These best web hosting providers for small businesses help free you from technical hassles so you can focus on your customers and grow your business. Every small business needs a website and most have higher requirements than lower-end hosting plans provide for blogs and portfolios. You never want your business to go offline or to be slow which can give a bad impression for crucial customers which is why we've hand picked providers that offer amazing uptime, email, and security features to make sure you're always ready and connected.
The best small business web hosting of 2024
The main hosting options for small businesses are VPS and cloud. Shared hosting can be an option for smaller businesses but your resources are shared with others which is not the best for speed, reliability, or security if you have a more demanding site.
We can't tell you what the best option is for you because no one knows your business like you but we can tell you these are the options most frequently used by small businesses and listed the key features so you can workout which one is right for you.
Best small businesses web hosting overall
We've recommended Siteground for small businesses because of their value for money, features, and strong reputation. Plus, their plans can be navigated without being the most tech-savvy. The main reason we recommend SiteGround is for their cloud architecture. It allows you to scale easily to meet demands without downtime or disruption to your customers.
For the first 12 months you get 100,000 monthly visits, unmetered traffic, 20 GB storage, managed WordPress, a CDN, and email for $4.99 a month. The plan later renews at $29.99/mo but that is still good value compared to other providers that offer managed hosting.
Siteground's customer support is a strong selling point. The majority of queries get solved at first contact and their team is very highly trained to help you with the majority of issues. If you're already with another host Siteground currently offer free domain and site transfer with all plans.
Read our Siteground review for more information and test results
Best small business web hosting for beginners
Hostinger has been around for a long time and over the years it accumulated over 29 million customers. Their shared plans are great for beginners but might not be suitable for small businesses. The highest spec shared plan is $24.99/mo (discounts are available based on contract duration with the cheapest being $9.99/mo), with which you get 200GB NVMe, unlimited bandwidth, free email, and free CDN but how much processing power you get is not guaranteed, or stated.
Hostinger's KVM4 plan is $29.99/mo (discounts are available based on contract duration with the cheapest being $10.49/mo for 24 months), for which you get 200GB NVMe storage, 4vCPU, 16GB RAM, 16TB bandwidth, 1 snapshot, weekly backups, dedicated IP address, and a malware scanner.
You just have to be aware that Hostinger's VPS plans are unmanaged so if you don't have someone within your small business who can frequently manage updates and deal with issues at 3am or on weekends, unmanage might not be the best option for you.
All in all, Hostinger is a capable provider with very cheap plans that can appeal to anyone that is looking for an unmanaged VPS.
Read our Hostinger review for more information and test results
Best cheap web hosting for small business
Shared hosting can be slower and less reliable than VPS and dedicated plans, but it might still be an option for smaller websites, and the best plans cover all the core business needs.
DreamHost's shared hosting plan scores well on the fundamentals. There are no limits on bandwidth, emails or MySQL databases. Your site is secured by a free Let's Encrypt SSL certificate, and preinstalled WordPress allows you to get a quality site up and running in an afternoon.
Handy extras include the ability to host unlimited domains from a single account. And in a nice touch, DreamHost doesn't just offer a free domain name with each shared hosting plan (except the monthly plan): there's free privacy protection, too. If you've registered a domain without that, and been inundated with emails and phone calls from ‘website designers’ and assorted scammers, you'll know how valuable that can be.
It's a strong all-round package, but if you need more, DreamHost also offers everything from managed WordPress and WooCommerce, to VPS, dedicated and cloud hosting plans.
VPS Business plan is especially suited for small businesses as it was built for them according to DreamHost. You get unlimited everything except for storage (60GB). Since it's a VPS, you'll use your own server resources for unhindered performance and if the need arises, you can easily scale up the RAM.
Billing is flexible. You can sign up for monthly billing, or alternatively choose the three-year plan for the best discounts. Don't be put off by the longer term: DreamHost products are protected by an exceptional 97-day money-back guarantee, so there's plenty of time to test the service for yourself.
Read our DreamHost review for more information and test results
Best managed VPS
ScalaHosting's has won 15 different awards for their VPS hosting in 2024 and their plans come with a range of features that make them perfect for businesses. All VPS plans come with free SSL certificates, SShield security, caching, remote daily backups, blacklist monitoring, and a dedicated IP address.
One of the best things about ScalaHosting is that they're cloud-based. If your website or web application demands increase significantly, you're able to scale your resources with zero downtime, and redundancy ensures that issues related to a server wont impact your business.
For VPS options ScalaHosting is slightly above average pricing wise but the support and features you receive make it well worth it. ScalaHosting is one of of top choices for small businesses because of the flexibility of the plans, uptime, backups, and range of features. Compared with unmanaged hosting the price gap is quite large but if you consider the extra management you receive it can work out cheaper.
ScalaHosting also offer an anytime money back guarantee on their 36 month plans but it's unlikely you'll ever use it because ScalaHosting's churn rate is a minimal 2%. That's a great testament to how satisfied ScalaHosting customers are.
Read our full ScalaHosting review
Best for managed hosting
WordPress is the world’s favorite website builder, and it’s easy to see why: newbies can learn the basics in an evening, yet WordPress is so crammed with features that it can also handle the largest and most demanding of sites.
If your web needs are simple, you can install and try WordPress on almost all hosting plans (even the really, really cheap ones.) But if you’re running a business site where speed, reliability and support are critical, then WP Engine is one of the best WordPress hosting providers.
While WordPress is just a small fraction of the typical web host’s product range, for instance, WP Engine sells nothing else. The company is focused entirely on building its own technologies to optimize WordPress and its speed, security and support.
The results are impressive. WP Engine doesn’t just try to accelerate your site by pre-installing standard WordPress plugins, for instance; the company has developed its own custom EverCache technology to maximize WordPress speeds.
There’s more performance-related help in a custom speed test which checks your page size, load time, how long it takes to display, and even keeps a history over time. Sounds simple, but we found this really helped identify which changes improved load times, and which slowed us down.
In another smart and very unusual touch, WP Engine restricts users from installing WordPress plugins which might introduce performance or security issues. We’ve not seen anything like that level of expertise from general web hosts, who (for the most part) will happily let you install whatever problematic plugins you like.
WP Engine support (via live chat and phone for some plans) is outstanding. Most providers have a handful of old WordPress articles on the website, and agents with little WordPress knowledge. We’ve found the WP Engine support team can handle all kinds of complex WordPress queries, and the support site has more high quality guides and resources than we’d expect from a paid course.
All this power comes at a price. The Startup plan includes all the core features we’ve described here for a single site, with free SSL, a free CDN, daily backups and more, but it’s $15 a month on the annual plan, and that’s with a tiny 50GB monthly bandwidth. (WP Engine suggests that’s enough for 25,000 visits a month.)
You can upgrade to lift these limits, but prices stay high. The Growth plan supports 10 sites, and its 20GB monthly bandwidth allowance should cover 100,000 visits, but it’s a chunky $58 a month.
If you need a quality WordPress package but these figures would bust your budget, Bluehost offers three decent plans for under $10 a month over three years.
But if you need the WordPress hosting best, WP Engine would be our choice. It may have a premium price, but it’s also an outstanding premium service, and the lengthy 60-day money-back guarantee gives you plenty of time to see if WP Engine is the best WordPress host for you.
Read our full WP Engine review.
Best for small eCommerce businesses
Every great web store needs fast, reliable, and secure web hosting, but that’s just the start. The very best ecommerce hosts have specialist WooCommerce plans, take the time to make ecommerce accessible to all levels of user, and have the expert-level support to help build your store, get it online, and keep the site running smoothly.
Bluehost supports web stores on all its products, but the WooCommerce plans outperform most of the competition.
One issue with many ecommerce hosts is they assume a lot of experience in both web design and running a web store. But Bluehost is very different. Every Bluehost ecommerce plan includes its WordPress-based website builder, an AI-powered tool which makes it very easy to create your initial store. Just answer a few questions on your site, its topic, purpose, your preferred colors, fonts and layouts, and Bluehost quickly generates a matching site.
Whatever store you create will benefit from quality hosting underneath. Our speed tests found Bluehost delivered well above average speeds, for example. And although we were a little disappointed to see that Bluehost doesn’t have an uptime guarantee, our test site has recorded a decent uptime of 99.93% over 337 days (that translates to only five hours 54 minutes down over almost a year.) That’s based on Bluehost’s most basic shared plan, too: the ecommerce plans should be better.
Bluehost’s support site doesn’t have much direct WooCommerce help. There’s some excellent background material, though, including a complete WordPress training course (free to non-customers, too), and plenty of general advice on how to build a web store.
If you need specific help on something, we’ve found Bluehost’s phone and live chat support to be responsive, knowledgeable, and willing to spend a very long time to help you solve your problem.
Bluehost’s great signup deals mean its ecommerce plans start very cheap. The starter Online Store plan is only $9.95 a month on the annual plan, or you can lock in those introductory discounts by paying. $12.95 a month over three years. Prices leap on renewal to at least $26.99 a month, but that’s still fair value for what you’re getting.
Bluehost may not be the best choice for very busy stores. Liquid Web has seven WooCommerce plans, ranging up to powerhouse servers which can handle 30 stores and cost $1,000+ a month. But Bluehost’s range is more than capable of handling most small business stores, and when we factor in its ease of use, Bluehost has to be our ecommerce hosting pick.
Read our full Bluehost review.
Most reliable
InMotion Hosting is a top US web host with one of the largest product ranges around. Most plans have way more features than we expected, but their prices are still very reasonable.
We rate InMotion Hosting for their reliability because they offer redundancy as standard and also DDoS mitigation. So, if your business is attacked or a disaster occurs, your customers wont see any impact.
InMotion Hosting is well worth a look for those reasons alone, but we were also really impressed with the Support Center, where we found more than 5,000 articles on troubleshooting, setup, product manuals and assorted educational materials. These aren’t just scribbled notes which tell you nothing at all, either: there’s more depth and detail than we’ve seen almost anywhere else.
If the support site doesn’t have the information you need, or there’s a problem which needs urgent help, you can contact the support team via ticket, 24/7 live chat or telephone. We found ticket support was slower than some, with replies typically taking around four hours. But live chat and phone support was excellent during testing. There was always someone available, and agents were friendly and knowledgeable, giving accurate and helpful advice for every test issue we threw at them.
Customer reviews tell a very similar story. InMotion Hosting scores 4.2 at Trustpilot, for instance, and when we checked the most recent 20 reviews, 16 were positive, and 12 singled out InMotion’s support for special praise.
Read our full InMotion Hosting review.
Most configurable
Liquid Web's starter VPS product gives you two CPUs, 2GB RAM, 40GB SSD space, 100GB backup, and 10TB bandwidth, for instance, and is priced from $59 (£42) a month. If you choose the two-year plan, the price drops to $15 per month.
Some hosts have cheaper VPS plans, but that's often because specifications have been trimmed to the bare minimum. Liquid Web takes a more honest approach, with even the most basic plans including items that are often chargeable extras elsewhere. For example, that $59 gets you built-in backups, Gigabit transfers, unlimited sites, a dedicated IP address, CloudFlare CDN, DDoS protection, antivirus, antispam, cPanel/WHM or Plesk Onyx, and more.
All VPS plans are highly configurable, with Linux options including CentOS 6, CentOS 7, Ubuntu 14.04, Ubuntu 16.04 and Debian 8, and high-level plans support Windows Server 2012 and 2016.
Whatever you're installing will include server management by default, which means Liquid Web will handle maintenance tasks such as operating system updates. Proactive system monitoring allows the company to detect and fix some problems before you even notice them, and speedy, responsive 24x7x365 support will help you with anything else.
Factor in the 100% uptime guarantee and generous service level agreements and Liquid Web has a lot of business hosting appeal.
Read our Liquid Web review
Best dedicated hosting for small businesses
Sign up for dedicated hosting and there’s no more sharing resources with anyone else: you get a full web server that’s solely for your own use, giving you the best possible speeds. Dedicated servers are relatively expensive and unnecessary for most small businesses, but if you’ve a really busy or demanding website, taking the dedicated route could be a sensible choice.
Hostwinds’ dedicated servers score for their ease of use. Add cPanel and Softaculous to your plan and they’re as simple to manage as shared hosting, with one-click WordPress installation, easy email account creation and all the other key features you need.
Dedicated plans start from around $80 a month, rising $126 if you add cPanel, Softaculous, server monitoring and Softaculous. That’s cheaper than many (GoDaddy’s managed dedicated range starts at $270), and the good news is you don’t have to sign up for years to get that deal: it’s for monthly billing.
If another provider seems significantly cheaper than Hostwinds, check the small print to see what you’re getting. Low cost dedicated servers are often unmanaged, leaving you to handle security, operating system updates, monitoring and every other low-level technical tasks. But Hostwinds only sells managed dedicated plans, which means its support team will monitor and manage your server 24/7.
Hostwinds performance can’t quite match the enterprise-level dedicated hosting competition. Liquid Web, for instance, offers far more powerful servers at the top end of its range. But Liquid Web also comes with an enterprise-level price tag, and we think Hostwinds has very acceptable speeds for what you’re getting.
Hostwinds uptime is also above average, in our experience, and the company has enough confidence in its abilities to offer a 99.9999% network and power guarantee. If the systems go down for more than 31.6 seconds a year, you can claim hosting credits as compensation.
If you have problems for other reasons, Hostwinds support is available 24/7. There’s no international phone support, but live chat is always available, and we’ve found tickets get a friendly and helpful reply in under 15 minutes (many providers can take hours.)
If you’re tempted but not quite sure, Hostwinds offers a three-day refund period for dedicated products. Sign up and you’ve got 72 hours to set up a site, test support, check your new site speeds and generally make sure Hostwinds is the right dedicated hosting provider for you.
Read our full Hostwinds review.
Best cloud hosting for small businesses
Cloud hosting is an advanced technology which gives you storage space, CPU time and RAM on multiple servers, instead of just one. That makes it far less likely that your site will ever go down (because if one server fails, another takes over), and also means you can easily upgrade your plan with extra storage, CPU time or other resources as your site grows.
Cloudways is a managed cloud hosting specialist which offers some of the most powerful products around. They’re not cheap, but if ultra-reliable and scalable hosting are top of your priorities list, the company has a lot to offer.
Sign up with Cloudways, for example, and you don’t have to cross your fingers and hope that its servers are as reliable as you’ll need. While other providers often use their own servers, Cloudways hosts your site on top cloud computing platforms including Digital Ocean, Amazon AWS and Google Cloud, giving you as good a guarantee of uptime as you’ll get anywhere.
Although cloud hosting can be difficult to manage, Cloudways make it easier than most. Once you’ve chosen your preferred cloud platform, the company sets up your account, preinstalls WordPress or WooCommerce (depending on your plan), and then it’s almost as simple to use as a beginner-friendly shared hosting plan.
Long-term support is impressive, too. Cloudways plans are fully managed, which means the company handles operating system updates and security patches, as well as monitoring your server and apps to make sure they’re running smoothly. There’s no phone support, but we’ve found Cloudways 24/7 live chat and ticket systems generally give speedy and helpful replies to even the most technical of questions.
Cloudways pricing will be a concern for many. You can get started at only $8.40 a month, but that’s for a very basic 25GB storage, 1TB bandwidth, 1 core and 1GB RAM DigitalOcean setup. Opting for a more usable 4GB RAM, 2 core, 4TB plan lifts the starter price to $32.40 a month. AWS and Google Cloud plans are more expensive, and you can pay extra depending on your choice of data centers.
While that looks far more costly than many competitors, that’s partly because Cloudways bills monthly - you don’t have to sign up for long-term contracts. HostGator’s starter cloud hosting plan looks a relative bargain at only $3.75 a month, but that’s on the three-year plan. Opt for monthly billing instead and (after the first month) HostGator charges a far higher $15.99.
Cloudways also offers hourly pricing, allowing you to start with a cheaper baseline plan and add more resources at peak times. If your website traffic has big traffic spikes at particular times of year then this could save you a lot of cash all on its own.
In reality, most small businesses probably don’t need Cloudways level of configurability and power. But if you feel you’re an exception, the company offers some of the best managed cloud hosting plans around, and there’s even a free three-day trial (no credit card required) to help you find out more for yourself.
Read our full Cloudways review.
How we test the best small business web hosting services
Similar to how we test web hosting and website builder services, we dig through those services to find out which ones best suit small businesses.
This is done by identifying what a small business needs from a web hosting solution - anything from 24/7 customer support to custom shared hosting plans depending on the size of your small business.
We also test how reliable these services are and whether it's easy to use for beginners.
Lastly, budget is everything. If you're a small business that is looking to expand online, we are aware that you may not want to fork out a tone of money monthly to keep your site up and running. We choose web hosting solutions that give you more for your money.
What makes a host good for small businesses?
I would say, ease of use, value, and flexibility. You want to be able to implement business strategies quickly without fuss and also possibly have expert support and management to free up your time to focus on those business strategies. Value is of course a point to consider, as it is for everyone, but more so with small businesses. For flexibility, being able to upscale your resources for sales promotions or unexpected traffic peaks is essential to meet customer needs and not lose out on revenue.
