Bluehost Pro Vs. Bluehost Shared Hosting: Which Plan Is Best for Your Site? - 2021 Edition

Bluehost Pro Vs. Bluehost Shared Hosting: Is it Worth (2021)

Running a self-hosted WordPress blog is fun because we have to take care of everything. The moment you start a self-hosted blog, you almost have a business. That means you have to take care of everything around your blog. One of the biggest concerns with self-hosted bloggers is web hosting.

Until the time your current hosting isn’t causing any problems, don’t worry about anything, but the moment your WordPress blog gets old, or a buggy plugin or codes are playing hide and seek, a web hosting company can throw a nightmare .

In the past 4 years of blogging, I’ve had a lot of sleepless nights due to hosting issues, and it’s always nice to fix the problem and learn something new.

This is one of the reasons why I often recommend new bloggers to opt for high quality web hosting, which makes it easy to host your WordPress blog, and allows you to focus more on what you do best; ie writing.

In my earlier guide (Web For beginners hosting plans), I explained different types of hosting plans and why shared hosting is best for a new WordPress blog. A quality like hostingBluehost or Hostgator starting at $ 5.95 / month can easily handle traffic up to 20K / day from an optimized WordPress blog.

Check out: Bluehost review

Usually when shared hosting can’t handle our traffic we tend to upgrade to VPS hosting, and I’ve tried this within the past Knownhost VPS and linode VPS, and realized it only works if you have enough memory on your VPS server, and is fully optimized for running WordPress blog.

Disclaimer: This article contains affiliate links. If you purchase a tool through one of the links, SML will receive a small commission for coffee ☕️, at no extra cost.

In fact, there was a time when I downgraded from a standard VPS plan to a shared hosting plan, and it worked better for me.

Today I’ll be talking about the Bluehost PRO package and explaining why it is a good option for bloggers looking for something between shared hosting and VPS hosting.

Read Also:

What is the Bluehost Pro package?

Bluehost Pro package is a paid add-on offered to Bluehost shared hosting customers, who require more resources as compared to shared hosting resources.

When we are on a shared hosting, all server resources are usually shared by all websites hosted on the same server.

That means if a shared hosting has 100 websites hosted on them, all server resources can be used by any site, and this is one of the reasons why we often face problems like server outages, due to buggy websites on that shared hosting.

Bluehost pro package gives extra privileges by limiting the number of sites hosted on the same server along with increased server resources and many add-ons to get the most out of their hosting package. Here are some of the features of the Bluehost Pro plan:

Free Dedicated IP:

I had a long discussion about how shared hosting affects search engine rankings, and towards the end we came to the conclusion that, if budget is not an issue, your site is hosted on private IP and has its advantages. With a pro plan, you get 1 dedicated IP address, and needless to say, you can get SEO benefits.

Performance Upgrade:

Website speed is useful not only for your users, but also for search engines. With more CPU and memory on the Bluehost Pro account, your website will load faster.

Especially if you are struggling with a slow WordPress dashboard on shared hosting, you should consider upgrading your account to a pro plan and notice the difference. $ 20 / month for improved website performance is totally worth the money.

SSL Certificate:

If you run a WordPress membership site or ecommerce WordPress site and accept payments, an SSL certificate is a must have for your blog. Pro package provides a positive SSL certificate to provide your customer with a secure way to access the payment page.

There are many more extra features you get with the Bluehost Pro package such as:

1 Domain
1 Domain Name Registration
Privacy Protection1 Site Backup ProFiltering
10 Post ini Email

Here is a video explaining the main benefits of the Pro package:

Is it worth upgrading to the Bluehost Pro plan?

If I would have been you, and my website has memory issues on Bluehost standard shared hosting, or if my site needs more resources, front end and back end are a bit slow, I would rather upgrade to Bluehost pro package over switching to cheap or entry-level VPS, for simple reasons:

on the Bluehost Pro package, we get more resources compared to their shared hosting.
There are fewer users on the Pro package compared to standard shared hosting. Now more resources with fewer users will be much better than upgrading to an entry-level VPS.
With the Bluehost pro package I pay much less than managed VPS.

Along with the above two reasons, if you use add-ons like special IP address, SSL certificate, email accounts, pro package will save you over $ 200 / year.

Any existing Bluehost user can upgrade to a pro package from the Bluehost dashboard. Here are quick steps to upgrade:

Log in to Bluehost cPanel
Click on
Add-ons and add Pro package.

Remember that it will take 1-2 hours for them to migrate your website to a new powerful server and your website may be 1- 2 hours offline for hours, due to DNS propagation. So it’s a good idea to upgrade to the pro package on weekends and on a low-traffic day. Overall, if your shared hosting is giving you trouble and you are considering upgrading to VPS, you should consider the Bluehost Pro plan to avoid massive VPS bills and technical issues.

Check out Bluehost

discount added.

If you are an existing Bluehost Pro customer, please share your experiences and rate their service.