A couple of years ago I wrote a blog about what hosting companies I recommend for small businesses websites. You can find the blog post here – What is the best website hosting company for your business. A lot has changed online since then and hosting companies have changed as well…some good and some not so good. Some recommendations I made back then I wouldn’t recommend now.
My criteria for website hosting companies are pretty simple:
- Quality of Servers – are they fast, easy to manage, easy to upload files to servers.
- Customer Service – Are they responsive, easy to get a hold of – Online Chat or Phone Support, Does support help you when the site is down or during and emergency, 24/7 service.
- Cost and Value – Is the price worth it, Do you get a free SSL, CPanel, etc
Here are my current TOP Recommendations for Website Hosting Companies for your Small Business Website:
Site Ground – We’ve been recommending Site Ground more and more these days. If our clients had issues with GoDaddy or Hostgator we will recommend Site Ground.
HostGator – They are still consistent with customer service and have decent website speeds. But for some reason some of our customers love them and some don’t. The performance really depends on each client.
BlueHost – They seem to be pretty consistent with service and customer service. We never had any issues with them and our customers that use them rarely have website issues.
DreamHost – Another very consistent hosting company, Online chat for support and very responsive.
I don’t want to go deep into the technicals of each hosting companies. The above are the top hosting companies I recommend and currently use for our clients.
My recommendations that I made a couple of years ago have changed. One of the main reasons for the change is that we noticed the customer services experience dropped a lot and we also started having issues with website speed. The ones we recommended in the post are the current hosting companies that we are currently using, and from our experiance, the services can vary from customer to customer… you really won’t know till you try.