Can You Host Multiple Websites on BlueHost?
BlueHost is one of the most known players in the web hosting business. Millions of websites are being hosted using one of their plans. But can you host multiple websites in one single account? That’s a good question. After all, why would you pay twice the money for 2 different sites, when you could host them in a single account. For more websites it would be even worse.
In this article we’ll take a look at BlueHost and see which hosting plans are suitable for more than 1 website. For the purpose of this article, we’ll consider the shared hosting plans, that BlueHost is offering. But before we dive into those, let’s see why it’s best if you choose a shared hosting plan, instead of another type.
Shared Hosting Advantages
One of the biggest advantages for shared hosting is the cost. You don’t want to overpay for something when you can have it for less money, right? Luckily, shared hosting is by far the most reasonable among the other web hosting possibilities (VPS hosting, dedicated hosting or reseller hosting). The price for a shared hosting plan is anywhere from $2,00 to $20,00. Bigger the cost, bigger number of features.
What is the next bonus that comes with a shared hosting package? The possibility to choose from more options. Most companies, and BlueHost as well, offer shared hosting in 2, 3 or even more plans, all priced differently. If you start with a small website, you might not need all the features that a more expensive plan has to offer. But when your websites grow big enough, you might need to upgrade the resources behind them. This is easily done by upgrading to a higher plan. But this is true in the reverse as well. You can downgrade anytime you want to.
The third positive fact that comes with any shared hosting plan is that you don’t have to possess a lot of technical knowledge to be able to use them. All the maintenance is done by the developers behind the platform. You just need to use it. But how?
This is where the 4th perk comes in: control panel. Most companies come with the traditional cPanel to control everything about your website. This is really good, because using it you can tweak the site’s performance and functionality the way you’d want it to be. But this isn’t a must.
Now that you know why shared hosting could be your best choice to host all your websites, let’s see what does BlueHost give you regarding this matter. First, I’ll tell about some of the features that come with any of the 3 shared hosting plans.
About BlueHost
Here are some of the features that come, no matter the plan you choose:
- SSD storage. This is good news for any site owner. If you want a fast website, or more, then you must choose a host that gives you SSD storage instead of HDD storage. SSDs are much faster than traditional HDD drives.
- Better rankings in Google. This is due to the SSD storage. Who likes a website that loads very slowly? I guess you don’t. So, why should your visitors? Studies show that a lot of new visitors give up on a website that works slowly, so having a fast loading time is essential for every website that you have online.
- Unmetered bandwidth. This is very important as well. To be able to accept all the visitors that come to your website, the bandwidth must be at least huge. Thus, BlueHost giving unlimited bandwidth is a welcomed addition.
- Free SSL certificate. Do you want your websites to be secure and safe when a visitor accesses them? Of course, you do. The SSL certificate will handle the security by encrypting the data that leaves your server. Basically, the only ones who can access that data is you and the destination server. A good example for this could be when someone buys an item from an online store. When you send your credit or debit card info for payment processing, the SSL certificate will encrypt it, so only you and the payment processor can access it. Nobody in between is able to see this critical and sensitive information.
- Top level support. BlueHost is famous for its client support. You get the fastest response time from the support team. It is almost instantaneous. They know pretty much everything about hosting, so all your possible issues will be solved in no-time. This is an award-winning support team, so you shouldn’t be disappointed by them.
BlueHost Multi-Domain Hosting Plans
BlueHost comes with 3 separate shared hosting plans: Basic, Plus and Choice Plus. The first plan, which is the cheapest, does not support hosting for multiple websites, so we’ll skip that one. The second and third however, both come with the possibility to host multiple websites for the base cost of the package.
So, here’s your answer. Yes, BlueHost does allow you to host multiple websites in the same single account. How many though? Well, that number is equal in both plans: unlimited. That’s right. BlueHost is giving you unlimited websites for hosting, if you choose to buy the 2nd or 3rd shared hosting plan. If you need a host with this capability, look no further.
Both plans cost the same amount of money: $5,95 / month. But how? I understand why that seems weird. But it’s true, both plans come for the same price. Let’s see what you get if you choose to purchase one:
Plus: This is the second plan, and like I already mentioned, you can host an unlimited number of websites using it (for only $5,95/month). If that’s not a good deal, then I don’t know what is. For this price, you get all the following features:
- Unlimited websites
- Unlimited SSD storage. Yes, there is no limit on the amount of data you can have stored on their servers. For unlimited websites, it’s a must to have it.
- Unlimited parked domains
- Unlimited sub-domains
- Unlimited professional email accounts and storage
- $200 for marketing purposes. This is great. You can use this credit to market your websites, and have a faster growth. Not many hosts give this type of bonus.
- 1 SpamExperts: anti-spam tool for all your email accounts.
Choice Plus: As the third plan, you have all the features from the previous plan, the standard features and some additions as well. What are those?
- Domain Privacy. This is a welcomed addition. You know why? What this does is to protect your identity on the web. More precisely, it removes your personal information from the web (in the WHOIS database). It does this by replacing it with generic info. This information is mandatory to appear in the said database. You are still the owner of the site, but this way, you are secured from unwanted threats that may come up. I mean who wants personal information like address of phone number to be available for the whole world? Solely for this feature, you should choose this package.
- CodeGuard Basic. This tool is here to help you manage the backups that are made by BlueHost. Basically, using this tool, you can replace a website with a previous backed up version with only 1 click. This could be needed anytime something bad happens with your website.
Other than these 2 new tools, there isn’t anything else added to the package.
BlueHost is recommending the use of Choice Plus. This way you can delete your personal info from the web, and have backups restored on command. Both of these features could be needed anytime. So, its best if you purchase the 3rd plan from the beginning.
There is one more addition that is present no matter the plan you choose. This is very popular and everyone loves it. If you pay the hosting for a whole year upfront, you get 1 free domain name for a whole year. This way, you can really cut the costs for hosting one of the websites. But even if something will bother you, BlueHost will give you a refund.
Conclusion
Let’s recap what we covered in this article:
First, we’ve seen that shared hosting is best, if you want to host multiple websites. Some of the advantages were: low cost for the hosting plans, not much technical knowledge is required to work with them and the number of features is great considering that you get 2, 3 or even more plans to choose from.
Next, we talked about BlueHost, and what it offers no matter the plan you choose to go with. I think, all the plans are a good deal. If you look around online, there won’t be too many other companies giving these many resources for such low prices.
Just a minute ago, we covered 2 of the plans that BlueHost offers. Both of them are supporting an unlimited number of websites.
All in all, BlueHost is a good choice for anyone in need of cheap but efficient hosting for multiple websites.
Now it’s up to you, to choose the best hosting plan that fits your needs.