It can be hard to find the best website hosting for small business. There are many factors that you should consider when choosing a host, so it’s important to know what they are before making your decision. In this blog post, we will discuss the different types of hosting options available and show you which ones are the best for small businesses.
Recommended Web Hosting Providers for Small Businesses
1.) WebCitz
WebCitz really helps small businesses when it comes to affordable web hosting solutions that don’t skimp on performance, speed, and security.
Their servers have a lot more resources than your typical shared hosting service. They set PHP memory_limit to 2048MB and max_execution_time to 300 seconds. These are great for websites with demanding web applications, but don’t have the budget for a VPS. Other web hosting providers limit max_execution_time to 60 seconds, which is really bad if you need to run complex database queries periodically.
For website performance, they run LiteSpeed Web Server, which lets you install the LiteSpeed Cache plugin on WordPress. LiteSpeed Cache, with “Guest Mode” optimizations enabled, has helped WordPress sites pass Google’s Core Web Vitals in the past. Many hosting companies offer proprietary caching systems, but this has worked better for us in the past.
All of their shared web hosting services include nightly and weekly backups. Nightly backups are stored in the same data center, whereas weekly backups are stored remotely.
Their web servers are located at Hivelocity data centers in Tampa, FL or Dallas, TX. These are state-of-the-art data centers, so that is also a good sign for the security and connectivity of the web servers. They offer two different configurations of server hardware for shared web hosting. Performance hosting is their cheaper solution, which runs on dedicated servers with Dual Intel Xeon 5220 CPUs (36 Cores, 72 Threads), 128GB+ ECC Server Memory, and Hardware RAID-10 SSD Storage. For 10GB of space, that hosting service starts at $249/year. The more expensive option is their Supercharged Hosting, which runs on dedicated servers with AMD EPYC 7742 CPUs (64 Cores, 128 Threads), 256GB+ ECC Server Memory, and RAID-10 NVMe Storage. For 10GB of storage, that hosting service starts at $500/year.
Related: Best Website Hosting For Bloggers.
2.) Siteground
SiteGround has been a great choice for us over the last few years. I’ve always been happy with their server performance and control panel. From their control panel, you can restore to your own backup point. For most web hosting companies, you have to contact customer service to get a backup restored. They also have good server performance and customer service. Another feature we like is their collaborator functionality, which is far better than GoDaddy who has a similar feature that allows site owners and developers to share access.
FAQs
How expensive is small business website hosting?
Small business website hosting is fairly inexpensive, especially when you compare it to all the tools and features that are included with each package. In fact, you’ll likely only spend a few dollars per month to host your website.
If you’re interested in learning more about the cost hosting a website, you might be interested in checking out our blog post on How Much Does It Cost To Host A Website?
How do small businesses choose a new web host?
Before choosing a web host, small businesses need to consider their budget as well as what kind of features will be most useful in terms of running and maintaining an online presence – such as cPanel access or unlimited storage space. They also need to consider what sort of support is available, since technical questions might arise when you least expect them.
How can small businesses learn how to build their own websites?
Small business owners need not worry about learning code language in order to create their own website because today’s web hosts make it easy by offering cPanel access so that even beginners can easily upload files without needing any prior coding experience. They only need an idea for their business along with some digital assets like images, logos, etc.
What does unlimited storage mean?
This is typically a marketing gimmick within the hosting industry. If you read the fine print, you will find lists of restricted types of files that can be stored, or obscure references to not utilizing more server resources than what is appropriate for your account. Simple put, there is no way to offer unlimited storage – what if a company like YouTube with an estimated 2500 Petabytes (as of 2021) of data decided to go to HostGator or GoDaddy for unlimited storage space?
Should small businesses shop around for website hosting?
If you are shopping around for the best hosting performance or the best customer service, then the answer is yes. Please don’t be a business owner that sacrifices the performance, security, and reliability of your website for a couple dollars of savings each month.
Is good customer service important?
Yes, good customer service is critical. If you experience website downtime, the last thing you want is to spend an hour on the phone being transferred between different departments. Another nice benefit is 24x7x365 customer support, but often times you’ll find server administrators aren’t available at night and you’ll only be able to talk to a general receptionist in the off-hours. We suggest you focus on the quality of the customer service during normal business hours.
What does an SSL certificate do for my website?
Having your website load from HTTPS:// means your website has an SSL/TLS certificate installed to encrypt data transferred between your web server and your website visitors. It is recommended all websites be protected with HTTPS://, since it is considered an SEO ranking factor and can help improve trust with your website visitors. WebCitz offers free SSL/TLS certificates with all of its shared web hosting plans.
How much downtime will my website experience?
Most paid web hosting companies promise 99.9% downtime or less each year, which equates to approximately 8 hours of downtime each year. More often than not, downtime is caused by an issue within a website application and not the hosting service. For example, upgrading your WordPress installation and having it experience downtime because of a code conflict isn’t considered an issue with the web hosting service.
Final Thoughts on Finding a Web Hosting Provider for Your Small Business
In conclusion, the cost of small business web hosting is likely to be one of your cheapest expenses each month. We recommend focusing on selecting a quality web hosting service that isn’t going to disappoint you with hidden fees or service nightmares down the road. When it comes to choosing your hosting solution, you’ll want to consider what kind of hosting plan works best for your business. If you have a large website (numerous pages, lots of images/video, complex database queries, custom functionality) with heavy traffic (2,000+ visitors/day) that might mean considering a VPS, dedicated, or cloud hosting service instead of shared web hosting.