Best Web Hosting Services for Small Businesses of 2022

When you own or manage a small business, you can’t always rely on the immediate name recognition that large brands enjoy. In order to promote your business, you likely rely on word of mouth, creative advertising, and web presence. A good website is absolutely essential for any modern business. It’s generally the first place that both potential and existing customers and clients will go when they are seeking information about you. Whether they’re looking for something as basic as your hours of operation, or they’re ready to buy something from your e-commerce shop, the last thing you need is a technical headache that will disrupt the process.

A good web hosting service for small businesses will offer a mix of reliability, affordability, features, and support. You probably don’t have endless funds to funnel into professional web design services or developers to customize your online storefront. Instead, you need your web service to have what you need from the get-go and also have dependable, easy ways to access support when you need it. To help small business owners find a web host who can do all this and more, we’ve narrowed down the Best Web Hosting Services for Small Business of 2022.

In this rating, you’ll find the information required to make an informed decision about what web hosting service will best suit your small business. We’ve examined hosting types, plan options, affordability, storage, memory, website building tools, customer support, and more, all with the particular needs of small businesses in mind.

The following five companies are our choices for the best web hosting services that meet the unique needs of small businesses.

While it’s easy to imagine that webpages simply dwell freely in the mysterious, nebulous spaces of the internet, the reality is that physical servers here on Earth provide the connectivity between users and your site. Web “hosts” are exactly that – they provide the physical server space to host your site for the duration of your plan with them. To have a website, you must have access to server space. The most common type of web hosting is shared hosting, where multiple websites share server space and its resources, like CPU and RAM.

Good web hosts do far more than just rent out server space. Many also provide website building tools and services, manage domains, offer a range of security protocols, provide automated data backups, and ensure stability and reliability for the sites it hosts. The web hosting services in this small business rating and those in our Best Web Hosting Services of 2022 rating provide some of the most comprehensive web hosting for small and large businesses alike.

To learn more in detail about the ins and outs of web hosting, check out our What Is Web Hosting? guide.

Web hosting costs vary widely based on a number of factors and plan options. The first step is determining which type of hosting you’re looking for. Among the options are shared hosting, VPS hosting, WordPress hosting, dedicated hosting, cloud hosting, and more. Shared hosting will almost always be the most affordable, as you are sharing server resources with other websites, and for a good majority of small businesses, shared hosting plans can be a great option, sometimes starting as low as only a couple of dollars per month.

Something to pay careful attention to is the length of the commitment term. Almost all web hosting services provide sales or introductory pricing that can be very attractive. However, when that introductory period is up, renewal costs can increase sharply. Also pay careful attention to any add-on costs. For example, not every plan will include your domain or SSL certificate.

When choosing a plan, carefully consider how long you are willing to commit to the web host. Some have plan options for as long as four years, but most will give you a selection of monthly, one-year, two-year, and three-year plan durations. Typically, the longer you commit, the better the price will be. If you know you want your site up and running with the host for a long time, you can comfortably select a longer-term plan. But, if you know that your business may be experiencing changes in the short term, you will want to weigh the cost and benefits of pursuing a month-to-month or shorter plan length.

Small businesses have unique needs, and this includes the tools and features that will be most important for developing a great website. Your needs will likely be different from those of large or enterprise-level companies. For small businesses looking for a web hosting service, there are some key questions to ask during your search:

For the average small business, pricing, available support, reliability, and e-commerce capabilities will be the most important considerations. Once you have a sense of what your requirements are in a web hosting service, you can begin to better narrow down your options based on which companies can best meet your needs.

While it is possible to host your own website, it is not recommended. It requires a real investment of time and learning that isn’t worth it for most business owners and managers, who already have enough on their plates. A good web hosting service should be worth the cost, as the tools, features, uptime guarantees, and available support that come with reputable companies mean that you can concentrate on running your business and not spend valuable time troubleshooting site issues.

There are many different hosting types available, including shared hosting, VPS hosting, dedicated hosting, WordPress hosting, cloud hosting, and reseller hosting. Dedicated hosting is typically the most expensive type of hosting, as when you lease a server solely for yourself and do not have to share resources with other sites. However, most small businesses don’t have the traffic or high-security needs to warrant that type of hosting and can get exactly what they need from shared hosting, VPS hosting, or WordPress hosting.

Shared Hosting: Shared hosting is generally the most affordable hosting option. With shared hosting, your website is stored on a server with other websites, so you split CPU and RAM with other customers. For personal websites, informational websites, and low-to-medium traffic sites, shared hosting is an excellent option.

VPS Hosting: For businesses that want more control over their server environment, or that are especially concerned with website performance, VPS hosting may be the right option.  With Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting, you’ll still share some resources with other customers on the same server, but you’ll have your own dedicated resources as well that are not shared with anyone else. These plans are generally more expensive than shared hosting plans but not as expensive as dedicated hosting.

WordPress Hosting: WordPress Hosting is a type of web hosting that is tailored to WordPress websites. It is one of the best options for e-commerce and online shops, as some of the most popular e-commerce platforms, like WooCommerce, are designed specifically for WordPress. It can be more expensive than shared hosting, but it comes with features built specifically for WordPress websites, such as plug-ins, one-click installs, themes, and automatic updates.

Bandwidth – the amount of data that can be transmitted and accessed over a period of time – is measured in megabits per second (Mbps) and can impact your website’s performance if the limits slow performance. The amount of bandwidth your site will use depends on the number of visitors it has, how many pages those visitors are looking at, and the size of your pages. If you have these metrics, you can calculate an estimated bandwidth.

For most small businesses, the amount of bandwidth offered by the lowest plan tiers with a web host will likely be sufficient. If bandwidth is a concern, you may wish to purchase a higher-tier plan. There are also many hosting services that offer unlimited bandwidth for you to consider, even at their lowest shared hosting plan tiers, such as Bluehost, HostGator, and InMotion.

Uptime is the amount of time that a website is available and fully operational. This is typically expressed as a percentage. Many of the most popular web hosting companies will boast an uptime as high as 99.9%. Some downtime is unavoidable and required for server maintenance and to address other issues, but generally speaking, the higher the uptime, the better.

Pricing transparency ranges from company to company, and it may not always be clear right away what is and is not included in your plan. Some of the most common features to be aware of that may come with extra fees include the following:

The good news is that there are many excellent tools for website building that do not require any kind of extensive background in web design. For small businesses looking to build a basic website, most web hosts provide site-building tools with drag-and-drop functionality or pre-installed templates so you can build a site without any additional knowledge of coding or development.

If you’re looking to build an online shop, a web host that offers e-commerce functionality can get you up and running. WooCommerce, an open-source e-commerce platform designed for WordPress, is one of the most commonly supported e-commerce platforms by the web hosting companies in our ratings.

If you don’t want to deal with site design at all and have some extra funds to dedicate to professional services, many web hosts have associated services for web design. For example, our No. 1-rated web hosting service, Bluehost, offers full-service website design, marketing, search engine optimization (SEO), and pay-per-click (PPC) services.

Though it may not be the first item on your list of wants and needs from a web host, good security is essential. The United States Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) explains that when it comes to website security, it is essential to have safeguards in place to help prevent cyberattacks, especially those that could compromise any sensitive customer data. If you are a small business that conducts e-commerce via your website, this will be especially critical, as security breaches can put you and your customers at risk.

A good web host will provide essential security measures and protection with its plans. SSL certificates, secure file transfer protocols, DDoS protection, automated backups, and web application firewalls are all security measures that you may want to look into as you shop for a web host.

Site speed and page load speed can start to sound a bit like buzzwords when you’re researching web hosts, but these are actually really important aspects of your website, as they directly impact user experience. A potential customer who comes to your site and then has to wait for a slow, glitchy page to load may take that as a sign of what they might expect from your business generally, even if it isn’t true.

A good web hosting service can do a number of things to help improve speeds for its customers and ensure that user experience stays fast and reliable. These include using the fastest solid-state disk (SSD) drives, running the latest PHP: Hypertext Processor (PHP) version (a web-development scripting language), providing a free Content Delivery Network (CDN), and employing strategic caching methods. You don’t necessarily need to know what all that means, but if your web host outlines on its site the actions that they take to improve site speed for all customers, that’s a good start.

For more information about web hosting services, see the following guides:

In addition to our ratings of web hosting services, you may be interested in these guides to other products: