As a small business owner, web hosting can require a lengthy decision-making process to ensure your team chooses the one that will support ongoing revenue generation and customer satisfaction. Below, we compare a number of the most well-known hosts to help make this decision more streamlined, including several factors varying from pricing, to security and even extending as far as eco-friendliness.
1. GreenGeeks.com
GreekGeeks is one of the top choices for web hosting for small businesses, with features including daily backups on all plans, a 300% green energy match, a website builder, and 24/7 support. Therefore, while we believe that this platform is comparable based on its eco-friendliness alone, its pricing, performance, and other features are also among the best in the market today. GreenGeeks also offers free IP and caching and pricing discounts on multiple-year contracts. Taken together, small businesses, even those that don’t consider themselves particularly eco-conscious, are likely to benefit from the platform and its setup.
2. HostGator.com
HostGator is a popular choice as an easy-to-use service with a remarkable uptime (99.99%). That said, the number of features is more limited than it appears at first glance. One of these examples is the number of backups the platform does, which aren’t daily. Instead, users will need to pay for automated daily backups for their site if they believe this feature is needed.
That said, as long as your team doesn’t rely heavily on daily backups or beyond standard security, HostGator.com is an adequate solution for small businesses. Additionally, high-end features are useful, although they come at an extra cost, including a distributed caching setup, which accelerates the loading times of any static content and frees up space for loading dynamic content.
3. DreamHost.com
DreamHost offers a diverse set of features within the plan’s cost, with an average allocation of SSD storage, daily backups, free domain registration, and bandwidth. Additionally, upgrading from shared hosting services to a dedicated server is both simple and affordable, especially for those able to pay their first three years upfront. Also worth calling out is the money-back guarantee, which is just over three months, one of the longest in the industry.
DreamHost.com also offers a business plan specifically targeted at small businesses. The package includes virtually everything you might need to get started other than storage, which is limited to 60 GB. However, the plan includes VPS hosting, meaning website owners do not have to worry about limited performance through extended use and can scale up offerings as needed.
4. Bluehost.com
Bluehost is one of the most cost-effective options for small business owners, with basic plans costing less than $10 a month. Their more comprehensive plans are also reasonably priced, so long as users are willing to pay annually instead of on a month-to-month basis. Given their low price point, Bluehost plans offer just about everything a business may need for a website, including storage, email, and data transfers.
Bluehost also offers hosting plans specific to WordPress, which addresses its simplicity, security, and load time at a slightly higher price than their standard plan. With all packages, platform users may also take advantage of a free version of the website builder, Weebly, for added functionality. Although, Weebly is fairly plain in functionality in comparison to other paid offerings.
5. Namecheap.com
Namecheap has become a popular choice with their technical support for those brand new to managing a website. Standard with their offering is 24/7 chat support, which a dedicated team monitors. The support team has since earned the reputation for going the extra mile to ensure a user’s site is up and running quickly, with minimal downtime. Additionally, as suggested by the name itself, Namecheap offers prices on par with industry expectations.
6. SiteGround.com
SiteGround is a web hosting solution optimized for e-commerce applications, offering several different server locations, free CDN Service, advanced caching options, free daily backups, a free WP eCommerce install and transfer assistance. SiteGround’s hosting services also have room for customization depending on the needs of your website and have a highly supportive customer support team to provide support through live chat. Analysts often consider the solution to be feature-rich for its price point.
Making your decision
Finalizing your decision will come down to a few factors, including your level of computer skill, your overall budget, and how much traffic you may receive, all of which we have considered in the list above.
