Web hosting for small businesses is a service that allows an organization and individuals to post its website onto the internet. A web hosting service provider is a business that provides the technologies and services needed for the website to be viewed onto the Internet. Websites are hosted or stored on special types of computers named servers. When Internet users intend to view any website, they simply type the website's address or domain into their browser. Then the computer will be connected to the server and web pages will be delivered through the browser.
We need a domain. If we do not have a domain, hosting companies will help us buy one. There are many web hosting for small businesses, among them here are the top 10 best web hosting for small businesses are discussed.
Initial Requirements for Web Hosting
Web hosting requires 3 main features that one would expect from their hosting providers. They are mentioned below:
- Email Accounts - Most of the hosting providers require users to have their own domain name (e.g. www.yourwebsite.com) and email account features provided by your hosting company.
- FTP Access - FTP lets one upload files from their local computer to the webserver. If the website is built using its own HTML files, it can transfer the files from the computer to the web server through FTP, allowing your website to be accessed through the internet.
- WordPress Support - WordPress is a creation tool online that creates websites. It is a powerful blogging and website content management system, which is a more convenient way to create and manage websites. WordPress powers over a good percentage of websites on the internet.
Top 10 Best Web Hosting for Small Business
Hosting refers to a place where a site is intended to be on the internet.
Getting the best web hosting is very important in terms of running a business.
Your small business hosting needs to be reliable. Time is money, so every minute your site is down,the dollar is lost. It also has to be fairly priced adding the security certificates needed to give a safe online experience for your users.
The best web hosting for small business are mentioned below:(H3)
- Bluehost: Best overall small business host
- InMotion : Ideal for shared and also VPS Hosting
- HostGator : Great for dedicated server Hosting
- iPage : Budget friendly plans
- A2 Hosting :Number one for cloud Hosting
- GoDaddy : Full of extra features
- SiteGround : Excellent customer service
- Hostinger : Best Cheap Hosting Plans
- GreenGeeks : Best Managed WordPress Hosting
- WP Engine :Best Managed WordPress Hosting
Hosting # 1. Bluehost
If anyone is looking for old-fashioned reliability, Bluehost would really be a great choice. Bluehost’s customer support, strong uptime, and affordable beginner plans make it a dependable hosting provider. That is why it has been rated the best overall hosting provider on the market in 2020. Bluehost is also the best choice if anyone is hosting a WordPress site. It has already earned the title of best for WordPress hosting in our research. Similarly, WordPress.org itself has been recommending Bluehost since 2005. It is great for photography website hosting.
Bluehost came onto the scene in 2003. It has become one of the leading providers of web hosting services since then. It is currently owned by The Endurance International Group, which also owns competitor HostGator at the same time. Bluehost currently powers more than two million websites all over the world, primarily out of its data center in Utah.
Performance of Bluehost and Features
Bluehost is dependable. It has a great uptime guarantee of 99.98%.
It offers six different types of hosting and they are
- Shared
- Shared WordPress
- WooCommerce
- VPS
- Managed WordPress
- Dedicated.
Features of Bluehost
- Domain registration - It offers free domain to certain users when anyone signs up for a one-year plan.
- Website builder - There is a site builder for those who have an idea about what they want to create.
- Data transfer - It offers unlimited data transfer and provides CPU protection.
- cPanel - It uses the Control Panel(cPanel), which is a popular site management system. Bluehost also offers free backups so that no site files are lost.
- Storage - It offers from 50GB to unlimited storage space for the site.
| Bluehost Pros | Bluehost Cons |
| Dependable server uptime: Bluehost undoubtedly offers a competitive uptime It could not be easier to set up a WordPress site through Bluehost | Some further costs like optional add-ons will get into the cart at checkout and it is up to the customer to uncheck those items before buying |
| Prices are still competitive even after the first year.A variety of pricing plans means there is an affordable option for every site. | Bluehost offers a small amount of storage. |
Hosting #2. InMotion
One of the most popular hosting companies in 2020. InMotion Hosting has been providing quality web hosting for the last one and a half decades. It provides strong server performance and solid customer service, along with hosting services such as shared, dedicated, VPS, and reseller hosting.
It is considered to be the number 1 web hosting of 2020. It is hard to pick the perfect web host as different websites have different needs. However, if the best web hosting company for businesses were to be picked, InMotion Hosting would be the top recommendation among all others. The web host checks all the boxes for a business website, speed, business-friendly environment, free website transfer for first-time customers, plus a choice of server locations in the US East and West Coast.
If anyone is not satisfied with InMotion during the first 3 months of their subscription, the account can be canceled and also ask for a full refund. This is one of its eye-catchy features that brought this at the top.
Performance of inMotion
- InMotion Hosting Shared Hosting Uptime - InMotion Hosting uptime is tracked from the United States with 7 backup locations. The average uptime for the past 30 days has been 100%.
- InMotion Hosting Shared Hosting Response Time -The average response speed for InMotion Hosting is 123.54ms. InMotion Hosting response time is checked every four hours from 10 locations.
- InMotion Hosting VPS/Cloud Hosting Uptime - VPS/Cloud hosting uptime for InMotion Hosting is tracked from the United States, with 7 backup locations. The average uptime for the past 30 days has been 99.97%.
- InMotion Hosting VPS/Cloud Hosting Response Time- Average response speed for InMotion Hosting VPS/Cloud is 490.00ms. InMotion Hosting VPS/cloud hosting response time is checked every four hours from ten locations.
Features of inMotion
- Domains
- Websites allowed per VPS
- MYSQL databases
- FTP accounts
- Individual cPanel sub-accounts
- Email accounts
| InMotion Hosting Pros | InMotion Hosting Cons |
| Solid hosting performance | Server located only at the United States |
| Live chat support | Hosting price increases after the first term |
| One-clicked shared SSL | Only US-based data centers |
| Daily automated site backup | No instant account activation |
| Full SSD storage | eCommerce features only on power plans and above |
| Extremely scalable | |
| Choice of website builders | |
| Free website migration services | |
| Free domain name with all plans | |
| Safe application rollback | |
| Managed and Cloud VPS plans available | |
| 90 days money-back guarantee |
Hosting #3. HostGator
Whether anyone is looking for a personal website hosting plan or a business website hosting plan, HostGator would be the perfect solution for them. Among some others, HostGator is one of the easiest websites hosting platforms for people. It remains committed to providing customers with the best hosting solutions possible on the market.
HostGator Cloud is a further “upgraded” version of their shared hosting option. According to them, it is more likely to be faster and more scalable than their regular hosting. First of all, HostGator in the past four months has provided 100% uptime. Some comments have come up that it does not compromise with the quality of speed along with their friendly customer support have also been reviewed.
When it is time to review the plan,a message pops up of adding some extra fees.
Performance of HostGator
- 24/7/365 Support
Our support staff is available at any moment needed to assist via Telephone or LiveChat with any hosting-related questions. - One and a half month money-back guarantee
If anyone is not completely satisfied with their services, can cancel their hosting plan within 45 days and ask for a whole refund. - 99.9% Uptime
100% uptime can not be assured by any Web hosting platforms. In that case, 99.9% is a huge matter. The availability of anyone's website is their top priority until now.
Features of HostGator
- Shared hosting
- Cloud hosting
- VPS hosting
Pros and Cons of HostGator
| Pros of HostGator | Cons of HostGator |
| Very strong uptime of 99.9% | High renewal rates |
| Top 5 load times | No daily backup |
| Special discounted pricing | |
| Very user-friendly hosting | |
| Free Extras | |
| It is very fast | |
| Free domain | |
| Unlimited features | |
| Responsive support | |
| Great introductory price |
Hosting #4. iPage
In 1998, the company was established, and at present hosts over one million websites on their two data centers, which are located in Boston, MA. They offer a variety of hosting plans. iPage is a great choice for newcomers ( who have started business in different sectors and want websites), small website owners.
iPage is one of the most popular inexpensive web host companies compared to the others that offer shared, virtual, and dedicated hosting plans. Most web hosting review sites will give a general view of the hosting companies they list. Its review will be a bit different.
It has once been reviewed by a customer who is using iPage since 2010. He claimed that people can find tons of information about iPage, there are complaints, hate messages, there are people who love their service, who have been hosting their website with iPage for a very long time. He claimed that the iPage is not for everyone, because apparently, it's singing system should be up in the right way.
It is simpler to create and customize a website in an iPage. With the Weebly Drag and Drop Builder, anyone can start working on their website right after they are logged in for the first time to a hosting account. The website building process is simple. The interface of the tool allows customers to choose their own design as there are hundreds of free templates available for different purposes, adding up texts they want, images as per their choice, social icons, etc. After a few seconds of processing, the desired website will be online and visible to everyone.
It has been reviewed by many customers who worked with iPage that it is a great hosting company with a very good initial price and has a feature-rich shared plan. The Essential Plan provides the best performance and it also runs very smoothly with WordPress. So if anyone wants a small blog or a simple, professional, and cost-effective solution to build a website, iPage is the best way to go.
Features of iPage
- Easy website, domain, email, and file management
- Easy to use website builder with several numbers of free templates
- Affordable and reliable service backed up by a great all-time support team
- Risk-free hosting service with a one-month money-back guarantee
- Ability to host multiple websites
- Ability to add multiple email addresses
- create multiple MySQL databases
- Ability to expand to VPS
| Pros of iPage | Cons of iPage |
| Affordable shared hostings | High renewal rates |
| Lots of freebies | Lots of upsells |
| Flexibility | Only Linux hosting |
| Beginner-friendly | No SSD storage |
Hosting # 5. A2 Hosting
In 2001, A2 Hosting was founded by Bryan Muthig. It was originally designed to handle a small number of clients at the very first. By 2003, the company had gained a lot more clients than it was accepted. The company continued to grow rapidly day by day. It is known for its easy-to-use web hosting. Their turbo servers guarantee it up to 20X faster page loads compared to standard hosting. A2's main goal is to create and maintain such a good web hosting company that some of its staff wants to use it as well.
Hosting has committed to green energy practices since 2007. They have created a partnership with Carbonfund to reduce their carbon footprint. Whether anyone is new in creating their first blog or an advanced developer, A2 Hosting is worth adding to your consideration list.
Features of A2 Hosting
A2 Hosting is one of the reliable web hosting providers available among all others. This hosting company has been delivering since one and a half-decade:
- High-speed performance
- Reliable uptime
- Top-quality developer tools
- Top customer satisfaction
- A2 Hosting stands out to make sure your small business site performs optimally
- SSD Drives to speed up the performance
- Cloud Hosting increases the reliability
- Multiple back-ups
- Unlimited storage
- data transfer
- All-time support on all hosting plans
- A 99.9% uptime guarantee
- Advanced technology to make site load 20 times faster
| Pros of A2 Hosting | Cons of A2 Hosting |
| Excellent hosting performance | Site migration is chargeable when you downgrade |
| Well-optimized for the best performance | Live chat support is not always available |
| Good uptime record more than 99.95% | Turbo Plan does not support Ruby |
| Minimum risk ; anytime money back, sign-up discounts | |
| Free website migration by the Team A2 | |
| Choice of 4 different server locations | |
| Room to grow: VPS, cloud, and dedicated hosting | |
| Specialized developer environment in shared plans |
Hosting #6. GoDaddy
GoDaddy Website Builder is an online editing and publishing tool It helps to create a website, regardless of any technical skill level. It is just required to create an account, pick a design to decorate the website, and use the built-in editor adding own images and texts. You can make your website as simple or complex as you'd like. This all depends on someone's wish. You can even add a full online store with complete product listings, coupons, shipping, shopping cart, and multiple payment options.
GoDaddy is the world’s largest and trusted domain registrar company. This empowers and generates creative ideas to succeed online. Buying a domain name with the “GoDaddy” domain search tool is easy.GoDaddy has the experience with nearly around 20 years in the industry, of technology, and the hosting experts to help web designers, online businesses, developers, bloggers create and maintain their online presence. This is an assured, secure web hosting platform, complete with cPanel, offers a 99.9% uptime guarantee. It also has award-winning support, which has helped over 19 million customers get online.GoDaddy offers reliable affordable WordPress hosting plans which are one-click installs and the latest version so that customers have the most recent features available for their site.
There are some different reasons why web hosting should be transferred to GoDaddy. They have award-winning support and are always high on the list of why people move their presence to GoDaddy. One of the main benefits is their prices include a free 365 days extension on many other domain transfers.
Features of GoDaddy Web Hosting
- Fast, secure, and always online
- Work anytime, anywhere
- Protect data
- Earn customer’s trust
| Pros of GoDaddy | Cons of GoDaddy |
| The prices are very affordable. | The response is not always fast |
| A platform with a solid reputation | Restoration fees |
| One-click WordPress installation available | No live chat support |
| Many payment options are available | The internal speeds of GoDaddy are not always good |
| Numerous bonuses available for signing up | The economy plan does not allow unlimited websites |
| Other hosting options are available with just one-click | There can be uptime issues |
Hosting #7. SiteGround
SiteGround is one of the most popular providers of web hosting. They offer much more than shared hosting. From which some are to be mentioned like cloud hosting, enterprise hosting. In recent years, cloud hosting solutions have made a huge revolution which allows customers to have a network of several interconnected as a hosting solution. If anyone needs more resources just need to add more hosting capabilities to the configuration.
SiteGround’s main focus is its hosting business. They also offer domain names through their plans don’t include a domain name. They will ask to pay for it separately. It is clear that SiteGround is not the cheapest provider out there, so a good amount of budget will be needed to host the project with them.SiteGround is one of the providers that offer outstanding performance.
Features ofSiteGround
- WordPress 1-click installations
- starter plugin for beginners
- WordPress and plugins auto-updates
- A speed-optimization plugin for WordPress sites
- Test new code and updates
- Easy-to-use migration plugin
- Knowledgeable WordPress support team
- Bloggers with success
- Sites powered by WordPress, Joomla or Magento
- Online shops that is in need of a reliable hosting provider
- Design agencies
- Site developers
- Require a professional hosting service
- Professionals looking to resell hosting
- Anyone who needs a high-performance hosting service
| Pros of SiteGround | Cons of SiteGround |
| It can load the site 4 times faster | Limited resources |
| Quick server response all over the world | Higher price for renewal |
| Unfailing uptime since 2014 | |
| Customer support 24/7 | |
| Free daily backup | |
| User-friendly custom dashboard |
Hosting #8. Hostinger
A small company by the name of “Hosting Media” was formed, long ago in the faraway city of Kaunas, Lithuania, with some dreams in the web hosting industry. 1 million users within 6 years later, that dream was formally changed to Hostinger. Since then, Hostinger has started growing. They have set up shop in 39 countries and established 6 data centers all around the world. They admire to help their users learn, create, grow, and they might have done just that with their level of services and affordable prices.
Their Cloud Hosting plans are very easy and simple to use as their shared hosting options, and they come up with features that are more powerful. It seems like they’ve combined the best features of VPS and Shared Hosting to create an excellent Cloud Hosting. They will offer free daily backup, free SSL for life. With their 24/7 dedicated fully managed support, Hostinger will take care of all that for you.
Features of Hostinger
- Daily Backups
- Access Manager
- CloudLinux
- Proactive and predictive server monitoring
- SSD Drives for extreme speeds
- Custom CPanel
- Realtime reactive server monitoring
- The number of sites is 1 in Small and both premium and business are unlimited
| Small | Premium | Business | |
| SSD space | 10GB | 20GB | 100GB |
| Number of sites | 1 | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Free SSL | YES | YES | YES |
| Daily Backups | NO | NO | YES |
| Bandwidth | 100GB | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Pros of Hostinger | Cons of Hostinger |
| Fast | No daily backup |
| 99.9% uptime guarantee | Let’s Encrypt is available now |
| Faster loading | |
| Benefits that increase speed | |
| Custom dashboard | |
| Free domain | |
| Countless features | |
| Great introductory price | |
| They own the Zyro website builder | |
| Responsive support |
Hosting #9. GreenGeeks
GreenGeeks is a web hosting provider that is as environmentally friendly as possible. They offer a variety of shared hosting plans from beginners to large companies. They are affordable and their plans include many different useful features. It has become a well-known brand in the WordPress hosting industry. It has fast website performance, 24/7 U.S. based support, and an environmentally responsible platform.
They offer automatic 1-click WordPress install, free site migration, managed updates, free CDN, enhanced security, and the choice of over 5 different data center locations.
GreenGeeks power over 5 lakh websites. Other than all these, they have a special 60% discount for WPBeginner readers.GreenGeeks has a wide range of hosting plans for customers of every size. They offer managed WordPress hosting, basic shared hosting, reseller hosting, VPS, and dedicated server hosting. They provide a free website migration service so customers can easily move from the current hosting company.
GreenGeeks provides 24/7 support through live chat and email support. Besides this, they also offer phone support from Monday to Friday from 9 am to midnight EST, and on Saturday and Sunday from 9 am to 8 pm EST. There are WordPress expert support specialists, for managed WordPress hosting customers help to set up the site or handle any WordPress-specific issues. They have a reputation for a very quick response to any inquiries and providing expert help no matter what the issue is.
Features of GreenGeeks
- WordPress optimized servers for faster loading
- automatic updates for the security
- security scanning and DDoS protection
- built-in PHP caching
- Cloudflare CDN for faster loading
- pre-installed Git
- PHP version selection
- WP-CLI for direct command-line access
| Pros of GreenGeeks | Cons of GreenGeeks |
| Superfast | No 24/7 support |
| Offer optimizations to help speed up | Do not take unlimited too literally |
| Reliable with 99.9% uptime | |
| Unlimited resources | |
| A particular interface for beginners and experts | |
| Easily install 3rd party apps | |
| Satisfaction guaranteed |
Hosting # 10. WP Engine
WP Engine is the leading digital experience platform till now that offers a custom plan in order to design "large businesses" and “mission-critical sites’’. Customers get 400GB monthly data transfers, millions of visitors within 30 days, and up to 1TB of storage. It is definitely one of the expensive web hostings, as it positions itself as a high-end managed WordPress host.
All plans are designed with many excellent features, including a content delivery network for faster page load times, staging environments so that customers can test their site changes. On the other side, cloudways lets customers select the five infrastructure platforms. If anyone runs a small business that does not require enterprise-class WordPress hosting. Some suggest checking out A2, which is the category's co-Editors' Choice.
Features of WP Engines
- Screen options
- Post & Page Options
- Post & Page Options
- Quick Edit
- Misc. shortcuts
- Favoriting Plugins
- The hidden secret options panel
| Pros of WP Engine | Cons of WP Engine |
| Excellent uptime | Limited phone support for startup customers |
| Good customer service | Does not come with email |
| Daily backups | Does not sell domains |
| Threat detection | |
| Useful staging area | |
| Choice of Amazon web series or google cloud platform |
Final Thought/Conclusion
Top 10 best web hosting for small businesses here aims to provide customers with ease regarding their business or any other platforms. Website builder experts conduct their own research and obtain direct, personal insight. They take great care to ensure the best of all so that customers feel their website is best in all the ways. Best in overall look, a setting of the contents, and others. Most importantly, the more the money, the more efficient and excellent the website the customer gets. But some of the web hosting companies offer the best websites with domains and hosting which is more convenient.
