Blog
How to Design a Custom Logo For Your Business Like a Pro
When you want your business to stand out from the crowd, you need to think outside the box. The first thing you can do is
September 8, 2021
No Comments
Menu
Best Web Hosting For Small Business & Startups
Website Hosting Services For Small Businesses
Earnings Disclosure: Comparing.ly is a free to use site for its visitors. We may sometimes earn a commission when you buy services listed on this website at no extra cost to you. This does not influence our review process.
The world is becoming a smaller place with every passing day. Businesses all around are working hard to create a difference and be remembered, in order to attract more clientele.
If there’s one thing Rocky Balboa taught us about life, its about going all in and the survival of the mentally strongest. Bottom line is, you have to be fast and active at all times, else you won’t survive this competitive world.
You might start as a small business, but you surely can be big enough one day. So let’s gear up now to find the best web hosting for small business and get your business website up and running.
Why is Web Hosting Important For Small Business?
If you’re a small business or startup, having an online presence is a must because if you’re not on the web, people tend to doubt your business’ credibility. You just can’t afford to take this lightly, with the constantly growing number of consumers across the world becoming more aware and switching to the digital side, everyday. If you don’t have your business website, your competitor may take away the customer, who may have wanted to search and go with you in the first place. But instead went with your competitor, simply because he didn’t trust your brand anymore, owing to the non-availability of your business online. Businesses can’t afford to lose even a single customer. Period.
Look at this picture below, which small business owner do you want to be, the happy one that is making money with his online presence or the sad one that has no customers.
Thus, taking your business online is absolutely mandatory for your brand growth. Well, if you didn’t get scared enough already, this was just the tip of the iceberg. Finding a right web host is one of the biggest business decisions to make when building the online presence for your business, and it won’t be over-rated to say that the major initial struggle for a business’ growth is to choose the best web hosting provider for itself.
It can be extremely overwhelming to evaluate and then choosing the best web hosting company for your business, considering the broad number of web hosting providers available today. Being a small business, we understand the complexity and grind that a business can face while setting up their online presence, having gone through it ourselves as well. Getting the best web hosting for your small business requires a certain amount of due diligence wherein you need to compare multiple factors like site speed, security standards offered, bandwidth of hosting servers, website storage, customer support, scalability as your business grows and the most important of them all, hosting price affordability.
Web Hosting Fact : Server downtimes and unplanned outages cost as much as $100 million per year to companies - Infonetics
As a rule of thumb, you should never compromise with a second tier hosting provider, because a small portion of money saved on cheap hosting can cause a bigger dent on your revenue with slow speed or downtimes (which usually comes FREE along with cheap hosting providers).
Team Comparingly always strives to recommend the best business solutions and doesn’t want your business website to face any downtimes or loss in revenue. Thus we put together this informative guide to help you choose the best web hosting for small business. The web hosting comparison table lists the top 10 best recommended hosting providers. Using the same, you can choose a reliable web hosting service for your small or medium business.
Table of Contents
Best Web Hosting For Small Business – Top 3 Performers
Most small businesses or startups usually choose to go for a reliable as well as affordable business solution service. Web hosting is no different. The following web hosting providers aced our expectations with respect to the needs of a small business.
For our research, we considered the most important factors for setting up or hosting a website from the perspective of a small business or a startup. We chose the top 3 best web hosts to make the selection process easier for you.
✓ Uptime ~ 99.97%
✓ Fastest Load Time ~ 365ms
✓ Lowest Intro Price ~ $2.15 $0.80/mo
✓ Money Back Guarantee 30 Days
✓ Best Uptime ~ 99.98%
✓ Load Time ~ 383ms
✓ Intro Price ~ $7.99 $3.95/mo
✓ Money Back Guarantee 30 Days
✓ Uptime ~ 99.97%
✓ Load Time ~ 427ms
✓ Intro Price ~ $7.95 $4.95/mo
✓ Money Back Guarantee 45 Days
Broadly, the features on which these hosting companies excelled are …..
- These web hosts have the Best Uptimes.
- Fast Site Load Times which are responsible to make your website load real fast when accessed from any part of the world. Also called TTFB which stands for “Time To First Byte“.
- Intro Price Plans which play a crucial role in the selection of a web host for any business owner.
- These web hosts offer the Best Storage plans for your hosted sites.
- Option to Scale Your Hosting Server as your business grows.
- Robust Infrastructure which is vital to make sure your visitors don’t face Bandwidth or Security issues.
You can read more about these factors we considered to rank these hosting providers in our web hosting review process.
You should also check out the how to choose a web hosting provider section to make yourself aware of the hosting features your business needs.
If you want a robust and reliable web hosting without spending a lot of time in research, you can go with one of these web hosts listed above. All three of these have proven to be the best in the industry over the past few years and won’t disappoint you either.
However, if you want to learn more about web hosting services or choose a different hosting platform, let’s head on to the complete list of our recommended hosting providers.
Best Web Hosting Services
Before we jump to the list of best hosting providers, you should know about the various types of business hosting services offered in the market today, which are :
- Shared Hosting
- Cloud Hosting
- WordPress Hosting
- VPS Hosting
- Dedicated Hosting
- Reseller Hosting
We assume you already know what type of hosting your business needs. If you’re just starting up or are a small business, going with a Shared Hosting Plan is the best bet. You can choose a hosting partner that offers you the option to upgrade or scale your hosting as your business grows.
If you would like to learn more about different types of hosting, you can refer the types of business hosting section. We have also covered the most important factors to consider, before you take the plunge to find a web hosting service for your business brand.
Web Hosting Fact : About 38% online shoppers abandon an e-commerce website if it takes more than 10 seconds to load - Econsultancy
Features we considered for web hosting comparison :
- uptimes and loading speed guaranteed by the hosting companies
- ease of use to customer
- pricing for entry level hosting plans
- quality of customer support offered to customers
- easy scalability as your business grows
We hope this guide helps you choose the best web host that suits your business model as well as puts your business growth in the top gear.
To keep it most applicable to small businesses, we’ve compared these popular web hosts on the basis of their shared web hosting plans. We’ve used the following color scheme for your easy reference.
99.95% and upwards is the industry standard server uptime that most hosting providers claim and strive to offer. To be honest its unfair to expect a server won’t ever go down because there are so many factors which are beyond control. Uptimes have been categorized as per the following color bands.
99.96%-99.99% have been marked green,
99.92%-99.95% have been marked orange,
99.91% and lower, if any, have been marked red.
500ms-600ms is a comfortable load time for any server request and treated as an industry standard. Load times are also categorized as per the following color bands.
500ms-600ms have been marked green,
601ms-800ms have been marked orange,
801ms and above, if any, have been marked red.
Web Hosting Comparison
Hosting
SiteLowest price you pay for launching a logo design contest
Intro
PriceLowest price you pay for entry level hosting plan.
Uptime
Avg.
Average uptime calculated from consolidated uptime data of multiple user sites.
Load Time
Avg.
Average load time (TTFB) of user sites.
Refund
Policy
Money Back Policy duration if you don't like the services of the hosting provider.
Comparingly
Score
This score is calculated from multiple factors like site speed, site uptime, storage and bandwidth on offer, customer support, and the pricing of the hosting service.
To Site
Intro Price
$0.80/mo
Renews @$2.15/mo
Uptime Avg.
~ 99.97%
Load Time Avg.
~ 365ms
Refund Policy
30 Days
4.9/5
Intro Price
$3.95/mo
Renews @$7.99/mo
Uptime Avg.
~ 99.98%
Load Time Avg.
~ 383ms
Refund Policy
30 Days
4.8/5
Intro Price
$4.95/mo
Renews @$8.95/mo
Uptime Avg.
~ 99.97%
Load Time Avg.
~ 427ms
Refund Policy
45 Days
4.8/5
Intro Price
$3.92/mo
Renews @$7.99/mo
Uptime Avg.
~ 99.95%
Load Time Avg.
~ 320ms
Refund Policy
Anytime
4.7/5
Intro Price
$2.95/mo
Renews @$9.95/mo
Uptime Avg.
~ 99.95%
Load Time Avg.
~ 455ms
Refund Policy
30 Days
4.7/5
Intro Price
$3.95/mo
Renews @$11.95/mo
Uptime Avg.
~ 99.98%
Load Time Avg.
~ 680ms
Refund Policy
30 Days
4.6/5
Intro Price
$1.99/mo
Renews @$7.99/mo
Uptime Avg.
~ 99.97%
Load Time Avg.
~ 762ms
Refund Policy
30 Days
4.6/5
Intro Price
$5.99/mo
Renews @$8.99/mo
Uptime Avg.
~ 99.98%
Load Time Avg.
~ 538ms
Refund Policy
30 Days
4.5/5
Intro Price
$2.59/mo
Renews @$4.95/mo
Uptime Avg.
~ 99.95%
Load Time Avg.
~ 657ms
Refund Policy
97 Days
4.5/5
Intro Price
$3.99/mo
Renews @$7.99/mo
Uptime Avg.
~ 99.95%
Load Time Avg.
~ 789ms
Refund Policy
30 Days
4.5/5
Good Hosting Means Good Business ! Choose Wisely.
If We Were Able To Help You, Do Show Some Love By Sharing This Post & Help Us Spread the Word !
Twitter
Facebook
Reddit
LinkedIn
Email
1. Hostinger - Cheapest Shared Hosting For Small Business
$0.80/mo
4.9/5
Hostinger is at the top of our hosting provider list with its super aggressive and supportive pricing for Small Businesses. Their intro plan is the cheapest in the whole market. Having a strong network infrastructure to back such market dominating prices adds to the kitty for Hostinger. Their uptimes are exceptional and there loading times are phenomenal. They surely have got their tech part right at Hostinger.
Going to their higher tier adds even more muscle to the hosting plan as they deliver 2X and 4X processing powers in the Premium and Business shared hosting plans. They’ve a 24/7 live chat support which is always ready to support you with your hosting.
Types Of Hosting Offered
Pricing
Hostinger Single Plan starts @ $0.80/mo with a 48 month commitment after which the plan still renews @ $2.15/mo, a lot less than the intro price of a lot of major hosting providers.
You get hosting for 1 website in this plan along with 1 email account.
The plan includes 10GB SSD storage space and bandwidth of 100GB which is sufficient enough for a small website. On top of it they throw in a free SSL as well.
You get access to their Easy Website Builder along with this plan and one click install support for major CMS platforms too.
Hostinger offers a 30 day money back guarantee with all plans.
We recommend the Business Shared Hosting Plan @ 3.45/mo which is very reasonably priced and offers you free domain name, daily backups, unlimited websites, unlimited emails, unlimited bandwidth and lots of other hosting extras.
2. Bluehost - Best Shared Hosting For Small Business
$3.95/mo
4.8/5
Bluehost stands in the top 3 list as our choicest wordpress hosting provider. Its top of the line hosting features make it the best shared wordpress hosting in the market today. Their all round portfolio, amazing network infrastructure, value for money hosting plans and great customer support makes it one of the most recommended hosting choice for small businesses. Reason why WordPress.com chose them as their #1 Preferred Partner.
The best part about Bluehost is that it is capable to support you at every stage of your business. When you start you can avail their Shared Hosting, As you grow, you can switch seamlessly to WordPress. And when you need to switch to VPS or Dedicated server, their awarded support team gets it done before you know.
Types Of Hosting Offered
Pricing
Bluehost Basic Plan starts @ $3.95/mo with a 36 month commitment period after which the plan renews @ $7.99/mo.
You get hosting for 1 website in this plan along with 5 email accounts and 1 free domain for one year.
The plan includes 50GB SSD storage space and unmetered bandwidth along with free SSL and 24/7 live chat support.
You get one click WordPress install support with this plan which helps you get your site live super fast and you also get easy access to other commonly used CMS platforms as well.
Bluehost offers a 30 day money back guarantee with all plans.
Our most recommended Bluehost Choice Plus Plan @ 5.45/mo is the most value for money shared hosting plan from Bluehost. It offers Unlimited Websites, Unlimited SSD storage, Unlimited bandwidth, Unlimited emails and lots of other hosting goodies like Codeguard, Website Builder, Spam Experts, Daily Scans, etc.
3. Hostgator-Cloud - Best Scalable Hosting For Small Business
$4.95/mo
4.8/5
Hostgator Cloud Hosting is one of the best cheap web hosting options available and specially in terms of scalability according to our assessment. They have an amazing uptime record with 2.5X speed offered in their cloud hosting plans as compared to the regular shared hosting plans, thanks to the sturdy cloud infrastructure. Their bundled website builder solution Gator is one of the finest in the industry and very beginner friendly.
Hostgator is also known for its top of the class Dedicated and Reseller hosting offerings.
Types Of Hosting Offered
Pricing
HostGator Hatchling Cloud Plan starts @ $4.95/mo with a 36 month commitment after which the plan renews @ $7.99/mo, which is very reasonable considering the amazing cloud infrastructure in the offering.
You get hosting for 1 website in this plan along with 1 free domain for one year. The plan offers a 2 Core CPU along with 2GB memory which is more than sufficient for a single website.
The plan includes unlimited storage and unmetered bandwidth and free SSL.
You get access to the famous Gator Builder along with the plan and there is one click WordPress install support like other hosting providers.
HostGator offers a very generous 45 day money back guarantee which adds to the trust in their offering.
Our most recommended offering is the Baby Cloud Plan @ $6.57/mo. Its one of the most feature rich and balanced hosting plan that offers unlimited domains, unlimited emails, unlimited storage and bandwidth along with 4GB RAM and a 4 Core CPU which will ensure you may not need a hosting plan upgrade for a very long duration.
4. A2Hosting - Fastest Shared Hosting
$3.92/mo
4.7/5
A2Hosting turned out to be the fastest Shared Hosting as well as one of the fastest Cloud Hosting service as well. It came out with one of the fastest page load speeds leaving behind even Bluehost & Hostinger which formed the earlier threshold of being fast.
They offer a managed hosting service called HostGuard in which they’ve a super specialized support team called “Guru Crew” taking care of all aspects of your hosting for you round the clock so that you can focus on your business.
You get Linux as well as Windows hosting with this provider. Many advanced users seek Windows hosting services, so A2Hosting is ideal for them.
Multiple server locations worldwide. Michigan, Arizone(USA), Amsterdam(Europe) & Singapore(Asia).
They offer FREE Site Migration for customers which is a big plus.
Types Of Hosting Offered
Pricing
A2Hosting offers a Lite Plan that starts @ $2.96/mo with a 24 or 36 month commitment post which the plan renews @ $7.99/mo.
You can host 1 website in this plan along with 25 email accounts.
The lite plan includes unmetered storage and bandwidth along with free SSL & super fast SSD that hosts your OS and your website.
A2Hosting offers a very promising ANYTIME money back guarantee which separates it from a lot of industry players. And you also get the Guru Crew support 24/7/365.
Our recommended offering is the Swift Plan @ $4.90/mo. It offers unlimited websites, unlimited databases. You can use this plan if you are looking to set up multiple sites. All sites will run blazingly fast backed by A2Hosting’s best in class hosting offering.
5. GreenGeeks - Best Eco-Friendly Web Hosting
$2.95/mo
4.7/5
GreenGeeks web hosting is an eco-friendly web hosting that’s nothing like the rest. Not only they are environment savvy but deliver a great power packed performance as well. If you always think of giving back to mother nature, this is your chance. GreenGeeks boasts of making your website “carbon reducing” thanks to their 3X replacement of consumed energy into renewable energy credits.
They have exceptional server uptimes and loading speeds of around 450ms which is phenomenal and very much in line with the top performance tier. They’re specifically suited for clients in the US or EU areas with no presence in the Asia region.
They offer a specialized FREE Site Migration to new customers coming onboard.
Types Of Hosting Offered
Pricing
GreenGeeks entry level Lite Plan starts @ $2.95/mo with a 36 month commitment after which the plan renews @ $9.95/mo, very reasonable with the number of hosting goodies they pack with the plan.
You can host 1 website in this plan with 1 free domain for one year with unlimited email accounts
The plan includes unlimited SSD storage and unmetered bandwidth along with Free Wildcard SSL.
You get access to the there proprietary PowerCacher tool that helps your sites load at lightning speeds. Plan also includes one click WordPress install support along with other CMS.
GreenGeeks offers 24/7 live chat support along with a no risk 30 day money back guarantee. Their simple Drag n’ Drop Builder is also included with every hosting plan offering.
Our most recommended offering of GreenGeeks in case you want to host multiple websites is the Pro Plan @ $5.95/mo. It offers 2X the performance along with all the benefits of the Lite Plan along with nightly data backups.
6. SiteGround - Best WordPress Support Hosting
$3.95/mo
4.6/5
SiteGround web hosting is a WordPress Preferred Partner and has earned its name in the industry as the Best Customer Support Hosting available. If you want to go for WordPress offering, it is at par with the top performers in the industry. The pricings are are moderately premium but their solid offerings make up for the price and really look value for money.
If you’re a steadily growing enterprise, they’ve a unique Enterprise Offering in which you get mirrored servers in both US & EU which are able to serve visitors from around the world with no latency at all.
Their offerings are slightly premium and they stand by the same as well. They’ve boutique hosting solutions for Developers, Students, Agencies, Resellers, Enterprises, WooCommerce and many others.
Their extremely fast load times and exceptional uptimes make it one of the most worthy hosting choices for small businesses. And to top it they offer Free Site Migration to customers as well.
Types Of Hosting Offered
Pricing
SiteGround offers a Basic Startup Plan @ $3.95/mo which renews at $11.95 after 12 months commitment. However you can choose to go with a 3 year lock-in and enjoy this pricing for a 36 month period.
In this plan you get hosting of one site along with a free domain for 1 year and unlimited email accounts.
It is a premium service which provides high speed bandwidth for upto 10000 visits in a month and 10 GB of fast SSD storage as well.
Free SSL & SiteBuilder is included with the plan as well. Plan includes a
The plan also includes Free CloudFlare CDN access to make your site run super fast. The hosting provider provides Free Daily Backups for you as a contingency which is a great addon.
Like other hosting providers, SiteGround also offers a 30 day money back guarantee which we don’t think you’d ever need to use, if you choose this web host.
We recommend the GrowBig Hosting Plan @ 5.95/mo which lets you host unlimited websites, 20 GB of SSD storage and 25000 monthly visits. A really value for money premium quality offering.
7. iPage - Low Budget Shared Web Hosting
$1.99/mo
4.6/5
iPage is as simple as it gets. They’re there to help you startup and make the most of it. One of the oldest companies in the web hosting industry. They offer only a single plan in the Shared Hosting.
What separates iPage from others is the unique offering of hosting unlimited websites on such small priced monthly hosting plan with an access to almost every single feature you get on a higher priced hosting plan with other hosting providers.
What adds to the excitement here is that you can host unlimited websites under your hosting plan for this meagre monthly subsription fee. With uptimes around 99.97% and decent load times around 750ms it surely makes up for a great hosting plan.
Types Of Hosting Offered
Pricing
iPage offers its core Shared Hosting Plan @ $1.99/mo which renews at $7.99 after the 36 month commitment period. And you get one domain for a year free along with your subscription as well.
You get unlimited email accounts, metered bandwidth and storage which is still enough to host a lot of small websites. And free SSL too.
You get the website builder addon for free which you can use to build sites upto 6 pages.
All their plans come with over $500 worth of extras in the form of Google & Bing Ad credits as well as security addons like SiteLock and others integrated into the hosting plan itself.
iPage offers a dedicated 24/7 US based support and a simple 30 day money back guarantee which really adds value to the offering since the pricing is under $2.
The only Shared Hosting Plan offered by iPage is our most recommended plan. $1.99/mo and unlimited domain hosting. Nothing can beat this combination.
8. GoDaddy - Best Reseller & Most Popular Web Hosting
$5.99/mo
4.5/5
GoDaddy is one of the most popular web hosting providers in the market today. Stellar performance at a little expensive initial price. They deliver the best and hence charge the premium for the same too. They’re really popular for their Reseller Services which is loved by many. GoDaddy also happens to be one of the biggest domain name registrars in the world.
This puts them in a very comfortable position where they offer end to end solutions to the customers. From domain name to hosting to maintenance, they have it all. Once you signup with GoDaddy, you don’t need to go anywhere else.
With every package they add a special feature, which is the option to increase hosting resources in your hosting plan with just one click if you experience increase in traffic and need more bandwidth or server resources to handle the surge in traffic.
Multiple server locations worldwide make them the one of the fastest and biggest hosting network.
Types Of Hosting Offered
Pricing
GoDaddy offers a starter Economy Plan that starts @ $5.99/mo with a 36 month commitment. After this the plan renews @ $8.99/mo.
You can host 1 website in this plan along with free office 365 email. You get 1 free domain for one year with this plan.
The plan includes 100 GB storage and unmetered bandwidth. No free SSL so you’ll have to purchase the same separately.
Setting up a website is super easy with just 1 click for GoDaddy purchased domains.
They offer an award winning 24/7 US based expert customer support with 30 day money guarantee.
Our recommended offering is the Deluxe Plan @ $7.99/mo. It basically offers everything unlimited in the plan except free SSL(which you can buy cheaply). As a premium plan offering this is the best in the market.
9. DreamHost - Best Value For Money Web Hosting
$2.59/mo
4.5/5
DreamHost is one of the three WordPress Preferred Partners and rightly so. It has got its basics right. They deliver everything that a business may need and everything they deliver is at a really affordable price. They’re in the industry since 1997 and host over 1.5 million websites.
Their domain and renewal charges are very aggressive as compared with other competitors. Though they offer great performance at an affordable price, their live chat is only available after you subsribe to their plans. So you’ve to go through the process before you can ask them for help.
Types Of Hosting Offered
Pricing
DreamHost offers its base plan @ 2.59/mo which renews at $4.95/mo with a 36 month commitment period.
You get unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth, free SSL and 1 free domain for a year along with pre-installed WordPress for fast access.
They bundle in their best in class proprietary WP Website Builder for free with every plan.
They offer an extended 97 money back guarantee that no other hosting provider offers. That means you can try their services for over 3 months without any worries and still ask for a refund if you don’t like their service. Reason enough they’re WP Preferred Partner.
DreamHost offers the Shared Unlimited Plan @ 4.95/mo which is our recommended plan. It offers unlimited websites, SSD storage, bandwidth, email accounts and SSL. This is one of the most value for money plan in the whole industry.
10. InMotion - Best VPS & Dedicated Hosting
$3.99/mo
4.5/5
InMotion is one of the industry stalwarts that has the best dedicated servers on offering. Nobody even comes close when we talk about VPS & Dedicated Server Hosting. Looking for a small business hosting solution, this is your best choice for VPS & Dedicated Servers.
They’ve an amazing customer support that knows about their product offering inside out. Businesses specially in the e-commerce division prefer InMotion for their reliable services.
Apart from there industry leading services, they are also one of the few hosting providers that offer a FREE Site Migration to new customers coming onboard.
Types Of Hosting Offered
Pricing
InMotion offers their Launch Plan @ $3.99/mo that renews at $7.99/mo with a 3 year lock-in like other hosting providers.
You can host 2 websites in this plan along with unlimited emai accounts. You also get 1 free domain for one year along with this plan.
The plan includes unlimited SSD storage and unlimited bandwidth along with free SSL.
They also offer 1 click CMS install option for WordPress and other popular CMS platforms.
They offer you servers only in US and you can choose any out of the 4 they offer. Their 24/7 US based support is their strength and they offer an industry leading 90 day money back policy which puts immense customer trust into their offering. 3 months is not a small time to try out and trust an already amazing established service.
Our recommended offering is the InMotion Power Plan @ $5.99/mo. It basically offers you hosting of unlimited domains along with every other unlimited feature like the Launch Plan. This makes it one of the premium plan offerings at a very nominal price.
How We Reviewed The Best Web Hosting Companies
We considered multiple important factors in our review process to sort the best web hosting companies from the plethora of hosting providers available on the internet today. Every hosting provider is different and unique in its own terms. Some are known for speed, while others are known for their service reliability. At the end of the day, you’ve to consider each feature they provide and evaluate what’s important to you and your business the most. The factors that we considered for hosting review process are the following:
1. Server Uptime
Considered one of the most important stats for website hosting, it is the backbone of your hosting success. In simple terms, you can’t buy from a shop with its shutter down, can you? Its the same with websites. If the hosting server on which your website is hosted goes down, your website will suffer outage and the customers will see a “site not reachable” or “down for maintenance” dialogue. And if this happens frequently, then your customer base will sink like a ship because the internet is so huge and has so much to offer, a visitor lost may never come back to your site.
Web Hosting Fact : An exceptional 99.99% server uptime in a calendar year means your site server was down for almost 52 minutes 34 seconds in a period of 365 days.
A greatly built site can perform bad, if the hosting is not good, while an average built site may perform very well just because the hosting is perfect. So choosing the right hosting provider with a great uptime history and performance is very important.
Most web hosting providers promise an uptime of 99.99%, which roughly translates to under an hour of downtime in a whole year’s time. However, please do keep in mind that even the biggest companiess like Mastercard or Yahoo face hacking attacks all the time. On other times even Google or Facebook services go slow.
A one-off technical downtime is OK, but a consistent downtime of short duration every now and then speaks of a bad service. Uptimes of around 99.95% and above are acceptable depending on the nature of your business website.
To check a server’s availability status and calculate its uptime there are multiple tools available in the market today. We used Pingdom for our testing purposes which is considered one of the most trusted pinging tool.
Our top 3 hosting picks boast of consistent high uptimes. Bluehost being on top with a maintained uptime of 99.99%.
2. Site Loading Speed
Site load speed is one of the other most important factors. Just ask yourself how long would you wait for a webpage to load. You know the answer. According to experts at Google, a site load time of around 1s helps maintain a smooth flow of thought for the visitor and does not divert his attention. If your site doesn’t load for another 4-5 seconds, the user may just abandon your site after getting frustrated. Not only did you lose a potential customer, but gathered a bad review as well.
Google gives a lot of weight to the site load timings and uses it extensively to rank websites. So if you want your site to rank better, good content won’t get you there alone, you need to have a blazing fast server as well.
Web Hosting Fact : People using mobile phone browsers usually don't wait longer than 3 seconds for a page to load - Akamai
With the advent of mobile internet and google’s site crawling bots switching and preferring a website’s mobile version, it has become even more important to have a good site speed in order to serve mobile browsing users optimally.
Hostinger came out as the clear fastest winner in our Site Load Speed test comparison of the web hosts.
3. Ability to Scale or Upgrade
You started a business, you will work hard to make it big and successful. When your business grows, your traffic also grows, but what about your hosting plan? Even that needs to grow consistently, along with your growing business. If you’re in the ecommerce, your website traffic spikes can really hamper your business if you’re on a shared hosting which offers limited resources. When you reach this stage, you can switch to bigger powerful individual servers for your site hosting.
Upgrading your servers is a cumbersome task but many hosting platforms offer a free migration to VPS and Dedicated servers, which are the immediate choice to scale from Shared hosting for quite some time. However, Cloud hosting services are becoming really popular now, owing to their great flexibility and ease of upgrade. One of our top three hosting picks Hostgator Cloud really excels in the option to scale your website along with your business.
4. Server Security
The internet houses everyone, good and bad. Hence, your website’s safety is of utmost importance. The last thing you want is someone hacking into your website and stealing all your client data. Many credit card companies have faced this kind of data theft in the past. Your hosting provider should have a strong 128 bit encryption network installed throughout the hosting website and servers that prevents hackers and any kind of DDoS(denial of services) attacks.
Many hosting providers have started bundling SSL(Secure Socket Layer Protocol) certificates along with their hosting plans now. This is a very important hosting component and one should never ignore it. The big green lock in your URL bar on the left end means all is good and the site you’re on is secure to use.
Web Hosting Fact : About 84% online shoppers would abandon their purchase cart if their data was sent over an insecure connection - GlobalSign
Most customers get scared while entering sensitive data online when they don’t see this green lock sign, as it adds a trust value. Not to forget, even Google gives more weightage to websites that have the SSL security certificates activated on their websites.
5. Quality of Customer Support
Many website owners are usually first timers with limited knowledge about websites and hosting servers. Things may go south and you may need a helping hand to fix your website. A good customer support comes in very handy in such times of distress because a website developer or admin may or may not be available to your at that time. Most of the small websites run on the WordPress platform and thus your hosting provider’s customer support should be well verse with basic wordpress troubleshooting to provide easy solutions to you.
Siteground (WordPress Preferred Hosting Partner) excels in the wordpress support and is considered the most helpful customer support for wordpress hosting.
6. Hosting Storage & Bandwidth
Most first time website owners usually start with a single website only. However there are many who are having multiple business sites. What kind of storage is offered and how many sites you can host under a hosting plan is very crucial to make the choice of a web host.
Hosting Bandwidth is also very crucial. It basically means how much traffic your website(mostly shared) can handle at a particular point of time. Your hosting should be able to accomodate common traffic spikes without showing the “Server Not Available” error. Thus, good bandwidth bundled along with decent storage is crucial to good performance of your hosted website.
Hostgator Cloud wins here hands down, with the best storage and bandwidth flexibility at offer.
7. Pricing For Entry Level Hosting Plans
Pricing plays a very important role while making a choice. For most of the hosting services, the pricing structure is somewhat similar only. One hosting provider may charge a little extra while other may charge little lower. But do keep in mind, this directly affects the quality of hosting.
For most first time users pricing becomes very crucial because not everyone can afford a $100 dedicated server from day one, neither do they need one, when anyone hardly knows about their site and site generates very less traffic. In such cases, going with a shared hosting plan is the wisest choice as you get the option to see where your business is going and then take a good call on hosting.
Most shared hosting plans are almost similarly priced as you can see in the hosting comparison, however, Hostinger has one of the most aggressive pricings and that is something which really stole the show, as the pricing is backed by a great networking infrastructure that maintains a very good uptime and offers great site loading speeds too, that too on the entry level plan.
Different Types Of Web Hosting Services
Every Business is different and so are its server needs. An offline business may need their website just for having their contact details or service portfolio online, while another online business may be thriving entirely through online operations. So choosing the right web hosting depends on knowing the requirements of a business and then zeroing on the type of hosting most applicable to you. Let’s have a look at the most common types of hostings offered by hosting providers.
1. Shared Hosting
One of the most popular and commonly used hosting type is Shared Hosting because its the most economical for any business to start with. In this type of hosting, The web hosting provider hosts multiple websites on the same server. Under this plan , you get a fixed storage space, bandwidth, number of domains you can host, and a few other hosting features.
Since the server resources are shared among multiple sites hosted together, sometimes, the resources may get over-used by other co-hosted sites in extreme cases, leaving lesser bandwidth for your website, which may lead to slower load times for your website or even “server not reachable” errors popping up.
You should go with Shared Hosting,
- if you’re just starting up and not an established business,
- have comparitively less web traffic to serve, or
- if your revenue does not depend on how your site performs.
Bluehost turns out to be the clear overall winner in Shared Hosting. Hostinger comes a close second with its amazing hosting performance and the most competitive pricing.
2. Cloud Hosting
The fastest growing hosting service on the block. Cloud Hosting is very similar to Shared Hosting, major difference being the way the data is stored. In case of Cloud Hosting, there are a number of servers that work together and your site data is collectively stored on multiple servers.
So it has an advantage from the very start itself, because in the case of Shared Hosting, your data is stored on a single server. If the shared server goes down, your site goes down. While in Cloud Hosting, one server goes down, another one is up. So you’ve a strong network infrastructure protecting your website at all times.
Cloud hosting may require advanced technical skills in setting up or managing, if you opt for an Unmanaged Cloud Hosting. Managed Cloud Hosting, or Shared Cloud Hosting is easier to manage and customize.
Another plus of using a Cloud Hosting server is that your site is more secure and protected from online attacks since your resources are spread across multiple servers behind a big cloud network.
Biggest advantage of Cloud Hosting is that you can have server resources at your disposal at all times. Unlike Shared Hosting, you can scale smoothly and your growing business won’t face any upgrade or scaling hiccups along the way.
Hostgator is one of the Best Cloud Hosting Solutions in the market, Hostinger & A2Hosting come a close second.
3. WordPress Hosting
WordPress Hosting is another popular form of web hosting service. Usually Hosting Services offer you an option to host sites using a CMS(Content Management System) of your choice on a windows or linux based server system. Popular ones being WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Magento, etc.
WordPress Hosting is a completely customized solution for building or hosting sites built using WordPress CMS only. Every aspect of WordPress Hosting is optimized to offer extremely reliable and smooth WordPress experience. The loading speeds and uptimes are completely customized and improved for hosting a WordPress website as compared to other hosting types.
From support perspective as well, its one of the most easy to manage hosting service for a newbie setting up a website. There is a great support team making sure your website runs flawlessly and stays secure. The infrastructure is mostly similar to a Shared Hosting setup only, but with a better performance.
Bluehost, SiteGround & Dreamhost are the Best WordPress Hosting Providers and the Preferred Partner of WordPress.com as well.
There are Premium WordPress Hosting solutions available as well. Most popular premium wordpress hosting services available today are WPEngine & Kinsta. Their offerings are expensive for an average user but their extremely powerful WordPress Hosting plans are very apt for advanced users or bloggers who receive a lot of web traffic.
4. VPS Hosting
VPS stands for ‘Virtual Private Server’, and one of the most popular upgrade choices for a growing business looking for an upgrade from the Shared Hosting plan. Features wise and pricing wise, its midway between Shared Hosting & Dedicated Hosting.
VPS is also called a virtual instance of a server. You can make multiple VPS instances on a single server using advanced operating systems. You can share the resources of a single server among multiple VPS according to your preferences. Its an ideal upgrade for a growing enterpise.
InMotion, SiteGround & GoDaddy come out on top as the best VPS hosting service providers.
5. Dedicated Hosting
The most powerful hosting solution is Dedicated Hosting, in which you’ve the entire server to yourself. Your website can utilize 100% of the server resources available. This is one of the most ideal choice for bigger enterprises who need a customized, fast, powerful and secure personal server.
From resources perspective, a server is similar to a computer you use at home everyday. It has CPU cores, RAM, HDD storage, Bandwidth and other features which decide how powerful your server is and how much load it can take.
To make it really easy to understand. Think of it this way, a server is similar to a building.
You can have the whole building to yourself. Dedicated Hosting.
Or you could have one of the many flats in the building. VPS Hosting.
Or you could have one of the rooms in a flat shared with your friends. Shared Hosting.
InMotion, GoDaddy & Hostgator are the industry leaders in Dedicated Hosting Solutions.
6. Reseller Hosting
Reseller Hosting a commercial form of hosting solution. Its very similar to having a Dedicated Hosting. You’ve complete control over your server resources, you can make multiple VPS out of your single server and use it to provide solutions to your own clients.
Reseller Hosting is mostly used by businesses who provide end to end hosting solutions to small businesses. Their client may need a shared or VPS or dedicated hosting. Resellers can customize the offering according to their customers’ requirements.
GoDaddy & Hostgator are one of most popular and easy to use Reseller Hosting Solutions.
How To Choose A Web Hosting Provider
Now that we’ve covered the most important aspects of hosting and the features offered by major web hosting platforms. Its time to evaluate what is applicable to your small business. For starters, your business web host should be able to meet your business’ needs today as well as the needs that will arise in future.
Since we’ve already compared the most popular and reliable web hosting services and know the hosting portfolio of each of the provider, let’s go through the various features we’ve discussed once more, keeping your small business in focus this time.
What Type Of Hosting Do I Need ?
We’ve already discussed this above, but its very important for you to know what your business needs. Would your business suffice with just a Shared Hosting Plan, or would you need to go for a VPS or Dedicated Plan. Or do you want to start with Shared Hosting and move your way up to Dedicated Hosting.
What Are The Hosting Provider’s Performance Metrics ?
Server uptimes are the most important figures. Pay close attention to choose the best perfoming host with the best uptimes. You’re doing all this to have an online presence for your small business. Make sure you make the most of it and your site is up for the longest possible duration.
Page Loading Speed or ‘Time To First Byte’ figures are the second most important. The faster your site’s response, the more happier your visitors would be as they won’t have to wait for pages to load.
Web Hosting Fact : A website page must load within 1000 milliseconds to maintain a customer's continued attention - Google's Ilya Grigorik
How Much Storage & Bandwidth Do You Need ?
Do you’ve a three to four page website or you’re setting up an e-commerce website with multiple pages? Make sure you get enough storage with your hosting plan to store all your site files.
Hosting Bandwidth is also very crucial. Make sure your bandwidth is not limited and able to cater to multiple incoming visitors on your site (Unmetered Bandwidth is Preferred). The more traffic you receive on your website, the more bandwidth you need in your hosting plan.
The last thing you want is running a campaign on social media to bring visitors to your site, only to find your hosting server is incapable of serving an optimum number of incoming visitors at a particular instance.
No. Of Email Accounts Allowed
Once you setup your business website, you’d be setting up business emails for your work team as well. Make sure the hosting provider allows setting up multiple email accounts with your hosting plan.
You don’t want to end up with a hosting plan that supports only 5 email accounts, when you’ve 8-10 employees you need to setup email accounts of.
What’s Your Hosting Budget ?
How much money are you comfortable spending is your choice at the end of the day. Make sure you get the best value for money when you choose your hosting plan. There are hosting providers who provide the services for cheap and are lower performing and there are hosting providers who charge a premium for their outstanding performance figures. Choose what suits your business and your pocket the best.
How Is The Customer Support ?
You would need help with multiple things through your site setup journey. Make sure you choose a host that is known to go the extra mile to help its customers. A good customer support means lesser hosting problems and roadblocks for you and your site’s performance.
Make sure the web host provides timely round the clock support. Do they’ve Live Chat, Phone Support, Email Support? Choose the host that is known for its great customer service as it’ll make your life easier going forward.
How Serious Is The Host About Security ?
Your web host should be committed to your site’s security as well as their network. If you run a shopping site, its all the more important to you. Auto website malware scans, network firewalls and server monitoring features come as a standard these days.
Make sure your hosting provider performs all these backend processes on a regular basis to make sure your site and customer data is secure. There should be quality SSL offerings and network infrastructure to combat DDoS attacks which are the two most needed security features these days.
Scalability Option
You’re going to work hard on your business, make sure your web host supports you well in your growth. There would come a time when you need to scale your website continuously due to growth in your incoming traffic.
Make sure you choose a host that provides you enough support and options to upgrade your hosting. A great host saves you the hassle of hosting upgrades as your business grows.
Site Backups
This can’t be stressed any less. Times may come when your site crashes due to unknown errors. A Site Backup is what comes handy at this time to bring your site back to the previous state without any hassles.
Make sure your hosting plan includes Regular Site Backups so that you can sleep peacefully at night.
Site Migration
When you choose a web host, you expect things to go smoothly. In case they don’t, you may need to switch your hosting providers. Maybe you outgrow your hosting plan and need a bigger better hosting server for your site. Or maybe your server starts going down very frequently and its affecting your business.
There are web hosts that provide Site Migration for FREE and there are also web hosts that charge hefty amounts of $100-$200 for migrating a site to their server. Sure you could do this yourself as well, but you need to have good technical skills in order to pull this off. If you’ve a tech guy in your team who can take care of this, you shouldn’t worry but if you’ve to do it yourself, you better choose a host that offers site migration for free or at a very reasonable price.
Is A Website Builder Included ?
If you’ve a tech guy in your team who’s going to take care of setting up your website, you’re good to go. You may also choose to hire a freelance developer for your website from sites like fiverr.
If you want to do it yourself, you could also choose a hosting plan that includes a website builder. Using the same you can build your own website, without the need to depend on a developer.
We hope this section would help you in choosing the right hosting partner for your website. If you like it, show some love by pressing the Tweet button below.
How To Choose The Best Web Hosting Provider For A Small Business?
Web Hosting FAQ
Every website has two components, web hosting and a domain name. Web hosting is the service that a web host provides in order for you to host a website on its platform. To understand in simple terms, a domain name is like the address of a house, while web hosting is the physical space in which you build the house. A web host provides you this space in its network where you can build or host your website.
There are different types of hostings available, viz. shared, cloud, wordpress, vps, dedicated, etc. and your website can use any of these depending on the nature of your business. For a startup or small business, shared hosting from a provider like bluehost, hostgator or hostinger is advisable as its the most economical to begin with.
If we talk about best web hosting, Bluehost, Hostgator Cloud & Hostinger are the best bets. If we talk of cheapest web hosting Hostinger & iPage are the most pocket friendly web hosting services.
Setting up a business website is an easy step by step process.
1. Buy a domain name. (relevant or similar to your business)
2. Choose a web hosting service to host your website.
3. Build your web pages.
4. Test & publish your website.
000webhost & AwardSpace offer free web hosting services. However, its not advised to go for free web hosting providers for your business, because they don’t guarantee uptime quality, site speeds or performance that your business website needs to function optimally.
WordPress is a free software platform to download and use. However, if you want to build a website using wordpress, you need a web hosting plan that supports wordpress installation. Web hosting providers like Bluehost offer wordpress hosting for as low as $2.75 per month.
Building a website for your small business doesn’t need to cost a bomb. If you build the website yourself, you can do it for as low as $100, taking in account the expenses for your domain name, hosting as well as website theme.
Shared web hosting for small businesses can cost as little as $1.99 per month from hosting providers like iPage. Usually this cost varies between $3-$7 per month from most of the popular hosting providers.
You can build a website yourself for a cost of $100-$500. For a custom built feature rich website this cost can go as high as thousands of dollars.
Uptime rates, site load times, storage, bandwidth, security and customer support are the important hosting features for a small business. These features directly affect the performance of your website, which enhances your customer experience.
Web hosting providers charge differently for site migration. Bluehost for example charges around $150. On the other hand, web hosts like Inmotion, A2hosting, SiteGround & GreenGeeks offer site migration services for FREE.
Best Web Hosting For Small Business – The Conclusion
Web Hosting is a very important aspect of your small business’ performance and growth. While choosing a web host, make sure to remember the various hosting features discussed in this guide. Good business site performance is key to creating a lasting impression on your customers. If they return to your site, the cycle of patronage starts. So your prime goal should be to give the best site experience to your customers which results in more business for you.
Choosing one of these web hosting companies as your web host would ensure you set your marketing foot right and that your site and business are both in good hands. This would let you focus more on growing your business while your web host takes care of your site. Good luck picking the best web host for your business website in 2020.
Have any questions or suggestions about the discussed web hosting providers, please let us know in the comments section below.
Editorial Team
Team Comparingly is committed to helping Startups, Small Businesses & Entrepreneurs in finding the best reviews & comparisons for the services their business needs.
- January 2020
- 5 Comments
Facebook
Pinterest
Twitter
Reddit
Print
Email
Recommended Articles From Our Business Blog
Read More »
Blog
5 Proven Benefits of Unlimited Graphic Design For Small Businesses
Business owners are always looking for options to grow and succeed in this cut-throat competitive market. To succeed, they need to catch more user attention
April 10, 2020
1 Comment
Blog
10 Compelling Benefits of Web Hosting For Small Businesses
The world around us is continually changing and evolving in itself. Due to the ongoing unrest and major changes in various parts of the globe,
March 17, 2020
No Comments
Blog
25 World Famous Logos & Hidden Meanings Behind These Iconic Brands
Every day all around us we see hundreds and thousands of iconic business logos. Be it the local dollar store or of an online eCommerce
January 13, 2020
1 Comment
Blog
5 Design Hacks To Make A Memorable Small Business Logo
Acquiring new customers is a major challenge for small business owners all across the world. The struggle is similar to all, but a handful of
December 21, 2019
1 Comment
Blog
Color Psychology In Logo Design; How Logo Colors Evoke Emotions?
Everyone loves colors. Humans have a genuine affinity towards colors. Colors evoke feelings, convey messages, and add a sense of element to things around us.
November 10, 2019
3 Comments
Blog
6 Reasons Why Branding Is Important For Your Business
Branding is a marketing promotion practice where a business creates its identity by creating a name, logo or design that becomes an identity to the
October 4, 2019
1 Comment
Blog
6 Ways Design Crowdsourcing Sites Are Helping Startups
Finally emptied that garage to make space for your dream startup. Great job! Let me tell you what’s up next very soon. Lots of design
May 6, 2019
1 Comment
Don't Miss Our Next Comparison...
Signup now to get notified when we compare new business services!
We hate spam as much as you do. Give it a try, you can unsubscribe anytime.
Earnings Disclosure : Comparing.ly is a free to use site for its visitors. We may sometimes earn a commission when you buy services listed on this website at no extra cost to you. This does not influence our review process at all.
5 Comments
I didn’t know A2Hosting was the fastest shared hosting of the lot. And its priced pretty competitive as well. Not as much as DreamHost though. Their price offering surely makes them the best web hosting in terms of value for money. Definitely going to give both of these a try for my new websites. Thanks.
Nice article and great design. Keep up the great work. I’d like to suggest you to include WPEngine & Kinsta to your list of best web hosting services. Cheers.
Hi Gaurav
Thanks for the feedback. We’re working on the same. WPEngine & Kinsta fall under Premium WordPress Hosting Services. Our goal primarily was to create a post on the best web hosting services for small businesses. We’ll definitely include WPEngine & Kinsta in our other Hosting Company Reviews.
Nice post and content compilation from your end, but for me Dreamhost is one of the best web hosting services out there. I’ve personally tried it and its super affordable, scalable, and not to forget, a wordpress preferred partner.
Great post. I’m currently on Bluehost itself. But I’d definitely try out Hostgator Cloud Hosting or Hostinger when my renewal time comes. Bluehost renewals are pretty steep tbh.