Bluehost is a long-established web hosting company, best known for shared and WordPress hosting, that also sells a four-plan VPS line. Raff Technologies is a US cloud provider where the virtual machine is one product among several, alongside managed databases, object storage, Functions and Kubernetes on the same account. The two are not really the same kind of purchase: a Bluehost account bundles a domain, email and a hosting panel, while a Raff account is infrastructure an application runs on. At the matched entry shape, Bluehost NVMe 2 renews at $5.69/month for 1 vCPU and 2 GB, and the identical Raff shape is $8.99/month.
Bluehost VPS and Raff at a glance
Bluehost sells four self-managed VPS plans, from NVMe 2 at 1 vCPU core, 2 GB DDR5 RAM and 50 GB NVMe, up to NVMe 16 at 8 vCPU cores, 16 GB DDR5 and 450 GB NVMe. Every tier lists unmetered bandwidth and multiple data centers, and Bluehost states that all VPS tiers include root SSH and API access. Two things are excluded from VPS plans by Bluehost's own note: cPanel and 24/7 priority support.
Bluehost's VPS positioning has moved toward developers — it describes the recommended NVMe 4 plan as suited to Docker, AI agents and growing applications. Pricing is promotional: each advertised rate applies to a 24-month term paid upfront, and each plan then renews higher.
Raff Technologies runs 15,000+ VMs for 3,000+ customers from its us-east region, with a 99.9% uptime SLA backed by service credits, rated 4.5/5 on Trustpilot and 4.6/5 on G2. VMs run AMD EPYC with DDR5 ECC memory and NVMe storage in two lines: General Purpose with shared vCPU from $4.99/month, and CPU-Optimized with dedicated vCPU from $15.99/month, scaling to 16 vCPU and 32 GB. Every plan includes a 3 Gbps port with unmetered transfer, automated Daily or Weekly backup schedules, uncapped snapshots, firewall controls, private networking and full root access.
Past the VM, Raff sells S3-compatible object storage at $7/month for 100 GB and 1 TB of egress, managed PostgreSQL, MySQL, Valkey, ClickHouse and Kafka from $7.99/month, managed Kubernetes with a free control plane and workers from $9.99/month, Functions with a free monthly tier, block volumes at $0.08/GiB-month, and Raff Apps from $3/month.
Bluehost VPS pricing vs Raff pricing
Bluehost VPS plans use shared vCPU cores, so the like-for-like Raff line is General Purpose.
| Shape | Bluehost promo (24-mo term) | Bluehost renewal | Bluehost upfront for 24 months | Raff General Purpose |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 vCPU / 2 GB | $4.69 — NVMe 2, 50 GB NVMe | $5.69 | $112.56 | $8.99 — 1 vCPU / 2 GB / 50 GB NVMe |
| 2 vCPU / 4 GB | $9.49 — NVMe 4, 100 GB NVMe | $11.99 | $227.76 | $17.99 — 2 vCPU / 4 GB / 80 GB NVMe |
| 4 vCPU / 8 GB | $12.99 — NVMe 8, 200 GB NVMe | $28.99 | $311.76 | $33.99 — 4 vCPU / 8 GB / 160 GB NVMe |
| 8 vCPU / 16 GB | $25.99 — NVMe 16, 450 GB NVMe | $49.99 | $623.76 | $71.99 — 8 vCPU / 16 GB / 240 GB NVMe |
Raff General Purpose against Bluehost's self-managed VPS — both shared vCPU. Bluehost publishes no dedicated-vCPU VPS line, so every row above is shared against shared. Bluehost pricing read from Bluehost's live VPS pricing page on 2026-08-18; all figures monthly USD.
Which Bluehost number you compare against changes the answer completely.
Against the promotional rate, Raff is 90% to 177% more expensive. Against the renewal rate — the price you actually pay from month 25 onward, and the fair comparison since Raff runs no promotion — the gap collapses:
| Shape | Raff | Bluehost renewal | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 vCPU / 2 GB | $8.99 | $5.69 | Raff +58% |
| 2 vCPU / 4 GB | $17.99 | $11.99 | Raff +50% |
| 4 vCPU / 8 GB | $33.99 | $28.99 | Raff +17% |
| 8 vCPU / 16 GB | $71.99 | $49.99 | Raff +44% |
NVMe 8 is the clearest example: $12.99/month promotional, $28.99/month at renewal — a 123% increase on the same hardware. Budgeting from the advertised number will understate the two-year cost of that plan by more than half.
The commitment differs too. Bluehost's advertised rate needs a 24-month term paid upfront, up to $623.76 at the top tier. Raff bills monthly with no term and carries a 14-day money-back guarantee, so evaluating it does not require a two-year decision.
Automated backups
Bluehost's VPS plan cards do not list backup or snapshot pricing, so treat data protection as a separate line item to confirm before committing to a 24-month term. Raff includes a free backup and snapshot storage pool — 50 GB per account plus 10–15% of each VM's disk — with Daily and Weekly schedules you configure and uncapped snapshots. Storage above the pool is billed at $0.06/GB-month.
Bandwidth
Neither provider meters standard outbound transfer, so there is no overage table to build. Bluehost lists unmetered bandwidth on all four VPS tiers; Raff includes unmetered transfer on a 3 Gbps standard port. Bluehost does not publish a port speed for its VPS plans.
Bluehost VPS performance vs Raff
Raff has not run a head-to-head benchmark against Bluehost VPS, and this page will not estimate one. Where numbers are not measured, they are not claimed. What follows is what can be stated from published specifications and architecture.
Plan ceiling. Bluehost's VPS line stops at NVMe 16 — 8 vCPU and 16 GB RAM. Raff General Purpose scales to 16 vCPU and 32 GB, and CPU-Optimized offers dedicated vCPU from $15.99/month. Outgrowing NVMe 16 means leaving the product; outgrowing a Raff plan means selecting a larger one.
Resize behaviour. Raff plans change size on demand: stop the VM, switch plan, restart, with the price difference settled to your account balance. Disk grows the same way, and there is a resize API endpoint for both. Bluehost does not document an equivalent in-place resize for VPS plans.
Storage architecture. Both use NVMe, but differently. Local NVMe attached to a host answers a small write without a network round trip, which favours small-block random I/O. Raff runs distributed block storage across an NVMe cluster, so a write crosses the network and is replicated before it is acknowledged — slower for small synchronous writes, and the reason data is replicated rather than pinned to one machine, snapshots and backups are taken at the storage layer, and a VM can change plan without being rebuilt.
Reliability commitments. Raff commits to a 99.9% uptime SLA with service credits, documented in the service level agreement, running 15,000+ VMs from us-east on AMD EPYC with DDR5 ECC memory. ECC matters for long-running database and application workloads because it corrects single-bit errors rather than passing them into your data.
If you need a measured comparison rather than a specification one, the honest advice is to run your own workload on both for a week.
Bluehost vs Raff: features and reliability
Compute
Bluehost offers four shared-vCPU shapes with 2 GB to 16 GB DDR5 RAM and root SSH plus API access on every tier, ending at 8 vCPU and 16 GB. Raff offers General Purpose from $4.99/month and CPU-Optimized dedicated vCPU from $15.99/month, on AMD EPYC with DDR5 ECC memory, scaling to 16 vCPU and 32 GB, with on-demand resize through the API.
Networking
Raff includes a 3 Gbps port with unmetered transfer, private networking, VPC, firewall controls and site-to-site VPN gateways. Bluehost lists unmetered bandwidth and multiple data centers; private networking is not presented as part of the VPS product.
Storage
Bluehost includes more local NVMe at every tier — 100 GB against Raff's 80 GB at 2 vCPU / 4 GB, and 450 GB against 320 GB at 8 vCPU / 16 GB. Raff separates storage into VM disk, block volumes at $0.08/GiB-month that resize independently of the VM, and S3-compatible object storage at $7/month for 100 GB and 1 TB of egress.
Support
Raff provides 24/7 human support through live chat, with a first response typically under 10 minutes. No bots triaging you first, and no support tier to buy: a single $4.99 VM reaches the same engineers as a hundred production machines, through the same queue. Bluehost states that 24/7 priority support is not included with VPS plans, so support level is a difference to price in rather than assume.
What Raff does not replace
Bluehost is a hosting company. Raff is a cloud provider. That distinction is worth making concrete, because a Bluehost account bundles things a cloud account does not.
Raff does not offer mailboxes or email hosting, domain registration, cPanel, a one-click WordPress installer, or bundled SSL certificates. Moving a site from Bluehost means leaving email and domains where they are or moving them to a specialist provider, and installing your own certificates on the VM.
What replaces them is infrastructure: managed PostgreSQL, MySQL, Valkey, ClickHouse and Kafka from $7.99/month, object storage at $7/month for 100 GB and 1 TB of egress, Functions with a free tier of 100,000 GB-seconds and 10,000 vCPU-seconds per month, Raff Apps from $3/month, and managed Kubernetes with a free control plane — all on one account, connected over private networking, on one bill.
If what you need is a website, a mailbox and a domain on one bill, Bluehost is the right shape. If what you need is infrastructure for an application to run on, Raff is.
When you should choose Bluehost over Raff
- A website with email and a domain on one bill — Bluehost bundles mailboxes, domain registration and hosting; Raff offers none of the three
- WordPress and agency sites — a hosting-account workflow rather than infrastructure to assemble (VPS for web hosting)
- Lowest monthly cost — $9.49 promotional and $11.99 at renewal against Raff's $17.99 at 2 vCPU / 4 GB
- Storage-heavy single servers — 450 GB NVMe at 8 vCPU / 16 GB against Raff's 320 GB
- Users outside the United States — multiple data centers against Raff's single us-east region
When you should choose Raff over Bluehost
- Applications that outgrow a hosting account — Raff scales to 16 vCPU and 32 GB; Bluehost's VPS line ends at 8 vCPU and 16 GB, so outgrowing NVMe 16 means leaving the product
- APIs, containers and background jobs — resize on demand through a
resizeAPI endpoint, plus Raff Apps from $3/month and managed Kubernetes with a free control plane (VPS for Docker containers) - Database-backed products — managed PostgreSQL, MySQL, Valkey, ClickHouse and Kafka from $7.99/month over private networking, instead of running your own on the VPS (VPS for databases)
- Workloads that must recover cleanly — Daily and Weekly backup schedules on a free storage pool, uncapped snapshots, 1–365 day retention, and block volumes at $0.08/GiB-month, all API-driven
- Teams that cannot prepay two years — monthly billing with a 14-day money-back guarantee; $17.99 at 2 vCPU / 4 GB is the same in month 25, against $227.76 upfront
- 24/7 human support — live chat to the same engineers at any account size, first response typically under 10 minutes; Bluehost excludes 24/7 priority support from VPS plans
Migrating from Bluehost to Raff
- Inventory the account, not just the server — record the OS version, runtimes, database engines, cron jobs, and separately: which domains, mailboxes and certificates live in the Bluehost account. Those need a new home.
- Decide where email and domains go first — Raff does not host either. Settle that before touching the server, because it is the step people discover too late.
- Size the Raff VM by workload, not by matching disk — Bluehost includes more local NVMe, so decide what belongs on VM disk and what moves to block volumes or object storage.
- Provision and harden — create the Raff VM with the same distribution, apply firewall rules, attach private networking before moving data.
- Move data in order, then test before DNS — files with rsync or SCP, then database dumps, then uploads to object storage. Run the application against the Raff VM by hostname, check logs, take a snapshot once verified.
- Cut over and watch the term — lower DNS TTL beforehand, switch, then confirm your Bluehost billing term. A 24-month prepaid term does not stop when you migrate.
About Bluehost
Bluehost is a US web hosting provider offering shared hosting, WordPress hosting, domains, email and a four-plan self-managed VPS line, aimed largely at website owners and agencies. Its VPS tiers run from 1 to 8 vCPU cores with unmetered bandwidth and multiple data centers. See Bluehost VPS hosting for current plans and terms.
Conclusion: Bluehost or Raff?
The comparison resolves across four measured axes:
- Price — Bluehost is cheaper at every tier: $9.49 promotional and $11.99 renewal against Raff's $17.99 at 2 vCPU / 4 GB
- Price stability — Raff charges the same rate indefinitely with no prepayment; Bluehost's NVMe 8 goes from $12.99 to $28.99 at renewal, a 123% step-up on $311.76 paid upfront
- Headroom — Raff scales to 16 vCPU and 32 GB with on-demand resize; Bluehost's VPS line ends at 8 vCPU and 16 GB
- What surrounds the server — Raff adds managed databases, object storage, Functions, Apps and Kubernetes on one account; Bluehost adds a domain, mailboxes and a hosting panel
If you want the cheapest server to run a website that will look the same in two years, and you want email and a domain on the same bill, choose Bluehost. If the workload has to grow — resize without rebuilding, pass 16 GB of RAM, or sit next to a managed database or Kubernetes cluster — choose Raff.
Raff runs 15,000+ VMs for 3,000+ customers and is rated 4.5/5 on Trustpilot, with a 99.9% uptime SLA in writing.