One of the most overlooked parts of starting an online business is what type of hosting you have. While there are many different types of hosting companies we’ll focus on hosting for WordPress since it’s the most popular blogging platform and in its short life has expanded to accommodate e-commerce websites and more. There are also lots of in-depth guides on how to use WordPress to grow you business.
WordPress makes a great choice to start your business on as there are many free plugins which can give you a feature rich website without you needing to know anything complex about code. Some of these plugins can turn your website into an e-commerce store within minutes if you wish to expand into other areas.
Depending on the nature of your business this might require certain hosting requirements for example, if you run an e-commerce store and have an image based business such with a lot of products then you’ll need a WordPress hosting company with enough space to host these images along with a fast server to make sure your content is loaded within a good time frame, 1-2 seconds.
With this in mind we’ll look at the different requirements a business may need to determine the best WordPress hosting for small businesses.
WP Engine – Managed WordPress hosting
WP Engine is a little pricey starting at $29 per month for a single website but it’s a hosting company which focuses only on WordPress meaning that their server configuration is highly tuned for the WordPress platform. While quite expensive you’ll get many hidden benefits of WP Engine’s service. One of of the most important is the speed. With WP Engine you should get loading times within 1 second or faster simply by just moving to their servers. Check out our WP Engine review for more detailed information on WP Engine.
To get an estimate of how fast your website will load if on WP Engine, use this tool.
Traffic, storage, backups
With WP Engine’s personal plan you can have up to 25,000 visits per month which is just over 800 visitors per day along with 10GB local storage.
If your traffic is below a monthly volume of 25,000 and you want to focus on site speed, security for your business then WP Engine will make a great choice to host your small business. With it’s 10GB of storage you’ll have plenty of space even if you own a e-commerce site with a lot of images.
You website is backed up everyday meaning that you don’t have to worry about losing your website.
If you so a lot of social media promotion it’s possible that you can get a surge of traffic. If this happens and you’re on a cheap shared hosting then this may cause problems with your website. WP Engine has the ability to soak this traffic up leaving your website up and still loading with decent speeds for new visitors.
One of the disadvantages of the personal plan is you are looking for an SSL certificate, this isn’t included in the personal plan.Supercharge your website
SiteGround
While not as fast as WP Engine, SiteGround makes an excellent choice for a small business hosting company if you are looking for a reliable company for cheaper prices. Prices start from $3.95 per month making this an affordable choice for small businesses with low traffic.
With SiteGround’s cheapest plan – StartUp you are allowed up to 10,000 visits per month with 10GB space. While you’ll get the same space as WP Engine you have a significant reduction in the volume of traffic. This is fine if you never expect to hit over 10,000 per month as you’ll get other benefits such as a free ClouldFlare CDN which helps speed up your website along with a free domain name meaning that if you haven’t yet created your online business you can save yourself some money by using SiteGround’s free domain name feature. See our SiteGround review for more information.
SiteGround also offer daily backups along with excellent 24/7 support from experts in their field.
If you are testing your small business with expected plans to expand quickly, SiteGround allows you to move up into more premium features and resources. You can easily upgrade yourself to their GrowBig package with prices at $7.95 per month. While still cost effective you’ll have the added benefits of multiple websites, 20GB storage and increased traffic of 25,000 visitors per month.
But with this package you’ll also get more premium features which might suit an e-commerce store more than the cheaper package. You can the added benefit of a free 1 year plan to a SSL certificate with their e-commerce and you’ll also get faster speeds by using their SuperCacher on this plan making it a great choice for e-commerce sites with a low hosting budget.
A2 Hosting
A2 Hosting offer a Prime Web Hosting Package which will be suitable for a small business. One of the main features of A2 hosting is their use of an SSD (Solid State Drive) meaning that you’ll get faster speeds than most shared WordPress hosting companies as shown in the image below.
Some hosts claim to offer Solid State Drive Hosting but only host your OS or MySQL databases, not your files. We use SSD for everything so you get the biggest speed boost possible. That’s why our SSD Hosting loads pages 300% faster than our competition and why even we host our site on SSDs.
Be careful however as A2 Hosting offer two different packages under Prime. The cheapest being $4,97 and the other $7.46 per month. It is the more expensive of these packages which will give you the SSD if this is what you’re after.
The other benefits of A2 Hosting are a free CloudFlare account (CDN) making your website faster again, but you can also opt-in for the Railgun Optimizer making your HTML load times 143% faster. This is free on the Prime + SSD package but an extra $2 per month on the normal Prime package. They also offer the ability to run a e-commerce store with Magento or another e-commerce type solution meaning that you’ll get a full online store with fast loading times.Make your website 300% faster
All of the above hosting companies have an excellent reputation for customer support with 24/7 service meaning that if any problems happen they have you covered. These are our top companies for the best WordPress hosting for small businesses. Let us know if you have any experience with them or want to suggest another company and we’ll give them a try.
