Bluehost VPS Review

Although Bluehost does not necessarily offer a premium service in terms of VPS hosting, you’ll notice that most Bluehost VPS reviews are overwhelmingly positive – and for good reason. This company’s main target audience is comprised of people or businesses who want to get online quickly, but do not have extensive knowledge in the field. The same holds true for their VPS plans, although these are more suitable for websites with high monthly traffic.

Getting started on your first website can be overwhelming. Among other things, you’ll need to choose the best hosting provider and invest in the right hosting plan for your website.

While most new and small website owners will typically sign up for shared hosting, you’ll need to upgrade to a more powerful hosting option as your website grows and demands more resources and functions.

One popular upgrade option is VPS (Virtual Private Server) hosting. Unlike shared hosting, VPS hosting solutions offer the necessary features and resources you need to seamlessly scale your site without breaking your budget.

In this post, we’ll be looking at the Bluehost VPS plans. The main aim of this review is to showcase Bluehost’s higher tier of services as we delve into the reliability and scalability of the service. I’ve included all the essential details below to help you out.

An Overview of Bluehost

Boasting an unwavering reputation in the web hosting space, Bluehost is one of the fastest-growing web hosting providers in the world.

Best known for its affordable, feature-rich shared hosting packages – the Utah-based hosting company offers a plethora of hosting services to accommodate the various hosting needs of its customers. 

Alongside shared hosting, Bluehost offers WordPress hosting, Dedicated hosting, and the widely coveted VPS hosting. You can check how the various hosting plans compare here.

However, for a better understanding of what the Bluehost VPS hosting service entails, we’ll briefly look at what VPS hosting is – and how it compares to shared hosting.

VPS Hosting

VPS or Virtual Private Server hosting is a type of web hosting aimed at individual site owners and small business owners who need more than they can get with shared hosting.

Flexible, secure, and scalable – VPS hosting combines the features of both shared and dedicated hosting. You can think of VPS as a hybrid model of shared hosting but in a dedicated server environment.

Unlike shared hosting where multiple websites share the resources of a single, physical web server – VPS uses virtualization technology (hypervisor) to partition one physical server into several virtual servers.

Each of these virtual machines operates in isolation from the others. This means that with VPS hosting you get your own virtual machine with an operating system, storage space, memory, and processing power.

In a nutshell, a VPS is a small server running within a big server but with its fair share of resources. The resources are divided equally among the virtual machines.

However, depleting your resources such as your storage space or RAM could lead to performance lags. The good thing is that you can always upgrade your VPS plan to add more resources.

Why You Might Need Bluehost VPS Hosting

From the description above, it’s clear that VPS is a step up from Shared servers. VPS also has fewer limitations and your website gets to enjoy a huge portion of the server’s hardware and higher resource availability.

In other words, VPS hosting gives your website enough room to grow – and with the dedicated resources you do not have to worry about other websites eating too much storage or bandwidth since all the resources are dedicated to your website.  

Other reasons why you might need to upgrade to VPS hosting include:

• Security: With VPS you do not have to worry about hacks or malware attacks from neighboring websites.
• Flexibility and control: With VPS you have full server access. This means that you can configure its settings and make the necessary customizations.
• Scaling: VPS is an easy-to-scale service. You can easily upgrade the RAM, disk space, bandwidth, and other server resources as your website grows.

Bluehost VPS Features

Compared to some other hosting companies, Bluehost does an excellent job of balancing price and features that come with its VPS plans.

Some of the key features that you’ll benefit from include:

• A free domain name for each new VPS for one year
• Seamless migration from shared plans
• An enhanced cPanel with special tools for VPS management and WHM control
• Free Solid-State Drive (SSD) storage
• Free SSL certificate
• Instant provisioning allows you to get up and running in seconds
• Multi-server management meaning you can add more than one server to your account
• Root access for complete control of your server
• Resource guarantee thanks to the KVM hypervisor
• 30-day money-back guarantee if you are unhappy with the service
• Great and around-the-clock customer service
• Domain privacy and protection (optional add-on)
• Optional SiteLock  security and CodeGuard backups

As you can see, Bluehost offers everything that a modern VPS should have. While several other features are not included on the list, each of these features is intended to achieve a certain objective. Some notable objectives include speed, security, and control.

Bluehost VPS Plans and Pricing

With some of the most flexible and competitive prices in the industry, Bluehost offers three tiers of Linux-based VPS hosting. -the Standard, Enhanced, and the Ultimate VPS plans.

Each of these plans is tailored to cater to a variety of needs and comes with different pricing options and features.  Here’s an overview of Bluehost’s VPS plans and pricing.

Standard Plan

Bluehost’s Standard VPS plan is the most basic and cheapest of them all. The plan retails at just $18.99 per month and is ideal for small and medium websites looking for the convenience of VPS hosting.

The package includes 2 GB RAM, 2 Cores, 1 IP Address, and 30 GB SSD storage. Along with that, it comes with 1 TB bandwidth to prevent your site from crashing in the event of massive traffic spikes. Something that you cannot find with a shared plan. 

Enhanced Plan

Bluehost Enhanced is the most popular, recommended, and widely used VPS hosting plan. Going for $29.99 per month, the Enhanced plan is a perfect choice for site owners who want to scale their websites with a limited budget.

Just like the Standard plan, the Enhanced plan comes with 2 cores. However, it adds a few extra perks. For instance, it comes with 4 GB RAM, 2 IP Addresses, 60 GB storage, and 2 TB bandwidth. This is comparable to what you can expect to get a specialized hosting provider like DigitalOcean, but for a fraction of the cost. You can check out our Bluehost vs DigitalOcean comparison to learn more about the differences between the two popular hosting providers.

Ultimate Plan

Lastly, there is the Ultimate plan, which is the most advanced VPS hosting plan offered by Bluehost. Being the superior package, the Ultimate plan is expensive than the Enhanced plan – but with a lot more features.

At $59.99 per month, you get access to a system with 8 GB RAM, 4 CPU cores, 2 Dedicated IP Addresses, 120 GB storage, 3 TB storage space. Once again, the value for money here is very good, allowing Bluehost to easily hold its own against main rivals like GoDaddy or HostGator, to name just a couple of well-known examples.

The Ultimate package is suitable for eCommerce websites, agencies, and websites that record massive amounts of traffic. So, if you are looking for a superior package –and your budget is a little stretched – you won’t go wrong with this one.

However, if your budget is not on a leash and you are looking for more power, security, and control – a Dedicated hosting setup would be a brilliant upgrade.

Be that as it may, it’s pretty obvious that VPS features are more advanced and techier in comparison to what Shared hosting offers.

Discounts and Renewals

One very important thing that you should note, however, is that the prices I’ve indicated above have already been discounted.

The discounts only apply to any Bluehost customer who purchases a VPS plan for the first time as a welcoming gesture – which means they are not applicable for renewals.

For example, the Standard plan which goes for $18.99/ mo renews at $29.99/ mo while the Enhance plan renews at 59.99/ mo. The same applies to the Ultimate plan which renews at 119.99/ mo. 

So, if you choose a month-to-month billing cycle, you’ll only enjoy the discount for the first month. Similarly, if you choose a long billing cycle, say 36-months, the more money you’ll save. 

Bluehost VPS Performance

Whenever we talk about performance, the first thing that comes to mind is page load speed and uptime – or the time that a web service or website is available to users over a certain period, say 3 months or 1 year, and is usually measured as a percentage.    

Both speed and uptime are essential metrics when it comes to determining the performance of a website. For instance, if you run an eCommerce website or an agency website where you need to accept payments online, a few minutes of downtime can mean a significant loss in revenue. Similarly, slow loading speeds would mean a higher bounce rate.

Bluehost understands this very well and through their Next-Gen VPS hosting you are guaranteed unparalleled performance. For one, all VPS plans pack Solid State Drives (SSD) instead of the traditional Hard Disk Drives (HDD). The reason for using SSD is to deliver better performance and speed – and also reduce power consumption.

To add to this, Bluehost utilizes open source technology like the KVM hypervisor to ensure that all available resources are dedicated to your website’s performance. Also, depending on the plan you choose you are assured of sufficient bandwidth, storage, powerful CPU cores, and memory.

MamboServer uses a comprehensive step-by-step process for testing the performance of every hosting provider we review, including Bluehost of course. Click this link if you want to learn more about the process.

Bluehost VPS Reliability

Just like performance, a server’s reliability has to do with uptime, speed, hardware, and technical support. Remember that even the most experienced tech gurus need help in the event of a glitch.

And given that there is hardly any authentic negative review online concerning Bluehost VPS plans, it goes without saying their service is highly reliable.

For one, Bluehost’s uptimes over the years have been highly reliable at 99.99% – which is way above the industry standard. Moreover, the company is known for its industry-leading hardware, performance-enhancing SSD storage, and its knowledgeable and responsive customer support.

Bluehost VPS Security

Despite the relentless efforts to keep your site up and running, Bluehost’s web infrastructure offers robust security and meticulous backups should disaster strike.

The company’s VPS systems are secured and protected by Anti-DDoS systems to enhance protection against spamming. On top of that, Bluehost incorporates tools like Spam Assassin and SpamExperts – which help in filtering out spam.

Bluehost also allows you to make account filters, email filters, maintain control of private keys, create IP address backlists, as well as generate digital certificates and password protected directories. 

Bluehost VPS Scalability

One of the most attractive benefits of Bluehost VPS hosting is its scalability. VPS scalability means that you can be able to immediately add storage, RAM, bandwidth, and other resources to meet the growing demands of your website. This is usually the sort of feature you can only expect to find at major cloud hosting providers.

To help you understand scalability, imagine a small eCommerce business hosted on the Bluehost Standard VPS plan. As time goes on, people start discovering the awesome products and services that the business offers.

They then start referring their friends to the site. Within a short time, traffic grows, the customer base expands, and so does the revenue. Now with more growth anticipated in the future, the owner of the website must take the necessary measures to ensure that the website can meet the increasing demand for resources or risk crashing the server.

At this juncture, the first thing is to understand what resources are depleted and add – or upgrade to a new plan entirely. Bluehost gives you a choice to either add resources at a small cost or upgrade to a more advanced plan if you want more computing power.

VPS Hosting vs. Shared Hosting vs. Dedicated Hosting

Whenever we talk about shared hosting – and especially when comparing it to VPS hosting or dedicated hosting – we tend to bring out shared hosting as being the substandard type of hosting.

In my opinion, this is wrong. And none is inherently better than the other. It all depends on the unique requirements of your website. For example, most new sites with less traffic will work perfectly on a shared hosting plan. 

Similarly, websites with massive amounts of traffic and that cannot afford a moment of downtime (such as eCommerce stores) will work perfectly on a VPS or a Dedicated hosting set up. Coincidentally, Bluehost also offers eCommerce plans designed specifically for those types of situations. You can read more about those in our separate Bluehost eCommerce review.

However, if you are seeking control and power, Shared hosting will simply not give it to you. As such, you’ll need to decide between VPS and dedicated hosting.

To a larger extent, the decision on either of the two will be highly influenced by your budget. With dedicated hosting, you’ll have to break your piggy bank. A VPS, on the other hand, will give you an economical hosting alternative and the benefits of much higher priced hosting services.

Bluehost VPS Hosting – Is It Worth It?

Besides having a colossal market share in the Shared hosting arena, Bluehost continues to wear its work hard, play hard badge with pride in the VPS hosting arena. Making the switch from shared hosting to VPS is a big step. Although the costs are steeper, the superior performance, higher degree of control, and better security you get in exchange are well worth the price tag. This is especially the case with Bluehost’s VPS plans, which are some of the most affordable options currently on the market.

Compared to other VPS hosting providers, Bluehost continues to impress thanks to its reliable uptime scores, industry-leading hardware, and unbeatable prices. Furthermore, Bluehost is a WordPress recommended hosting provider which makes it a go-to host for WordPress beginners and experienced webmasters alike.

The cPanel is easy to use and gives you the option for dynamic resources. Meaning you can add storage resources to your VPS without the need for technical support. You can also create FTP accounts and manage multiple servers in one place.

As with any good VPS provider, Bluehost takes security seriously. For example, they even provide you with a complimentary SSL certificate which is essential for eCommerce websites.

With that said, I think Bluehost is an excellent VPS hosting provider. The only downside is that Bluehost doesn’t offer Windows-based VPS. But this is no big problem since Linux hosting (which Bluehost offers) is more popular among developers and offers more features.

For more general information regarding the company and its wide array of services make sure to check out our dedicated Bluehost hub. If you’re looking for something a little bit different, on the other hand, you may want to look into our list of best Bluehost alternatives instead.