Top 13 Small Business Hosting Providers in 2022

SiteGround is one of the top hosting providers on the global market. It manages millions of domains, and it is among the industry leaders in CMS hosting.

Here’s what it can do for small businesses:

SiteGround Ease of Use

It’s relatively easy to sign up for SiteGround. The business web hosting provider can even preinstall various software, like WooCommerce. If you’re a WordPress user, SiteGround will set up several plugins and make things easier.

SiteGround accepts payments via VISA, MasterCard, American, and Discover cards. You can make your payment through PayPal. You have to contact the billing department to arrange this, which is, admittedly, kind of annoying.

The small business website hosting provider developed its own in-house panel. It unifies the account management area with traditional web hosting control panel features.

The interface is clean and features large, obvious icons. It’s relatively easy to navigate it, manage hosting plans, and use all the common website hosting functionality.

SiteGround is beginner-friendly, especially when used with WordPress, though it doesn’t accept as many payment methods as some hosts.

SiteGround Features

SiteGround has generally sound website hosting for small businesses. For starters, it features tools like Cloudflare CDN, SSD storage, SSL integration, daily backups, emailing, and some extensive security.

Many of SiteGround’s advantages are geared towards WordPress users. These include several proprietary WP plugins, auto-updates, staging, WP-CLI, SSH access, and much, much more. This makes it one of the best choices for WordPress business sites or selling products through WooCommerce.

The provider offers similar advantages for other PHP-based CMSs, including big ones like Magento, Joomla, and Drupal. It’s a great provider if your business relies on these.

Another prominent feature of these small business web services is that you can white-label the largest shared hosting plan. It’s a very affordable system if you’re a developer or an agency with several low-demand clients. You can resell them client accounts without going for a pricey reseller plan.

You do get advanced tools like Git integration and access for multiple collaborators. This is handy if you have multiple employees or developers working on the same project.

Lastly, if you already have a business site, SiteGround’s expert team can migrate it for free. It saves you the trouble of going through a migration process and all the troubleshooting. WordPress users are especially in luck here, as SiteGround throws in a migrator plugin free of charge.

Shared plans offer 10-40GB of storage and enough resources to roughly handle 10,000-100,000 monthly visitors. After you’ve exhausted these, you can even get cloud hosting for small businesses.

SiteGround is a bit more expensive than a few other business hosting providers. The platform is extremely high in quality, though, so it has good value for money.

SiteGround Support

SiteGround runs possibly one of the best support teams in all of hosting.

The support is there 24/7, and it tends to answer all chat queries near-instantly. Even the frontline agents have tremendous training, and they have a solid grasp of how various applications work. They can help you with all kinds of issues, including giving advice on optimizing your site.

To top it off, the knowledge base is impressive. Signing up with SiteGround even gets you a free ebook on optimizing WordPress, which is a handy resource to have.

The support team exceeds all expectations. SiteGround has some of the best web hosting for small business here.

SiteGround Performance

Not only does SiteGround have insane infrastructure, but it also adds a bunch of security tools, robust account isolation, and proactive monitoring. It all amounts to near-perfect uptime. The lowest availability SiteGround ever recorded in a month was 99.98%, which is a meager eight minutes of total downtime.

And let’s talk about server speeds. Server response times are some of the fastest recorded in these reviews, and the host has some of the fastest loading for PHP-based CMSs. Truly impressive.

To top it off, SiteGround easily handles 50+ simultaneous connections with practically zero increase in response times. This is great for a shared plan, and it is a testament to SiteGround’s well-maintained platform.

You’d be hard-pressed to find website hosting for small business that performs better than SiteGround.

Verdict

SiteGround has a well-rounded platform that performs fantastically. It can handle all manner of business sites, including online stores. Plus, the support team is one of the best around. There’s a lot to love about SiteGround’s offer.

When you open its website, the first thing you see is a banner saying how great HostPapa is for small businesses. It’s obvious who the plans are geared for.

Let’s see how the facts back up HostPapa’s claims of having the best web hosting for small business websites.

HostPapa Ease of Use

HostPapa’s interface is clean and simple. There are a few upsells to get around, but they’re less aggressive than that of many other hosts.

You use cPanel with all plans, which is standard and easy to get the hang of.

HostPapa offers Softaculous with 400+ 1-click installs for various platforms, shopping carts, and apps. You can get a decent website up and running, even without prior experience.

Features

HostPapa offers decent cyber security tools, speed optimization, and free SSL certificates across the board.

Most users looking into small business web hosting services get the best results with the Business plan. It lets you take advantage of additional processing power and RAM availability. It also removes annoying limitations on email accounts and subdomains.

The Business Pro plan is more expensive, but it adds even more resources, speed optimization, advanced security, and free domain privacy. It also comes with automated backups and a WildCard SSL certificate, which are ecommerce essentials.

You can also get managed hosting for many of the most popular shopping carts. If you want to sell products through software like AbanteCart or CubeCart, HostPapa is your best bet.

As for email features, the total storage per email inbox depends on your plan. The maximum is 1Gb. If you need more, you can purchase a 5Gb inbox for $2/month. The price is fair, but users looking for something even more powerful will need to find a third-party email hosting provider.

HostPapa’s larger VPS plans have more resources than many dedicated plans out there. This makes up for the lack of pure dedicated hosting. Some of the VPS plans are fairly pricey, though, so tread carefully if you have to upgrade.

You can also get AdGuru, which is a tool for designing marketing campaigns, and OnePlan Connect which helps with sales, digital marketing, and CRM. Both are useful for connecting with customers.

All in all, HostPapa is a solid web host for small business websites.

Support

HostPapa has a knowledgeable support team. The staff has plenty of experience helping business owners.

The knowledge base has 2,500+ articles. You’ll find all sorts of guides there, including detailed explanations of key online business concepts (like PCI-compliance).

HostPapa has qualified and efficient support.

Performance

HostPapa states it has a 99.9% uptime guarantee, but doesn’t specify a refund. It says it “will use reasonable efforts” to ensure this availability. It’s hardly what you want to hear from web hosts for business websites.

HostPapa’s monthly uptime stays exactly at 99.9%. It did dip to 99.59% in February, though, which is concerning.

With a 0.2s response time and 0.9s to load a page, however, HostPapa performs excellently. Only a couple of providers can compete with it in terms of speed.

HostPapa’s infrastructure gets amazing speeds, but the availability of its small business web services needs improvement.

Verdict

HostPapa has a comprehensive offer. You can use it to establish your online presence, make a good impression on your visitors, and even sell them your products and/or services..

It definitely has among the best web hosting for small business in 2022.

InMotion Hosting is a prominent independent provider. Business Essential plans geared for small businesses are the highlight of its offer.

Let’s see how it matches up against the best web hosting sites for small business owners.

InMotion Ease of Use

The signup is straightforward, but InMotion Hosting’s account activation takes a while. You have to get on the phone with the support team to verify your identity. The support is U.S. based, so it’s a bit of a pain if you’re outside of the States.

Apart from that, there are no surprises. InMotion Hosting uses cPanel, which is standard.

You can get WordPress, Joomla, or PrestaShop preinstalled, which saves you a couple of minutes. If you prefer a different software, InMotion offers 1-click installation for 400+ apps.

Features

InMotion Hosting offers free SSL, automated backups, and free digital marketing credits across the board—which is always a handy addition to small business website hosting.

Servers are also protected from malware and DDoS attacks.

You get free email hosting with each plan. The ToS doesn’t specify how much storage you actually get, and InMotion Hosting doesn’t offer separate email hosting. If you need a powerful email solution, you might need to purchase it separately.

The smallest shared plan is decent if you just need a static website for your business. If you need small business hosting for ecommerce, the medium and large shared plans offer more resources.

The two larger plans also come with a set of CRM tools. These come in handy for maximizing your profits.

The largest plan also gets you “pro-level” support. The term is pretty vague, but it essentially means the support dedicates more time to managing your server, leading to a more reliable service. The last thing you want with ecommerce is downtime, making this a helpful feature to have.

InMotion also offers ecommerce-optimized managed VPS and dedicated plans. You have plenty of room to grow your store. Just keep in mind the smallest VPS plan has about the same resources as the largest shared one—so it’s not really an upgrade.

You can also purchase additional services like custom web design. These tend to be costly, but you do get a year of free hosting to offset the steep price.

All in all, the pricing on the plans is fair for the resources you get—starting at just $3.99/month. It’s a solid offer if you need a cheap business website.

Support

Aside from the usual channels, support is available through Skype—useful if you’re outside the U.S.

The support team is excellent. InMotion’s agents obviously have plenty of experience with business website hosting and can help make your experience smooth.

The support team is spread a bit thin, though. You might need to wait a while before you get matched with an agent.

InMotion Hosting’s knowledge base is extensive. You can find guides on all essential topics. If you think something is missing, you can even ask your own question, and a hosting professional will add the answer to the website.

Performance

InMotion hosting promises 99.9% uptime across the board. If you get the Pro shared plan, it increases the guarantee to 99.999% uptime. The provider only accepts its own logs as proof, so you need to contact the support for a refund.

Consistently getting 99.999% availability is pretty optimistic for shared hosting. According to our testing, the actual uptime of the Business Pro servers is around 99.95%. This is fine, and the support did reimburse me when uptime fell below the limit.

InMotion Hosting has created a custom technology called Max Speed zones. It’s designed to deliver content at top speeds all around the world. Instead of having data centers on various continents, InMotion uses just two, both located in the United States.

InMotion Hosting can tussle with the top web hosts for small business websites in North America. The speed in the rest of the world is just average, though.

InMotion Hosting’s performance is fantastic if your business targets the American market. Otherwise, a few other providers might be a better match.

Verdict

InMotion Hosting is a powerful provider for small businesses in the United States. It also offers a 90-day money-back guarantee, which is three times longer than average. You have plenty of time to try it out and see if its web hosting for small business is the right fit for you.

HostGator started in a college dorm room and quickly became one of the largest names in hosting. It now houses over 10 million websites.

Its plans are optimized to help business owners, so let’s see what they offer.

HostGator Ease of Use

You do have to scroll past a few upsells to sign up. A few items (like SiteLock security) are preselected for purchase. Remember to uncheck the items you don’t need.

HostGator has instant account activation, but more than a few visitors reported this can be buggy. You might need to wait an hour or two to access your small business hosting account.

These are all minor issues, though. You will be using the standard cPanel, so it’s smooth sailing after you get your logins.

Features

All plans come with free Let’s Encrypt SSL, solid security, and ad credits.

Unfortunately, automated backups and SiteLock are only available as paid services.

The only email limitation is that you can send a max of 500 emails per hour. The saved emails do count towards your inode limit, but HostGator sets the limit fairly high. You should be fine unless you receive tens of thousands of emails.

Most business owners enjoy the Business Plan. It lets you take advantage of a free dedicated IP address and SEO tools—both fantastic features for business web hosting users.

HostGator offers a Positive SSL certificate for free as long as you use the business plan. Unlike the standard Let’s Encrypt, a Positive SSL comes with $10,000 insurance in case data gets stolen due to a fault with the certificate. It’s one of the best business web hosting freebies you can get, especially if you sell things online.

The plans are also optimized for running CMSs like Magento. If you want to use an ecommerce platform, HostGator has you covered.

HostGator also has solid VPS and dedicated plans, leaving your business has room to grow.

Support

The support team is knowledgeable. The agents know their way around small business web hosting and can easily fix most issues.

That said, the support team is kind of sluggish. Providing support for millions of users is tough, but a few other providers have a better grip on this.

The knowledge base is extensive and frequently updated. It’s a valuable resource if you’re just learning how to manage your website, though it only covers the basics of the business side of things.

Performance

HostGator has a 99.9% uptime guarantee and refunds you a full month of hosting if it breaches it.

Its uptime has been nearly perfect over the last year, though. None of the other small business web hosting services recorded fewer service interruptions.

The load time of 1.28 seconds pegs HostGator as about average. Your website will load fairly quickly, although a few hosts are even faster.

One thing to note is that the shared servers struggle with high traffic. You might need to move your business site to VPS hosting a bit sooner if you suffer significant traffic spikes.

Also, like InMotion Hosting, HostGator only has two data centers in the U.S. This makes it a solid choice for United States-based businesses, but subpar for European or Asian markets.

HostGator is reliable, but a bit slower than the best small business website hosting providers.

Verdict

HostGator’s offer is a good one. You get a lot of features and freebies that help you run a business.

HostGator has reliable hosting if you need a business website for the North American market.

A2 Hosting started out as one man’s hobby. Despite being small compared to some hosting giants, it has gained a lot of traction over the years and is loved by many users.

Here’s how its small business web hosting performs.

A2 Ease of Use

Signing up for A2 Hosting’s services is simple. You do need to get around a few upsells, but it’s nothing too major.

One thing to point out is that A2 Hosting charges for its website builder. Few business owners rely on website builders, but many providers in these small business web hosting reviews still offer one for free.

You get cPanel as with the previous hosts.

A2 Hosting is a supporter of open source and offers many of the most popular platforms preinstalled. It is even an official partner for a few, like AbanteCart. Everything is well-optimized for running various CMSs, so you’ll have an easy time setting up a website.

Features

A2 Hosting has tight security, and all plans come with free SSL, ad credits, and effective speed optimization tools.

You can pay extra for a spam firewall. It’s surprising since other top web hosts for small business throw in spam protection with the regular cyber security getup.

You can create as many email inboxes as you need with most plans except the smallest one. It is limited to 25 You can only 10Gb of space for email storage and send a maximum of 1,000 emails per day.

The support also informed me it’s forbidden to use the inbox for email marketing. Most providers impose various restrictions instead of stating this explicitly—A2 Hosting is more transparent here than most website hosts for small business.

This is enough for day-to-day correspondence of most small businesses. If you need to create accounts for dozens of employees—or you want to run email marketing campaigns—you’ll have to get email hosting from a provider that specializes in that.

A2 Hosting’s plans are all ecommerce-optimized. They are meant for running open source software like WooCommerce, Magento, PrestaShop, or OpenCart—which makes everything a lot easier if you want to sell products online.

The smallest plan is sufficient for smaller static websites. The two larger shared plans let you take advantage of automated backups, generous resource allocation, and even more speed optimization (like RailGun and an advanced server configuration). This makes larger plans perfect for eCommerce or high-traffic websites

Of course, you can also scale up into managed or unmanaged VPS or dedicated servers. You have options if your website outgrows shared hosting.

If you’re looking for the top web hosting for small business, A2 has a solid offer.

Support

The support team is fast and efficient. The agents are wonderfully knowledgeable about web hosting, especially running CMS apps. They are a helpful asset for any business owner.

The knowledge base is also helpful and frequently updated with fresh info. It’s incredibly useful, especially if you’re just starting out.

The knowledge base navigation also works well. It might seem like a minor thing, but you’d be surprised how many hosts combine a clunky interface with an essentially useless search tool. A2, luckily, gets this right.

Performance

A2 Hosting gives a 99.9% uptime guarantee and refunds you 5% for each hour of downtime.

The actual uptime has been nearly flawless over the last year. A2 Hosting brings you close to perfect availability.

A2 Hosting toots its own horn about speed a lot. It does have powerful speed optimization features to back it up.

When I first turned off the speed optimization, the server speed was decent, but A2 lagged behind the fastest hosts. It has made improvements since, though, and now the server takes 1.07 seconds to fully load a basic page. This pegs it as one of the fastest out there, though a couple of small business hosting providers still have faster servers.

A2 Hosting’s servers are both fast and reliable.

Verdict

A2 Hosting is terrific for small businesses. It’s exceptionally well-optimized if you want to run a shopping cart software.

All in all, A2 Hosting qualifies as one of the providers with the best website hosting for small business in 2022.

Hostinger is an independent hosting provider from Lithuania. With nearly 30 million users, it is beyond massive. It is probably the most influential entity in hosting aside from EIG and GoDaddy.

Let’s see what its business-optimized hosting is all about.

Hostinger Ease of Use

Signing up is straightforward. The interface is clean, and navigation is intuitive. Hostinger accepts PayPal and a variety of credit cards, so it should be easy to make your payment.

Hostinger is a bit different from other small business web hosting services here—it offers a custom control panel called hPanel. It’s easier to use than cPanel, so beginners will be able to hit the ground running.

The tradeoff is that it is missing some of cPanel’s advanced features. This won’t matter to you, unless you decide to add custom coded functions down the road.

All in all, Hostinger is among the easier hosts but lacks a couple of advanced functions.

Features

The smallest $0.99/month plan is insanely affordable, but it’s fairly limited if you’re in the market for web hosting for business.

Most business owners might even go for the largest shared plan right away. It lets you take advantage of more resources, free SSL, daily backups, and much more. It’s perfect for ecommerce websites.

All plans include a six-month trial for the Business Email plan. This comes with 10Gb of storage and its own antivirus. After the trial period, automatically renews for one year and costs $2.99/month.

This is a bit of a marketing trick. The email inbox comes at a 50% discount for the first year if you get it without hosting—you might actually end up paying more if you renew it after the trial.

If you need a larger inbox, Hostinger sells the Enterprise email plan with 30Gb of storage for $5.99/month.

Hostinger also has decent cloud hosting plans. They also come with a free dedicated IP address and are ecommerce-optimized. The cloud plans are perfect if your store outgrows shared hosting or if you want to run a more demanding platform like Magento.

While the starter plan is limited, the larger plans are the go-to solutions for getting a cheap business website.

Support

The support team is fast and competent. They can handle even more complicated problems without much trouble, and they’ll be able to assist you with your business.

Hostinger opts out of phone support, however. This is becoming the case with more and more hosting providers.

The reason is that frontline support has adequate technology to go basic troubleshooting over chat. Plus, maintaining phone support is pricey.

The problem is that Hostinger’s live chat tends to malfunction. It’s only available on some pages, and it doesn’t work on all browsers.

The agents work hard to provide excellent support, but availability leaves something to be desired.

Performance

You get 5% of your monthly hosting fee back if uptime falls below 99.9%.

The actual uptime averages exactly at the promised 99.9%.

Unfortunately, monthly uptime does fall below this percentage occasionally. While you might get a few days of free hosting out of this, it’s less than perfect for running a business website.

On the other hand, the servers are fast. With all the speed optimization tools turned off, a basic page loads in 0.81 seconds. This ranks Hostinger as the fastest hosting provider out there.

Among the best hosting companies for small business, Hostinger is the fastest. Availability could be a little higher, though.

Verdict

Business owners who are just starting out don’t usually have much of a budget. You can make good use of the initial discounts and get your business website up and running at an affordable price.

Hostinger offers top web hosting for business at a bargain.

Going as far back as 1996, DreamHost is one of the oldest providers still in existence, which is an impressive feat in and of itself. Even better, it holds numerous awards, and it is even recommended by WordPress.org.

Here’s why its small business website hosting services attract attention:

DreamHost Ease of Use

It’s easy to sign up for DreamHost’s plans. The provider accepts PayPal and all major credit cards.

They will try to upsell you for proprietary tools like DreamShield security and webmail. These are solid options for business users, and affordable to boot, but not all people find them necessary. You can just deselect them during checkout if you don’t intend to use them.

Similarly to a few other business web hosts, DreamHost developed an in-house control panel. This unifies the classic web hosting control panel with management tools for hosting and email accounts. You can control multiple servers from one panel, which can simplify workflow for some businesses.

One thing the panel lacks is direct file access, meaning you would have to use an FTP client. While this is not a massive issue, it can be kind of annoying if you want to make a direct change to website files.

The panel doesn’t integrate Softaculous (or a similar feature), meaning the list of software that can be installed automatically ends with WordPress. While it isn’t much of a problem to use the command line, 1-click installers are just more straightforward. Plus, most website hosts for small business do have Softaculous, putting DreamHost behind.

DreamHost adds a free drag-and-drop page builder for WordPress. This comes with many preset themes, making it easier to do more advanced design changes to WordPress. The builder adds SEO tips. This eliminates the guesswork in optimizing your first site if you’re an SEO beginner.

DreamHost has a bunch of features to make it more beginner-friendly, especially if you run a WordPress site.

DreamHost Features

Unsurprisingly, many of DreamHost’s advantages have to do with WordPress and WooCommerce. Beside the page builder, you can take advantage of core software and security auto updates, automatic installation, a migrator plugin, command line support, and more.

DreamHost has a plethora of advantages for standard small business hosting users, as well. This covers daily automated backups, Let’s Encrypt SSL, SSD storage, and a lot more.

One awesome feature for businesses in DreamHost’s premium webmail service. It costs $1.67/month for a 25GB inbox, and it works rather well. It’s excellent if you want to purchase both web and email hosting all in one place.

An excellent addition from DreamHost is a free domain registration with domain privacy that stays free forever. The latter keeps your info private and helps avoid spam, while both add a bit of extra value to the deals.

The business web hosting plans start at $2.59/month for a single site and $4.95/month for multiple sites, provided that you subscribe for three years. DreamHost’s prices stay fixed even after you renew the plans. Not many providers offer this kind of deal, making DreamHost one of the most affordable hosts to stick with long-term.

Once your needs outgrow shared hosting, DreamHost has advanced managed plans for both WordPress and WooCommerce. These add many other advantages and are some of the most robust WP plans on the market.

And if your business doesn’t rely on WP, you can always go for VPS, cloud, or even dedicated hosting. The prices are reasonable and transparent across the board.

DreamHost has some of the best web hosting for small businesses to scale and expand with.

DreamHost Support

The support team provides pretty solid customer assistance. The representatives are fast to answer queries. Moreover, they take their time to understand each issue instead of just looking to close each query as quickly as possible.

The knowledge base is massive. It has up-to-date guides on all hosting services offered by DreamHost.

The WordPress tutorial repository really takes the cake, though. It has guides on everything from using the BoldGrid plugin to debugging common WordPress errors.

All in all, it’s one of the better support services among small business web hosts.

DreamHost Performance

DreamHost offers a 100% uptime guarantee, which sounds impressive on paper. If you read the terms of service, though, you’ll find you get 1 day of free service for an hour of monthly downtime. This essentially means you only get compensated if downtime falls below 99.9%, which is standard.

To its credit, DreamHost does consistently deliver 99.99% uptime, which is near-perfect. The last time it violated the guarantee was a year ago, giving it a decent track record.

The speed test results are equally as impressive. Over several years of testing, the host consistently scored in the top four fastest providers. It’s no small feat, considering it is up against goliaths like SiteGround and Hostinger.

Verdict

DreamHost is one of the top web hosts for small business if you rely on WordPress or WooCommerce. It does the job for other apps, too. The provider handles pretty much everything well, has excellent customer service, and sports very affordable long-term deals. When it comes to business hosting, DreamHost is well…a dream.

With 40,000+ customers, GreenGeeks is a smaller, independent provider based in California. Though environmentally friendly hosting is one of its main selling points, it also has plenty of robust tech to offer.

Let’s see if it has the best business web hosting:

GreenGeeks Ease of Use

GreenGeeks makes it easy to go through checkout. The whole process is streamlined, and there are no upsells to think about.

One thing to point out is that GreenGeeks supposedly offers separate plans optimized for various apps, like Drupal and Magento. This is something of an SEO trick since most plans have precisely the same features as standard shared hosting. The web hosting for business is actually only WordPress-optimized.

GreenGeeks states it accepts various credit cards and PayPal, which is standard. Once I opened the checkout page, I noticed only the credit card option. It took some back-and-forth with the support to enable a PayPal payment in my cart. The support helped me quickly, but it would be even better if all the checkout methods were available immediately.

The plans run cPanel with Softaculous, which is the solution most webmasters are familiar with. The panel is sleek and makes it easy to run your website.

Despite a few bumps, GreenGeeks offers reasonably smooth small business web services.

GreenGeeks Features

To begin with, GreenGeeks offers standard features like RAID-10 SSD storage, daily backups, security tools, free domain registration, and a CDN integration.

Instead of the typical single-domain SSL, GreenGeeks throws in the WildCard Let’s Encrypt. Instead of just securing one level of your website, it also encrypts all the underlying subdomains. This is excellent for more complex business sites, especially ecommerce ones.

You can purchase premium SSL from GreenGeeks if you need a higher level of validation. This is a useful option down the road and can help you build more trust among customers.

The hosted servers for small business run LiteSpeed with the latest versions of PHP and other dev technologies. This, in principle, makes for a much faster and secure platform. Add a bunch of speed optimization systems, and you get a solid foundation to build your business website.

The plans start at $2.95/month. Remember this is only the initial price if you prepay for three years. After that period is up, the price rises to $9.95/month. It’s a similar deal with the higher-tier plans.

While the initial costs are reasonable, GreenGeeks doesn’t really offer enough to justify the price hike. You can find more affordable web hosting for small business.

GreenGeeks Support

The support is available 24/7. Unlike some providers, GreenGeeks makes it easy to find both the phone number and live chat, the latter featured both in the navigation bar and at the bottom right website corner.

The agents are polite and do their best to address each issue quickly. The provider’s team is entirely decent, though the agents aren’t the hosting experts some providers employ.

The knowledge base is stacked with articles. These cover important CMSs like WordPress and Joomla and shopping carts like PrestaShop and CubeCart. Many businesses rely on these, so the articles are helpful if you need help learning how to manage a website.

The support is about average for business website hosting, all in all.

GreenGeeks Performance

GreenGeeks extends a 99.9% uptime guarantee, but an iffy one. The ToS has nothing about a refund if the host does breach it. What’s more, the provider states DDoS attacks bringing down a server doesn’t count as downtime.

According to the StatusCake monitoring, the downtime does fall below 99.9% occasionally. GreenGeeks doesn’t provide any uptime logs or explanations, so it’s simply not the most stable.

When I started testing GreenGeeks, the web hosting services for small businesses were blazing-fast. However, the speeds have been falling ever since then, and the host doesn’t perform nearly as impressively. At one point in 2022, the servers took as long as 1.14 seconds just to respond. A few providers take less than this to deliver an entire page, which is bad news for GreenGeeks.

Verdict

GreenGeeks has a very reasonable offer, with an intuitive site, okay support, and integrated WildCard SSL. The servers perform sort of poorly, though, so the price is a bit much. Providers in the same price bracket, like SiteGround and HostPapa, offer more sound website hosting for small business.

Hostwinds might be newer to the hosting world than a few other providers. Be that as it may, it is quickly gaining traction and already has a strong reputation in Reddit hosting communities.

Here’s how it measures up to the best hosting companies for small business:

Hostwinds Ease of Use

Hostwinds has an easy-to-navigate site that makes picking a plan easy. All the product page info is transparent.

An annoying aspect is that you have to register to open your shopping cart. Not a massive issue, but still.

You can purchase web hosting for small business with a credit card, various crypto wallets, PayPal, or AliPay. It’s handy that Hostwinds accepts more modern methods of payment in addition to the traditional card ones.

The business plans run standard cPanel with Softaculous. This is the industry-standard control panel. It’s easy to use and lets you install various software without bothering with the command line.

While Hostwinds doesn’t point this out on the website, you can get a free website transfer. You just need to put in a ticket with the support, and the tech team will handle everything for you.

It all makes Hostwinds a user-friendly web host for small businesses.

Hostwinds Features

Hostwinds offers special plans designed for business users. While these are technically a shared platform, they have a few differences to shared hosting.

For one, the plans have fewer clients per physical server, giving you more resources to spend. They raise the PHP memory limit from 256MB to 512MB, allowing for more demanding websites. The inode limit is also lifted from 250,000 to 600,000, which is great for sites with a bunch of files.

Unlike the standard shared accounts that run on Apache, small business web hosting runs LiteSpeed web server. It is faster than the open-source alternatives and can even be a bit more secure.

Lastly, the webmail on the business plans allows up to 250 outbound emails per hour. This is ten times what personal users get, which can be useful for businesses and stores that need to answer a lot of queries from customers.

Aside from that, you get features like daily backups, proactive monitoring, weekly malware scans, free SSL, SSD storage, and a lot more. Along with various 1-click installs, you can build your website using Weebly, which is okay for non-technical users.

The small business website hosting services start at $5.64/month for one domain. Keep in mind you have to prepay for three years to get this discount. The price goes back up to $13.99/month afterward. Since the plans are more robust than your typical shared server, it’s a fair price.

Bottom line—Hostwinds has a robust setup that can handle powerful business sites as well as open communication lines with customers.

Hostwinds Support

Hostwinds support is there 24/7 via all the standard channels. Even better, Hostwinds has 3-minute ticket and 30-second live chat response times. Most of the time, though, you’ll get pretty much instant responses.

The support does a decent job. The agents know their way around business website hosting and the standard applications. They understand the needs of businesses and can help you with your website.

The knowledge base is not half-bad either. It has well-written, comprehensive tutorials on using the supported tools and troubleshooting common problems.

Hostwinds performs decently in the support department.

Hostwinds Performance

Hostwinds extends a 99.9999% uptime guarantee. This might sound like a marketing gimmick, but the legal documents confirm it. If an outage exceeds 32 seconds, the provider will issue a full-day refund in hosting credits.

The small business web host does maintain high uptime, so you might not have to ever invoke the guarantee. The infrastructure works like a charm.

The servers are reasonably fast as well. With the LiteSpeed web server, you should have an easy time getting fast load speeds. And, if you run a CMS like WordPress or Magento, you can use the relevant LiteSpeed extension for even better site optimization.

Hostwinds performs decently, all in all.

Verdict

Hostwinds offers many tools to help small business owners set up a powerful and fast website. Moreover, you can enjoy excellent support and take advantage of webmail to handle all your business communication in a professional and seamless manner. Add fair prices, and it’s a very lucrative offer. Hostwinds makes it to the top 10 web hosting sites for small business.

Namecheap is mostly known as one of the best-value domain registrars. A little-known fact is that it sells a bunch of hosting plans as well, including ones geared for businesses.

Here’s how its web hosting servers perform:

Namecheap Ease of Use

Namecheap’s web hosting for small business starts off on the right foot. It’s easy to add a plan to your shopping cart. The provider does suggest a few other useful services you might want to try out, like email hosting. The offers are non-obtrusive, so they won’t get in the way of quickly purchasing your plan.

Namecheap accepts various credit and debit cards, PayPal, and Bitcoin. It should be easy for you to make the payment.

The client area feels good and lays out the options well. It’s easy to manage all your websites and domains from one dashboard. This leads to some of the top web hosting for businesses running more complex projects.

The plans run cPanel with Softaculous, as usual.

If you go for the managed WordPress plans, though, you can use Namecheap’s custom control panel. This is optimized to provide an effortless WordPress experience, and it adds a few features like easy WP backups and one-click maintenance mode.

The web host for small business is generally easy to work with, whichever plan you go with.

Namecheap Features

Namecheap starts with all the standard features like free SSL, solid-state drives, analytics, webmail, and much more. One thing to point out is that daily backups aren’t supported until the second hosting plan, which is not ideal if you’re looking for a bargain.

All plans include a bunch of speed optimization tools, like Namecheap’s proprietary CDN. The CDN features content caching through global servers, DDoS mitigation, and encryption by your SSL certificate of choice. It is free for the first 50GB of traffic per month and has reasonable pricing afterward.

The largest small business hosting plan is ecommerce-optimized. It enables private nameservers, PCI compliance features, and adds priority support. It moves your site to a cloud infrastructure, which is more reliable. It can help leave the best impression on your customers, though it’s a bit overkill for simpler business sites.

If you want to build a site with WordPress, you can go straight for the EasyWP plans. This adds useful tools like auto updates, easy WP installation, and WordPress site statistics.

The WordPress plans are very affordable, starting at only $1/month. They are only worth it for users who want to set up a single site., though, since there’s no multisite feature. A provider like SiteGround offers better value for running several WordPress websites.

The standard web hosting for business is fairly budget-friendly, as well, starting at $1.44/month. The upside is that even the smallest plan supports up to three websites. It’s one of the most affordable multisite offers.

Namecheap Support

Good support is one of the core qualities to look for in a hosting provider. Namecheap’s team doesn’t do the provider any favors.

The agents are kind of slow. Though they can handle basic questions and follow a script, most complicated questions take way too long to resolve. The support team tends to pass you around and link to the knowledge base rather than actually resolve the problem.

The positive is that the knowledge base is rather extensive and easy to navigate. All the articles are comprehensive and do a decent job explaining how to get around common issues. It’s a great resource if you prefer to handle problems yourself.

Still, many providers offering website hosting for small business have better support.

Namecheap Performance

Namecheap phrases its uptime guarantee differently based on the hosting plan, but the gist is mostly the same. Once monthly downtime exceeds 45 minutes, or 0.1%, you get a day of free hosting. Each hour of downtime after that gets you an additional day. It’s a nice way to ensure the servers will keep running smoothly.

The provider’s infrastructure did have a few hiccups back in 2018. That said, the host did enjoy 99.98% uptime all through 2019 and half of 2022. The downtime troubles appear to be over.

Namecheap servers take about 0.36 seconds to respond and just under a full second to load a basic page. Namecheap is about average as far as web hosting services for small businesses go.

50 simultaneous connections hitting the server added almost 0.9 seconds to the response time, which is not great. Namecheap is faster than some, but it’s hardly a match for the likes of InterServer and SiteGround.

Another issue is that Namecheap only has data centers in the US and the UK, and the latter costs $1/month extra. It’s not the most extensive offer if you need a host with a global presence.

Namecheap has a reliable infrastructure, but it’s not the fastest of all providers.

Verdict

Namecheap offers some of the most affordable web hosting for small businesses, but it adds little beyond that. The servers are kind of slow, albeit reliable, and the feature offer is kind of slim. While the effort is commendable, and Namecheap is improving, it needs a bit more to compete with the top hosts.