Starting a small business online might seem easier than choosing a web hosting company.
Web hosting gets your small business online. Whether just starting or trying to scale, consider what web host you’ll use.
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What is Web Hosting?
A web host is a company that stores and delivers documents, graphics and other files that make up your website’s content. Web hosts use shared, dedicated or virtual servers to store this data.
Look for a few things when considering what web host will work best for you.
What to Look for with Small Business Web Hosting
If a business has a website detailing the company’s location and other information, its hosting provider acts as a business host. You can find this infrastructure extremely beneficial, whether you have a big or small business.
Web Host Uptime and Load Time
Uptime refers to the amount of time that a hosting system is operational. Load speed measures how fast your website loads each page. Both affect the reliability and speed of your website.
In other words, if your site is down, new clients or customers can’t find you or access your website. Regular customers may end up losing confidence in your service.
If they need access to a service or widget today, this could lead to them going to a competitor to get the job done and might never come back to you.
What Features do you Need?
When looking for a web hosting service, you want a web host that offers virtual private servers, dedicated servers, high-end WordPress options and 24/7 customer support.
Depending on your type of business, you may need a web host that can handle page views or visitors that rank in the high thousands or millions. In other words, you may want to look for anything more advanced than shared web hosting.
Planning on selling a product? You should look for a web host that offers a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate. SSLs can encrypt the data between the customer’s browser and web host to safeguard purchasing information. You’ll notice an SSL as the green padlock that appears in your web browser’s address bar as you visit an online financial institution or retail outlet.
A few companies toss in an SSL certificate free of charge; others may charge you roughly $100 for that extra security layer.
Web Hosting Cost
A dedicated server will likely cost you more than $100 per month.
Your website lives on a server all by itself. If you choose a dedicated server, you’ll probably need to handle firewalls, updates and maintenance yourself. If this isn’t your kind of thing, you can opt for a managed server. A managed server takes care of all of this but it can cost even more money. Basically, the web host acts as your IT squad. If you would rather have a web host do the server-related dirty work, choose managed hosting.
Depending on how you spec out your hosting package, you can easily expect to pay close to $1,000 per month or even more. However, don’t let this hinder your web hosting shopping — you get what you pay for.
Those kinds of prices come with excellent security, amazing customer service that provides onboarding and a scalable structure that lets you grow as needed.
Top 5 Web Hosting for Small Business
Great web hosting companies offer a variety of features, and these 5 offer a lot:
- Best overall small business host: Bluehost
- Great for dedicated server hosting: HostGator
- No. 1 for cloud hosting: A2 Hosting
- Best for discounted prices: Hostinger
- Best for value for money: DreamHost
1. Best Overall Small Business Host: Bluehost
Great for small businesses, Bluehost can range from $3.95 to $209.99. Furthermore, Bluehost offers a variety of hosting choices such as VPS, dedicated, reseller and WordPress hosting. WordPress site hosting plans offer managed hosting plans with a support team.
You can easily install WordPress for free on a standard shared hosting plan. Once you activate WordPress, you can install the WooCommerce plugin to create an e-commerce online store.
All shared hosting plans get the cPanel control panel. Bluehost also includes unlimited bandwidth, 1 free domain name and 1 free SSL certificate. With the basic shared hosting plan, you only get 1 website and it has limits on server resources. On the other hand, the 2 other plans get unlimited SSD storage space.
Pros:
- Free SSL certificate
- Free domain name
- Unlimited bandwidth
- Unlimited SSD storage space with higher plans
- Unlimited subdomains with higher plans
- 24/7 customer support
- 99.9% uptime guarantee
- 30-day money-back guarantee
Cons:
- No native email account manager
2. Best for Dedicated Server Hosting: HostGator
If you don’t need a lot of extravagant features from your web hosting provider, HostGator offers one of the best options.
HostGator offers an extensive list of guides for technical support. If you don’t find the answers you need, tap into its helpful customer support. You can turn to phone, live chat and email support. Unlike some hosts, HostGator does include support in all of its plans.
HostGator does offer Windows hosting in addition to Linux and also offers a variety of options to upgrade. This can include hosting, VPS hosting, managed WordPress and a dedicated server. Shared hosting plans start at $2.75 per month.
Pros:
- Free SSL certificate
- Free domain name
- Unlimited bandwidth
- Unlimited storage space
- Unlimited subdomains
- Unlimited email accounts
- cPanel control panel
- 24/7 customer support
- 99.9% uptime guarantee
- 45-day money-back guarantee
Cons:
- Disks not SSD
3. Best for Cloud Hosting: A2 Hosting
Like Bluehost, A2 Hosting provides dedicated servers, VPS hosting and shared hosting plans.
Bluehost’s starter plan hosts 1 website. The others all have no limit on the number of sites they can host. Unlike Bluehost and HostGator, none of the shared hosting plans get a free domain name. All plans can host WordPress and they all get 1 free SSL certificate included.
The plans all get SSD storage space and a webmail interface for email accounts. These plans also get Cloudflare CDN to improve load times and cover for server downtime and security features that include malware and DDoS attack protection.
Pros:
- Free Cloudflare
- CDN Free website builder
- Free SSL certificate
- Free FTP accounts
- SSD storage space
- Choice of data center location
- WordPress, Drupal and Joomla included
- Hassle-free money-back guarantee
- 99.9% uptime guarantee
- 24/7 customer support
Cons:
- No free domain name offer
4. Best for Discounted Prices: Hostinger
Normally only $7.99 per month, Hostinger just offered its lowest plan cost to $1.59 per month. Hosting can’t get any cheaper than that!
Hostinger, an employee-owned company based in Lithuania, also runs a domain registration service. The company also offers an email hosting plan. However, customers of the shared hosting plans don’t need to buy email hosting as an add-on because email account management is included with all plans.
In addition to its email hosting, it also includes 1 free SSL certificate and 1 free domain name. Small businesses can take advantage of this feature with any hosting accounts.
As for the WordPress plan, you don’t need to opt in because the shared hosting conditions have an installer that will set up the CMS. You don’t have to be too tech-savvy to do this, either. You can also use Joomla and Drupal but WordPress has direct access to a huge library of plugins, which includes WooCommerce, the e-commerce plugin for WordPress.
Last, the website builder remains a separate plan.
Pros:
- Free SSL certificate
- Free domain name
- Unlimited bandwidth (except for the basic plan)
- Email accounts included
- SSD storage
- 24/7 customer support
- 99.9% uptime
- 30-day money-back guarantee
Cons:
- Website builder is an add-on feature
5. Best Value for Money: DreamHost
DreamHost offers an amazing shared web hosting plan at very affordable month-to-month prices.
As a matter of fact, its month-to-month plans start at $3.95 per month. This plan includes 1 website with unlimited traffic, along with 1 free SSL certificate — a great package deal.
DreamHost also stands out for the way it manages its web hosts. It doesn’t use the standard cPanel, which most hosts use. Instead, DreamHost offers a completely custom control panel for website management. If you want more control, you might want to choose DreamHost.
The catch: Its custom control panel makes it more difficult to migrate from DreamHost but you can easily migrate to DreamHost.
The 97-day free trial period is amazing. Another great feature: DreamHost doesn’t do promo pricing and prices won’t jump up after your first contract is up.
DreamHost offers a regular dedicated server plan that’s also VPS hosting. The shared hosting plans also get offered in a dedicated WordPress package. As for standard web hosting plans, you can get WordPress for free and the CMS installed automatically on demand. All shared hosting plans get unlimited bandwidth and good data transfer speeds. You get email account management in these plans as are 1 free domain name and 1 free SSL certificate.
DreamHost also offers 1 free unlimited shared hosting plan for 501(c)(3) organizations.
Pros:
- Free SSL certificate
- Recommended by WordPress.org
- Unlimited bandwidth
- Unlimited email accounts on most plans
- 100% uptime guarantee
- 24/7 customer support team with live chat support
- 97-day free trial with money-back guarantee
Cons:
- No malware protection
Ready to get Started?
As you can see, there are a lot of options available to choose from. There’s even more that we don’t cover here. However, when it comes to the best of the best, our choices reflect that.
You should always be able to find a great deal with any web host. Nonetheless, you do get what you pay for. Overall, when shopping for a web host, make sure you keep in mind the host’s reliability and support. If you can find one that offers both domain registration and SSL certificates, then you’re probably better off with them. This is because transferring domains can be time-consuming. Additionally, SSL certificates can be costly.
Choosing your web host from what we recommend is ultimately up to you. This is because your choice may rely on your budget and your website know-how.
