What is the best hosting for a small business website?
Short answerThere isn’t one best host. The right hosting follows from how the site is built. A builder like Squarespace includes it. WordPress needs managed hosting that handles updates and caching. A static or prerendered site runs best on a global CDN. Look for speed, uptime, backups, support and easy access to your own files.
Not sure your hosting is pulling its weight?
Send me your site. I’ll check speed, setup and who holds the keys, and tell you whether hosting is the problem. Within two business days.
The longer answer
Hosting follows the build, not the other way round
People often shop for hosting first and then try to fit a website into it. It works better in reverse. If you’re on Wix, Squarespace or Shopify, hosting is part of the subscription and there’s nothing to choose. If you run WordPress, the server has to run PHP and a database, so you want managed hosting that patches, caches and backs it up. If your site is a static site or prerendered, it can sit on a CDN and be served from a location close to each visitor.
Each of those is a reasonable setup. The mistake is putting a heavy WordPress install on the cheapest shared plan you can find.
What to look for in any host
- Speed where your customers are. A Calgary business wants fast response times in Canada, not just in one US data centre.
- Automatic backups you can restore without filing a ticket.
- Free SSL that renews itself.
- Real support that answers when the site is down on a Saturday.
- Access to your files and DNS, so you can leave if you need to.
Cheap shared hosting tends to fail on the first and fourth points. You share a server with many other sites, and when one of them misbehaves, yours slows down.
Where the site lives versus who looks after it
Hosting is the building. Someone still has to watch it. Plugins need updating, certificates need renewing, forms need testing. On a builder, the platform handles most of that. On anything else, it’s you or a maintenance plan. When comparing hosts, compare who is responsible when something breaks, not just the monthly fee.
Ask a prospective host or designer three plain questions. Who gets the alert if the site goes down at night? How quickly can a backup be restored, and by whom? If I leave, how do I take my files and domain with me? Clear answers to those tell you more than any spec sheet.
What I’d do
Nick Lovett, founder of Tavro
The sites I build are prerendered to static HTML, so I host them on a global edge network. There’s no database to hack and no server to patch, and pages load quickly from Calgary to Halifax. That’s part of the Pulse Plan, along with monitoring and updates. If you’re on WordPress and happy with it, I’d move you to a decent managed host before I’d suggest a rebuild. Hosting is often the cheapest fix for a slow site, and it’s easy to test before committing to anything bigger.
Follow-up questions
Not much on its own. What matters is how fast pages load for your visitors, and a CDN takes care of distance for most sites.
For a light, simple site it can be. For WordPress with several plugins it’s often slow and less reliable than managed hosting.
It’s fine if you have access to the files, the domain and the DNS, and a written way to move the site elsewhere if you part ways.
Keep reading
- nick@tavro.ca
- 587-439-9994
- Calgary, Alberta