The difference between Website Pro and Express is mainly in the business layer rather than technology. Currently, Pro and Express websites are all hosted on the same platform, sharing the same computational resources. However, there are a few premium features that are either only available to Pro or limited to Express accounts:
- Custom domains: Pro accounts can add custom domains to their websites, while Express accounts can only have one default domain (like my-site.websitepro.hosting) for each website.
- Staging sites: Pro accounts can create a staging environment for their websites, make necessary changes in the staging environment, and push the change to production with minimum downtime. Express accounts can only edit their production websites directly. A staging site is separate from the production site, and you can import All-In-One Site Export or Website Pro backups to a staging environment
- Backups: The platform creates daily backups for all websites automatically, and also allows users to create backups manually at any given time. These backups can be saved for up to 60 days for Pro accounts, while for Express accounts it is only one day.
We also plan to limit the database and file storage sizes of Express accounts in the future. Otherwise, Express accounts should enjoy most of the nice features (such as Google Analytics, caching, phpMyAdmin/SFTP access) and full performance of the platform as Pro. We hope that customers would be more willing to upgrade after getting a true taste of the product.