21 Nov
Last Updated on
While choosing the best web hosting for small business in 2020, there are a number of things to keep in mind. Either you are going to launch a blog or beginning a freelancing career, you must select the best hosting services for your website. Now there are a lot of popular web hosting companies that offer the best web hosting for small business with unlimited features and excellent customer support at a highly affordable price. These are the 6 Major Checklists before choosing a web host.
- Super Robust Performance
- 99.99% Uptime
- Hosting Plans
- Technical Support
- Low Costs
- Secyrity Measures
Let’s read about the top performers in web hosting!
1. Best Web Hosting for Small Business - Top 10
I’ve gone in-depth into the each web hosting provider’s features that are considered as best in the hosting industry. You can read a general overview of each hosting giant down below. Here are my Top 10 picks that offer best hosting with industry standard uptime and affordable costs.
Fortunately my TOP 3 favorite web hosting companies Bluehost, SiteGround and A2Hosting are highly enriched with all of the above factors. That’s why I recommend them everywhere as my most lovable hosting brands.
New technology and tools are emerging in the market. Old tools and procedures have become obsolete and therefore it is the current demand of the customers around the world to have a web hosting on latest infrastructure. For instance, if I just talk about the disk storage, the web hosting services providers use SSD drives for faster performance. Furthermore, high speed quad core processors are used for robust performance. Similarly CloudFlare CDN is offered free of cost to speed up the loading time. Therefore every blogger or startup looks for the best web hosting company that provides ultra high performance with excellent uptime at very low costs.
2. What is Web Hosting?
Web hosting is a service that brings your site on the internet. That’s the simplest definition just poped up in my mind. When you write your code, design your web page or write content for a blog, it will need to be placed on a web server. There is no need to get a server, a VPS or any other dedicated resources in the beginning phase. There are many popular and great web hosting companies that provide the best web hosting services on highly affordable rates.
Types of Web Hosting:
There are many types of web hosting but these are the major types that we’ll focus as per the requirement of this article:
- Shared Web Hosting
- VPS Hosting
- Reseller Hosting
- Dedicated Hosting
The plans and prices are different for different web hosts.
Want Free Hosting? These are Top 5 Free Web Hosting Platforms
Shared web hosting is the most cheapest and affordable web hosting that you should choose while you are in the beginning of launching your business or blog. VPS hosting is suitable for E-commerce online stores with some high volume of traffic.
Reseller hosting is a best fit for people who want to resell the web hosting services making their own small hosting company. Reseller hosting plans are expensive due to high volume of resources per a reseller account.
There is some point when a certain business outgrows and the quantity of the traffic can not be handled by shared or even a VPS server. Here we need a dedicated server to handle that amount of traffic. The dedicated hosting plans are costly and mostly start from the least price of $90/month.
3. Best Web Hosting for Small Business
In the beginning of launching our small business, we are very conscious about the prices because there are many other expenses going along. At the same time, we have to pay for the domain, a wordpress theme, the developer guy and the content writer. Therefore, its really hard to pay around $40 or $50 for a VPS or more for a dedicated box. Million of thanks to the hosting giants that offer hosting solutions for the developers and bloggers on shared platforms. Hence the prices cut down and we get the best web hosting at highly affordable rate.
Here is a general overview of the features, hosting plans and discount that you can get from the top 10 most popular hosting brands.
Bluehost is the No.1 best web hosting in the world that offers a free domain and a free SSL certificate. Whether you buy a VPS, a WordPress hosting plan or a dedicated server, you’ll get a free domain for the first year and an SSL certificate free for lifetime. Only 3 popular hosts have been recommended by wordpress.org, Bluehost is at the top and in my opinion, it is the biggest achievement of the hosting giant.
Read Bluehost full review here
More than 2 Million websites are hosted on Bluehost’s powerful infrastructure. The number is growing very fast and the reason behind it is the amazing 24/7 live support that Bluehost provides around the clock. Bluehost has 700 employees that are highly skilled to promise 99.99% uptime and best performance. According to the stats report, the uptime from January till date has been 99.9%. That’s how Bluehost is a topper among the hosting industry.
The company was founded in 2003 and after its acquisition by EIG in 2010, it’s now an EIG brand and included among the world’s 20 largest web hosting companies in the world.
Features
Bluehost offers a wide variety of features but these are the most prominent:
- Free Domain Name and SSL Certificate
- 1-click WordPress install
- Live Support over chat and Phone
- 24/7 Infrastructure monitoring
- Unlimited features
- High Security measure
- Spam Assassin Protection
- International Domain names support
- Free Drag and Drop Site Builder
For a beginner, their shared hosting plan is the best and cheapest plan. You just need to sign up and select the plan here.
The total cost will be $106.20, you’ll save $181.44 on a 3 year plan. [63% off]
That is a discount of 63% right away. Finally my recommended plan for your small business is Basic that starts at $2.95/month to buy hosting.
SiteGround is the best web hosting for WordPress. I never heard anything negative about SiteGround. As I’ve stated earlier, there are only 3 web hosting companies officially recommended by wordpress.org and SiteGround is one of them. SiteGround is highly recommended for personal wordpress blogs as it is the best hosting for wordpress.
If you have a wordpress blog or a website hosted somewhere else, SiteGround has a free WordPress Migrator Plugin to migrate your wordpress site with no worries. It’s totally hassle free and smooth. The Bulgarian based SiteGround is the finest cloud platform as well. Their cloud infrastructure is super fast & equipped with high speed servers where you can develop, integrate and deploy apps easily in few clicks.
Features
SiteGround has the following promising features:
- 99.99% guaranteed uptime
- Isolated resources on Linux containers
- Multi-language support
- Free SSL certificate, Free CDN and Site Builder
- WordPress support and staging
- Hosting plans with daily backs
- OpCache and Super Cacher
- Highly secure anti-hack systems
- No data transfer limits
SiteGround recently launched its new fantastic client area introducing the new tools and features. It provides the best user experience and that’s among the reasons 2 Million People love SiteGround.
There are 3 big shared hosting plans Startup, GrowBig and GoGeek. Startup @ $3.95/month is the best plan suitable for beginners. There are No setup charges if you sign up for more than 1 year. There is a lot of stuff that comes free while you sign up. That includes a free SSL certificate, free Cloudflare CDN and a free website builder.
The total price for 3 years plan is $142.20 & you’ll save $288 USD
SiteGround’s managed wordpress hosting has the same prices that of shared hosting. But it has a lot of features that I’d say are only dedicated for WordPress. Therefore, I recommend SiteGround for Managed WordPress Hosting.
A2Hosting is at the top whenever you look for speedy turbo servers. These servers are built and configured in such a way that they provide up to 6X faster page loads. What does make A2Hosting more faster than other standard hosts? The answer is simple and its Turbo Caching and with that module, A2Hosting promises speeds up to 20X faster.
The hosting giant offers a wide range of features with unlimited storage and bandwidth. That is why it doesn’t matter if you are just a startup or a passionate developer, A2Hosting has got your back. Additionally, it is a premium provider of shared, managed wordpress, reseller, VPS and dedicated hosting with technical support available all the time.
Above all, A2Hosting is an award winning web hosting service provider that offers free website migration and optimized WordPress, Drupal and Joomla hosting solutions. More importantly, A2Hosting has a 99.9% uptime commitment and Anytime Money Back Guarantee.
Features
Here are some of the best features of A2Hosting:
- 20 times Faster and Optimized Turbo servers
- Easy cPanel control panel
- Server Rewind Backups
- 1-click WordPress staging
- Server Location options
- Free SSL certificate
- Isolated resources
- Free Domain reseller account
- Managed hardware and network
- Billing software
- Isolated resources
- 24/7 Live support via phone, chat and Email.
The total price for a 3 year term is $71.16 and you’ll save up to $144.48
We have the option to choose from the data center that is near to our geographical location. This is very important and that means our website will load more faster. Finally A2Hosting is my full time recommendation with no risks.
Hostinger based in Europe is one of the finest and quality hosting providers in the world. Their motto is “It’s not the big that eat the small – It’s the fast that eat the slow.” Hostinger offers high quality web hosting at un-beatable prices. It has around 30 Million users around the world and that is really a big number. Around 8000 new users sign up every day, it’s because of the Hostinger’s cutting-edge features that help people to develop their successful online businesses.
The single shared hosting just starts at $0.80/month with a free SSL certificate and a free domain.
It is highly suitable for small projects keeping our costs very low. You can host only one website in single shared hosting plan. Hostinger’s goal isn’t to just sell, it’s to help succeed.
Features
Their premium shared hosting has the following features:
- Unlimited websites and bandwidth
- Free domain name and SSL certificate
- 99.9% uptime guarantee
- 24/7 technical support
- Powerful control panel
- Multiple server locations
- Free website builder
- Optimized wordpress hosting
Only $38.40 for 4 years single shared hosting plan and save $345.12
Hostinger also offers VPS , Windows VPS and Cloud hosting with a 30-day money back guarantee. You can get free hosting in Hostinger’s brand 000webhost.com.
I would say it’s the host of your dreams. The hosting giant is a highly reputed and world’s famous web hosting company that fulfills people’s online business dreams. DreamHost is also one of the largest web hosts in the world that hosts more than 1.5 Million websites on its servers. One thing that I like the most about the host is it’s 97 day money back guarantee that makes the hosting company stand out from the crowd.
It has an official recommendation of wordpress.org
It is also favorite for WordPress hosting platform. There is no limit on traffic either you choose shared starter or unlimited plan.
Features
Here are some of the great features offered by Dreamhost.
- Free domain and SSL
- WordPress pre-installed
- Automatic wordpress security updates
- 24/7 ticket and live chat support
- SSD storage
- Unlimited features in shared unlimited plan
- No limits on bandwidth and traffic
- WordPress website builder
DreamHost also helps for the SEO rankings of our website. The lowest plan starts at $2.95/month.
Total cost is only $93.24 and you’ll save $99.91 on a 3-year term signup.
Hostpapa is a reliable host that hosts over half a million websites with award winning support. The Canadian host has been in the hosting industry for over a decade now and the winner of numerous awards for providing great web hosting services. Their servers are housed in industry-leading data centers and the servers infrastructure is monitored 24/7/365.
Whether it is hosting, apps, marketing, e-commerce or SEO, Hostpapa provides unlimited features. There are more than 400 different apps in a single hosting package with a 99.9% uptime guarantee.
Features
Following are the best hosting features:
- Unlimited SSD disk storage
- Unlimited domains and websites in business plans
- Free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate
- Mobile ready websites
- Unlimited email addresses with great looking webmail interface
- Multilingual support in 4 languages
Domain transfer and website migration is free
Hostpapa’s wordpress hosting is perfect for small business with 100+ free wordpress themes. WordPress is auto-installed with unlimited image CDN.
Save up to 70%, 3 year business plan cost is $142.2 you will save $326
iPage is packed with the best hosting features at a very low cost of just $1.99/month. So there is no doubt about that price being the cheapest in the hosting market. Not only this but iPage also promises high performance and 99.9% uptime with their performance load balanced servers.
The company was founded in 1998 and that means 22 years in the hosting industry. It now has 2 data centers that powers over a million websites. I would strongly recommend iPage as a web hosting for small business because of their one-size-fits-all plan.
Features
Here is a list of some of the prominent hosting features.
- Free domain and SSL certificate
- 1-click wordpress installer
- 1000s of free website templates
- Free email and ad credits
- Host unlimited domains
- Enriched with a lot of apps
- Paypal integration
- 30 day money back guarantee
Save up to 75% & pay $71.64 on its shared hosting plan with $216 massive discount.
There is no limit on domain hosting. Additionally there are a lot of apps to launch an online store and finally, iPage offers free domain transfers.
As the name says it is a green energy web hosting provider. GreenGeeks is powered by 300% clean renewable energy which means the web host is highly environment friendly. Honestly using the green energy makes this host a lot different from the other providers in the world. The award winning host has 5 large state of the art data centers with robust server infrastructure. Accounts are provisioned with their own dedicated computing resources and secured virtual file system.
The Green company is 11 years old in the hosting business with 500K websites from customers around the world. The company offers customers a no-questions asked money back guarantee with a full refund in the period of 30 days.
Features
I’ll highlight the major qualities of GG as:
- Positive energy footprint on the environment
- 99.9% Uptime Guarantee
- Live Telephone & Live Chat Support
- 24/7/365 Email Support
- 1-Click App Installer
- SSD-based RAID-10 Storage Arrays
- Container-based Technology
- Free website migration and more…
Enjoy a free domain and a free wildcard SSL with every hosting plan
The shared hosting plan starts at $2.95 if you sign up for a 3 year term.
The total cost will be $106.2 and you’ll save around $252.00
HostGator is a giant hosting company and it’s among the top 10 web hosting companies in the world. The company hosts over 8 million domains and it has a great and positive reputation in the hosting market. It was acquired by Endurance International Group in 2012 and expanded its global footprint. Chinese and Russian language support is also available.
Their shared windows web hosting plan starts $4.76/month with a free domain for the first year. HostGator is among those few hosting companies that provides both Linux and Windows hosting.
Features
Let’s have a look at the hosting features:
- Offers both Linux and Windows shared hosting
- cPanel is used in Linux hosting and Parallel’s Plesk is for Windows customers
- 100+ Mobile-Friendly Templates with an Image Library
- Free website and domain transfer
- 1 click WordPress install
- Free SSL and Free domain in all hosting plans
- Create instant backups
- 24/7/365 phone and live chat support.
The hosting giant promises 99.9% uptime and a 45 day money back guarantee.
Save up to 60% on shared plans with a discount of $150.00
The 3 year term for basic Hatchling plan will be $99 only. Finally, it is one of the best hosting companies that provide best web hosting for small business websites and blogs.
GoDaddy is though very popular for domain names registration and transfers at low costs. But it also provides the expert hosting solutions with free domain, free SSL and a free professional email. Godaddy also has good windows shared hosting plans with unlimited features. One of the best qualities of GoDaddy is it’s multiple region hosting with prices in your own currency. In the following image, you can see the prices are listed in my own currency PKR and it’s more convenient for me.
GoDaddy has more than 125 apps that are 1-click away to install with cPanel and Linux hosting. Above all, the Linux servers are powered with up-to-date software stack that includes CloudLinux, WordPress, Drupal, PHP, Python etc.
Features
There are 4 shared hosting plans with the following features:
- From 100GB to unlimited storage
- Free Office 365 email
- 1GB database storage
- Industry standard cPanel control panel
- 99.9% uptime and money back guarantee
- Fastest page load times
- WordPress hosting with full-featured packages
Though their prices are slightly higher than the market rate but you can still get a discount of 33% on deluxe shared hosting plan.
That sums up around $100 discount if you sign up for 3 years
4. Final Thoughts
Choosing a web host is the most critical step towards your business journey. Your whole business depends on the web host’s performance and loading speeds. More importantly, search engines also rank those sites that have SSL certificate installed, load in Milli seconds and have the most updated content. Most of these top 10 companies offer a free domain and that is a $15 USD savings.
Why Bluehost is at the top? It’s because of the unlimited features, best reputation in the hosting industry, free domain, free SSL and it also has the official hosting recommendation of wordpress.org.
SiteGround is at No.2 because of a little price hike and also they do not offer a free domain. The domain price is high as well when you register. Other then that their support is excellent and page loading speeds are best.
Finally, rest of the hosting services providers have a little bit differences depending up on their performance and prices. They have my full endorsement as well as the best web hosting for small business.
7 Comments
Kristine Beaves
This is a great list of hosts! I’ve personally used both Bluehost and SiteGround. No problems with either of them (despite the bad rep Bluehost receives).
Faisal Rehman
Yep, you are right Kristine, I have reviewed them in depth and found both as the best hosts in the world
Nadia Malik
A very well written post and the way you have compared all the possible options is great for new bloggers who are just starting in this industry. Keep up the good work.
Faisal Rehman
Thank you so much 🙂
Ash
Used bluehost and hostgator but currently with namecheap. I really like their 24×7 live support and i prefer my domain and hosting at same provider.
Faisal Rehman
Yep Namecheap is on my list and I’ll update this post soon