you remove any harmful software injected into it.
Domain Privacy – Bluehost provides privacy to your domain in the first year. When you register a domain, your personal information is out there on the WHOIS database. This is because the law guiding the purchase of a domain requires that every domain name owner disclose their contact information. But since scammers and unethical hackers have taken advantage of this, Bluehost now offers its customers Domain Privacy services. So instead of them seeing your personal contact on the WHOIS database, it is replaced with generic Bluehost contact information.
Bluehost’s domain privacy protects you and your niche site from:
- Unsolicited emails
- Identify theft
- Unauthorized domain transfer
- Malware and SEO blacklist
Malware Scanning – This is an extra security feature Bluehost offers to protect your site. It identifies and removes malicious code before it harms your niche site.
Automatic WordPress Update – Bluehost updates WordPress – the content management system on which your site is managed. No action is required from your end. This ensures that all WP plugins installed in your Choice Plus hosting account function properly which leads to the overall performance of your site.
Google My Business – If you sell products and offer services on your niche site, adding your site to Google My Business is recommended. This will make it easier for your target audience within your location to find you once they perform searches related to the product and service you sell.
Let’s assume you live in California, have a fish pond niche site, and also help people set up their fish ponds. An audience in California who is looking for such a service will easily find you on Google Maps because you added your site on Google My Business.
How To Host Your Niche Site On Bluehost Choice Plus
Now you know the features of Bluehost Choice Plus and how it benefits your niche site, let’s look at how you can host it.
Step1
On the homepage, select scroll, and you will see different WordPress plans of Bluehost – Basic, Choice Plus, Pro, and Online Store plans.
Step 2
Select the Choice Plus plan which costs $5.45/month.
Once you click on Select, you will be directed to a page where you create a new domain name or use a domain name you bought from domain name services like Namecheap.
You can also decide to add domain later by clicking ” I’ll create my domain later”
Step 3
Create Your Account
After clicking on next, you will be directed to another page where you will create your hosting account. Here you fill in your personal information like name, address, country, and email address accurately.
Step 4
Set Your Package Information
Here you select WordPress Choice Plus Hosting and the duration you want to host – it can be 12 or 36 months. After which you see the total amount you will pay for hosting.
Below it is the free SSL certificate and site backup Bluehost offers you.
Step 5
Choose Your Extra Packages ( Optional)
Here you select extras features you want to include in your Bluehost Choice Plus hosting plan.
Note that this will increase your hosting price.
I will explain each of them to you and why you may or not need them:
CodeGuard Basic – costs $2.99/month: You need this feature to automatically back up your site, revert to the previous version of your site in just a click, and have a copy of your backups stored in secured locations.
SSL Single Domain: You need this feature to assure your visitors your site is safe and secured. Bluehost already offers it for free if you are hosting a single site.
Site Lock Essential: You need this to protect your site from malicious attacks from hackers which may compromise sensitive data, lead to blacklisting on search engines, and downtime that will cost you traffic, leads, and sales.
Yoast Premium SEO: You don’t urgently need this. If you’re on a low budget, you can install a free version of Yoast and use it to optimize your WordPress blog post. Once you install WordPress, go to your dashboard, select New Plugin, and install the free version of Yoast. Then you can upgrade to the premium version when you have the budget.
In the end, you see how much you’ve saved with the discount Bluehost offered you and the new total amount you are to pay after adding some package extras to your hosting price.
Step 4:
Payment Information
Here you enter payment information and pay for the hosting and other extra packages you added.
Bluehost supports card and PayPal payments.
Indicate the payment method you want to use.
If you tick a card, you can use your VISA, Mastercard, American Express, and Discover credit cards to make payments.
You are required to enter the following:
- Credit card number
- CVV2 Code/ Signature
- The expiration date of your card
If you tick PayPal and click the button, you will redirect to the PayPal page where you enter your PayPal email address to proceed with the payment.
If your PayPal account is already saved on your browser, you just enter your password to proceed with the payment.
And if you don’t have a PayPal account but want to create one and use it to pay for your hosting, there is an option on the page to create a new account.
And that’s it. You have purchased the Choice Plus hosting plan on Bluehost.
Bluehost will email you immediately to confirm the payment. And it includes an invoice that breaks down the products you purchased.
Before I call it a wrap, there are a few downsides of Bluehost Choice Plus that you should know.
First is that it’s a shared hosting and that means you share a server with other sites. This can impact your site in the event of a sudden spike in traffic as you may run out of hosting resources. Although Bluehost has a resource protection feature, it does little to ensure that being on a shared hosting package doesn’t impact your niche site.
Another is that you pay more when you want to renew your hosting. This is because the discount Bluehost offered you 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 when Bluehost offered me more than a discount.
Final Thought On The Best Bluehost Plan For Niche Site
Choice Plus plan is your best bet to host your niche websites on Bluehost. Apart from being a WordPress hosting, it’s affordable, guarantees a high speed, 99.9 % uptime, and allows you to host unlimited websites.
You don’t have to pay for hosting if you decide to start another niche site. The features are a bit advanced, and you have basic tools to manage your niche sites yourself.
Start Hosting Your Niche Sites On Bluehost Choice Plus
Recommended Reading: Read this article where I suggested the best Bluehost plan for WordPress site.
