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Best Web Hosting for Small Business – What Your Clients Want vs What They Actually Need

Small business websites are by far the most common type of website on the internet. This shouldn’t be surprising considering that, these days, if your business is not on the web, it might as well not exist at all. Finding a quality web hosting for small business becomes essential.

So, what makes any given web hosting for small business “quality”? Even though a small business website might not be very technologically advanced in terms of web development, or not even very traffic heavy, it still has its specific requirements. Those requirements have to be met if you want your visitors and customers to have a seamless experience with your site.

Let’s look into what that might be, and then decide on the hosting plans that have a good chance of working for a small business.

Best Web Hosting for Small Business

The best web hosting providers for small businesses compared (in a nutshell)

In case you’re in a hurry, here are the highlights of our findings:

Company Price
InMotion $1.99/mo
SiteGround $2.99/mo
A2Hosting $2.99/mo

Note; in addition to the factors listed above, I also went back to our hosting survey results and filtered the list to only focus on the hosts reported to be in use on small business sites. I then included the rating scores from the survey for each host below.

1. InMotion Hosting (www.inmotionhosting.com)

InMotion

InMotion Hosting is a known player in the web hosting landscape. We’ve recommended it a number of times in the past, and for a good reason. InMotion Hosting offers very affordable pricing and a number of traits that should be beneficial to small business websites.

Pricing

  • “Lite” – $1.99 / month, 1 website, 10 GB disk space, unlimited bandwidth, free email address.
  • “Launch” – $4.99 / month, 2 websites, 50 GB disk space, unlimited bandwidth, 10 email accounts.
  • “Power” – $3.79 / month, 50 websites, 100 GB disk space, unlimited bandwidth, 50 email accounts.
  • “Pro” – $11.91 / month, 100 websites, 200 GB disk space, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited emails.

Available data centers

  • Washington, D.C.
  • Los Angeles, CA
  • No data centers outside of the US

Ratings

  • Reliability: 4.36 / 5
  • Support rating: 4.18 / 5
  • Support team WordPress-proficient: 3.90 / 5

What users say

They are transparent if one of their servers goes down, and they actually tell you what the problem is if it is serious. One time a usual update knocked out their servers for 2 days. They told everyone what happened. I’ve never heard this from another hosting company.

Backups and security

  • InMotion runs automatic remote backups on all shared hosting and VPS hosting plans for free. Each account comes with the first 10GB block of remote backups free. (Important note: New backups overwrite previous backups, so it’s recommended that the user maintains backups on their end as well.)
  • You get access to a 24/7/365 US-based support, and there’s 24/7 server monitoring on all hosting plans.

Extra features and perks

  • Although InMotion doesn’t offer any specialized WordPress update features on their own, they do allow you to configure the site to update itself via WordPress’ own built-in tools.
  • For an additional fee, you get access to InMotion’s team of experts that can help you set up a site or take care of any other management-related tasks. The price tag on this varies from $40 / month to $100 / month. Also as part of the deal, you get enhanced security measures, fast-responding support, and additional platform optimization.

E-commerce capabilities

InMotion Hosting offers dedicated IP addresses on some hosting plans, various SSL options, and also PCI compliance on top of that.

Performance experiments

InMotion loading times 🔃
East Coast USA: 0.20s ⭐West Coast USA: 0.59s ⭐
Central USA: 0.49s ⭐London, UK: 0.76s ⭐
Paris, France: 1.27sMumbai, India: 1.89s

2. SiteGround (www.siteground.com)

SiteGround

SiteGround is one of the top rated companies in our hosting survey overall (4.6 / 5). They have managed WordPress hosting plans that are optimized to run WordPress sites, offer good server parameters at an affordable price, and let you choose from a handful of data centers.

Overall, SiteGround hosting plans let you grow quite nicely, and deliver different features and parameters based on the scale of the small business website in question.

Pricing

  • “StartUp” – $2.99 / month, 1 website, 10GB of disk space, suitable for ~ 10,000 visits monthly, free email accounts.
  • “GrowBig” – $4.99 / month, unlimited websites, 20GB of disk space, suitable for ~ 25,000 visits monthly, free email accounts, priority support, 1 year of free wildcard SSL.
  • “GoGeek” – $7.99 / month, unlimited websites, 30GB of disk space, suitable for ~ 100,000 visits monthly, free email accounts, priority support, 1 year of free wildcard SSL, free PCI compliance, staging features.

Available data centers

  • Chicago, IL
  • Amsterdam, the Netherlands
  • Singapore
  • London, UK
  • Milano, Italy
  • IOWA, USA
  • Frankfurt, DE
  • Sydney, Australia

Ratings

  • Reliability: 4.65 / 5
  • Support rating: 4.69 / 5
  • Support team WordPress-proficient: 4.51 / 5

What users say

I love SiteGround, and I think they are the best option if you need to host multiple sites on one account and especially if you also want to have email and other benefits of cPanel.

SiteGround has earned their reputation as the current WordPress shared-hosting darlings. Their offerings hit the sweet spot for performance and optimization plus their commitment to security and performance is admirable. They pioneered one-click Let’s Encrypt certificates. What more can you say?

Backups and security

  • SiteGround offers free daily backups on all hosting plans. Starting from GrowBig, they also keep up to 30 backup copies of the website.
  • There are free Let’s Encrypt certificates available. Also wildcard SSLs available on higher-tier plans.
  • 24/7 award-winning support, over phone, chat and ticketing system.
  • Additional security features offered via their “SG Site Scanner” option – monitoring service that checks your website daily and immediately notifies you if it has been hacked or injected with malicious code.

Extra features and perks

  • There’s an auto update feature available for WordPress sites. You can choose if you want to enable automatic updates for the WordPress core only, plugins, or everything.
  • One-click staging and pre-installed Git available on the GoGeek plan. While not for everyone, this can be handy when doing any changes to your live site.

E-commerce capabilities

SiteGround offers PCI compliance starting from their GoGeek plan, along with wildcard SSLs and some optimizations put into place to make WordPress (and WooCommerce) work better. A dedicated IP address can be purchased separately.

Performance experiments

SiteGround loading times 🔃
East Coast USA: 0.85s ⭐West Coast USA: 1.33s
Central USA: 1.12sLondon, UK: 0.37s ⭐
Paris, France: 0.35s ⭐Mumbai, India: 1.32s

3. A2 Hosting (www.a2hosting.com)

A2 Hosting

A2 Hosting has been on the market for a while, but it’s only gotten its spotlight lately, due to their great reported performance (by actual users) and attractive pricing. This makes them a good choice in terms of web hosting for small business.

Pricing

  • “Lite” – $2.99 / month, 1 website, 5 databases, 100 GB of storage, unlimited transfer, 25 email addresses.
  • “Drive” – $5.99 / month, unlimited websites, unlimited databases, unlimited storage, unlimited transfer, unlimited email addresses, free automatic backups.
  • “Turbo Boost” – $7.99 / month, same as above, plus you get up to 20x better performance.
  • “Turbo Max” – $11.99 / month, same as above, plus 5x more server resources.

Available data centers

  • Michigan
  • Amsterdam, the Netherlands
  • Singapore

Ratings

  • Reliability: 4.43 / 5
  • Support rating: 3.71 / 5
  • Support team WordPress-proficient: 3.67 / 5

What users say

After struggling with GoDaddy and all there options, I found DreamHost too expensive, and A2 offered me the speed, reliability and scaleability necessary to grow.

Backups and security

  • Backups are taken automatically on the Swift and Turbo plans. Plus, they come with a file recovery feature in case anything goes bad.
  • Offsite backups available.
  • Free SSL certificates via Let’s Encrypt available on all hosting plans. Wildcard SSLs and advanced SSL available as well.
  • 24/7/365 “guru crew” support available via email, phone, live chat.
  • A2’s Perpetual Security package included on all plans – proactive protection against malicious hackers and security threats. Includes: KernelCare, Dual Web Hosting Firewall, Brute Force Defense, Virus Scanning, Server Hardening, 24/7/365 Security Monitoring.

Extra features and perks

  • A2 enables you to activate WordPress’ own auto update capabilities via cPanel.
  • You get free CloudFlare CDN integration.
  • Easy Google Apps setup.

E-commerce capabilities

A2 Hosting offers good SSL options, including free Let’s Encrypt certificates, as well as wildcard SSLs and advanced SSLs. There’s also the possibility to get a dedicated IP address for $1.96 / month.

When it comes to PCI compliance, here’s what A2 says:

The short answer is that A2 Hosting does not support PCI compliance. However, you can use a third-party shopping cart API (application programming interface) on your site to ensure PCI compliance.

Performance experiments

A2 loading times 🔃
East Coast USA: 0.64s ⭐West Coast USA: 0.88s ⭐
Central USA: 0.71s ⭐London, UK: 1.31s
Paris, France: 1.23sMumbai, India: 2.18s

The requirements for quality web hosting for small business

Here are the key elements that make a web hosting plan suitable for a small business website:

🤝 Reliable
Reliability is always a big question mark. Stuff can always happen unpredictably, and even the best servers can go offline from time to time. For that reason, working with web hosting for small business that has a good track record is crucial.
📈 Room to grow
Even though most small businesses will probably want to launch just one website, it’s worth having the possibility for your portfolio to grow and expand to a couple more websites. Even though most hosts will allow that, some of them might charge more than what can be considered reasonable. Also, rolling out new sites should be easy to do – without the need to reconfigure or move the original site.
🔒 Backups, updates, other management on autopilot
You want the host to offer some maintenance and handle things like backups, updates and etc. There’s high chance that you won’t bother to take care of those things on your own. And since you always want to be protected in case disaster strikes, having those things taken care of on the host’s end can be incredibly beneficial.
🌐 Data centers in multiple locations
Or at least in a handful of locations. Basically, if you operate in the Chicago area, why would you get a server that’s in San Francisco, right? It will only make the site take longer to load for its target audience.
👐 Good support
Good both in terms of customer service and their problem-solving skills.
🔑 Some security measures in place
You really do not want to ever see their site hacked.
🛒 Possibility to launch an e-commerce store
Adding an online store to a small business website is a fairly common thing. However, if the site is set up on a server that does not offer affordable SSL certificates, dedicated IPs, or PCI compliance, then you might end up having to move the entire website to a completely new host. It’s best to avoid that and prepare yourself ahead of time. More on best hosting for e-commerce.

Conclusion

Overall, you can’t really go wrong choosing any of the featured platforms offering best hosting for small business here. They are all more than capable of serving any business, and also leave a lot of room for growth.

The right approach would be to always look into the individual features and parameters of each of these hosts, and pick the one that really looks like it’s been tailor-made to fit your needs.

Something you’ve probably noticed is that I didn’t feature WP Engine on this list. This is no mistake (or at least I hope). As awesome as WP Engine can be, it’s just too expensive of a product to recommend to most small business websites. If you’re lucky, the price tag will be $20.00 / month, and potentially a lot more. This is just not the kind of investment that most small business owners will be eager to make.

Here’s a quick summary of some of the more significant parameters of the platforms and what makes them possibly the best web hosting for small business available:

Best Web Hosting for Small Business
InMotion SiteGround A2 Hosting
Hosting plans start at ($ per month) $1.99 $2.99 $2.99
Available data centers Washington, D.C. / Los Angeles, CA / No data centers outside of the US Chicago, IL / Amsterdam, the Netherlands / Singapore / London, UK / Milano, Italy, IOWA/USA, Frankfurt/DE, Sydney/Australia Michigan / Amsterdam, the Netherlands / Singapore
Reliability 4.36 / 5 4.65 / 5 4.43 / 5
Support rating 4.18 / 5 4.69 / 5 3.71 / 5
Backups
SSL certificates
WordPress auto updates

What do you look for when picking a hosting plan for a small business website? Do you always go with the same provider?

Don’t forget to join our crash course on speeding up your WordPress site. With some simple fixes, you can reduce your loading time by even 50-80%:

 
Yay! 🎉 You made it to the end of the article!
Karol K
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Vashishtha Kapoor
May 6, 2017 1:21 pm

I was anticipating inmotion hosting to be there as they have the best technology along with good uptime for small businesses.
What I like about managed hosting plans is that, no one is allowed to consume more than 75% of the CPU usage. this way, any emergency can be treated well. and the server never goes down.

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