Best small business web host of 2023: SMB hosting providers and services for all budgets

Every small business needs a website, but finding the right web hosting (opens in new tab) package isn't always easy. Many plans are targeted primarily at home users, and don't have the power that businesses need.

Small business websites can't afford to fail – ever – so reliability is key. Choose a Virtual Private Server (VPS (opens in new tab)) or dedicated server hosting (opens in new tab) plan, if you can afford it, to avoid the hassles of shared servers. Look for support that can be accessed at speed with telephone and live chat available, as well as emails and tickets. You'll probably want a plan that includes automated backups, too, but that's another area where you'll need to check the small print: backups are often an optional extra.

Think about an upgrade path, too, especially if you're starting with a basic shared hosting plan. If your business grows then your website needs might also expand, and it will make your life much easier if your chosen host has the add-ons and extras to cope.

There's a lot to think about, but fortunately, there are also some excellent hosting providers around that understand exactly what small businesses need. In this article we've highlighted six web hosts who have something to offer everyone, from the smallest home business to demanding corporate users.

These are the best small business web host services of 2023

Some small businesses might not want to pay for VPS or cloud hosting, or they just can't afford it, so in that case, shared hosting is a good and affordable choice. 

Hostinger (opens in new tab) has been around for a long time and over the years it accumulated over 29 million customers. The company above all has very wallet-friendly plans, and these are a great choice for any newcomers.

The pricing starts at just $1.39 per month over the 4-year period. Seeing as this is a starter plan, you only get one website and two MySQL databases with 100GB bandwidth, but with that price, you can't really complain.

That being said, the best option for small businesses would be the "Business (opens in new tab)" plan which gives you lots of features as well as being four times faster than the starter plan. You get unlimited databases, and bandwidth for up to 100 websites across 200GB SSD disk space. The price is $3.99 per month over a 4-year period. 

As you can see, you don't get many restrictions and SSL certificate, Cloudflare protection, and daily backups are also included, among other features.

The company also has cheap VPS packages with a starting price of $3.95 per month. This has 1 CPU, 1GB RAM, 20GB of storage and 1TB of bandwidth. The high-end tier package gives you 8 CPU, 16GB RAM, 250GB of storage and 12TB of bandwidth, with the price being $77.99 per month.

All in all, Hostinger is a capable provider with very cheap plans that can appeal to everyone more or less. If you are not satisfied, the plans are also fully refundable for 30 days.

• Read our Hostinger review (opens in new tab)

Another option for small businesses is cloud hosting, and HostGator has some good offers for cloud hosting, especially if you value speed above all else.

Cloud hosting is a smart technology which spreads your website content across multiple devices, improving redundancy and speeding up load times. It's an interesting idea which has many business benefits, but if you choose wisely, you can try it out for less than the cost of some shared hosting products.

HostGator's (opens in new tab) Business Cloud, for instance, delivers on the business basics with support for unlimited websites, unmetered storage and bandwidth, and a private SSL certificate.

As this is a cloud plan, three mirrored copies of your website are spread across multiple hosting servers. If there's a hardware failure, your website can immediately be switched to another server.

All HostGator cloud plans give you shared access to a defined level of system resources (CPU time and RAM). Another benefit of cloud hosting is that you can purchase more of these and see the benefit immediately, with no downtime or time-consuming migrations required.

The high-end features continue with a distributed Varnish caching setup to accelerate the loading of your static content, freeing up RAM and CPU time for producing dynamic content.

While we've highlighted HostGator's cloud plans here, as an interesting improvement on regular shared hosting, the company also provides managed WordPress hosting, good value VPS packages, dedicated servers and more. There really is something here for everyone.

• Read our HostGator review (opens in new tab)

Shared hosting is slower and less reliable than VPS and dedicated plans, but it's still perfectly adequate for many simple websites, and the best plans will handle all the main business needs.

DreamHost's (opens in new tab) shared hosting plan scores well on the fundamentals. There are no limits on bandwidth, emails or MySQL databases. Your site is secured by a free Let's Encrypt SSL certificate, and preinstalled WordPress allows you to get a quality site up and running in an afternoon – plus SSD storage as standard will keep performance high.

Handy extras include the ability to host unlimited domains from a single account. And in a nice touch, DreamHost doesn't just offer a free domain name with each shared hosting plan (except the monthly plan): there's free privacy protection, too. If you've registered a domain without that, and been inundated with emails and phone calls from ‘website designers’ and assorted scammers, you'll know how valuable that can be.

It's a strong all-round package, but if you need more, DreamHost also offers everything from managed WordPress and WooCommerce, to VPS, dedicated and cloud hosting plans.

VPS Business plan is especially suited for small businesses as it was built for them according to DreamHost. You get unlimited everything except for storage (60GB). Since it's a VPS, you'll use your own server resources for unhindered performance and if the need arises, you can easily scale up the RAM. 

Billing is flexible. You can sign up for monthly billing, or alternatively choose the three-year plan for the best discounts. Don't be put off by the longer term: DreamHost products are protected by an exceptional 97-day money-back guarantee, so there's plenty of time to test the service for yourself.

• Read our DreamHost review (opens in new tab)

Most small business hosting products are focused on power and functionality above ease of use. That's not a problem if you know what you're doing, but small businesses don't always have the technical expertise to manage this kind of hosting, and it could take quite some time and effort to figure out how the service works.

With GoDaddy Business Hosting (opens in new tab) small businesses have another choice if they want to try something different than what's already mentioned. This is a hybrid product which aims to offer the dedicated resources and similar performance to Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting, with the simplified cPanel-style management of a shared hosting service.

GoDaddy's baseline Launch plan gives you 4GB RAM, two CPUs and 100GB of storage, for instance. These resources are solely for the use of your website, which should give you improved and more consistent website performance, no matter what's going on with other sites hosted on your server.

Restrictions elsewhere are kept to a minimum, with support for unlimited websites, databases and emails, and unmetered bandwidth. (‘Unmetered’ means there's no fixed limit, but GoDaddy reserves the right to complain if your site is hogging resources.)

There's a SSL certificate thrown into the mix, and GoDaddy has included a one-year, one-user subscription to Microsoft Office 365 Business Email.

Overall, the range is a little more expensive than some VPS products, but if you're looking for easy setup and simpler website management, GoDaddy could be worth a look.

• Read our GoDaddy review (opens in new tab)

Basic shared, cloud and similar hosting plans are easy to use and can deliver good performance, but they also limit your control over the server environment. You can't choose to install Windows, for instance, or do anything else that would affect other websites hosted on the same server.

Virtual Private Servers (VPS) are isolated environments which you can tweak, adjust and customize however you like. As a bonus, you also get CPU time and RAM allocated just for you, improving both performance and stability.

For small businesses, we already mentioned DreamHost's VPS plan but Liquid Web's offer is more than deserving of a mention too.

Liquid Web's (opens in new tab) starter VPS product gives you two CPUs, 2GB RAM, 40GB SSD space, 100GB backup, and 10TB bandwidth, for instance, and is priced from $59 (£42) a month. If you choose the two-year plan, the price drops to $15 per month.

Some hosts have cheaper VPS plans, but that's often because specifications have been trimmed to the bare minimum. Liquid Web takes a more honest approach, with even the most basic plans including items that are often chargeable extras elsewhere. For example, that $59 gets you built-in backups, Gigabit transfers, unlimited sites, a dedicated IP address, CloudFlare CDN, DDoS protection, antivirus, antispam, cPanel/WHM or Plesk Onyx, and more.

All VPS plans are highly configurable, with Linux options including CentOS 6, CentOS 7, Ubuntu 14.04, Ubuntu 16.04 and Debian 8, and high-level plans support Windows Server 2012 and 2016.

Whatever you're installing will include server management by default, which means Liquid Web will handle maintenance tasks such as operating system updates. Proactive system monitoring allows the company to detect and fix some problems before you even notice them, and speedy, responsive 24x7x365 support will help you with anything else.

Factor in the 100% uptime guarantee and generous service level agreements and Liquid Web has a lot of business hosting appeal.

• Read our Liquid Web review (opens in new tab)

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