How To Choose Best Web Hosting For Small Business?

Do you have a small business? Then, you really need a website because Businesses without a website face huge challenges. We live in a society where most people discover new services, products, local businesses, restaurants and even mom and pop shops on the Internet. Although I agree, building a website takes a lot of efforts and may take about a month, but the benefits are unlimited for your business. You’ll need an affordable and trustable web hosting for your business. We’ve done all the testing, comparisons for you and if you need web hosting for small businesses then these Top 3 web hosting services are for you.

Introduction Of Web Hosting For Small Business

Amongst its many meanings, a host refers to someone or something that provides the facilities for an occasion or an event and the definition of web hosting is very similar to the aforementioned statement. When talking in terms of a website, hosting refers to the process of making your site live on the Internet by assigning it a unique domain name and making use of a server and database to store all of its data and the source code of the entire site.

Read More – How To Create A Website With WordPress – Getting Started With WordPress

There is only one way to host your site and that is to simply choose a hosting service provider and choose a plan from their assortment of options and let them take care of the rest. Sounds easy, right? Sure, but let us make it very clear that getting around this process is not as easy as you would be imagining. 

If you are the proprietor of a small business, finding the right hosting plan for it is very important. You need to keep in mind the factors of affordability- is it well within your estimated budget, and usability- does it have sufficient resources included to handle your needs. If your chosen plan falls short of your requirements, then it is nothing but loss of business because a second-tier plan won’t have enough resources to load your site fast enough and if the plan has more resources than what is being actually utilized, well that is just overkill! Your hosting plan and more importantly, the service provider should be reliable: one that has all the essential security certificates for a safe experience. If you’re new to hosting and looking for some insights, then the following guide has been tailor-made for you.

Top 3 Best Web Hosting For Small Business – Buy Today – Limited Time Offer

Rank	Web Hosting	Name	Experts Reviews	Starting Price	Official Website
1.		BlueHost	Most Popular Web Hosting	$3.95 Per Month	www.Bluehost.com
2.		iPage	Free Domain - Unlimited Disk Space - Excellent Customer Support - Highly Recommendable	$1.99 Per Month	www.iPage.com
3.		GoDaddy	Overall Expensive But Really Worth Buying	$2.99 Per Month	www.Godaddy.com

The world of web hosting plans and companies is huge! There are literally thousands of companies that offer various hosting plans and finding the right fit for your needs can become nerve-wracking at times. But fret not because we are here to make your life a whole lot easier by reviewing the top 3 web hosting for small business.

Bluehost 

Bluehost is one of the best hosting provider of this lot and that is a well-deserved achievement because Bluehost as a service provider has been one of the most reliable names globally, which is all thanks to its unmetered bandwidth, excellent customer service, extremely value for money plans, a wide assortment of plans, and much more.

Another best thing about BlueHost is their cPanel. Bluehost is simple to use and understand for any user. Although, someone who is a newbie in online business will be able to get knowledge of using this hosting in a short span of time. Read on to know more about it.

Pros

• 99.99% uptime
• Fast load times
• Free domain for the first year
• Free SSL certificate
• Affordable introductory prices
• Excellent security measures
• Included access to CDN’s
• Simplistic UI of the cPanel

Cons

• High renewal rates

Bluehost Features

Excellent uptimes maintained annually – The most important factor in website hosting is to make sure that your site does not crash or is not down frequently because every time that your site goes down, all potential clients are moving away from you possibly leading to big and multiple losses and the longer the site is down, higher is the stack of uncountable and unpredictable losses.

For estimation purposes, let us assume that your site is live 99% of the time. This means that your site would be down for a whopping 432 minutes a month and almost 5200 minutes (~87 hours) annually: these are unacceptable figures for any site. For further estimation and clarification, let us assume that a person visits your site once a month for the whole year during when it is down and let us assume that every time he came with the intention of spending at least $10 on your domain. This accounts for a loss of ~$870 and that’s just from one person. Imagine the losses if your site is susceptible to frequent crashes!

In the hosting world, an uptime of 99.5% is considered decent. Bluehost, however, does you one better by maintaining annual throughputs of 99.9%, thus ensuring that your site does not keep going down often and that your small business does not incur more losses than it can.

Rattling loading times – Let’s be practical; no one has the time or the patience to wait for a minute or more just for your website to load. If your site does not load in a proper time frame, people are going to move on, which subsequently is again nothing but a loss in business. 

But you don’t have to worry about that with Bluehost because Bluehost sites have an average ping of 200ms. To be honest, that is a great figure, and it is far better than other shared web hosting providers.

Immaculate security measures – Bluehost gives it their 100% percent to make sure that your site, as well as your site data, is as safe as houses by implementing some great security measures in place. Examples of measures include a free SSL certificate, a privacy feature that keeps your personal information secure on a different server, making a backup of the site and site data daily to rollback to site to a previous version if it gets hacked somehow, spam protection, SiteLock to prevent malware attacks and rogue SQL injections. 

Regardless of which plan you choose, you get all these features bundled along with.

Pricing – Bluehost has 3 types of hosting plans-

1. Shared
2. VPS
3. Dedicated 

The plans start out at $3.95/month for the shared plan and keep rising as per the needs and infrastructure demanded. The highest price goes out to the ‘premium’ plan which is a subsection of the dedicated plan type. As a small business, if you go with the basic plan of the shared type hosting (which is also the cheapest plan), you still get 50GB of SSD storage, unlimited bandwidth, a free SSL certificate, 1 domain, 5 parked domains, and 25 subdomains. So you can see that you are getting a pretty good value at a very sweet price that does not threaten to burn a hole in your pocket.

iPage

If Bluehost is a fan-favorite, then iPage is not far along. We highly recommend iPage web hosting for our blog users. They have the most affordable plans and their customer support team is always ready to help their valued customers.

Apart from being one of the best in the business, it is also one of the oldest in the industry so you can rest assured of the fact that it is more reliable than almost all web hosting providers out there. In fact, it has the best price versus performance tradeoff amongst all other companies with plans starting out at as low as $1.99/month. 

Pros

• Excellent uptime stats
• Outstanding customer care support
• Free SSL certificate
• Wide variety of add-ons
• Good Ads credit and coupon system
• Affordable introductory prices 
• Easy and appealing cPanel
• A free domain name for a year

Cons

• Limited plans

iPage Features

Brilliant uptimes – Forget the clichéd tag of 99.99% uptime guaranteed by other hosting providers. iPage dares to take a step further and claim 100% uptime scores and to be very honest, it manages to keep up to its promises to a very large extent. The hardware and infrastructure of iPage are so good that even in its worst-case scenarios, an iPage hosted website goes down for less than a minute in a whole year: which brings the uptime figure to something like 99.999%. Those are impressive figures and stats, achieving which is a lot easier said than done because like said before, you need the best hardware and its management to do so and with so many years of experience, this should not come as a surprise.

Ad Vouchers – For small businesses, one of the biggest challenges is advertisement because initially, funds may be low to invest separately on for letting more people know about your undertaking. iPage solves that problem brilliantly by giving you a bunch of vouchers: specifically, $100 Google Adwords voucher, $50 Yahoo and Bing Search credit, $50 Facebook ad credit, and free Yellowpages business listings with every plan of theirs as an initiative to help you kickstart your small business.

Robust Backup and Security Measures – iPage offers a robust set of security measures to safeguard your site and all the data that flows to and from it. Measures such as SiteLock- to protect the site from malware and rogue SQL injections & XSS, daily automatic backups to make sure that the site data is never redundant and can be restored to an earlier version in the unfortunate event of a hacker gaining access to it.

Pricing – For all its flexibility in everything, pricing is one department of iPage that is not flexible at all. Where all hosting service providers offer monthly, quarterly, semi-annually, and annually, iPage does not give you such options. Which is really good if you are looking for a long term view. The smallest duration for which you have to commit is 1 year. Similarly, there are 3 plans up for the taking on iPage-

1. A 1-Year plan priced at $2.99/month
2. A 2-Year plan priced at $2.49/month
3. A 3-Year plan priced at $1.99/month

We recommend you to go with 3 years plan. It’s a buy and forget plan. They provide 30 days no question asked money back guarantee. So, there is nothing to loose. Also, the highly affordable introductory price of $1.99/month applies only when you buy a plan for 3 years. Other than this commitment, iPage does not set a foot wrong in its entire operation to ensure that your small business sees the success it deserves.

GoDaddy

Mostly known as a domain registrar, GoDaddy is actually, in fact, a bundled package that offers web hosting services and a website builder apart from being a domain registrar. It is in fact, World’s Biggest Domain registrar which means that you are bound to get the best of everything with them.

So if you are looking for a one-stop-shop for all of your website needs, GoDaddy is the perfect place for you. You can save hours with bulk WordPress updates, automated backups and regular security scans with GoDaddy. They provide all these features for free.

Pros

• Excellent uptimes
• Good page loading speeds
• CDN support
• Affordable basic plans
• Good customer support
• Offers multiple functionalities
• Free domain for the first year

Cons

• Upsells a lot

Godaddy Features

Excellent average uptime stats – Coming up with good and punchy uptime figures for a month or two is very easy; maintaining them, in the long run, is the bigger and the ultimate task and GoDaddy with all of the experience amassed over the years manages to maintain a wonderful average of 99.99% in keeping its hosted websites online. 99.99% averages to just 10 minutes of downtime in a year: if you haven’t understood by now, then they are superbly magnificent stats; Sure, iPage has better uptime figures but when you factor in the fact that GoDaddy is not just involved in website hosting but in various other activities as well, then you really got to commend the architecture and the maintenance of their hardware.

Good page loading speed – With GoDaddy, you won’t have to at least worry about loss in sales or business due to a slow website that prompts users to walk away and try someone or something else, ultimately leaving a dent on your search engine ranking. 

With an average ping of 300ms, GoDaddy makes sure that your site loads not only fast but also does so smoothly; smoothly in the sense that it does not hog up too much of the memory of your device and degrade its performance (temporarily, of course). It does so by ensuring that if your site has intensive images and videos, it stores them in a dedicated folder on the server and delivers them efficiently through a CDN. Sure, the speeds could be slightly better, but have no doubts because 300ms of loading time is not bad in any situation.

Pricing – GoDaddy has 4 plans to choose from. The best thing about the plans is that unlike other companies, you don’t need to commit to anything for too long. One thing that ticked us off a bit is that after a plan expires, the cost of renewing it becomes almost double to what you paid initially, but given that it is an industry-wide practice, one can make their peace with it. Also, if you lock your plans for longer durations, you get a cheaper price for all the plans. The plans include:

1. The starter pack which starts out at $2.99/month and goes down to as low as $1.5/month when committing for 3 years.
2. The economy pack starts out at almost $4/month and goes as low as $2.99/month when purchasing it for 3 years.
3. The deluxe pack starts out at almost $8/month and drops as low as $4/month for 3 years.
4. The ultimate pack starts out at almost $10/month dropping as low as $6.5/month when committing for 3 years.

How Do You Choose A Small Business Hosting Provider?

Before availing hosting services for your small business website, you need to factor in various variables to ensure that the plan you are choosing is the right fit for you and serves your purpose easily without becoming too much of an overkill both in terms of wastage of resources and the extra money being shelled out. Before buying a hosting plan, consider the following two factors extremely carefully:

Expected Traffic 

Having set up your business and a network for the same, you would have a rough idea about how many people would be interested in availing your service: so always choose a plan depending on this ‘traffic’ that you are expecting. Given that your business is relatively small right now, we can assume that the traffic would not be too heavy and so you should go with a shared plan. However, if you are expecting a good rush, go for a plan with a dedicated server.

The Budget

Having had an idea of the estimated traffic, you should carefully choose a plan that does not burn a hole in your pocket. If you find a good plan, but it sounds too expensive, then you can always go for long-term plans and get a huge discount.

If you don’t have any budget problem then go with Bluehost but if you are just starting out then we highly recommend you to go with iPage 3 years plan. This will help you to focus on your business without worrying about the high yearly renewal cost of web hosting.

Conclusion

In the end, There are tons of hosting providers and for a newbie, it really becomes a confusing mesh to get out of. But don’t think much because the three platforms that we reviewed viz. Bluehost, iPage, and GoDaddy are the 3 biggest names in the industry for business and very few companies come close to even match (forget beat) the services that they offer at the most affordable rates.

It is ultimately your decision to choose from any of the hosting platforms out there for your small business, but always make sure that you do business with a company that has a great reputation and reliability, which is why we are mentioning, again and again, to stick with either of these top 3 web hosting companies for your business, because if you are spending your money to take your business to bigger heights, make sure that you get the most value out of it.

FAQs

Q. What is the cost of web hosting for small business?
It all depends on the plan you are choosing and the duration you are choosing it for. Committing for longer durations can bring the cost down to as low as $1.99/month.

Q. What is the reason for the price difference amongst different hosting plans?
The reason that plans differ so much in their price is the number of resources dedicated to each type. For example, a shared plan has the data from multiple sites on the same server, a dedicated plan allocates a whole server just for you which surely is more powerful but also more expensive.

Q. What to do when your plan expires?
Well, once your plan expires, you have 2 options: you can either continue with the same hosting provider by continuing with your existing plan or choosing a new one depending on your needs or you can migrate your site to a new hosting provider. If you end up moving your business elsewhere, you will have to pay a decent amount to your existing provider as a fee.

Q. When do you need to renew your plan?
Well, that completely depends on the duration of your small business hosting plan. Most plans of maximum providers are billed monthly, quarterly, annually, biennially, or triennially. Remember that throughout the market, renewal costs of your plan are almost double at the expiration of your plan so it is always a wise option to invest in a plan for a long duration.

Disclosure – We are a professional review site that receives compensation from the companies whose products we review. We test each product thoroughly and give high marks to only the very best. We are independently owned and the opinions expressed here are our own.

If there’s anything you think I’ve missed – talk to me in the comments below!

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