Picking a web hosting company as a small business can be tasking since there are numerous options around. Yet, it is very important to choose the right one in order to avoid waste of money, time, and other limited resources.
Choosing the best web hosting company for a small business requires checking for certain factors that make them beneficial. Some of these factors include affordability, value for money, customer support, and the overall quality of their services.
In order to make the decision easy for you, we have tested the top web hosts in the industry and compiled the best ones for small businesses. This article will, therefore, provide information about them and why we consider them great options for small businesses. In the end, you will be able to pick your favorite web hosting service for your small business.
5 Best Web Hosts for Small Businesses in 2024
After testing and reviewing the best web hosting services in 2024, we picked the top 5 that are suitable for a small business and compared them side-by-side.
1. Hostinger – Best Web Hosting for Small Business Overall
Hostinger is the best web hosting service a small business can trust in 2024. The web host is based in Lithuania but serves users and businesses worldwide. Hostinger is popular mostly for being one of the most affordable web hosting services of 2024.
Despite being very affordable, the value for money the web host provides is unmatched. Hostinger also excels in ease of use, customer support, performance, and security. Now, let us look deeper into these aspects.
Hostinger’s Pricing and Value for Money
As hinted earlier, Hostinger is a very affordable web host and that is why it is our favorite option for businesses that are low on budget.
Hostinger has the shared, WordPress, VPS, cloud, and cPanel hosting types. According to our thorough review of the plans, they are very affordable for small businesses in terms of introductory and renewal pricing, unlike packages on other web hosts.
Something to note about Hostinger plans is that their pricing is not an indicator of the quantity and quality of the features they offer.
In fact, for only $2 per month, the host provides better features than competitors that charge up to $10 monthly. Since the main hosting type small businesses use is shared, let us have a quick look at the plans and features available under it.
- Single: costs about $2 per month; renews at $4 monthly on a 4-year subscription. It includes free SSL certificates, 50 GB SSD of storage, unlimited bandwidth, automated weekly backups, one free email account, and can host only one website.
- Premium: costs around $3 monthly; renews at $7 per month on a 48-month plan. You will get Single features, unlimited email accounts (100 per site), 100 GB SSD storage space, and a free domain name for the first year. This plan allows up to 100 websites.
- Business: costs about $4 per month; renews at $9 monthly on a 4-year subscription. It includes Premium features, daily backups, free CDN, and 200 GB NVMe SSD. This server is 5 times faster and better than the one on the Premium plan.
- Cloud Startup: costs about $10 monthly; renews at $20 per month on a 48-month plan. In addition to Business features, this server can host up to 300 websites, has a dedicated IP address, includes priority support, and delivers up to 1o times better performance than Single or Premium.
Hostinger has a 30-day money-back guarantee in case you are dissatisfied with the services you received. To find out more about the best web host for a small business and its prices, check out our breakdown of Hostinger pricing.
Hostinger’s User Interface and Ease of Use
Another reason why we chose Hostinger as the best web host for a smaller business is that it is very easy to use and manage your site with it.
Hostinger has a proprietary control panel called hPanel. This hPanel offers an intuitive way to manage your hosting account and all the other services including websites in a straightforward manner.
One of the first things we love about the hPanel is the site creation process. This control panel is integrated with a beginner-friendly process where you can create a site easily using a one-click app installer that supports over 80 web apps.
Further, the interface of the hPanel makes it easy to access any setting you want without having to click through several links. It does this by arranging all major controls as mega menus on the left sidebar and putting popular settings users may need for their website underneath them as menu items. It also makes switching between sites to manage easy.
Hostinger’s Performance
According to our tests and experience using Hostinger, the web host delivers some of the best performances even on shared hosting. Hostinger uses top performance technologies like LiteSpeed web servers, advanced caching, CDNs, and object cache for WordPress.
Besides, the hosting company has data centers in several locations, allowing businesses to choose the ones closest to their audience for the best website loading speeds. It is also possible to change data center locations if one’s target location changes free of charge once every 30 days.
Here is a quick summary of how Hostinger performs;
- Server response time (TTFB): 314 ms
- Website loading speed: 769 ms
- Load and response time (1000 visitors/minute): 47 ms
- Uptime: 99.997%
The above results show that Hostinger is perfect for hosting a high-traffic site that needs fast-loading web pages and great uptime.
Help and Support
Another reason why Hostinger is our favorite web hosting service for a small business in 2024 is that it has a great customer support team. Hostinger provides 24/7 customer support via live chat and emails.
While both channels are okay, we highly recommend the live chat option for real-time support. After contacting the Hostinger support team several times, we can say that they are very competent and helpful. They reply very fast as well.
Discover Hostinger Hosting Plans
Hostinger’s Pros and Cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Affordable with Great Value for Money | No cPanel on Shared & Cloud Hosting |
| Free Domain, SSL | No Phone Support |
| Oustanding Uptime | No Dedicated Server and Windows Hosting |
| Excellent Customer Service | |
| High Speed & Performance | |
| Multiple Data Centers | |
| Easy Account Management | |
| Commercial-grade Security | |
| Free Hostinger Website Builder |
2. DreamHost – Best for Affordable WordPress Websites
DreamHost is a company that provides some of the best services for small businesses in 2024. The web host is one of the three hosting solutions recommended by WordPress.org.
Hence, it is considered one of the best WordPress hosting services. DreamHost excels mainly in affordability and ease of use. It also has an unmatched 97-day money-back guarantee and great performance.
DreamHost’s Pricing and Value for Money
The main reason why we recommend DreamHost as a top web host for small businesses is that it is very affordable, especially for shared hosting.
This host provides unlimited features and functionalities on shared hosting while keeping costs at the bare minimum. Not only that but if your small business grows and needs more resources, upgrading to another hosting type is not too expensive.
Here is a quick rundown of the pricing of DreamHost’s plans and their features;
- Shared Starter: costs almost $3 per month; renews at $6 monthly for a 3-year subscription. It includes unlimited bandwidth, free SSL certificates, 50 GB SSD storage, a free domain name for the first year, free site migrations, and a WordPress site builder. Moreso, it can host only one website.
- Shared Unlimited: costs almost $4 per month; renews at $11 monthly for a 3-year plan. This plan includes an unlimited version of all the features on the Starter package.
While DreamHost lets you have all the features on its shared hosting plans for only $11 monthly renewal, the value for money does not surpass Hostinger’s. However, the web host’s unmatched 97-day money-back guarantee gives peace of mind to try its services for a long time and decide if it is worth it or not.
Other hosting types available at DreamHost include cloud, dedicated server, VPS, and managed WordPress.
DreamHost’s Ease of Use and User Interface
As mentioned earlier, ease of use is one of the factors that make DreamHost a top web host for small businesses.
DreamHost also uses a custom control panel that has been designed to make website management easy for customers. The DreamHost Panel has a simple and clean interface that makes sure there is the utmost focus when editing the settings of your account or website.
To achieve this, it makes sure the links to various important settings are available on the front page of the Panel. Hence, all that is required is a single click on these main settings for the actual controls to show up on the next page(s).
Some of the available links are File Manager, MySQL databases in PhpMyAdmin, and Emails. This is also where you can easily install a web app like WordPress on your website with a one-click installer.
DreamHost’s Performance
Another area we reviewed DreamHost in before listing it as one of the best hosting providers for a small business in 2024 is performance.
DreamHost comes highly recommended for hosting WordPress websites. As a result, we decided to see how well the host performs. We tested DreamHost in terms of uptime, loading speed, server response time, and the ability to withstand high traffic.
After the tests, our results indicated that DreamHost will deliver great speed and performance for your small business website so that it will excel in various aspects including SEO. Similarly, DreamHost has an outstanding uptime that will make sure your website is online most of the time without any hint of downtime.
However, unless you are on powerful servers aside from shared hosting, DreamHost may not be suitable for traffic surges. Yet, you should still be able to host medium-traffic websites where visitors aren’t loading your pages at the same time.
Here is the summary of how Dreamhost performs in the crucial aspects;
- Server response time (TTFB): 199 ms
- Website loading speed: 482 ms
- Load and response time (50 visitors/minute): 713 ms
- Uptime: 99.960%
Find out more in our DreamHost review.
Help and Support
DreamHost provides customer support via live chats and tickets. While all these channels are great, we recommend contacting the web host for support via the live chat option.
From our experience, the web host’s support team is very fast to reply and always available. More importantly, the team is quite resourceful and always eager to assist.
DreamHost also provides support via its Knowledge Base which is filled with helpful articles regarding your account and website. Hence, where the DreamHost support is found wanting, you can help yourself out to avoid any service disruption that could affect your business.
DreamHost’s Pros and Cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Affordable | No Free Email Hosting on Starter Plan |
| Free Domain & SSL | Cannot Handle High-traffic Sites |
| Automated Daily Backups | Limited Data Centers (US only) |
| Great Speeds | Inadequate Security Measures |
| Great Control Panel | No 24/7 Live Chat Support |
| Unmetered Bandwidth | No Phone Support |
| 97-Day Money-Back Guarantee |
3. InMotion Hosting – Best for Affordability and Speed
InMotion is an interesting choice in our list of the best web hosts for a small business. It is a quite notable web host when it comes to the use of high-performance technologies to power websites and applications.
The web host delivers one of the best performances for a website in terms of speed and uptime. InMotion also makes it easy to build any type of website you want through the provision of a one-click app installer.
InMotion’s Pricing and Value for Money
According to our research, InMotion is one of the best hosting providers for small businesses when it comes to affordability, with a corresponding value for money.
InMotion offers shared, WordPress, managed WP, cloud, and dedicated server. Each of these hosting types has plans with great features or configurations and affordable prices.
The hosting provider does not hoard features on its plans in order to force an upgrade and the renewal prices are budget-friendly for a small business.
Let us see the shared hosting plans at InMotion Hosting with their prices and main features;
- Core: costs almost $3 monthly, renew at around $9 per month for a 3-year plan. You will get free SSL certificates, unlimited bandwidth, 100 GB SSD, 10 email addresses, and 2X UltraStack speed & performance. It allows up to 2 websites.
- Launch: costs around $5 per month; renews at about $14 monthly for a 3-year subscription. In addition to Core features, it includes unlimited free email hosting, a free domain name for the first year, and unlimited NVMe SSD. You will also get 6X UltraStack speed & performance and be able to host up to 25 websites.
- Power: costs almost $5 monthly and renews at about $18 per month for a 3-year subscription. It includes Launch features, the capacity to host unlimited websites, 12X UltraStack speed & performance, advanced caching, and phone support.
- Pro: costs about $13 per month; renews at $25 monthly for a 3-year plan. You will get 20X UltraStack speed & performance, pro support SLA, a dedicated IP address, and the Power plan features.
Other features that come with the packages at no extra cost are DDoS protection, hack & malware protection, a free website builder, and free advertising credits. You will also have a 90-day money-back guarantee which gives you time to try out its services with a chance of a full refund if dissatisfied.
InMotion’s Ease of Use & User Interface
InMotion has two control panels for different hosting types. They are Account Management Panel (AMP) and Platform i.
The AMP is the more common control panel that comes with an integrated cPanel. AMP has a simple interface that presents the controls for the settings of your site in the form of sections and icons. Hence, it makes it easy to navigate to the controls that you need.
The web host also ensures that there are direct links between the AMP and cPanel in case you want to switch between them. It comes with Installatron, a one-click app installer too.
The “Platform i” control panel is available only on the managed WordPress packages specially designed for WP sites. Its interface is cleaner than the AMP and cPanel, so it is easier to manage your WP website with it. It pre-installs WordPress on your website and you will even get several tools that will make managing your site straightforward and enjoyable.
InMotion’s Performance
As mentioned earlier, the top performance technologies InMotion uses are part of the reasons we recommend it as a great web hosting service for a small business.
These technologies will make a business website excel in the areas where performance is a determining factor. InMotion’s implementation of these technologies is great overall, based on the results we got from our tests.
Typically, you won’t have issues hosting your business site with moderate traffic on InMotion’s shared servers at a very high loading speed. These servers, may, however, lag when it comes to a high-traffic website. The servers can still handle a traffic surge of about 50 visitors per minute. InMotion is very reliable in terms of uptime too.
See the results of our InMotion performance tests below;
- Server response time (TTFB): 312 ms
- Website loading speed: 530 ms
- Load and response time (50 visitors/minute): 475 ms
- Uptime: 99.995%
Help and Support
InMotion is not exactly the best web hosting service for small businesses in 2024 when it comes to customer support. The host provides support via phone calls (757.416.6575), live chat, and ticketing.
However, the support team is not available 24/7 as it should be. They are available 9 AM – 9 PM ET, Monday – Friday. Besides, the wait time can be extremely long sometimes and some of the first contacts are fruitless.
Nonetheless, the host has a very resourceful Help Center with helpful articles about several topics your site issues may fall into. This could offer a faster way to get your issues resolved if the support queue is taking too long. What’s more, there is a community forum where you can ask fellow small business owners for help. You could also just browse the community forum and see the issue you are having with solutions that worked for people already.
InMotion’s Pros and Cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Affordable Plans | No Free Backup Manager |
| Great Speed | Limited Data Centers |
| Outstanding Uptime | |
| Unlimited Bandwidth | |
| 90-day Money-back Guarantee | |
| Easy to Use |
4. A2 Hosting – Performance and Security
A2 Hosting is a reliable web hosting service suitable for small businesses in 2024. This hosting provider focuses mainly on performance and security. Hence, it delivers excellent services in these aspects.
Nonetheless, A2 is great in other aspects as well and it is a good option for businesses that need scalable server power and features without worrying too much about budget.
Generally, it is our favorite web hosting service for small businesses that need high-performing servers for resource-intensive projects.
A2 Hosting’s Pricing and Value for Money
A2 Hosting pricing is a little higher than other top web hosting services for small businesses when it comes to renewals. While this is just a few cents or dollars above many competitors, it can make a huge difference in the budget of a small business.
However, when we consider the pricing of most of the plans and the included features, it is evident that A2 Hosting offers great value for money. This is because every plan is filled with so many useful features that you won’t need an add-on or any third-party tool that can make your expenses skyrocket.
Here is a short summary of A2 shared hosting plans with their pricing and top features;
- Startup: costs about $3 per month; renews at $12 monthly. It includes 100 GB SSD, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited email accounts, site staging tools, and a free website builder. You can host only one site on this plan.
- Drive: costs about $6 per month; renews at $15 monthly. You will get Startup features, unlimited SSD storage, unlimited databases, free automated backups, and double of Startup’s performance. It allows the hosting of an unlimited number of websites.
- Turbo Boost: costs about $7 per month; renews at $23 monthly. It includes Drive features but the hosting environment is built on LiteSpeed web servers and NVMe SSD for better performance. This makes the server 20X faster than the Startup and Drive servers.
- Turbo Max: costs about $15 per month; renews at $29 monthly. Has the same features as the Turbo Boost server but it is equipped with 5X more resources.
Other general features you will enjoy on A2 Hosting, depending on the plan, include firewalls, anti-DDoS protection, brute-force protection, malware scanning, spam protection, security rollback, dedicated IP addresses, Git integration, etc.
There is also a 30-day money-back guarantee on all hosting plans.
A2’s Ease of Use & User Interface
A2 Hosting’s Portal is a simple dashboard that allows users to manage their accounts without breaking a sweat. Accessing areas like domains, security, support tickets, and other related controls is quite straightforward via the Portal.
However, since the Portal is not a control panel, A2 integrates cPanel to allow businesses to customize their site settings easily.
In addition, A2 Hosting provides an improved cPanel interface which has only the necessary settings and controls. Other unnecessary things that could be distracting to a user with little or no technical know-how have been stripped off. The cPanel has a one-click app installer for several web apps.
A2 Hosting’s Performance
As said earlier, A2 Hosting is the best web host for small businesses in terms of performance. The host uses advanced performance technologies like LiteSpeed web servers, NVMe SSD, OPcache, object caching via Redis, Turbo cache, Memcached, QUIC, and multi-core processors. It also has a traffic spike protection technology to prevent downtime during traffic surges.
Besides, A2’s servers are optimized for several popular CMS and web apps for the best performance via A2 Optimized. Some of the CMS include WordPress, Drupal, PrestaShop, Magento, etc.
Moreover, the host has several data centers you can choose from in order to get the chance to host your site at the location closest to your audience. This lets you deliver the fastest speeds and at the lowest latency. The data centers run on a 10 GB/s redundant network.
Here is a summary of the results of our A2 Hosting performance tests;
- Server response time (TTFB): 152 ms
- Website loading speed: 418 ms
- Load and response time (1000 visitors/minute): 257 ms
- Uptime: 99.993%
Help and Support
Of all the web hosting services for small businesses in 2024, A2 has one of the best customer support teams. The web host provides 24/7 customer support through phone calls, live chats, and email/ticketing channels. From our experience, the support team at A2 is very competent with adequate knowledge of technical website stuff. What’s more, they reply very fast!
A2 also has a Knowledge Base that customers can use to troubleshoot their issues quickly in case there is ever a really long queue and they need a solution fast.
To find out more, take a look at our in-depth A2 Hosting review.
Speed Up Your Site with A2 Hosting
A2’s Pros and Cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Low Introductory Prices | High Renewal Prices |
| Fast Load Times | No Free Domain |
| Great Uptime | No Windows Hosting |
| Excellent Customer Service | Expensive Powerful (Turbo) Servers |
| Excellent Security Features | |
| Multiple Data Centers |
5. SiteGround – Security and Customer Support
SiteGround is the last web hosting service we recommend for small businesses in 2024. The web host is also highly recommended by WordPress.org and our trials have shown that it really delivers.
SiteGround is known as the master of custom technologies and tools as the host does not rely on any third-party company for its major services. Instead, it has many proprietary tools that are better than the popular ones. Yet, some of its resources are sourced from the Google Cloud Platform.
SiteGround’s Pricing and Value for Money
SiteGround is not the best web hosting service for a small business looking for cheap packages or servers. This web host’s plans are more expensive than what you will get when using some of the SiteGround alternatives.
Nonetheless, when we consider the features that are present on each SiteGround, we can see that the price hike might be worth it. You don’t need add-ons to access features on SiteGround. Hence, SiteGround provides great value for money.
- StartUp: costs about $3 per month; renews at $15 monthly. It includes 10 GB SSD storage space, unmetered traffic, free SSL, automated daily backups, unlimited email hosting, and advanced caching. The ideal monthly traffic is 10,000 and it can host only one site.
- GrowBig: costs almost $5 monthly; renews at about $25 per month. It includes StartUp features, 20 GB SSD storage, on-demand backups, a staging tool, and 30% faster PHP configuration. The ideal traffic is about 100,000 monthly and it can host unlimited websites.
- GoGeek: initially costs about $8 per month; renews at almost $40 monthly. Aside from GrowBig features, it comes with a 40 GB SSD, Git integration, private DNS, and white labeling.
SiteGround has a 30-day money-back guarantee on all its hosting plans for new sign-ups.
SiteGround’s Ease of Use & User Interface
SiteGround has one of the best control panels in the industry, making it our choice of web hosting service for small businesses in 2024 for ease of use. Rather than using the conventional cPanel, SiteGround has a proprietary control panel called Site Tools.
Site Tools offers a modern way to manage your website and hosting services better through a very intuitive interface. It is rich in features and easily navigable irrespective of the technical know-how of the user. The Site Tools makes it possible to switch between sites during management easily and pin/arrange your favorite controls in the form of tiles for quicker access. Of course, it has a one-click app installer as well.
SiteGround’s Performance
One of SiteGround’s strengths that makes it one of the best web hosting services for small businesses in 2024 is its approach to performance.
SiteGround uses custom technologies and advanced caching methods to improve the performance of its servers and sites hosted on them. For instance, it uses a custom PHP configuration which makes your PHP projects perform generally better than normal. It also uses custom MySQL databases to ensure that your website can process more queries than it would normally at once.
Furthermore, SiteGround has 11 data centers and 16 CDN locations worldwide. What’s more, it uses the Google Cloud platform of over 170 CDN Edge networks. All these ensure that you get great website loading speeds irrespective of where your visitors are from, especially when far from the primary data center.
See how SiteGround performs overall based on our thorough tests;
- Server response time (TTFB): 229 ms
- Website loading speed: 731 ms
- Load and response time (1000 visitors/minute): 143 ms
- Uptime: 99.998%
Help and Support
One of the best services that SiteGround provides to its customers is support. SiteGround provides 24/7 customer support via live chats, phone calls, and a ticketing system.
These channels are available to every user, irrespective of their plans. The support agents connect almost immediately after a live chat session is initiated and they provide assistance seamlessly. In our opinion, they are competent and very knowledgeable in website-related topics.
In addition, SiteGround provides customer support in several languages, depending on the country on your account or the version of the site you sign up from. It also has a Help Center that is rich with helpful and well-illustrated articles or tutorials.
For more information about the provider, read our SiteGround review.
SiteGround’s Pros and Cons
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Great Uptime | Pricey for Beginners on Renewals |
| Outstanding Customer Service | Limited Storage on Shared Hosting |
| High Speed & Performance | Paid Server Migrations |
| Multiple Data Centers | No Free Domain |
| Easy Account Management | |
| Great Value for Money | |
| Commercial-grade Security | |
| Unmetered Traffic | |
| Free Website Migrations with a WP Plugin |
Conclusion: What Web Hosting Service is the Best for Small Businesses?
While we have compiled and presented a detailed list of our favorite web hosting services for a small business, it is important to note the best of them.
In our opinion, Hostinger is the right choice for any small business looking for the best web hosting service to use in 2024.
This is because Hostinger excels in all areas that affect small businesses better than the rest. Some of these areas include affordability, ease of use, customer support, security, and performance.
FAQs
What is the Cheapest Way to Host a Website?
The cheapest way to host a website as a small business presently is by getting a plan from Hostinger. With this host, you can host a site for as low as $2 per month and access several features your business needs with no hidden cost.
How Much Does Small Business Web Hosting Cost?
The cost of hosting a small business depends on the web host of your choice and the needed resources. The starting pricing of the recommended hosting services for small businesses ranges between $1 to $4 per month and the renewal prices can go as high as $100 per month.
Hostinger
