What is the best web hosting for small business?
There are so many web hosting options, what is the best web hosting for your small business?
Web hosting services are one of those things that you “get what you pay for”. Low budget hosting reflects the quality of hosting and web hosting support you are going to receive.
Many small businesses’ lifeline is their website. If it is slow, offline and constantly pulling you away from your job to address issues, it’s not helping your business grow.
Gimmicks like; free domain name, first month for a penny or unlimited storage may save you (literally) a couple of dollars. Is that worth it for poor service?
Consider the following to learn about features to look for when you are trying to find the best web hosting for a small business website.
Small Business Hosting Features to Consider
Forget unlimited bandwidth (with restrictions), free domain for a year (with restrictions)
and upsells galore of things they say “you need”, when you don’t.
Consider the following features every website owner needs that aren’t promoted.
Secure Web Hosting
It seems like every day we are reminded about the importance of security in every aspect of our lives.
Investing in secure web hosting is not an optional extra. It’s a critical factor in the web hosting service you purchase. Maintaining a professional and trustworthy online presence for your small business makes a huge difference to potential customers.
* This is even more important if your site is built with WordPress. WordPress is a big target to get hacked. You need secure WordPress hosting along with code maintenance.
Fast Web Host
When looking for the best web hosting services, the performance of your host is crucial to consider for multiple reasons.
The quality of the hardware (web server) that your website is hosted on is a factor in how fast your website will load.
How fast your web host can deliver web pages is a bottleneck you can not control over optimizing further. High-performance hardware means that your web pages are delivered faster.
Other features they offer like enterprise level software (LiteSpeed), and server caching, and storage type (SSD, NVMe, Cloud) all are factors with how fast the web host can deliver pages.
Reasons to only consider a fast web hosting service:
- User Experience – they will leave if your pages load slow, you will lose customers.
- Google uses how fast your website loads as a factor in how well you rank in search engine results.
- Professional image – impression matters.
Web Hosting Support
Web hosting support is often overlooked until you have a problem. When your site is down, it’s stressful for a business website. You are potentially losing sales and new customers.
Web hosting support is essentially part of your team for your online business. You need web hosting support that is knowledgeable and quick to respond when you are having website problems.
You are paying for a service after all, web hosting support is a very important factor when deciding on a web host for a small business.
If you are not getting quality support from your host, it’s time to find a new host. Migrating a website to a new host is not as hard as it sounds.
Uptime & Reliability
Web hosting is a service, not a tangible good. Reliable and responsive web hosting services and support should be a huge factor in deciding on a web host.
Read company reviews, contact support before purchasing to see how quickly they respond, how knowledgeable the response you receive and how clearly they can communicate with you. (Are they asking questions to understand your issue, or giving you a “canned”, scripted response?)
Cheap web hosting for small businesses will cost you more than you realize.
I get it, small business owners are very budget conscious.
Shopping for web hosting by price only can cost your business a lot down the road.
My advice, don’t shop for the cheapest web hosting you can find. Find reliable and affordable web hosting that fits your budget. Cheap out on inspirational wall art or office furniture. A wobbly desk chair won’t make you lose customers or sales, but a “wobbly” website can!
When your site is down or running slow, you’re losing potential customers and damaging your reputation, these costs that far outweigh the few dollars you might save each month.
Get web hosting that is affordable, but also has quality services to support your small business.
Recommended Web Hosting for Small Businesses
With decades of experience working with dozens of web hosting companies, these are Freelance Web Programmer’s recommendations for web hosting service meet the needs of most small business websites.
Affordable, Quality Hosting
If you are just starting a website, or you have a simple site that does not need code and content updates often, Knownhost offer superior support and service.
Best for static HTML websites, and site owners that have a basic understanding of websites/hosting to be able to manage their domain, hosting and communicating with support themselves.
Affiliate Disclosure
This website includes affiliate links for a recommended web hosting service. If you click on these links and make a purchase, we may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.
We only recommend one web hosting company that we genuinely believe in and use ourselves. Our recommendation is based on our positive experience and confidence in their service, not as part of an affiliate marketing strategy. Our goal is to provide free, helpful advice to guide you toward a reliable hosting solution that best suits your needs.
The opinions expressed here are our own, and we aim to offer accurate and valuable information. If you have any questions about our recommendation or affiliate relationship, please feel free to contact us.
Business Grade, Fully Managed WordPress Hosting Services
If you are serious about your small business site being fast, secure and error free all the time, consider fully managed WordPress hosting & website maintenance services.
Best for WordPress site owners that want a hands-off approach to managing their website so they can focus on their business.
What is the best web hosting service for small business?
Beyond the points mentioned above, the best web hosting for small business is the one that fits your needs of your website and is affordable for you. It depends on more than factors than volume of traffic you receive, amount of bandwidth needed or operating system you want to use.
Since most small businesses don’t have a tech support team, quality web hosting support is so important to keep your site running its best.
You need to consider quality in terms of performance, security and reliability. These are hard to evaluate compared to the statistics a web hosting package provides like x GB of storage and amount of bandwidth you get.
What to Look for When
Buying Web Hosting Services
High performance hardware means that your web pages are delivered fast. Who wants a slow website?
Reliability
With 99.99% proven uptime, your website is going to be “up” and available to your users all the time.
Security
Service
If an issue comes up, most of the time I find and address an issue before my customers are even aware.
Are you constantly dealing with web hosting problems?
Is your website always running slow, do you regularly see server 500 errors or database connection errors? Does web hosting support take days to respond, and then tell you to “clear your cache”? Drop your bad host, moving your website to better hosting is not as hard as it sounds.
Learn more about migrating your site to better hosting.
What people say about
small business hosting service
with Freelance Web Programmer
Before we met Adrienne we had major security issues with our website. After we met Adrienne there has never been a security issue with our website. Over the years she has been a pleasure to work with and has met all of our expectations regarding our website. It is my professional opinion to highly recommend Adrienne for all website services.
If you have tried the rest and looking for the best, you found it. I have been using her services for a couple of years now, she is my “Guru”. I use her services for website development, SEO and web hosting. Everybody loves my webpage and I get lots of calls. I can’t say enough about the excellent work she does.
Finding the Best Web Hosting Providers
Running a small business myself as freelance web developer, I need fast, dependable and secure website hosting services to do my job effectively all day.
I have worked on websites hosted on dozens of different web hosting companies. Because of this, I get to evaluate performance, security issues and support hands on. On top of this, I have done countless hours of research to find the best hosting service for my business.
The web hosting service provider I partner with delivers business grade, secure web hosting services that I can depend on to perform day in and day out.
I offer this quality website hosting service to my clients so I can provide them best web hosting for their business, and so I can do my job efficiently.
It is frustrating for me to try to provide web programming services when a client’s web site loads painfully slow and support will not help with problems. (I turn away new clients that have their websites hosted with some of the biggest name hosting providers because it is so frustrating and time consuming for me to do my job.)
Consider the following when looking for web hosting service:
- Performance
- Security
- Knowledgeable Customer Service
- Fast Customer Service Response Time
You pretty much “get what you pay for” when it comes to buying web hosting services. Cheap hosting pricing usually means cheap service provided.
What Type of Web Hosting Services Do I Need?
I have found that most of my clients do not know how to research what type of hosting they need, and end up being frustrated with the poor quality service their provider delivers. Since the quality of website hosting effects how I can do my job, I began offering web hosting packages to my clients as a value added feature to web development services I offer.
Regardless of the type of hosting you buy, quality is a factor with all of them. Your website’s (and business) livelihood depends on your web host. If the server goes offline, delivers your pages slow, has vulnerabilities, or support does not respond timely, its effects your website/business.
An Affordable Solution for Getting the Best Hosting Service
Shared hosting is the common, low budget service promoted by big hosting companies. They lure you in with gimmicks like unlimited storage and bandwidth, unlimited sub domains, unlimited email accounts… It sounds great, but do you need unlimited subdomains?? Do you need any subdomains? : ) If you’re paying a couple dollars a month for the service, how can they possibly provide a quality product and support?
I provide virtual private server website hosting. (VPS). While it still looks the same – i.e. cPanel and you can still build the same types of websites on them, VPS hosting is different from shared web hosting in several key ways.
I use the analogy of shared hosting is like a college dorm; affordable/cheap but overcrowded and have to share all resources available (showers, lounge…). VPS hosting is more like a condo community. Not as crowded, and you still sharing some resources, but upgraded resources like a community pool or tennis courts.
For you to purchase VPS hosting on your own, it probably would not make much sense from a financial standpoint for a single website’s needs. With a VPS ,you have more control over the web server configuration compared to shared hosting, but need to have the technical knowledge to manage this too. I can offer this higher quality web hosting to you at an affordable rate. You will be happy with dependable and high quality hosting services, I am happy because I can do my job without the frustration of dealing with hosting issues and slow, unknowledgeable support.
Web Hosting FAQs
