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The mark of every business is the storefront – whether you’re selling virtual services or adding to your online storefront, your website is typically the first thing a future client or customer will see. Your website is an online version of your in-person store and should meet the same high-quality standard you would expect to see in a building, and therefore, selecting the top website hosting service is a necessity to make sure all of your needs are met.
Best Website Hosting Services
Web hosting services are the backbone of any website and work to ensure that your website is connected to the internet and is running properly for your online customers. We designed our simple guide to help show you how to choose the best host for your business. Whether you are just starting out with a new site or are an experienced user who has spent years searching for the best host, our guide is developed to help you find the next top hosting services to meet your needs.
However, the problem with this is that when it comes to choosing the best hosting companies for your small business, there are hundreds of web hosting services to choose from. All these hosting companies offer select services to meet both your budget and your needs. With all of the noise out there from both hosting companies jockeying for your attention, we’ve compiled a list to help you decide what is the best website host and which one is the best hosting for small business. It’s 2019 and as technology improves, more and more functions become available for the average person. So unless you’re a massive business with large server needs, most basic hosting packages will suit you just fine no matter what kind of interaction you’re looking for and help answer the question: What is web hosting?
Siteground
Many web hosting companies focus on meeting the most basic website functions for their clients. This helps the business owner maintain a low budget but also creates a lack of functionality necessary to keep a website going year-round. Most of the time, business owners must reach for secondary services to help handle their hosting. Platforms like Siteground help take that secondary source away and develop an all in one style connection.
The SiteGround plan is a bit different. The service includes 10GB of hard drive space and cPanel site management. This is intended to give you enough space to create whatever your heart’s desire without worrying about storage. There are unlimited bandwidth, email addresses, databases, and FTP accounts to make sure your customers can continue to browse the website fast and effectively while staying in communication with you when necessary. The new service includes Spam Experts-based spam filtering, free Let’s Encrypt SSL, daily backups and an integrated Cloudflare CDN. The website also comes with two forms of staging, making it easy to choose how you design your website functions. These accounts run a bit higher than their competition, but the variety of different functionalities help make the cost worth it. In many ways, with prices at $3.50 a month, the cost is surprisingly affordable for customers despite the high-end functions. The services come with additional support any time you have questions, making this service unstoppable.
For the most part, CDN usually comes as a free plugin added into the admin panel of the hosting service. Starting a CDN is quite simple, and we particularly like hosts that combine the performance and speed boost of a solid-state drive with programming languages, optimized hardware, and caching tools already completely installed and ready to go out of the box instead of having the task of building it from scratch. Siteground offers not only this but much more in its CDN service. The SiteGround solution is far and away the most powerful, with a combination of tools such as SSD, PHP 7, HTTP/2, Memcached, and OpCache. These tools promise to make sure you start with your best foot forward and not have to worry about installing your security measures.
WPengine
WPengine was designed specifically to combine with the powerful functions of WordPress’ hosting abilities. The company was founded in Austin, TX and is known as one of the first, most popular, and most reliable brands today. While WPengine has a plethora of competition for both their general and managed hosting functionalities, the company is still considered one of the top leaders of web hosting with a loyal customer base and some of the best modern functionalities to date.
WPengine is purposefully designed to handle speed for websites, no matter what kind of design you are running. They have customized servers that are capable of running large amounts of specifically designed plugins that are designed to help make sure the content of your website is running strong at any given time. They also have trained support who are available around the clock at your convenience and are trained so that they can go into your WordPress installation and identify the exact chokepoint that needs to be moved for your site to start working properly. WPengine also has two staging functions that allow you to decide whether you want to code your website or design it with a drag and drop feature. It also allows you to add employees to your website so you can delegate tasks.
WPengine’s speed is where the service gets its reputation, from the very beginning, speed has been one of the top priorities of WPengine’s functionality. While other providers allow customized servers, they still get overloaded when installing WordPress plugins, making it hard to keep the site load speed at top-notch, but with WPengine, they have the ability to build servers not only customer to their web hosting but to their plugins as well, providing ultimate support on both ends and top speed on both front and back servers.
Bluehost
All Bluehost plans offer 24-hour live chat, unlimited bandwidth, and at least five email accounts. The cost of the service comes with free webhosting. The website comes complete with a two-stage development process that allows you to decide how to build your website and a solid CND that automatically backs up all of your work. By default, Bluehost provides several excellent security features giving you the best security process for your buck considering the inexpensive cost of the plans, including the free SSL certificate for each plan. All planes promise to protect the domain registration information for your website secured and protected against hackers looking for personal detail and other sensitive info. Despite all of their functionality, the website functions at 99.9% upload speed throughout the year, allowing for fast connection for browsers.
Bluehost provides top of the line security and integration with Cloudflare – an industry-leading content delivery network. This CDN protects against hacking attacks and fake traffic, spammers and more to help keep your website as secure and confident as possible. This helps to make sure your website isn’t bogged down by people trying to get at personal information or crash your website.
Using a CDN will increase site speed by letting you host your web files on their home servers, rather than having to keep your web information in multiple places. It not only allows for better organization, safer and more secure content, but it also quickens the time it takes to bounce information between your website and your visitor.
InMotion Webhosting
InMotion is known for its amazing service with an A+ rating from the BBB and 15-year CNET-certification. Their servers are shared but private.
InMotion hosting bundles some high-tech features into its plans that other companies often consider as bonus packages, including the likes of malware and DDoS protection, spam-safe email and a system of basic backups, around the clock support, two staging services and much more. All of this is wrapped up in one neat bundle for InMotion and they are making sure to protect all of this information as well. InMotion also supports cPanel and Softaculous panels helping create fast upload speeds. In short, there’s a lot to love about this service if you’re looking for basic functionality and simple structure.
InMotion takes pride in its managed security and making sure their equipment is the latest and best technology with continuous updates. All of this allows them to have speed enhancement that is much, much faster than most services available on the internet. Their web hosting services also come equipped with free SSD storage on the cloud Linux platform with NGINX, and PHP 7, making their servers well rounded and protected.
GoDaddy
GoDaddy is most known for providing unique URLs, however, they are also able to provide unique hosting services for Windows and Linux users as well. Once a user has registered with the company they provide each website with a DNS that is unique to the website. GoDaddy offers a variety of plans that meet the business owners’ needs from simple sharing to powerful, business integrated hosting and dedicated servers for ultimate control.
Some of the best features that GoDaddy are the Odin Plesk management tools, which packs everything into a single location for easier management possibilities. GoDaddy’s remote control center lets you easily transfer your website files to a new host by typing in a few keystrokes. In case of a hack, they will run several anti-spam tools to protect your site from malicious software.
GoDaddy stands out from the crowd with its 24/7 technical service. They make it their promise to provide all of your technical needs so that you don’t need to worry about yourself. They will also provide you with the latest software and security patches to keep your site running smoothly. Their support is very good, and they can be very helpful when you have a problem. With GoDaddy, you also do get solid-state storage and multi-site management console. They protect you from DDOS attacks, and the provided interactive walkthroughs should be able to assist you with simple WordPress problems in case any issues arise. Another option is to just contact the customer service—alternatively, you may also add your technical team to the hosting site as well.
Choosing the Best Website Hosting Services
When choosing a website hosting provider, focus on these factors: reliability, technical support, and speed. I hope this guide gave you some context and information around which hosting companies fit your exact situation. Ultimately, a host should provide high site speed, strong security, and should also be easy to use, allowing you to focus on expanding your business rather than expending effort on your back-end work.
Speed is the most important consideration in deciding on a host. You can find an average-speed host that can handle your regular traffic well, but what happens if your traffic spikes on a particular day? You need to be able to handle anything that might come your way and know where to go if something goes wrong. Some hosting plans don’t support this kind of configuration. It is important to take into account these factors in deciding which of these sites is the fastest.
The audience’s reaction to the performance of your content and web hosting is an important factor in how well everything functions. If traffic is high and your hosting is poor quality, it may cause a problem with your servers. But if your traffic is rather low, you don’t need a high-quality service and can upgrade at a later date. With some services, you can even hand over the control of content and technical design to another person entirely, and take the worry off your shoulders.
The location of the hosting server another factor that determines speed. Oftentimes overlooked, a CDN can help you ensure that the server selected is close to your audience’s general location. Choosing a cheaper alternative that has servers on the other side of the globe will directly hurt your site’s speed. Hopefully, our selection has helped you decide which one works for you. Of course, we would suggest using WPengine or Siteground as their long-standing quality has proven the best over the years and they continue to improve every year, but always consider your needs and budget first.
Disclosure: Some of the links in this page may be affiliate links and if you purchase through them we may earn a referral commission. Keep in mind that we endorse and link to these companies and their products because we believe in their quality and not solely because of the referral commission we receive from the purchase. We are independently owned and the opinions we express are our own.
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