What is Web Hosting and Why Do Small Businesses Need It?
In this article we’ll go through exactly what web hosting is and what the best web hosting provider may be best based on your needs.
Definition of web hosting and its importance for small businesses
A web hosting service is simply a platform that allows individuals and businesses to host their websites on the internet. Nothing more than that.
Small businesses need web hosting to establish an online presence, increase visibility, and reach a wider audience.
Which web hosting company you choose will be dependant on your needs (defined and suggested below).
Benefits of using a web hosting provider for small businesses
Using a web hosting provider gives you a lot of benefits over hosting yourself. These web hosting companies are solely focused on creating a platform for businesses and companies so that those companies can focus entirely on their product and niche without having to expend energy thinking about uptime, security and scalability of their website (more on this below).
Some benefits of hosting providers include:
- Reliable uptime and fast loading speeds
- Enhanced security features and protection against cyber threats
- Scalability and flexibility to accommodate growing business needs
- Access to technical support and web hosting management expertise
I’ll try to make this simple by breaking this down in to my recommendation based on categories.
Once I’ve done with the recommendations we’ll go in to the specifics of what you will need to look out for.
Best web hosting for bloggers
WordPress
WordPress is easily the best platform for hosting your blog. Whether you get one visitor per month or one millions visitors per month, WordPress can handle it.
WordPress offers extremely easy creation with their own templates ready for you to use. Simply browse their catelogue of prebuilt themes and choose the one you want:
Even those of us with no design ability can have an amazing looking blog.
WordPress hosted sites account for 43.4% of all websites on the internet. I’ll repeat that. 43.4% of all websites are using WordPress!
The support even on the most basic of plans is very quick and thorough and if you have a problem, due to the sheer amount of people using it, the problem will have been solved before and be extremely easy to find through Google.
WordPress has 59,600 plugins. If you want a plugin, it exists.
From:
WordPress offers a range of packages, starting at $5 a month and ranging up to $63 per month (they also have an enterprise offering too).
For those wanting to test the waters and see how they do with writing a blog, $5 per month is perfect.
WordPress offer an extremely easy upgrade plan to move higher through the tiers. This allows you start off cheap and easily move up a pricing plan or two when you grow.
Through plugins like WooCommerce, you can easily monetize your blog through online sales and taking payment is easy through the same set of WooCommerce plugins.
WordPress is fast, populate, safe, scalable and reliable.
Best web hosting for small to medium e-commerce sites
Shopify
As the name implies, Shopify is designed to sell.
Shopify holds 16.36% of the market share of all online marketplaces. There are 4.8 millions stores on Shopify and they sell to over 700 million customers a year with a total revenue of $444 billion.
With stats like that, you know they must be good.
Shopify offer three forms of package. Basic, Shopify and Advanced Shopify
For small businesses just starting out, Basic is all you need. With Basic, you still get great support, fast page load times, security features expected for your online store.
Moving to the Shopify plan allows you to have small team and better reporting. This is ideal for companies who are in the growth stage.
The Advanced Shopify plan gives you major benefits in the post sales space. You get professional reporting that allows you to fully track your users journey. Understanding the user journey should not be taken lightly. It has been proven just how critical it is to have an easy user journey for scaling your business to new hights.
Best web hosting for small businesses to advertise services
BlueHost
BlueHost is one of the oldest web hosting providers out there, hosting over two millionswebsites. Formed in 1996, BlueHost has been the hosting provider of choice for me for a number of years due to its affordability and ease of use.
For advertising services, you don’t need complexity. You need a simple and affordable solution.
BlueHost have a variety of plans available (all of which very cheap in my opinion):
Ranging from their Basic plan which offers a single website for $2.95/mo up to their Proplan for $13.95/mo there’s something for everyone.
The support, uptime, security and speed are all you need for advertising your services.
There isn’t much more to say here. Keep it simple when simple is all that’s needed.
Best web hosting where virtual private servers and Managed Servers
BlueHost
BlueHost again.
For the same reason that they are my preffered choice for basic website hosting, they are also my preferred choice for VPS and Managed Services.
I used BlueHost when working at a FinTech start up and I couldn’t recommend the support enough.
Depending on which package you choose, you can get an onoboarding specialist to help you get everyhing set up.
They offer:
- 24/7 fast response support
- Your Operating System of choice
- Easily configurable hardware setup
- Simple Dashboard for overview
- Unlimited Bandwidth
Choosing the Right Web Hosting Service for Your Small Business
Essential Features to Consider
When choosing the right web hosting provider for you, there are things you need to consider. Whether you are a small local business, starting your own blog or providing online services, the following will be critical to your success.
Security
Look for a web hosting provider with robust security features, such as SSL certificates, firewalls, and malware protection. Internet browsers such as Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Apple Safari all highlight to the user if your site is not secure.
Your company may be the best in the world at what it does, but if people are concerned that their personal details are not safe with you, they won’t engage.
Would you enter your bank details in to a site that your browser is telling you is unsafe?
Uptime
In this day and age, attention is at an all time low. If your website or service is down, people will move to a competitor rather than wait for you to be back up.
The impact of downtime on a small company can be huge. Not only can your site being down cost you potential customers, but it has an affect on your reputation as well. You don’t want to be known as a flaky site that sometimes doesn’t work.
Ensure that your hosting provider has at least 99.6% guaranteed uptime. Anything less than that and I’d look for another hosting provider.
Load Time
I’m going to reference attention here again. There is a distinct lack of it today. Don’t waste your customers attention by making them wait whilst your page loads.
The quicker you can get a person from clicking through to your site to being engaged, the better.
Look at the providers features for things like “dedicated SSDs”, “High Speed CDNs” and “Fast Caching” to ensure that they are focused on getting your website to load as quickly as possible.
You can also use services like Smooth SEO to get a performance report into your website. They will show you load speeds and how to improve them.
Price
There is a balance here to be had.
If you’ve read above, you’ll realise you don’t want to go too cheap on your web hosting. Speed, reliability and security should be considered things that will help your company stand out and grow.
However, most small businesses do not need to the enterprise level of service that a lot of hosting providers have. Enterprise as the name indicates, is reserved for those medium to large companies who are expecting large levels of traffic, complex workflows and multinational clientele.
Scalability Considerations
If you are a small business or site that is looking to grow a lot bigger in the coming years, consider how easy it is to go up a level or two in the hosting provider you choose.
If you start on the “Basic” plan, can you move to the “intermediate” plan easily? Is there a migration needed, or a simple click of a button?
There’s no use in signing up for the intermediate plan now and paying the extra while you are still small, but equally you don’t want to grow to the intermediate requirements only to find our your hosting provider doesn’t have an easy way to move up through their service offerings.
You want to know that when the time comes and your site is getting more traffic, or selling to more countries (or any number of reasons) that you can very easily and quickly upgrade your service.
Ease of Use and Support
Support comes in many forms. The cheaper and lower level offerings usually have support via email and public forums. The response time for these can be anything from never (public forums) to 24 hours (email).
Depending on your own level of expertise, this may not be a problem.
However, if you or someone in your company does not have much knowledge of the technical side of things, paying a bit extra for support is vital.
If you are not able to resolve a problem yourself with your payment processor, sales pagesor sign up forms you could lose a lot of money and customers.
I recommend going for the more highly used providers (more on this later) for the exact reason that if you are having a problem, the chances are that someone else has had it before. If you use a large provider and know how to Google, helping yourself becomes much easier.
Specialized Web Hosting Options for Small Businesses
Managed Web Hosting and Its Benefits
Managed web hosting is for when products and services get more advanced. With a fully managed service, you get 24/7 support from your provider and a dedicated machine (usually a virtual machine on a shared physical machine).
Your dedicated machine will tweaked by your provider and set up for your exact needs.
If you have peak times of the day/week/month/year you can have your machine recalibrate for those times to claim more resources.
Managed web hosting i would say is required if you are a medium size business or above and have specific needs that don’t fit the generic nature of other smaller providers.
Cloud Hosting and Virtual Private Servers (VPS)
Cloud hosting and VPS (Virtual Private Servers) are the stage up from managed web hosting.
This option is usually resigned to those companies that have in house IT services but don’t want to maintain physical machines.
Buying, maintaining and upgrading hardware is expensive and time consuming. Having a specialised company that can do this for you whilst you concentrate on running your business is a great time and effort saver.
WordPress-Specific Web Hosting Services
42.3% of all websites on the internet are powered by WordPress. Some are self hosted, some are hosted by WordPress themselves. Either way, that’s a huge amount.
If you want to do it, WordPress can do it. If you want a specific level of support, configuration, features, WordPress has it.
WordPress has thousands (if not tens of thousands) of plugins that are developed by individuals and companies alike. There is no problem that hasn’t already been solved on the WordPress platform.
Whether you are starting a blog, creating a small business website or need a more reliable hosting provider for your current website, WordPress has you covered.
Frequently Asked Questions About Web Hosting for Small Businesses
Can I host my own website?
Yes. You absolutely can.
Should you host your own website is a better question.
Hosting your own website means an awful lot of set up, both in physical hardware and software.
You need to take in to account all requirements listed above (security features, uptime, scalability, performance) and ask yourself if you have the in house expertise to handle all of these.
The responsibilities of hosting your own website usually cross the boundaries between Software departments, Infrastructure departments and domain admins. That’s a lot of people you need to have in house.
Having said all of that. If you already have these expertise in house and also requirements that are fairly unique to you, hosting your own website may be the correct thing to do.
Does managed web hosting come with a free domain?
Some of the best web hosting for small business website platforms do offer free domains with your web hosting. The free domains are usually the less desirable TLDs (Top Level Domains) though, such as “.co”, “.org”, “.blog” etc. You may need to pay if you want a prime “.com” domain.
If you don’t get a free domain with your web hosting provider however, it’s very simple to get one with companies like 123 Reg.
Conclusion: Finding the Best Web Hosting for Your Small Business
Recap of key considerations and top picks
To summaries, you need to think about what your best web hosting provider would be based on your short and intermediate term goals. Ensure that whatever you go with, the web hosting provider gives an easy upgrade at least to the next level up (higher traffic, more space for storage, better support, increased performance).
Is your primary focus blogging, advertising through your business website, e-commerceor a mixture of the above?
If you are writing your own website from scratch then you should look at managed hosting or virtual private servers.
Whatever your goals are, there are plenty of reputable companies out there with the trust and support built over many years.
What to do i do once I have my website?
Getting a domain and web hosting is just the first part of the journey.
Once you are set up with content and ready to go, you need to get your website in front of customers.
Without customers, there is no business.
Your website being on page one of Google would mean more people see you, visit you and ultimately turn in to customers. Being on page two of Google or beyond is a totally different story.
I would recommend getting an SEO expert that specialises in small businesses to run a report and tell you how to improve your visibility to the big search engines.
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