It’s 2023, and if you’re in business, no matter what type of business, you need an online presence. Even if your business has nothing to do with the internet, you don’t plan on email marketing or receiving online leads, your small business website presents itself as validation.
We’ve reviewed the best small business hosting providers in the US, Canada, and the UK in detail. We’ve weighed up their pros and cons to give you the best possible start to your small business venture.
Choosing the best reliable web hosting provider is essential to getting your business on the right track. Web hosting not only allows your website to be seen online, but it also impacts your website’s speed and thus customer satisfaction. In return for a reliable and fast web host, you could see your ROI increasing.
Best Hosting Providers For Small Businesses:
- BlueHost (Best Overall Small Business Startup Plan)
- SiteGround (Best For Growing eCommerce Websites)
- WP Engine (Best Premium SMB Business Hosting)
- GreenGeeks (Best Green Hosting Provider)
- HostPapa (Best Small Business Hosting In Canada)
- Hostinger (Best For Cheap Pricing)
- A2 Hosting (Best for Business Support)
How We Review Best Small Business Hosting
Our team spends hours signing up for different web hosts and testing them in detail. We test speed, performance, uptime, customer support, features, and lots more.
We weigh up every aspect of each small business hosting provider to find the overall best host, taking into account what small businesses need. We’ve identified these areas as:
- Uptime
- Storage
- Bandwidth
- Features
- Pricing
- Customer Support
- Security
Other Resources
- Web Hosting Coupons – Exclusive discount codes and coupons for popular hosting companies
- Best VPS Hosting – A review of the best VPS hosting companies worldwide
- Cheap Hosting – We recommend the best cheap hosting providers to save you some money
Best Small Business Hosting Comparison
Before we dive into each of our detailed reviews for the best small business hosting, we thought it was worthwhile giving you a quick head-to-head comparison of each host’s essential features.
1. BlueHost
BlueHost (Best Business Startup Plan)
Headquartered in Utah, Bluehost’s United States servers are also located in their Utah datacenter. Their parent company, Endurance International Group, is based in Massachusetts. Combined with exceptional USA sales and support, US-centralized server infrastructure, and a simple and very user-friendly interface and management console, Bluehost is my #1 recommended small business web host.
If your business is already online and you’re just looking for a better web host than your current provider, Bluehost wins out here as well as their server capacity and scaling plans accommodate established websites. For those start out hosting with Bluehost, you’ll be able to scale with your business without the need to upgrade to a more robust hosting solution.
As a Bluehost partner I’m able to extend a significant discount to my readers, bringing your rate down to just $2.95/month. Yes, you heard right – that’s mere cents per day to host your small business website. Why wait? Signup today!
BlueHost Features:
- Storage: 50GB SSD
- Bandwidth: Unlimited
- Domain: Free for 1 year
- SSL: Included for free
All of Bluehost’s plans include a 30-day money-back guarantee. If for any reason you’re not happy with your service (though we’re sure you will be), you’ll get your money back, no questions asked!
2. SiteGround
SiteGround (Best Hosting for Growing e-Businesses)
If you’re running an ecommerce website, and seconds matter in your conversion rate and website’s revenue, then I’d recommend SiteGround. Their shared hosting plans are very reasonably priced, and their infrastructure is better suited for more popular websites.
SiteGround support is also outstanding, with friendly, yet very technical, reps standing by 24/7 via tickets, email, phone, or live chat. I have hosted many websites with SiteGround and highly recommend them for any ecommerce or growing small business websites.
Get SiteGround for just $6.99/month per month and keep growing your web-based business!
SiteGround Features:
- Storage: 10GB SSD
- Bandwidth: Unlimited
- Domain: Not included
- SSL: Included for free
Although SiteGround’s prices are steep, they definitely make up for it in their features, uptime, and customer support. They are one of the most powerful shared hosting providers around.
3. WP Engine
WP Engine (Best Premium SMB Business Hosting)
If you require top-tier shared hosting for your WordPress business website, then look no further than WP Engine. They are excellent! Their Austin, Texas based company hosts all support in-house, and employs premium managed WordPress servers, designed for speed, reliability and uptime. Personally, I’ve never found a faster hosting company for WordPress websites than WP Engine.
Their interface is very simple, yet powerful, and has a number of premium features such as auto-backups with one-click restore, phenomenal Texas USA support staff, and insanely fast servers.
Keep in mind, however, that WP Engine only hosts WordPress websites, so if you’re running Magento, Drupal, Joomla or another platform, you’ll need to host elsewhere, such as with Bluehost or SiteGround.
Additionally, premium service as good and fast as WP Engine comes at a cost with plans beginning at $35/month. However, if you have a high traffic website, then $35/month is a no-brainer, as the speed, reliability and will easily have ROI as you preserve your customer experience and NPS scores and protect the leads and/or revenue generated from your company’s website.
Shared hosting for WordPress business websites gets no better than WP Engine. They’re simply the best business website host there is!
WP Engine Features:
- Storage: 10GB SSD
- Bandwidth: 50GB
- Domain: Not included
- SSL: Included for free
WP Engine is suitable for small businesses using WordPress who need someone to deal with and manage the everyday technical side of your website.
4. GreenGeeks
GreenGeeks (Best Green Hosting Provider)
If your small business prides itself on being eco-friendly and environmentally conscientious, then you’ll want to check out Green Geeks. We analyzed the top green website hosting plans to find the best bang-for-your-buck with the most truly green web host. The result, GreenGeeks was the clear winner, and holds our recommendation for green web hosting.
The California based eco-friendly host, boasts a 300% renewable energy efficiency, meaning they calculate their energy consumption each year and purchase 3x the used energy in the form of renewable energy via the Bonneville Environmental Foundation.
Pricing starts at $2.99/month for their Lite plan, which offers the best value for smaller websites or blogs that are just launching. The Pro and Premium plans are for larger, or multi-site projects that require increased performance, server caching, and bandwidth speeds.
In the past, green web hosts were written off as a marketing gimmick, or sub-par performers looking to appeal to a smaller niche segment of the market. This is no longer the case today. Companies like GreenGeeks are directly competing with the other hosting giants on website speed, uptime and reliability, security, and tech support.
GreenGeeks Features:
- Storage: Unlimited
- Bandwidth: Unlimited
- Domain: Free for 1 year
- SSL: Included for free
If your business is conscious about the environment and you want to invest in middle of the road small business hosting, GreenGeeks is an up and coming eco-friendly web host.
5. HostPapa
HostPapa (Best Canada Small Business Hosting)
HostPapa, a popular shared web host founded in 2006, is headquartered in Burlington, Ontario, Canada. Their main datacenter is in Oakville, Ontario, Canada. I pulled one of the IP addresses from their Ontario, CA location and ran it through an IP location tool. The datacenter location was validated as being smack-dap in the middle of Oakville, ON, CA. (check for yourself here)
Many Canadian businesses wish to host with a fellow Canadian run company, and require datacenters located in Canada to both adhere to Canadian privacy laws and to better serve pages to their Canadian customers.
Beware, however, as many popular web hosts will advertise as “Canadian Web Hosts” but in actuality they have no direct Canadian offering, they do not price in Canadian dollars (CAD), and they have no Canadian datacenters.
An example of this is A2 Hosting, which has landing pages for the whole of Canada, and location specific pages for Ontario, Ottawa, Quebec, Toronto, and Vancouver… but alas, there is no real tie to Canada here except for some “sneaky” marketing positioning.
So who do you choose to host your Canadian small business website? The answer is HostPapa! Furthermore, when purchasing from the HostPapa .ca website, all prices are denoted in CAD, another nice feature for Canadians!
HostPapa hosting is affordable, with billing options as low as $3.95/month CAD for a 36-month term. If you’d rather signup for a shorter term, you’ll just pay a dollar or so more per month. They’re the easy choice for Canadian small businesses looking to target customers in Canada with super fast local hosting.
HostPapa Features:
- Storage: 100GB SSD
- Bandwidth: Unlimited
- Domain: Free for 1 year
- SSL: Included for free
HostPapa is a worthy choice for small businesses located in Canada, but other locations may struggle with HostPapa’s subpar performance, support, and underwhelming features.
6. Hostinger
Hostinger (Best for Cheap Hosting)
Hostinger offer super cheap pricing plans that come with a wide variety of features. From as little as $1.99 per month, you can get hosting for your small business. While we wouldn't recommend their Single shared hosting plan for small businesses, their other shared hosting plans are still an absolute steal, with decent uptime and performance statistics.
Small businesses love Hostinger for their cheap shared hosting. While many cheap web hosts may offer average features and hold back on resources, Hostinger certainly don’t.
Starting from $1.99 per month, Hostinger offers a range of hosting types, including shared hosting, VPS hosting, as well as Windows and Linux hosting options.
Hostinger use cPanel, but have created their own version of it named hPanel. For beginners or businesses who want to keep things simple, hPanel is hands down one of the easiest control panels we’ve come across.
Although we’ve ranked Hostinger down for customer support, it’s purely because they don’t offer phone support. In fact, they offer 24/7 support including live chat, which is multilingual. But for businesses who may need instant help in order to solve any issues, telephone support is something we look out for.
Hostinger Features:
- Storage: 50GB SSD
- Bandwidth: 100GB
- Domain: Free for 1 year (Premium and Business only)
- SSL: Included for free
Hostinger’s low prices are attractive, and they’ve got plenty of features to keep small businesses interested. Their hosting options are vast, meaning there is room to scale your business as it grows.
7. A2 Hosting
A2 Hosting (Best for Customer Support)
A2 Hosting is one of the few web hosts to offer Windows hosting. A2's shared hosting plans come with the option of Turbo Boost which is said to increase speed and performance by 20x. In our experience of A2 Hosting, their customer support has always been a priority; they are knowledgeable, helpful, and respond quickly to any requests.
For small businesses, A2 Hosting’s Turbo Boost plans are ideal. They’ll easily handle high-traffic websites and ensure your website performs well under pressure.
When your small business starts to grow, A2 Hosting’s cloud hosting is one of the best cloud hosting options for businesses. The scalability and flexibility will allow you to focus on your business without worrying about any spikes or dips in traffic.
Although A2 Hosting’s plans aren’t that expensive, they also aren’t the cheapest around. However, you do get all the basic features needed to host your small business website, like a free SSL, email accounts, and domain name.
A2 Hosting Features:
- Storage: 100GB SSD
- Bandwidth: Unlimited
- Domain: Not included
- SSL: Included for free
Small Business Web Hosting - UK
Finding quality United Kingdom based hosting is equally as challenging as finding a Canadian host. The same issues exist, with companies throwing up “sneaky” SEO pages that are geo-targeted towards those searching for location-based hosting.
In actuality, most of those web hosts don’t operate in the UK, don’t have datacenters there, and don’t sell in the British Pound. So how do you find the right UK web host for your small business website? That’s where my research, experience, and personal recommendation comes in.
My #1 recommended web host for UK small business hosting is SiteGround (yes, the same SiteGround as listed above!). They have 4 datacenters worldwide, one of which is in London, UK. When testing from the UK (and Western Europe), this London location has extremely low latency and very fast response times locally.
I also ran tests from Asia, Africa, South America and North America, and all were surprisingly fast from the London datacenter.
You can test ping/traceroute for IP: 5.10.97.132 to check latency for yourself, either from your personal computer in the United Kingdom or Western Europe, or from a geographically distributed ping test service (dotcom-tools) – see how fast the response time is from London, Paris, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Copenhagen, Madrid, and Warsaw locations!
While SiteGround is not based in the UK (their headquarters is in Sofia, Bulgaria), they provide excellent 24/7 English-based support, so aligning support during UK time zones of Western European Time or British Summer Time are a non-issue.
SiteGround offers fast speeds with SSD drives included for all plans, and they deploy the latest speed technologies such as NGINX, HTTP/2, PHP7, and a free CDN. They’re also partnered with Let’s Encrypt to provide free SSL certificates with each account.
All apps auto-update, they have a robust enterprise grade firewall system, and a very stable platform with auto-backups and easy restore functionality. SiteGround is truly an excellent web host, and one of my personal favorites as I have used them for countless website projects.
Best Email Hosting for Small Business
The easiest solution is to use the built-in email service provided by Bluehost, SiteGround, or HostPapa. But for those requiring a more robust email system with additional features, then I highly recommend GoDaddy for your business email.
In addition to their general webmail system, they offer Microsoft Office 365 plans. Office 365 accounts come with the full suite of Microsoft productivity tools and start at just $5.00/user/month. Microsoft Exchange plans start at $7.99/user/month, and the Rackspace Email plans are just $2.00/user/month.
In addition to the GoDaddy hosted email, which starts as low as $1.99/month for the email essentials plan, I would highly recommend looking into the Microsoft Office 365 plans offered through GoDaddy.
Here, the Online Essentials plan begins at just $5.99/month per user, and includes online versions of Microsoft Office, as well as a large 1TB secure online storage alocation.The Business Premium and Premium Security plans are even better, and a must if you need HIPAA compliance for your business.
Already have your business email setup elsewhere, but are looking to upgrade to Office 365 with GoDaddy? No problem! GoDaddy offers no hassle zero-downtime migration with no loss in productivity for your business.
If you’re looking for professional grade business email at an affordable rate in an easily manageable platform, then GoDaddy is the clear choice.
Additionally, for those businesses with on-prem email hosting, or a 3rd party IT company email system, I’d highly recommend moving your small business email to the cloud. By implementing a cloud-based email system like those provided by GoDaddy you’ll see numerous benefits such as:
- Your business will save money. Cloud solutions are almost always significantly cheaper than local systems.
- You will have better employee collaboration with cloud-based productivity tools.
- You’ll be able to access your data anytime, from anywhere in the world with internet access. Not just email access, we’re talking files uploaded to the cloud, served on demand 24/7, not sitting on your workstation back home.
- Your data will be far more secure as GoDaddy and Microsoft have enterprise grade security and offer the peace of mind of automatic offsite cloud backups.
Best Domain Name Registrar for Small Businesses
GoDaddy, the biggest domain registrar on the planet is the easy option here. I’ve personally registered hundreds of domains with GoDaddy as they are the easiest, most convenient platform out there.
They focus heavily on small businesses in their popular advertising campaigns and offer lots of nice add-ons and amenities for small business owners looking to get online or grow their existing online presence.
But the convenience and simplicity of the largest and most popular domain registrar comes at a slightly increased cost over some other lesser known domain registrars out there. GoDaddy standard .com domain registration will run you $14.99/year, which is often discounted to around $11.99 for the first year.
How to Choose the Best Small Business Domain Name
Of course, if your business is building a brand, then you’ll want your domain name to be branded accordingly. However, if your website isn’t necessarily “branded”, and you’re looking for a more general domain name, then that can be a little difficult to select the right one!
Luckily, I’ve found a great resource to help with this. Back in 2012, LeanDomainSearch.com curated a list of the 5,000 most frequently used domain name prefixes and suffixes. Below are the top 10, with the top 100 most popular domain name prefixes and suffixes below that in the expandable table.
- my+
- +online
- the+
- +web
- +media
- web+
- +world
- +net
- go+
- +group
- +blog
- +shop
- +book
- +store
- +inc
- +tech
- +design
- +box
- +now
- +site
- super+
- +news
- +app
- free+
- +club
- +pro
- green+
- net+
- new+
- +network
- +plus
- +tv
- +zone
- +link
- +co
- +cloud
- pro+
- get+
- mobile+
- best+
- +it
- +life
- all+
- +works
- +city
- smart+
- social+
- easy+
- ad+
- +hub
- +man
- +list
- digital+
- +direct
- +info
- +central
- +marketing
- big+
- +usa
- +lab
- +house
- +solutions
- +me
- +art
- live+
- +music
- cloud+
- top+
- shop+
- tech+
- +host
- your+
- +home
- auto+
- +market
- +guide
- +magazine
- global+
- love+
- eco+
- in+
- +soft
- +center
- +games
- real+
- mr+
- art+
- +land
- +live
- +software
- +space
- +time
- just+
- +studio
- team+
- +one
- +talk
- one+
- +search
The Best Options to get your Small Business Online
In summary, if you’re looking for the best setup for getting your small business online, I recommend you register your desired domain name with GoDaddy, setup your hosting with Bluehost, and if you’re not going to use the default Bluehost email and are looking for a more robust system, then setup your email with GoDaddy’s Office 365 package.
Congratulations again on your decision to start your own business and the proactive steps you’re taking to get online and start growing your presence on the web!
Best Small Business Hosting FAQs
Small business web hosting can cost as little as $0.99 per month. It really depends on your requirements. If you’re looking for great uptime, support, and value for money, BlueHost’s pricing is incredibly affordable. If you opt for a managed service like WP Engine, you could be paying $25 per month.
Without sacrificing quality, you can get the best deals from web hosting plans by signing up for them for longer. For example, if you sign up for a 36-month plan, you’re going to get the best rates compared to a 12-month plan.
Small business web hosting should take security very seriously, especially if you’re selling products or services online. Your website should always include an SSL certificate which all of our recommended small business web hosts include for free.
Shared hosting is the cheapest form of small business hosting. It’s reliable but you do have to share your server with lots of other people. If you want your own server but can’t afford a dedicated one, VPS hosting is the next thing to consider. Cloud hosting is also worth taking a look at as it’s scalabale and you can increase your resources as you go.