Published on April 12, 2017 in Business Tools & Services, Web Design.
Finding the best web hosting for beginner businesses can often be tough. In this tutorial, I want to recommend specific web hosting companies that might be a good fit for your small business. The idea here is to narrow down the choices and give you a decent starting point for finding a great web host.
If you checked out my tutorial, The 3 Critical Web Hosting Features Every Small Business Needs, then you know that all the recommendations I'm making here nail our biggest hosting concerns.
To help you out, I've narrowed down the best hosting options to just three, Web Hosting Hub, SiteGround, and WP Engine. These are hosts that I use myself for my various web projects. Below, I've embedded a video that compares these three hosts to one another to help you find one that's a perfect fit for you and your business.
If you're looking for the show notes mentioned in this video, look no further!
For your own assurance, know that you really can't go wrong with with any of the companies I'm recommending. I've rigorously researched every one of them, and as I say, I use these myself, for my own various web projects. Each of these web hosting companies have great pricing structures, fantastic customer service, and provide excellent reliability and security. I've spent a huge amount of time and money researching to to find the best web hosting companies in the industry to arrive at this narrowed down list.
This huge web hosting research project began because I was sick and tired of dealing with bad customer service, unreliable hosting, and companies who were...let's say unscrupulous in their business practices. My online businesses and projects were suffering, so I took it upon myself to find the best of the best. This took me years of testing, and thousands of dollars. Let's just say I'm thorough! The good news is, while there's no shortage of rotten apples, we have plenty of great web hosts to choose from.
But please, use my recommendations as a starting point. Definitely do your own research and find one that's a perfect match for you. And when doing your own research, please be careful! Learn about the sorts of things that go in on the web hosting industry. Also, be wary of web host review sites too. Many are filled with fake reviews and spam. TechCrunch ran an article about this a number of years ago.
Below, I've broken everything down by web hosting type, so we'll start things off with some shared hosting recommendations. Then, I'll offer some options for dedicated, VPS (Virtual Private Server), and cloud hosting. Finally, you'll be given a short list of managed WordPress hosting recommendations. If you're not familiar with the various kinds of web hosting I'm talking about here, be sure to check out my tutorial, The 6 Types Of Web Hosting For Your Business.
By the end of this tutorial, you'll have a short list of top web hosts for beginner businesses that you can then independently research further, or even get started with for your business project.
There's lots of good stuff ahead, so let's get started!
Okay, first up we have our shared web hosting companies. If you're just getting started in web design, or if you're running a small to medium-sized business website, then you're likely thinking that shared hosting is going to work for you. And you'd be right!
The challenge here is that we want to make sure that you don't break the bank, but also get great customer service and reliable hosting. If that's you, then it doesn't get much better than Web Hosting Hub. I've worked with them for a few years now, and they've been great. Their plans start at just $4/month, include the easy to use cPanel interface, and their service is fast and reliable. That's tough to beat!
Web Hosting Hub is a great option for small and medium-sized businesses.
If you're thinking you need a little more power and flexibility, you could try SiteGround. SiteGround also uses the cPanel interface, has great pricing, and is known to have some of the best, friendliest, and most knowledgeable customer service in the industry. I switched a site I manage to them a while ago, and they've been great.
If you're just getting started with your business, or even if you're more established, either Web Hosting Hub or SiteGround are great choices.
To help you make a choice between these two—I mean, we have two great web hosting here so it's hard to make a mistake with any of them—let me provide some additional information. Web Hosting Hub is really great if you want to run multiple websites (those add-on domains I've talked about elsewhere), and you like the cPanel control console, all at a very low cost. They're perfect for web design newcomers who just want to get moving quickly, or for small to medium-sized business owners who want to keep costs under control. Web Hosting Hub specialize in shared hosting, which allows them to keep their pricing so low.
On the other hand, what's nice about SiteGround is that they offer different kinds of hosting in addition to shared hosting. So if you ever foresee yourself upgrading to dedicated, VPS, or managed WordPress hosting, it might be nice to keep everything with the same host.
Again, it's tough to go wrong with either of these hosts. So have a look at each, and see if one's a good fit!
Next, let's have a look at some dedicated, VPS, and cloud hosting options.
I've decided to lump dedicated, VPS, and cloud hosting all together. I did this because it's my suspicion, especially after what we learned in my The 6 Types Of Web Hosting For Your Business tutorial, that these types of web hosting likely aren't a good fit for your needs.
But for completeness, I'll share what my research has uncovered about dedicated, VPS, and cloud web hosting.
Let's talk about some dedicated hosting recommendations first. If you'll recall from the shared hosting recommendations above, SiteGround, A2 Hosting, and InMotion offer dedicated hosting. They're all solid options.
In addition to shared hosting, SiteGround also offers dedicated and cloud hosting plans.
What about VPS hosting? If this type of hosting sounds right for your website, then take a look at either A2 Hosting or InMotion. Both offer VPS plans, so see if one of these might work for you.
Lastly we have cloud hosting. Some familiar names come up yet again: SiteGround, A2 Hosting, and InMotion, with their range of hosting options, also offer cloud hosting. I've talked about each a few times already, so if cloud hosting is what you're after, they're both a great place to start.
Alright, so there's our dedicated, VPS, and cloud hosting recommendations. The same names came up a few times, because my research showed that these really were the top providers for these kinds of web hosting.
Now, we have one type of web hosting left, and that's Managed WordPress hosting. Let's see if we can get some recommendations there too...
I talked about this in my The 6 Types Of Web Hosting For Your Business tutorial, but, for business owners who want someone else to handle the technical aspects of their WordPress-driven websites, managed WordPress hosting is the cat's meow! I've been using managed WordPress hosting for Ten Ton for quite a while now, and it's awesome.
If you're thinking that you want to go the Managed WordPress route as well, then look no further than WP Engine. WP Engine uses a custom user interface (as opposed to cPanel) and has great customer support. What's great too about their customer service is that they're WordPress experts, so you can ask them WordPress-specific questions or get WordPress-oriented recommendations.
WP Engine is one of the best managed WordPress hosting providers on the market.
WP Engine boasts scalability and solid infrastructure for growing businesses. So, if you're running a site that's seeing lots of traffic, maybe an e-commerce site or something that requires a little more heft, then WP Engine is a great option.
If this is the kind of hosting you're after, take a look at them and do some comparisons if you like. WP Engine has world-class customer service too, so don't be shy about asking any pre-sale questions.
Alright, so there you go, those are the hosts that I'd recommend you check out. When I was doing this research on my own, I wanted to keep the list of potential hosts limited. That way, I wouldn't have too many choices to sort through. And I've tried to do the same here. But as I mentioned earlier on, use my suggestions as a starting point for your own research and make sure you're comfortable with whoever you wind up using.
So first, you got some solid shared hosting recommendations. Both companies I mentioned here are great if your hosting needs aren't too strenuous, if you want to keep costs under control, and if you'll just be running a small to medium business or two. After that, you got some dedicated, VPS, and cloud hosting recommendations. Again, I kept this section a little shorter because you likely won't need these kinds of hosting. Finally, we looked at managed WordPress hosting.
Okay, do some comparison research for the kind of hosting you're after. Now you're armed with some great choices. Good luck!
Give me just 63 minutes, and I'll show you exactly what you need to do to launch your successful business!