Types of web hosting
As a small business owner, you’ll probably start with shared hosting or WordPress hosting due to their affordable and easy-to-use nature.
Shared hosting splits one web server’s resources — like bandwidth and data storage — between many websites. This limits how much content — like blog posts and landing pages — your site can store and how many monthly visitors it can handle, but it also makes shared hosting affordable. Low-cost shared hosting plans can usually accommodate up to 10,000 monthly visitors, while high-end plans can typically handle up to 400,000.
WordPress hosting is (typically shared) hosting optimized for WordPress, a content management system — CMS — for creating and organizing blog posts and other site content. This includes pre-installed WordPress and may include pre-installed themes or plugins and automated WordPress updates. Low-cost WordPress hosting plans can often accommodate up to 10,000 monthly visitors, whereas higher-cost plans can typically handle up to 400,000.
Cloud hosting stores a website in multiple data centers to improve uptime and loading speeds for users around the globe. This type of hosting is used by popular website builders like Squarespace. Many traditional website hosting companies also offer cloud hosting. Cloud hosting bandwidth varies a lot, but most plans can accommodate at least 10,000 monthly visitors, and scaling up as your site grows is often quite simple with cloud hosting.
Virtual private server — VPS — hosting involves creating several virtual servers within one physical server. Each virtual server has dedicated resources, like storage and bandwidth. This typically lets you store more data — tens or hundreds of thousands of large files like images and videos — and accommodate more traffic (often several hundred thousand monthly visitors) than shared hosting. You may also get to customize aspects of your server, like the operating system.
Dedicated hosting involves giving one customer a full physical server. Many dedicated hosting plans let you store 1TB or more of data and accommodate millions of visitors per month. However, these plans are expensive and can be complicated to set up, so I generally don’t recommend dedicated hosting for small businesses.
Performance
There are two ways a web host influences your site’s performance: uptime and site speed.
Uptime is the amount of time your website spends online. Most web hosting services guarantee 99.9% uptime, meaning that server issues won’t cause your site to go down for more than 45 minutes a month. Some go beyond this to guarantee as much as 99.99% uptime, meaning your site won’t go down because of server issues for more than four minutes per month.
Site speed is how long it takes for your website to load. As a general rule, shorter load times are better. There are a few things web hosts can offer to improve this aspect of performance:
- International data centers so you can choose a server close to your target audience and improve loading speeds for them.
- Caching tools to store key data in users’ browsers and improve loading times on repeat visits.
- Content delivery networks or CDNs to store data in several locations around the world, allowing users’ browsers to pull from the server closest to them.
Security
Keeping your data — and your customers’ data — safe is important, especially if you’re accepting payments or collecting sensitive personal information through your website. Your web hosting plan should provide at least two security tools:
- Secure socket layer — SSL — certification: A protocol that encrypts data sent to and from your website. SSL certification also indicates to Google, browsers and VPNs that your site is safe, and some browsers and VPNs won’t even let you open a site without it.
- Firewall: A software tool that filters out malware attempting to infiltrate your site. Some firewalls also provide protection from distributed denial of service — DDoS — and brute force attacks.
Some hosts also provide security provisions like malware scanning/repair to handle any malware that makes it through to your site and automated backups so you can quickly restore your site if something goes wrong.
Customer service
You should be able to reach customer service at any time of day or night via live chat, support ticket/email or phone. When you contact them, customer support reps should be fast to respond and knowledgeable enough to fix your issues in a timely manner.
This is one area where checking reviews is important. Companies always say their customer service is great, but that doesn’t make it true -- look at sources like Trustpilot and our own web hosting reviews to see what real customers have experienced.
Price
There are a few things to keep in mind when considering web hosting costs:
- Contract length: You may have to buy a one-, two- or even three-year plan — and pay for all of those months up front — to access the best price.
- Renewal pricing: Many web hosts offer low introductory pricing and raise the cost significantly when the contract renews.
- Additional fees: You may need to pay extra for things like a domain name. You’ll also want to pay attention to transaction fees if you’re choosing an e-commerce plan through a website-builder-focused host like Squarespace or Shopify.