Best Website Hosting for Small Business

There are many web hosting platforms on the market today, some dirt-cheap some not so cheap. Apart from the price what other considerations are there to make before we can say if the package we are looking at is a good website hosting for small business?

The answer to that is really dependent on what you want to host on it.

WordPress, a content management system, over the last few years has become better and better, not only for building blogging websites but for e-commerce and commercial websites.

It is also the platform I use daily so for this purpose we will discuss what requirements make a hosting platform ideally suited for wordpress.

Buying solely on cost is not very smart, a cheap hosting package may seem great but when you are squeezed onto a server with thousands of other users, your lag time will increase greatly for your readers.

Those lags in page loading and freezes will put them off and cause your users to search elsewhere for the knowledge they want. That is potential customers gone never to return with lost revenue, not ideal for an online business or building up a following.

To make sure you give the best service to your readers you need to make sure the server you are using has fast dynamic page loads and caches.

Now this all happens behind the scenes and you may think a small delay in page load is a good compromise for paying more money for excellent hosting but consider the cost of letting down your users, readers or shoppers with poor quality service and the lost revenue that you will be incurred by a result of this.

It would be better to give great service and not have to worry about this would it not?

Being able to upload files to a folder on the server was a big deal back a few years but now as WordPress allows the administrators to do almost everything they need from within the package themselves there is little or no need to be able to access the folders.

This may seem counterproductive to many web designers who want to manipulate code within the WordPress platform but again this can now be done within the WordPress dashboard and negates the need to access folders.

Let us consider some of the packages out there for dedicated hosting.

Bluehost $99.99 p/m with a comparable package
GoDaddy $79.99 monthly dedicated server.
HostGator $174 basic dedicated server
Webs $249 dedicated server

These are all dedicated hosting packages and claim to have you on a server with plenty of power and room.

There are also loads of basic packages and for someone starting out they may seem a fair option but when you start to get decent traffic they will look to upgrade you to a bigger package or you will be cut off when you reach your limit. Those price increases can get very steep very quickly.

Now let us consider Wealthy Affiliate’s hosting package. Wealthy Affiliate for those who haven’t heard of it yet is an online business learning community set up by affiliate marketers to teach new users how to become online marketers through many means.

For a more concise look at WA check out my review here.

As part of the package at WA, YOU CAN HOST 20 WEBSITES as a premium member. (10 with your own domain names and 10 under the siterubix domain to test so 20 in total) Also as a starter package which is totally FREE you get access to set up a websites on the siterubix domain which you can keep as long as you keep your account active.

You can upgrade to a premium member for $19 for the next month before it grows to the final price of $49. That being said, however, if you pay yearly instead of monthly the fee is only $359 which is less than $30 per month.

Even a better bargain if you signed up during the Black Friday weekend you would have got that down to $299 which is locked in for the life of your account. Which I have done and now for me $25 per month is not a lot to pay for unlimited hosting.

Consider the fact you get access to all the training, 1- 2 -1 help, live chat and access to the owners you are indeed getting great value for money. All that for less than a $ a day, WOW, sure what else could you get for that? Not much. Just cut back on a few coffees a week and you would have the cost covered.

That would be a great package by any standard however WA hosting is state of the art. It is scale-able and the server loads are monitored. If the load goes over a set quota more space is opened up automatically.

This means you are never squeezed onto a server with more than it can handle adequately. That plus support teams which respond to problems very quickly means you are getting great value for money.

Check out Kyle’s post on what really is below the hood on the WA hosting packages.

So to sum up web hosting packets are not all the same. Although some suggest you are on a dedicated server with loads of space and speed it is usually not quite what they say. You are placed on servers with many other websites that share your bandwidth.

What if you were hosted on a package beside a social platform like Pinterest with its many thousands of users per day how much of the shared bandwidth would be left for your website?

OK that example is extreme as Pinterest are hosted on their own servers but hopefully you get my thought.

At WA that is not the case you are never squeezed into bandwidth, you are given all the space you need and automatically upgraded as bandwidth is used.

This is all done without having to upgrade your package and this includes your membership at the best online business community on the web in my opinion.

What WA also have worked out is a simple start off training module which shows exactly what is required to get a website up and running in no time at all.

How to add content, connect to social platforms build traffic and get sales, all within the training area.

It is here that things have been made simple so there is no need for beginners to access back end folders to change code etc.

It’s all done on the WordPress dashboard and means the tasks of keeping a website running are simplified so those less technical can work alongside more advanced users without problems.

That to me is a hosting platform savvy to know how and what its users need to run websites. If however there is a specific need to upload to folders the FTP protocol is still active and advanced users can work away happily and if something extra special is required a ticket to the support team is all that’s needed to get sorted.

The guys as WA have made the platform as easy as possible to allow users of all skills to be able to build websites and concentrate on producing content rather than worry about the technical side of things. This to me is a real time saver as content is where the traffic is going to come from and therefore the sales.