Comparison of Best Web Hosting for Small Businesses
If you own a small business that doesn’t have a web presence but you would like to have one (for obvious reasons), you have come to the right place. It is high time you gave your small business and online platform because it’s a connected world that we live in and half of the retail decision that people make for products and services is by searching for them on the web. Sometimes, people just decide to buy things that they didn’t intend to in the first place just by surfing on the web. So, the question is why should you not capitalize from this opportunity?
Now comes the point when you need to have the most crucial tool, which is choosing one from a range of different web hosting platforms that will suit your requirements.
What is Web Hosting for Small Businesses?
We will start with making you understand what web hosting is before reviewing each of the best web hosting websites for you. Basically, a web hosting company provides their servers to the businesses to be used to generate video, audio or written content on the website.
There is an array of web hosting sites that you can make use of depending upon your budget. Some of the web servers charge thousands of dollars each year but these are usually targeted towards large businesses. For small and medium businesses as well, you may find some of the very well-known web hosting service providers that offer the best features.
BlueHost Vs GoDaddy Vs SiteGround Vs HostGator Vs DreamHost
We have included in this article review on all the best suited web hosting service providers for small businesses for you to have a handy information base.
BlueHost:
Bluehost was launched in 1996 by Danny Ashworth and Matt Heaton. It is one of the best recommended service providers for webhosting and has also been featured on wordpress.org while being rated as excellent.
A comparison of its Basic, Plus and Prime packages is detailed below against the main features that it offers in different categories.
Features and Pricing:
- Website
In the basic version, the user is offered services on 1 website. However, in Plus and Prime versions unlimited websites are offered.
- Website Space
There is a limited 50 GB website space offered in the basic version. Nevertheless, unlimited websites space is given in both Plus and Prime versions.
- Domains
All three versions offer 1 domain.
- Email Account
There is a limited number of email account that’s equal to 5 offered in the Basic version and unlimited email accounts are offered in Plus and Prime versions.
- Email Storage
A 100MB storage per account is offered in the Basic version and unlimited storage is offered in both the other versions.
- Pricing
- Basic version is offered at $7.99 per month. Plus version is offered at $10.99 per month. And Prime version is offered at $14.99 per month.
- There is also a discounted pricing where $2.95 per month is the discounted price for Basic version, $5.95 per month is for Plus and Prime versions
It offers three different packages including Basic, Plus and Prime with Prime being the one that features all the best available features. There are five main hosting plans that that it offers these are:
- WordPress hosting
- VPS hosting
- Shared hosting
- Dedicated hosting, and
- Cloud
If you are confused in what to get for you for starters, shared hosting is perhaps the best plan to get in case you have an inexpensive and basic service plan in mind. Usually, small businesses opt for this option whereas dedicated hosting is an expensive choice and also caters to huge business’ types. VPS hosting comes somewhere in the middle.
Other Features:
- If you are looking for eCommerce related features, it has a range of shopping carts available to you including OS Commerce, Agora, Cube and Zen. You can add as many products as you want to with the Plus version. It also offers SSL security that goes for the transactions.
- Bluehost is one of the best web hosting service providers with great security features. It offers a range of password protected directories in addition to a three-layered anti-spam protection solution including Spam Hammer, Spam Experts as well as Apache Spam Assassin. With this, you can also use the blacklist option to block IP addresses.
- It offers a 20-day money back guarantee.
- It features a very easy to use interface.
Customer Support:
No all the users are impressed by their customer services; some have reviewed them as really helpful and quick while the others suggest that there is no one to pick up their calls.
HostGator:
HostGator offers the following features:
Features:
- cPanel:
cPanel is perhaps one of the most famous control panels globally and the shared hosting accounts of HostGator offer CPanel making it convenient to use as well as offer a range of support for novice as well as professional users.
- Dedicated and VPS Services
Both the servers are offered by HostGator, which is major highlight.
- Site Builders
The HostGator Platform is famous in its offering of a range of site builders. It also allows you to get Joomla and WordPRess that means you get access to the directory of thousands of premium themes free of cost.
- Multiple Domain Management
You can add a huge number of domains using either the Business plan or even the Baby plan offered by HostGator. The same hosting plan can be used to manage multiple websites.
Pricing:
There are three kinds of plan offered by HostGator mentioned below:
- Hatching Plan:
By paying $3.96 per month you get access to a single domain, a 99.9% up time guarantee and unlimited bandwidth. It also offers unlimited disk space and a single click script installs. The customer service is open 24/7 for the users. - Baby Plan:
This plan charges the users $6.36 per month and offers unlimited domains unlike the hatching plan. It also offers unlimited bandwidth and unlimited disk space with a 99.9% guaranteed up time. Its technical support is open 24/7 and features a single click script install. - Business Plan:
The last is the business plan that charges $10.36 a month. The features remain the same as in baby plan.
Customer Support:
HostGator boasts of an excellent customer service and support and the representatives are available 24/7. There is also a live chat option and toll-free hotline.
GoDaddy:
GoDaddy is by and far featured as the giant of domain and web hosting world. Its features and pricing information are detailed below:
- Shared Hosting Package and Features
The unlimited bandwidth as well as parked domains offered by GoDaddy makes it desirable to users. However, the disk space is limited to 100GB. However if you are a small business owner and want to have a website to run your business, 100 GB is not a very small number. Moreover, you will be offered email accounts as well as MySQL databases to that number of 10.With GoDaddy shared hosting package, you also get to enjoy a 45-day money back guarantee and you are free to cancel the subscription at any given time.Also, you will see GoDaddy using cPanel 11.40.1, which is an easy to use control panel. It also has an anti-span feature for security.
- Customer Service and Support
The customer service and support for GoDaddy doesn’t have a very good reputation among users. Though 24/7 support is available by the service provider, however, the staff is just moderately helpful. It also has around 20-25 minutes wait time before each user is responded to their queries so it is pretty average and not like a stellar service that people usually expect out of GoDaddy. - Pricing
The business hosting rates for GoDaddy is $6.99 while they offer free setup and the domain registration is an additional $14.99.
SiteGround:
- Pricing:
SiteGround offers three different categories of pricing. The first is StartUp version that charges $9.95 for a month. Its discounted pricing after 60% off is $3.95.The other plan is GrowBig that charges $14.95 for a month, which you may get after 60% off at $5.95 per month.And finally, the GoGreek plan is priced at $29.95 per month and can be availed at a 60% discount and it would cost you $11.95 per month. - Features:
So what are the featured offered in each of these plans.With StartUp plan, you will get to enjoy about 10,000 numbers of suitable monthly visits and a web space of as much as 10GB. IT offers you a single web hosting service.All the other features including free email accounts, unlimited parked and sub domains, cPanel, unlimited MySQL DB and free site transfer is available with this version along with a 30-Day money back guarantee.The second GrowBig plan boasts around 25,000 monthly visits and a 20GB web space. It offers unlimited website hosting unlike the StartUp category and features all other benefits mentioned in the basic version above.Finally, the GoGreek plan offers as many as 100,000 web visits and a huge space of 30GB along with all other features mentioned in the above two categories. - Customer Service and Support
SiteGround is famous for its fast and speedy customer support. It offers a 24/7 available support system to all its users regardless of the buying category and they are available on the call as well as online chat rooms. However, only the GoGreek and GrowBig category users can leverage from their on-priority based services.
DreamHost:
DreamHost has been in the industry for around twenty long years. This is one of the oldest and thus trusted web hosting servers of all times. The users of DreamHost review it as excellent or very good at the minimum.
- Features:
The following are the highlighted features offered by DreamHost.- Managed WordPress
- Domain Names
- VPS Hosting
- Cloud Servers
- Dedicated Hosting
- Shared Hosting
- Cloud Storage
You can get any high –level domain in a reasonable price. While you get any domain through this service provider, you get to enjoy other features like subdomains, domain privacy, custom name servers, domain locking and DNS management.
One of their most famous services is shared hosting, which comes with a great package including unlimited storage, email accounts, unlimited domains and data transfers.
As far as security features are concerned, DreamHost offers firewalls, malware removal and encryption options. They also offer HTTPS secure hosting and the users can have the additional SSL certificates to their domains. The uptime is set on an average of 99.97%.
- Pricing:
It has as many as 4 different tiers or categories offered to the users as per the features they want. These include:- Starter package, which comes in $15 for a month and offers you a 1GB RAM with a 30GB SSD
- The other one is called the Popular, which comes at $30 for a month. It comes with a 2GB RAM and a 60 GB SSD.
- The third package is called the Go Big package. This is for $60 for a month. It features 4GB RAM and SSD of 120 GB.
Lastly, the package is called Maximum. It comes with a price tag of $120 for a month. It also features an 8GB RAM and a 240 GB SSD.
- Customer Support:
The customer support and service for DreamHost is as they say “rock solid”! The experts sitting on the other end are amazing in their work and are reviewed as very helpful and fast. They are very solution oriented and are available 24/7 for the service. The review reports suggest that majority or the customers have a positive feedback for this service provider.DreamHost also features a forum that is called Knowledge Base where all the general queries and their solutions are discussed so that customers can have rapid and easy access to the answer of their problems. This knowledge base is also prepared keeping in view the customer’s previous queries.
Hopefully, this review on comparison for best Small Business Web Hosting will give an idea for you to get started with your online Business.
