You decided to finally go online with your business? That’s great! You know why? Maybe you’ve heard the saying: “Who’s not online, doesn’t exist”. In a certain way, that’s true. But it’s true especially for small businesses.
Are you struggling to find new clients? Or you want more exposure for your new business? Maybe you just want to be online, like everybody else these days? It doesn’t matter what your reasoning is, having a website for your business is essential to succeed in the modern world.
But there is a very important step you must go through, before developing a website. You guessed it; choosing a hosting good provider! Every website needs a host to be able to work. But having a small business gives you a better motive to choose the best hosting for your future website.
In this article, you’ll see 10 of the most popular (and best) hosting providers. I’ll talk about them in order to see if they are good enough to be your host. The companies that I’ll cover in this post are the following ones:
- InMotion – from $3.99 / mo
- HostGator – from $2.75 / mo
- BlueHost – from $3.95 / mo
- A2Hosting – from $3.92 / mo
- SiteGround – from $3.95 / mo
- GreenGeeks – from $3.95 / mo
- Hostinger – from $0.80 / mo
- InterServer – from $5 / mo
- NameCheap – from $2.88 / mo
- StableHost – from $3.50 / mo
In the following table you can find more details about the renewal price, SLA uptime, bandwidth and storage, allowed websites and email accounts of the above enumerated hosting companies:
| Web Host | Promo Price | Renewal Price | SLA Uptime Guarantee | Storage / Bandwidth | Allowed Websites | Email Accounts |
| InMotion | $3.99 | $7.99 | 99.9% | Unlimited | 2 | Unlimited |
| HostGator | $2.75 | $6.95 | 99.9% | Unmetered | 1 | 1 |
| BlueHost | $3.95 | $7.99 | n/a | 50 GB / Unmetered | 1 | 5 |
| A2Hosting | $3.92 | $7.99 | 99.9% | Unlimited | 1 | 25 |
| SiteGround | $3.95 | $11.95 | 99.9% | 10 GB / Unlimited | 1 | Unlimited |
| GreenGeeks | $3.95 | $9.95 | 99.9% | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Hostinger | $0.80 | $7.99 | 99.9% | 100 GB / Unlimited | 1 | 1 |
| InterServer | $5 | $5 | 99.9% | Unlimited | 25 | Unlimited |
| NameCheap | $2.88 | 99.9% | 100% | 20 GB / Unmetered | 3 | 30 |
| StableHost | $3.50 | 99.9% | 99.9% | Unlimited | 1 | Unlimited |
As you can see, some providers offer multiple domains and website hosting even with their basic plans.
In each case, I’ll cover the pros and cons for a certain host. You should know from the start, there is no option that will comply with every possible wish that someone might have. Your site could need something else that another one doesn’t; or the other way around. In the end you should be able to choose a hosting provider, which is in accordance with your specific needs.
Though there are some options that must be available for anyone with a small business. For instance, you don’t want your site to have a bad uptime number. So, it’s mandatory that your chosen host will give you at least 99.9% uptime.
Another thing you should consider is security. An SSL certificate is of paramount importance if you own a business website. Some hosts will give you this for free. Others only if you buy it. This really depends on your financial possibilities. But either way, you must have this security layer built into your website. All your data, including that of your client’s, will be much safer with an SSL certificate.
Now let’s move on, and see what these hosting companies bring to the table.
Let’s begin with our first possible choice:
1. InMotion Hosting
InMotion was first launched in 2001 in the USA by Sunil Saxena and Todd Robinson. For more than 15 years now, it is one of the leading web hosting companies around the world. But what makes it such a popular choice for many people and businesses?
These are only some of the pros that you get if you decide to sign up for one of their hosting services:
- FREE Domain
- Free data backups
- Free 1 click installer
- Free SSD drives
- Google apps integration
- Secure IMAP Email
- 90 Day Money Back Guarantee
But what are the prices at InMotion Hosting? Let’s take a look at those right now! Their business hosting comes in 3 plans (yes, this is quite common): Launch / Power / Pro
Launch plan:
This plan comes for $6.39 / month. You may be thinking that the other 2 hosts have lower rates for their starter plan. Yes, that is true. But check out how many features InMotion gives you for this price (which is not too expensive at all).
Just like many other hosts, you get a FREE SSL certificate, to make sure your site is protected. Alongside this, you also have unlimited email accounts, unlimited email storage and unlimited disk space for your site.
InMotion gives the ability to host 2 websites using only their starter plan. How awesome is that? Most hosting providers give you only 1 website for the lowest price.
For this price, you also have free regular backups, which are mostly paid with others.
Even if you find that this host isn’t for you, they give you a 90-day money back guarantee. So, your money is safe, however you choose to proceed.
Power plan:
This one is the most often purchased plan they offer. It costs $8.49 / month. Of course, you have all the benefits from the previous plan, but other plusses too.
For example, you can build up to 6 websites, not only 2. This option will give you a great opportunity to grow your business way bigger and faster. If you choose to sell something online, like Amazon does, this plan will come in handy. Why? This will allow you to have an eCommerce ready website with little to no effort.
Pro plan:
The Pro plan is their most expensive business hosting plan. It will cost you $14.71 / month, if you choose to go for it. Is it worth your money? Well, take into consideration what you really need.
With this plan comes unlimited support for websites. Yes, you can have an unlimited number of websites for this money. But most businesses don’t need this option. So, it depends on your specific case.
They also give you unlimited parked and sub domains along with Pro Level Support. This support will take care of your sites well-being, so you don’t have to.
For a starter, the Power plan is all you need. If you outgrow it, you can upgrade to this higher plan anytime.
2. HostGator
HostGator is very popular amongst new website owners. Just like BlueHost, HostGator also comes with 3 different plans for hosting your site. But before I go through those, I’ll mention another plus that HostGator provides: a website builder.
Their website builder is a simple drag and drop tool. When I say simple, I really mean simple. Anybody can use this platform. You do not need to have any technical or programming knowledge to be able to create your perfect business website.
They include hundreds of professional themes to use on your site. And all of them are responsive, which means that it doesn’t matter if your visitor uses a smartphone / tablet or a PC to look at your website. It will look stunning on any device.
Something that is very popular on HostGator’s website builder is the ability to use prebuilt sections. These sections can be used to take care of certain functionalities. Since they are prebuilt, you don’t have to waste time with putting them together. Just drag and drop them on the site, and you are good to go.
Hatchling plan:
This one starts at $2.75 / month. Even cheaper than BlueHost’s starter plan. For this price, you get 1 single domain hosting and unmetered bandwidth. They also include a free SSL certificate.
One Click Installs: this means that you can install WordPress, Magento, Joomla, Drupal and other Content Management Systems with just one click. The best one is WordPress, which is easily able to create and manage any type of website.
Baby plan:
It costs $3.95 / month. For this amount, you get all the features from the Hatchling plan, but not just one single domain. This plan includes unlimited domains for the price.
Business plan:
To grow your website quicker, you should go for this plan. It costs $5.95 / month. Of course, you have included all the options from the first 2 plans, but additionally some other perks too:
You get a free upgrade to a Positive SSL. What is this? A Positive SSL will display on your site a TrustLogo Site Seal. This seal will let your visitors know that you value security on your site and make sure that they are secure too while using it. Trust between you and your users will be more easily established.
With the Business plan, you also have included free SEO tools. Using them will help you to be more easily found online. When you start using them, you’ll see a step-by-step SEO plan to help you out. It would be wise to give it a try, because you want to stand out in the online world and good SEO will let you do just that.
3. BlueHost
This company is one of the most recommended ones out there. They were founded in 2003 in the USA. More than 2 million sites worldwide are using BlueHost as their hosting provider. This number alone gives the company a very good trust score.
But what are they offering that so many people, and more importantly businesses are choosing them as a hosting provider? Let’s take a look at the features they include with the different plans.
If you’re just starting out with your business, it’s best if you go for one of the shared hosting plans. BlueHost gives you 3 possibilities to choose from: Basic, Plus and Choice Plus. Now I’ll cover what is offered with all of these and for what price.
Basic plan:
This plan starts at $3.95 / month. Yes, it’s very cheap, but it packs some great features. For instance, you get unmetered bandwidth and 50 GB of SSD storage. Any modern website needs an SSD based server, so it can perform fast enough for even slow internet connections.
Another good option they include in this package is 1 free domain name for a whole year. Many starter businesses find this option very attractive. After all, you don’t have to pay for your domain for an entire year, if you choose BlueHost.
Before, I mentioned how important security is for your new website. Well, BlueHost provides a free SSL certificate along with your free domain name. This way you don’t have to worry too much about your security and that of your visitors.
For your business to look more professional, they also include 5 email accounts. You can set up an email like “mybusiness@mybusiness.com”. This means that you can use a personal email, that isn’t linked to Yahoo or Gmail or any other email provider. This feature can give a real boost to your business, because people will see that you’re serious about what you’re doing.
Plus / Choice Plus:
These 2 plans come for the same price ($5.95 / month), but there are some differences. BlueHost recommends using Choice Plus. This plan comes with some additional perks compared to the simple Plus package.
All the following options are unlimited or unmetered if you choose Plus/Choice Plus: websites, SSD storage, bandwidth, sub domains, parked domains, and email accounts/storage. Compared to the Basic plan, these 2 packages come with lots of additional bonuses, as seen above.
With any of these 2 plans, you obtain 1 anti-spam service (Spam Experts), to protect your email addresses. You will also receive $200 for Marketing Offers. This will let your site grow faster.
If you choose Choice Plus you also get 1 domain privacy for free, which is very important to keep your personal information secure and hidden from the whole internet. CodeGuard Basic is also included here. This will allow you to periodically backup your site, so in case of a problem you can use a saved version.
BlueHost also provides other types of hosting services, but for a start these will be just good for you.
4. A2Hosting
A2Hosting is an American company founded in 2001. They say that the goal to their service is to provide the best hosting solutions that are blazing fast and very reliable. What can we say, is A2Hosting accomplishing this goal?
The clients using this hosting provider are mostly very pleased with the service. On their site you can find regularly updated testimonials. But if you search for other reviews online, you will find pretty much the same opinions. So, the trust score is quite good for A2Hosting.
But what do they offer? There are different types of hosting services provided: shared hosting, VPS hosting, reseller hosting and dedicated hosting. The best one for a small business is the shared hosting. Just like the others, A2Hosting offers this in 3 different tiers:
- Lite – $3.92 monthly
- Swift – $4.90 monthly
- Turbo – $9.31 monthly
For a small business website, it’s best to choose the Swift plan at $4,90/month. This includes everything a new website could need. For example, you have unlimited websites, storage, databases and transfer. With any of the plans, you get a money back guarantee (any time).
The SSL certificate is also freely added to this plan (all the others actually). Swift also comes with regular backups for your website.
The third Turbo plan includes something called Turbo (obviously). What is this about? According to the name, it assures that your site is faster than usual. 20 times faster, they say. It does this by having fewer users on a single server and it also uses less CPU memory. This way your site will load faster.
A fast loading site is a must for any business, no matter their size. Your possible clients could leave the site if it isn’t loading soon enough. So, think about it, you may need this feature.
5. SiteGround
SiteGround is a hosting provider company with more than 400 employees. It is one of the biggest independently possessed hosting companies around the globe. They have more than 1.7 million domains registered for hosting, and this number grows every day.
SiteGround comes with many different hosting possibilities. For example, you can choose between simple web hosting, WordPress hosting, reseller hosting, WooCommerce hosting, cloud hosting and enterprise hosting.
First, let’s see what do the normal web hosting plans have to offer (you should choose one of these for your small business). These also come in 3 separate packages.
But there are certain features included in every single offered hosting plan. They come in handy for any new website owner: free website builder, free SSL certificate, free email accounts, free daily backups, 24/7 support, 30 days money back guarantee, cPanel, and other options as well.
StartUp:
This one comes for a monthly $3.95. What’s included in this plan? Well, you get a pretty basic start. Along all the features I already mentioned, you have 1 website available for use. This has 10 GB ready for storage. It’s basically suited for about 10,000 visitors every month. Yes, it’s quite basic, as you can see.
GrowBig:
This one costs $6.45/month. Just like the name is suggesting, this plan is crafted for business growth. How’s it accomplishing this? It includes some great options that will help you along the way. For start, you can host an unlimited number of sites. If this doesn’t give you an edge over your competitors, nothing will.
For your sites to work well, SiteGround also gives you 20 GB of disk space to store your entire site’s data. The GrowBig plan is easily suitable for about 25,000 monthly visitors.
There are some so called “Premium features” included too: free site transfer, priority technical support, SuperCacher to give you a better site speed, restore to a previous backup for free. Let’s move on to the third and final plan they offer:
GoGeek:
This plan is available for a monthly $11.95 fee. How does it stack up against the other two? Of course, you have all the previously mentioned features included with some other ones also.
Instead of 20, you have 30 GB of disk space available for use. This plan is well crafted to support up to approximately 100,000 monthly visits.
Geeky Advanced Features; this is another pack of options available in the GoGeek plan. It allows you to have fewer accounts on the server. This means that your site will be much faster to load the content.
This third plan includes WordPress and Joomla staging. What does this mean? A staging site is basically a clone of your personal site. It can be used to test new features that you want to add to it. This way, your business site won’t be influenced if something goes wrong. You can only add that specific feature when it works well on your clone.
6. GreenGeeks
GreenGeeks captures many people’s attention. Yes, because of the name. What does it stand for? They say that the entire platform was built thinking about being eco-friendly. How could they do something like this with a hosting platform?
The energy used by GreenGeeks is invested 3 times in the form of renewable energy using the Bonneville Environmental Foundation. Every resource used by the company is put to maximum use, thus not wasting valuable means. The company says that using their hosting platform your website will make a difference, being eco-friendly.
Anyway, besides being ecological, what will your business website have? All the 3 plans they offer have the following things in common:
- Unlimited SSD storage space
- Unlimited Bandwidth
- Unlimited email accounts
- Unlimited hosted domains
- Included 1 free domain
- Free SSL certificate
- Free site builder
- Free website transfer
- cPanel and Softaculous (Software installing and managing tool)
- Automated backups
- Unlimited MySQL databases
- Cloudflare CDN – this allows your site to load faster
- Emails:
- Starter: 100 / hour
- Pro: 300 / hour
- Premium: 500 / hour
The 3 plans cost almost the same amount as the GreenGeeks plans:
- Starter – $3.95/month
- Pro – $6.95/month
- Premium – $16.95/month
If you choose to go with the Pro plan, you will receive 2 times the performance of the Starter plan and 4 times the performance with the Premium plan.
It’s best if you choose the Starter plan, at least to begin with. It will give you everything you need for your website to work the way you want.
7. Hostinger
This one will surely get your attention with its prices. We can safely say that Hostinger is one of the cheapest hosts that we talk about in this article. Just check out these prices:
- Single Shared Hosting (basic) – $0.80/month
- Premium Shared Hosting (pro) – $3.49/month
- Business Shared Hosting (premium) – $7.95/month
What do you say, pretty cheap, right? Yes, but does this mean that the service isn’t of a good quality? Let’s see! I’ll go through all 3 plans in order. Then you decide if it’s worth it or not (I personally think it is).
Single Shared Hosting:
With this plan you have 1 single website included for the price of $0,80/month. To start off, it’s all you need. They give you 10 GB of SSD space to store your data and 100 GB of bandwidth.
To have every data and info sorted out they include 1 single MySQL database. Now I’m going to list here some of the features included with any of the 3 plans, so this one has them too:
- 99.9% uptime guarantee
- User friendly website builder
- 24/7 support – this one is very good at Hostinger
- Unlimited parked domains and FTP accounts
- Weekly backups
- PhpMyAdmin
- 1-Click Installer (over 100 apps to choose from)
- Access to the latest version of WordPress
- GIT integration
- FTP over the SSL certificate for much better security
Premium Shared Hosting:
This plan comes with certain perks when compared to the previous one. For example, you have 1 free domain registration, if you pay hosting for a year upfront.
Another plus is the fact that you gain an unlimited number of email accounts, when the Single plan gives you only one account. The number of subdomains also increases from just 2 (Single) to 100 in the Premium hosting package.
This plan will allow you to have SSH access also. I’ll tell you what this is: it stands for Secure Shell access; this is a type of interface that will let you access your account from any remote computer. If you’re on the go, this will be helpful to manage the website.
Business Shared Hosting:
The most expensive plan (not really expensive) gives you a free SSL certificate for a secure website, daily backups and 4x the processing power if compared to the Single plan (2x when compared to the Premium one).
Above these new options, there isn’t much else to get from the Business plan. For starters the Single or Premium plan will be just fine.
8. InterServer
This company isn’t one of the most known players in the hosting business (compared to the ones like BlueHost or HostGator). But you should definitely check them out. They have more than 19 years of experience in hosting websites, being founded in 1999. Some of the hosting services they offer are shared hosting, dedicated hosting, cloud hosting and quick servers.
Let’s see more closely what will they if you choose to go with them:
Standard Web Hosting:
This one comes for a monthly $5.00 fee. One of the best things about this package is the Inter-Insurance. What is it? Maybe you’ve heard before that a site can be hacked, which will lead to bad things. Or just simply certain errors can occur (even with the best hosted and managed site).
That’s where the Inter-Insurance steps in. It will take care of compromised or hacked accounts. They will clean-up the account by doing 3 things:
- Investigate how and where the problem came up and the reason behind it.
- Restore everything the way it was.
- Preventing this from ever happening again, by fixing the cause.
The other features that you have for this price are the following ones: free website migration, 24/7 support, SSD drives for the MySQL databases, monthly payment (no need to pay ahead), 30 days money back guarantee and personal business email account, just to name a few.
Private Email Hosting:
This plan isn’t created to host a website. ‘’Then why are you talking about it?’’, you might ask. We are talking about it because it’s a nice plan that comes in handy for a small business owner. Why?
Every business needs a professional email account (as I said before). This plan allows you to own one, without owning a website too. It lets you have your own business email account to use with your company. This service costs $5/month, just like the hosting package I talked about earlier.
You have all time support, spam and virus protection, unlimited storage, unlimited devices and 100% uptime guarantee. All this will work on any platform: Windows, MAC, iOS, Android and Webmail.
9. NameCheap
NameCheap was founded in the year 2000 by Richard Kirkendall. According to the 2018 Inc. 5000, NameCheap is one of the fastest growing companies in America. It has almost 2 decades of experience in handling website hosting, with more than 10 million websites under its belt.
If we talk about hosting for your small business, they got you covered. Some of the service they provide are shared hosting (we’ll talk about this one), dedicated WordPress hosting, reseller hosting, VPS hosting and even private email hosting, just like InterServer.
All 3 versions of shared hosting are quite cheap. They come for the following prices:
- Stellar (basic) = $2.88/month
- Stellar Plus (mid-range) = $4.88/month
- Stellar Business (premium) = $8.88/month
Thankfully, NameCheap allows you to choose between paying monthly and annual plans. The ones I just listed are the monthly plans. If money is really important in your case, you should go for the yearly plans. Yes, they are longer, but you get a pretty good discount on each of them: 50%.
The Stellar plan comes with all the basic things you need for your new business site. An SSD is a must, which they give you along with 20 GB of storage. Unmetered bandwidth is also added to the plan. You can choose between the US and UK datacenter for the site to be hosted. A nice perk is the website builder. All this is possible for up to 3 sites on this plan.
The most popular choice is the Stellar Plus plan. This one is for more demanding websites. NameCheap gives you unlimited SSD disk space, unlimited bandwidth and unlimited websites. The website builder is also available for use.
Stellar Business is for a well-established site. You get something called Pure SSD storage. But since you’re just at the beginning with your site, the Stellar Plus plan is good enough.
10. StableHost
StableHost is a privately-owned company founded in 2009. They aren’t the oldest web hosting service out there, but they proved themselves to be worthy of mentioning. Why?
First of all, what is the basis for a good web hosting service? The most important aspect of any hosting service is good hardware. They own state of the art equipment to back up your site and make sure of an outstanding performance. 96 GB of RAM and Enterprise level SSD drives for a stable and modern platform.
But what else do you need for a good web hosting service? StableHost is made up of about 15 people (not hundreds like other hosts). This way they make sure you have the best support you could ever get from a company. They only hire people who have a passion for their job.
But what are they giving you to work with? Just like any other hosting provider, StableHost also comes in 3 separate plans:
- Starter – $3.50/month
- Pro – $7.50/month
- Platinum – $28.50/month
For a small business owner, the Starter package would be the best choice. It lets you have all the functionality a website may need. For instance, they include in the package unlimited disk space and bandwidth for a single website.
The support is also great. You have 24/7 technical (or other) support via email and live chat to solve all your issues. A site builder is also included, so you don’t have to worry about creating the perfect user experience.
The Pro and Platinum plans have of course other perks, but to begin with, the Starter pack will do just fine.
Conclusion
Well, we finally reached the end of this article. Are you ready to pick the perfect host for your new business website? We talked about 10 hosts, who are top notch choices for anybody.
All you have to do now is to pick the one that suits your personal business. Keep in mind that there isn’t a host who will take care of every single wish you may have. You must choose the one that goes best with your needs. In the future, when your site will grow big enough, you can upgrade your plan anytime, or even switch to a new hosting provider if you feel that is needed.
