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Last Updated May 2023 

Top 5 Experts

Best Web Hosting for Small Businesses 2023
Find the right service for your business

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1. Bluehost

2. Ionos

3. DreamHost

4. A2 Hosting

5. HostGator

A website is essential to build and grow a business today, and web hosting is a crucial part of building a quality website. With so many different providers and plans on the market, choosing a web host can be daunting. To make your decision easier, we narrowed down the 10 best web hosting services based on key features that matter most. We selected these services based on price, performance, security, and extras such as a free domain name and free business email.
Search our expert reviews to compare the leading web hosting for small businesses. Learn more about their special offers & get started today.

5 Best Web Hosting Services

  • Powers 2M+ websites worldwide
  • Automatic WordPress installation
  • Free domain & website migration
  • Unmetered bandwidth
Bluehost is one of the most popular web hosting platforms, and for good reason. It offers a wide range of features at competitive prices, making it perfect for people just getting started with web hosting. For its Basic plan, you’ll have 10GB of storage, unmetered bandwidth, a free domain for your first year and up to 25 subdomains. Its Plus plan doubles your storage, gives you $200 in Google Ads/Bing credits and provides unlimited primary domains, parked domains and subdomains.
Bluehost is an ideal option for website owners who need a reliable and affordable hosting service that offers a wide range of features and tools to help them manage their site.

1

Bluehost

382 reviews

9.8

Very Good

Bluehost plans start at $10.99 per month, but you can get its Basic plan for as little as $2.95 per month for your first term. Its Choice Plus plan is $19.99 per month, or $5.45 per month for your first term. Online Store costs $9.95 per month for your first term and renews at $24.95 per month. Its most expensive plan is Pro, and costs $28.99 per month, though your first term is $13.95 per month.

Bluehost

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Pros

  • Free domain name
  • Free SSL certificate
  • Free business email
  • Includes a CDN
  • Higher-tiered plans include pro features such as client invoicing, staging and insights
  • 24/7 support

Cons

  • Price triples upon renewal
  • Limited storage
  • Must pay for automated backups
  • No phone support on its Basic plan
  • Free domain & SSL certificate
  • 99.9% uptime
  • Scalable performance management
IONOS is a top-rated web host that offers a wide variety of hosting plans to start, grow and manage your business website. All plans include a free domain name for one year, a free SSL certificate and 24/7 support. Enjoy 99.99% uptime, DDoS protection, scalable plans, geo-redundant infrastructure, unlimited storage and websites.
Startups that are cash-strapped can appreciate its ultra-low first-year pricing at $1 per month. Pricing goes up to $10 per month after the first year. Even at $10 per month, its optimized CPU and MEM resources make it a great option beyond the initial term.

If you’re not sure which plan to choose, IONOS has expert recommendations for which to pick—for example, starting an online store or finding a better host for your WordPress website.

2

Ionos

306 reviews

9.7

Very Good

Ionos

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Pros

  • User-friendly interface
  • Daily backups and data recovery
  • DDoS protection
  • Geo-redundant infrastructure for best uptimes
  • 24/7 customer service
  • 30-day money-back guarantee

Cons

  • Monthly plan costs increase significantly after first year (e.g., from $1 to $10 per month)
  • Limited storage in entry-level plan
  • Domain only free the first year
  • Includes just one email account
DreamHost has quickly become one of the leading web hosting providers. It’s reliable and affordable with feature-rich plans that include everything you need to build a new website, from a domain name and SSL certificate to one-click WordPress installation. In addition to its great value for the price, it also offers a beginner-friendly site builder and, best of all, very helpful support that is there no matter the type of issue you are having with your hosting or site.
  • Free domain name
  • 100% uptime guaranteed
  • 24/7 support
Plans start as low as $2.59 per month for a basic package. Its Shared Starter plan renews at $5.99 per month. This comes with a single website, unmetered bandwidth, 50GB of storage, up to five subdomains, six MySQL databases, free domain name privacy and 24/7 support via ticket.

3

DreamHost

253 reviews

9.5

Very Good

The best deal is the Shared Unlimited plan, at $3.95 per month with a long-term 36-month contract. After the promotional period ends, this increases to $10.99 per month. This plan includes unlimited websites, unlimited domain email, unlimited storage and unlimited MySQL databases.

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DreamHost

Pros

  • Free domain name and SSL certificate
  • One-, three-, 12- and 36-month contract lengths available
  • Long 97-day money-back guarantee
  • 100% uptime guarantee
  • Top-notch support

Cons

  • Pricing increases upon renewal
  • Lots of upsells in checkout
  • Cheapest plan doesn’t include a custom domain
  • Must pay for its unlimited plan for email
  • Easy site transfer
  • Anytime money-back guarantee
  • Support: 24/7 phone, chat, email
A2 Hosting is a hosting company that lives under the radar, but it’s one that shouldn’t be ignored. With some of the best customer service in the business, insanely fast shared hosting, and top-of-the-line hosting packages, your website will only get the best service. Plans are pricey, but worth it. A2 Hosting only promises excellence, and in our testing, they never came short of that.
For the average user, figuring things out can be a bit difficult at first. There’s a lot of different hosting packages, and depending on what you end up with, there’s a ton of different features available to you. Suffice it to say, it could get confusing. But, once you figure out your hosting package and what tools you have at your disposal, it gets easier to find your way around.

4

A2 Hosting

191 reviews

9.2

Very Good

If you’re looking to make a WordPress site, it’s never been easier to grasp. You can order it pre-installed with your hosting package or you can go through the steps of the easy-to-use 1-click install tool. It’s just as easy for many other content management systems (CMS) on A2 Hosting as well.

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A2 Hosting

Pros

  • Easy for the average user to use
  • Excellent customer service

Cons

  • Feature restrictions on cheaper plans
  • Lacks Windows-based server options
  • Easy-to-use control panel
  • Unmetered disk space & bandwidth
  • Drag-and-drop website templates
HostGator is one of our top picks for best web hosting service because of its exceptional value for money, reliable performance and generous features perfect for small and medium businesses in any industry. Hosting options include shared, WordPress, website builder, dedicated, virtual private server (VPS) and reseller hosting. It offers unmetered disk space, unmetered bandwidth and a 99% uptime guarantee. You’ll also get 24/7 support and a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Plans start at $2.75 per month for your first term. Each plan comes with one-click WordPress installation, unmetered bandwidth, a free SSL certificate, a free domain name and free WordPress/cPanel website transfers. For its mid-tier shared hosting plan, you can have unlimited websites for $3.50 per month for your first term.

5

HostGator

73 reviews

8.8

Good

HostGator

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Pros

  • Unmetered disk space and bandwidth on all plans
  • Free domain name
  • Free SSL certificate
  • Free website transfer service
  • $500 in Google Ads spend match credit
  • Support available 24/7/365 via phone, chat, tweet, knowledge base and blog

Cons

  • Pricing reflects a three-year commitment
  • Domain privacy costs extra
  • Automated backups cost extra

Frequently Asked Questions

How To Choose the Best Web Hosting Service for You

When choosing the best web hosting service, consider factors such as pricing, storage space and bandwidth limits, customer service, server location options, security features and whether it has automatic backups. Another thing you need to consider is its scalability. Migrating a website, even when a web hosting service does it for you, isn’t an easy task. Does the host offer a wide range of options that will scale with your site? Additionally, how easy is your web host to use?

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Essential Web Hosting Features
We recommend that you look for a web hosting provider with the following key features, regardless of your specific website needs:

Reliability and performance: Look for a hosting provider with good uptime, preferably 99.9% or higher so your site won’t experience outages. Most hosts provide a contractual guarantee where they’ll reimburse you part of your premium for outages.
● Security: Make sure your web host has DDoS protection, SSL certificates and other security features so your site is safe from malicious attacks.
● Customer service: Look for a host with 24/7 customer support, so you can easily get help if something goes wrong. What support options are available? Chat, phone, ticket and email support are typical for web hosts.
● Storage and bandwidth: Storage and unmetered bandwidth are two of the most important factors to consider when choosing a web host. The more storage you have, the more content you can store, such as videos and images. Bandwidth affects how quickly your website loads and how much data is transferred when visitors view your site. Look for a host that provides unlimited storage and bandwidth.
● Backups: It’s important to have regular backups of your website, so make sure the web host you choose offers automatic backups. If a hosting provider doesn’t automatically back up your website, consider investing in a third-party backup service.
Ease of Use
Look for a web hosting provider with an intuitive user interface and control panel. This will save you time in the long run if you need to make changes or updates to your website. A good web host should offer one-click installations for popular content management systems (CMS), such as WordPress or Drupal, and a drag-and-drop website builder if you’re not comfortable with coding.

Scalability
Finally, it’s important to consider scalability when choosing a web hosting service. How will you grow your website in the future? Will your host’s services be able to keep up with your growth? Does the host offer an easy way to scale up, such as offering VPS and dedicated hosting options? A good web host should be able to handle the growth of your website. Similarly, if you’re taking a break for a while, can you drop to a lower-tiered plan?
Web hosting is a service that allows anyone to essentially rent space on the internet, and websites must have web hosting in order to be accessible online. Some content management systems (CMS),  include web hosting as part of their monthly fee, whereas if you’re building a site on WordPress, you’ll need to purchase web hosting from a web hosting provider, such as Bluehost or IONOS
What Is Web Hosting?

Before you can find a home for your website via web hosting, you first need a domain name. While related, web hosting and domain hosting are very different services. Web hosting is the process of connecting your website to a server, whereas domain hosting is the process of securing a domain name or web address for your website.

Following our earlier analogy, if web hosting is akin to renting space in a building then domain hosting is like putting a nameplate outside your door with your name and address. The domain is what people use to navigate to your address on the Internet.

Many service providers provide both domain hosting and web hosting, which can provide one-stop-shop convenience but. depending on your needs, you may want to consider separating the services. Regardless, before you can even consider web hosting, you first need a domain name via a domain registrar.
Web Hosting vs. Domain Hosting
Think of web hosting as the process of finding your website a home. The contents of your website—the domain name, HTML code, images, text and so on—all need a place to live. Web hosting provides a place for this content to live on a server.

In short, a server is a computer that connects users to your website. In other words, the server is like a large condo building or office building and web hosting is the process of renting office space or buying a condo in that building.
How Does Web Hosting Work?

Top 5 Experts

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