Best Small Business Hosting In 2022

February 27, 2022 March 28, 2022

Best Small Business Hosting In 2022

Best Small Business Hosting: Every small business needs a website, but finding the right web hosting package isn't always easy. Many plans are primarily targeted at home users and don't have the power that businesses need.

Take email for example. We've seen hosting plans offer at least five email addresses for a single website, and with inboxes limited to a few hundred megabytes, this is potentially a major issue for any business. Be sure to check the email specifications of any hosting plan before signing up.

An SSL certificate is a must for any professional or business website these days, but they are not included in every plan. Fortunately, they don't have to be expensive. Many hosts now offer free SSL certificates from the Internet Security Research Group's Let's Encrypt project, and although the Web Store may require a few more, these are perfectly sufficient for standard sites.

Small business websites can't afford to fail – so credibility is key. To avoid the hassle of shared servers, choose a virtual private server (VPS) or dedicated hosting plan if you can afford it. Look for support that can be accessed at speed with telephone and live chat, as well as email and tickets. You'll probably want a plan that also includes automatic backups, but this is another area where you'll need to check the small print: Backups are often optional extras.

Think about the upgrade path as well, especially if you're just starting with a basic shared hosting plan. Your website needs may expand as your business grows, and it will make your life a lot easier if your chosen host has add-ons and extras to cope with.

There's a lot to think about, but luckily, there are also some excellent hosting providers that understand what small businesses need. In this article, we have highlighted six web hosts that have something to offer everyone from small home businesses to demanding corporate users.

The Best Small Business Hosting In 2022

1. HostGator - Best Small Business Hosting

2. DreamHost - Best Small Business Hosting

3. Hostinger - Best Small Business Hosting

4. GoDaddy - Best Small Business Hosting

5. Liquid Web - Best Small Business Hosting

1. HostGator - Best Small Business Hosting

GOOD REASONS TO BUY

Speedy cloud hosting
Good value
Private SSL included
Excellent shared hosting offering
Good for novice webmasters
Useful site-building software and e-commerce tools
Helpful, 24/7 customer service
Outstanding uptime

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Best Small Business Hosting: Another option for small businesses is cloud hosting, and HostGator has some decent offers for cloud hosting, especially if you value speed more.

Cloud hosting is a smart technology that spreads your website content across multiple devices, improving redundancy and speeding up load times. It's an interesting idea that has many business benefits, but if you choose wisely, you can try it for less than the cost of some shared hosting products.

For example, HostGator's Business Cloud provides the basics of business with support for unlimited websites, unmetered storage and bandwidth, and a private SSL certificate.

Since this is a cloud plan, three mirrored copies of your website are spread across multiple hosting servers. If there is a hardware failure, your website can be switched to another server immediately.

All HostGator cloud plans give you shared access to a defined level of system resources (CPU time and RAM). Another advantage of cloud hosting is that you can buy more of these and see the benefits immediately, with no downtime or time-consuming migrations required.

The high-end features continue, along with distributed Varnish caching to free up RAM and CPU time for producing dynamic content, to accelerate the loading of your static content.

While we've highlighted HostGator's cloud plans here, as an interesting improvement over regular shared hosting, the company also offers managed WordPress hosting, good-value VPS packages, dedicated servers, and more. There is something here for everyone.

2. DreamHost - Best Small Business Hosting

GOOD REASONS TO BUY

Strong security features
Extensive domain-management tools
Excellent cloud hosting offerings
Unlimited data transfers per month
Generous money-back guarantee
Useful WordPress staging feature

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Best Small Business Hosting: Shared hosting is slower and less reliable than VPS and dedicated plans, but it's still perfectly adequate for many simple websites, and the best plans will cover all core business needs.

DreamHost's shared hosting plan scores well on the basics. There is no limit on bandwidth, email, or MySQL database. Your site is protected by a free Let's Encrypt SSL certificate, and preinstalled WordPress allows you to have a quality site up and running in an afternoon – plus SSD storage as standard will keep performance high.

Handy extras include the ability to host unlimited domains from a single account. And in a nice touch, DreamHost doesn't just offer a free domain name with every shared hosting plan (except the monthly plan): there's free privacy protection, too. If you've registered a domain without it, and have been flooded with emails and phone calls from 'website designers' and assorted scammers, you know how valuable it can be.

It's a robust all-around package, but if you need more, DreamHost offers everything from managed WordPress and WooCommerce to VPS, dedicated, and cloud hosting plans.

The VPS Business plan is especially suitable for small businesses as it was built for them according to DreamHost. You get unlimited everything except storage (60GB). Since it is a VPS, you will use your server resources for uninterrupted performance and you can easily increase the RAM if the need arises.

Billing is flexible. You can sign up for monthly billing, or choose a three-year plan for the best discount. Don't be put off by the long term: DreamHost products are protected by an exceptional 97-day money-back guarantee, so that's plenty of time to test out the service for yourself.

Read DreamHost Web Hosting Review

3. Hostinger - Best Small Business Hosting

GOOD REASONS TO BUY

Great value
Easy to use
Good, low-cost plans
Helpful customer service
Terrific uptime in testing
Optional Minecraft servers
Includes the company's own Zyro website builder

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Best Small Business Hosting: Some small businesses don't want to pay for VPS or cloud hosting, or they can't afford it, so in that case, shared hosting is a good and affordable option.

Hostinger has been around for a long time and has accumulated over 29 million customers over the years. Above all, the company has very wallet-friendly plans, and they are a great option for any newcomer.

Pricing starts at just $1.39 per month over 4 years. Considering that this is a starter plan, you only get one website and two MySQL databases with 100GB of bandwidth, but with that price, you really can't complain.

That being said, the best option for small businesses would be the “Business” plan which gives you a lot of features as well as is up to four times faster than the Starter plan. You get unlimited database and bandwidth for up to 100 websites on 200GB of SSD disk space. The price is $3.99 per month over 4 years.

As you can see, you don't get many restrictions and SSL certificates, Cloudflare security, and daily backups are also included, among other features.

The company also has affordable VPS packages starting at $3.95 per month. It has 1 CPU, 1GB RAM, 20GB storage, and 1TB bandwidth. The high-end tier package gives you 8 CPUs, 16GB RAM, 250GB storage, and 12TB bandwidth, priced at $77.99 per month.

Overall, Hostinger is a capable provider with very affordable plans that can more or less appeal to everyone. The plans are also fully refundable for 30 days if you are not satisfied.

Read Hostinger Web Hosting Review

4. GoDaddy - Best Small Business Hosting

GOOD REASONS TO BUY

Resources dedicated to your site
Easy to set up and manage

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Best Small Business Hosting: Most small business hosting products focus on power and functionality above ease of use. This isn't a problem if you know what you're doing, but small businesses don't always have the technical expertise to manage this kind of hosting, and it can take a lot of time and effort to figure out what to do. How does the service work?

Small businesses have another option with GoDaddy Business Hosting if they want to try something different than what's already mentioned. It is a hybrid product that aims to offer dedicated resources and performance similar to that of Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting, with simplified cPanel-style management of a shared hosting service.

For example, GoDaddy's baseline launch plan gives you 4GB of RAM, two CPUs, and 100GB of storage. These resources are solely for your website's use, which should give you better and more consistent website performance no matter what happens with other sites hosted on your server.

Elsewhere restrictions are kept to a minimum, with support for unlimited websites, databases, email, and unmetered bandwidth. ('Unmetered' means there is no fixed limit, but GoDaddy reserves the right to complain if your site is using up resources.)

An SSL certificate is thrown into the mix, and GoDaddy has included a one-year, one-user subscription to Microsoft Office 365 Business email.

Overall, this range is a bit more expensive than some VPS products, but if you're looking for easy setup and simple website management, GoDaddy may be worth a look.

5. Liquid Web - Best Small Business Hosting

GOOD REASONS TO BUY

Lots of features
Robust dedicated, VPS, cloud, and reseller packages
Prorated VPS plans
Powerful, high-end server specs
Terrific customer service
Excellent uptime in testing

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Best Small Business Hosting: Basic shared, cloud and similar hosting plans are easy to use and can deliver good performance, but they also limit your control over the server environment. For example, you can choose not to install Windows, or do anything that might affect other websites hosted on the same server.

Virtual Private Servers (VPS) are isolated environments that you can tweak, adjust and customize to your liking. As a bonus, you get CPU time and RAM allocated just for you, improving both performance and stability.

For small businesses, we've already mentioned DreamHost's VPS plan, but Liquid Web's offering also deserves a mention.

For example, LiquidWeb's Starter VPS product gives you two CPUs, 2GB of RAM, 40GB of SSD space, 100GB of backup, and 10TB of bandwidth, and costs $59 (£42) a month. If you choose the two-year plan, the price drops to $15 per month.

Some hosts have cheap VPS plans, but this is often because the specifications have been minimized. LiquidWeb takes a more honest approach, even with the most basic plans, which include items that are often chargeable elsewhere. For example, that $59 gets you built-in backups, gigabit transfers, unlimited sites, a dedicated IP address, Cloudflare CDN, DDoS protection, antivirus, antispam, cPanel/WHM or Plesk Onyx, and more.

All VPS plans are highly configurable, with Linux options including CentOS 6, CentOS 7, Ubuntu 14.04, Ubuntu 16.04, and Debian 8, and the higher-end plans support Windows Server 2012 and 2016.

Everything you install will include server management by default, which means that Liquid Web will handle maintenance tasks like operating system updates. Proactive Systems Monitoring allows the company to detect and fix certain problems before you notice them, and quick, responsive 24x7x365 support will help you with just about anything.

Factor in a 100% uptime guarantee and generous service level agreements, and Liquid Web has a lot of business hosting appeal.

Read Liquid Web Hosting Review

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