What is the Best Web Hosting for Small Business?

In a previous post, we wrote about the different types of web hosting. Now we’re going to answer the question “what is the best web hosting for small business.”

As a small business owner, you have too many things to juggle to be successful. Whether it’s marketing, content creation, social media, or advertising, it can all be too much for just one business to handle. Add hosting on top of it all and you might just reach your breaking point!

Hosting is one of the more technical aspects of running a business, so handing it off to knowledgeable and reliable professionals can be the right decision for your business.

But, to whom should you entrust this vital part of your business?

What are your options for WordPress web hosting?

There are different kinds of WordPress hosting services. Generally speaking, they split into three categories: shared hosting, DIY VPS hosting, and managed hosting. Each one attracts a different type of crowd.

Shared hosting is appealing to people who are looking for low-cost hosting and are just starting out online. Godaddy, Bluehost, and Hostgator immediately come to mind.

DIY VPS means do-it-yourself virtual private server. As you can probably tell from the name, this type of hosting is more suitable for those who are already tech-savvy about WordPress and computers. DIY VPS hosting can be appealing to startups that want to save money with DIY. This group of people is also aware of the limitations of shared hosting, and they do not want to compromise on performance.

It might seem like DIY VPS hosting is the way to go, but managed hosting comes with all of the benefits of DIY VPS hosting (besides cost), and it brings extra benefits as well.

The crowd that’s attracted to managed WordPress hosting is usually small to medium-sized businesses that are experiencing growth. These high traffic blogs and companies realize that managed hosting is a good investment for their business.

Managed WordPress Hosting: The best web hosting for small business

As you can see, there are many reasons why each type of hosting can appeal to different people. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to choosing the best web hosting for a small business.

While managed WordPress hosting is in many ways considerably better than the other options, the cost might not be justified if you’re running a smaller website.

There’s another option if you have a more extensive website and know a lot about computers and WordPress; you could start with the DIY VPS method and then upgrade to managed hosting after you grow.

Alternatively, you could begin with managed hosting to save time.

Now you know your options, we’ll talk about why managed WordPress hosting is the best web hosting for small business.

Peace of Mind

This is the primary benefit of managed hosting. What does peace of mind mean when it comes to web hosting? Let’s consider the following:

1. You want your website to be secure from hackers.
2. You don’t want to worry about ever losing your website data.
3. You want to test and fidget with your website without worrying about anything breaking.
4. And finally, you want to have the confidence that if anything does go wrong, there will be knowledgeable and helpful people around that can help you immediately.

Managed WordPress hosting comes with all of these benefits and more.

Security

If you go with shared hosting, they typically won’t assist you if you get hacked or catch malware. It’s the same story with DIY VPS. Managed WordPress hosting providers, on the other hand, include support if you get hacked. Their systems will also help protect you from malware.

Automatic backups (never lose data)

It’s a difficult question to ask, but ask it you must: what if you suddenly lost everything? With managed hosting, this question won’t fill you with dread. Your managed hosting provider should always allow automatic backups of your website for free and with no additional setup required on your part.

One-click staging environments

If you have a decent-sized website with decent traffic, then you should always be testing new changes, updates, plugins, and PHP versions. Doing so is critical to protecting your website from vulnerabilities.

Otherwise, you could end up like one of these 40,000 WordPress websites in the Alexa Top 1 Million. At one point in 2013, 70% of them were vulnerable to hackers!

However, you should never test these big updates on your production site! You need a development site. Luckily managed hosting makes it easy to maintain both with a simple dashboard.

In a one-click staging environment, you can clone your website with a single button press. You can access the cloned development site via a test URL. Then you can push the changes to your production site within the dashboard.

Excellent support

The support that comes with managed WordPress hosting is second to none. They are the true WordPress experts. This is because they don’t have to mess with other platforms like Drupal, Magento, etc. Instead, they live and breath WordPress daily.

SEO

Did you know that your web host can also bring you SEO benefits? These benefits come in the form of extra speed. That alone might justify the additional cost of managed WordPress hosting.

Here’s how managed WordPress hosting can improve your page loading times.

Optimized from the get-go

With DIY or shared hosting, you will need to install software to get the same speeds that managed WordPress hosting offers out of the box. Moreover, it’s often the case with shared hosting that there’s nothing you can do to achieve the speeds that you want.

Server level caching

Many managed WordPress hosting providers implement server-level caching and or full page caching. That way, you don’t need to find the fastest WordPress caching plugin. Besides that, server-level caching will almost always be faster. This is an SEO benefit as well!

Caching (aka delivering as many of your website’s assets as possible from cache) is critical for peak traffic times. Caching also reduces server load, ensuring faster loading times. Your provider should have reporting that can help you check how much of your WordPress site gets delivered to users from the cache.

Newest Technology

Managed WordPress hosting providers boast the latest and greatest architecture and technology. They’ve fine-tuned their environments to ensure that WordPress runs as quickly as possible.

Also, they shouldn’t take ages to release the newest PHP versions. The sooner your website utilizes the latest PHP, the sooner you can test it and take advantage of the free and instant performance gains (another SEO benefit).

Conclusion

The main benefits of WordPress managed hosting are the peace of mind that comes from knowing your website is secure as well as the SEO benefits that you can only get from this method of web hosting. In today’s hyper-competitive online environment, it might just give you the edge you need to achieve first-page rankings.

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