Selecting a credible hosting provider for your business website is a critical step that needs a lot of consideration and deliberation. Your website’s performance, user engagement, and revenue depend greatly on the quality of services offered by your host.
With so many major website hosting companies flooded into the market, all offering great packages of enticing offers and services, one is spoilt for choice. Especially when almost all services appear similar. They may seem alike, but there are several differences that a trained eye can tell, and one must be able to pick and choose a provider that fulfills their specific business needs and provides good value for money.
To make your selection process easier, we did thorough research across the industry, tapping into different services, inclusive features, and various price points to bring you a list of the 3 best web hosting providers for small businesses in 2022.
But not all hosting providers are equally good. So to find the ones truly fitted for business site hosting, we’ve researched, tested, and eliminated dozens of providers. In this post, you’ll find the providers that are:
- Offering the best feature-to-price ratio;
- Perform really well in terms of speed and reliability;
- Are easy to set up and manage websites;
These, we think, are the main criteria that make small business hosting less of a hassle. So without any further ado, what are the best providers out there?
ASPHostPortal
ASPHostPortal is one of the largest and most reputable hosting providers on the market today. They provide a wide range of hosting solutions that accommodate small businesses and first-time website creators.
I love that ASPHostPortal is an all-in-one solution for web hosting. If you’re starting a new website from scratch, you can get everything you need under one roof from ASPHostPortal.
Plans also come with a one-click WordPress installation, a free SSL certificate, and 24/7 support. ASPHostPortal is known for providing some of the best support options among web hosting providers—you can always connect with a real human whenever you have questions.
Look, WordPress is the best platform for building a site, adding and managing site content, and customizing the look and feel of your home on the web. We always recommend WordPress over other options if you’re looking for freedom and reliability.
So, with ASPHostPortal you get a drag-and-drop WordPress builder (which is easier to use if you’re not already acquainted with building on WordPress) and more than 300 templates to choose from. You can get up and running on day one with no technical experience required.
Vensdata
Vensdata is a white-label end-to-end eCommerce platform for selling digital solutions to local businesses. Their motto to protect & cherish local enterprises with their tagline to assist with resources, training plus tools is commendable. Earn recurring revenue by branding your own software for your fellow neighboring demographics. Source new products to sell with their marketplace, scale your business & establish customer satisfaction. Achieve all of this with one unified tool. Benefit from their AI & data to streamline sales pipelines to curate monetization streams. Build your own software stack & monitor progress with live task management. Your dynamic presence with analytical reports serves to demonstrate performance metrics that customers can gauge for themselves.
Unfortunately, even at the lower end, Vendasta might be a little pricey for some users. Even if you are the only user, you will still have to pay at least $1,188 per year ($99 per month) for Vendasta. Furthermore, signing up means you are bound by a 12-month contract.
From marketing automation software to web design services, Vendasta offers an extensive array of tools and services. Signing up for Vendasta allows you to take advantage of virtually any marketing service. The platform is made up of a Partner Center, Sales & Success Center, Business App, and Task Manager. But there are so many Vendasta products. Vendasta isn’t the easiest to use. Even with all the resources available to you, learning Vendasta and maximizing its potential can take a significant amount of time.
EngineYard
Engine Yard is your Platform as a Service service provider for your Ruby, PHP, and Node.js application hosting. With Engine Yard, you’re never alone and neither are your customers. Be as hands-on or hands-off with AWS as you want and know we have your back. Were an extension of your team, offering application, database support, architecture recommendations, AWS management, and White-Glove Customer Support with 24/7 coverage.
Engine Yard’s benefits include allowing developers to focus on code rather than infrastructure and allowing users to place a premium on writing high-quality code. They don’t have to be concerned about management and upkeep. Build up the productivity of the cloud app development team. Engine Yard’s features, functionality, and integrations can help cloud app developers work more efficiently and productively. Support for Modern Open Source Languages Engine Yard provides extensive support for various open-source languages, allowing users to develop and deploy flexibly.
Engine Yard enables users to scale their applications automatically without provisioning. By defining business rules, infrastructure scaling can be done automatically. Engine Yard’s custom app metrics help scale. After a deployment, Engine Yard provides users with frequent updates and fixes. To ensure the best results, security patches and improvements are rolled out and automatic security configurations. Engine Yard offers comprehensive overviews of how applications function and work during production by performing intelligent application performance monitoring.
How to Find the Best Web Hosting for Your Small Business
Every web hosting solution offers the same basic service: they provide a home for your website on servers, ensuring your site is available to anyone browsing the web.
You’ll also find significant overlap in the types of web hosting offered by each hosting service. Most offer shared, VPS, cloud, and dedicated hosting packages. While most small businesses can get away with shared hosting, it doesn’t mean you should just blindly commit to that option without examining others.
There are certain factors that you need to consider as you’re evaluating small business web hosting providers side-by-side, even if you’re picking from the options reviewed in this guide.
Below we’ll take a closer look at the buying criteria for small business hosting and how you can use this information to find the best web hosting for your small business.
Performance Needs
Having a website is useless if people can’t access it. Websites with slow loading times and unexpected downtime can reflect poorly on your business and chase away customers.
Make sure you choose a hosting provider that’s fast, secure, and reliable. But every service will promise that in vague terms on their website, so how do you know if they deliver what you need?
Hosting resources are usually described in terms of processing power, memory, storage, and monthly bandwidth or number of monthly visitors. As a small business website, the CPU cores you get don’t matter too much. To a lesser extent, neither does memory, as just about everyone provides enough on their entry-level plans.
You should pay attention to two key items to know if a hosting plan will deliver the performance you need: monthly visitors or bandwidth and storage.
The former lets you know two things. One, what amount of traffic it can handle in a month and, two, if the provider will charge you for going over that limit. Judge that against your expectations of traffic for the first year your website is live.
The latter, storage, is key if you have product videos or a lot of images going onto your small business website. You don’t want to run out of storage space or bog down your site too much with large files that need to load for every visitor.
Also, look at uptime guarantees from providers. Many promise 99% uptime or better, but check the fine print for a service-level agreement that backs up that promise (and potentially compensates you if it isn’t met).
Initial Setup and Ongoing Maintenance
What does it take to get your website live? This will look a little different for everyone.
Some of you might be launching a brand new site from scratch. In this case, you’ll want to look for one-click installations, website builders, pre-built templates, and more. This is also a good opportunity to bundle domain registration with your web hosting plan so you can get everything from a single provider.
Others might be switching web hosts, which means you’ll want to look for a hosting solution that offers migration services. The best hosts will do this for free with minimal or no downtime during the switch.
In both of these scenarios, you want to prioritize hassle-free maintenance. Small business owners don’t have time to be playing around on the backend of their web hosting service every day. It should be a set-it-and-forget-it solution. And keep an eye out for automated backups (including whether they’re done weekly or daily) as well as routine backend maintenance, such as automated WordPress and plugin updates.
Use-Case-Specific Needs
Some small business owners have unique needs that need to be addressed by a hosting provider. It all depends on the type of business you’re running and what you’re trying to get out of your website.
For example, maybe you’re planning to sell products on your small business site. In this case, you’ll need to use a web hosting provider that supports ecommerce functionality. Be mindful, too, of corresponding needs—not every host that supports ecommerce lets you easily sell services in the same way as regular products or lets you book appointments.
Or maybe you want to collect email addresses from your website visitors and integrate that with your CRM. For this situation, a WordPress-friendly hosting provider is likely the best option, as you can easily add plugins for this functionality.
Support
Your web hosting provider should be available to help you 24/7/365. If you have a problem or question on a holiday or in the middle of the night, you ought to be able to connect with a real person ASAP.
Small business owners probably won’t be updating or making changes to their website during regular business hours—they have operations to run, employees to manage, and customers to deal with. Most of you will probably be doing work on your site during off hours.
Look for a hosting provider that offers the full array of phone, live chat, email, and ticket support. You can also check out user reviews to see how long it takes on average to resolve problems and close tickets.
For those of you who want a little extra help, you can look for a managed web hosting solution. These will typically be a bit more expensive than an unmanaged plan, but everything is handled for you on the backend. This includes software updates, security patching, site backups, and more.
