The best small-business web hosting services of 2025: Expert tested

When you’re looking for web hosting, pricing isn’t the only consideration. You have to consider a lot of different things, like uptime, hardware specs, and customer support options to figure out the best way to get your business online.

Also: The best web hosting services: Expert tested

And a lot of these things can get complex, depending on what kind of digital presence you want to have. For instance: Businesses that rely mainly on online sales have to pay a ton of attention to uptime guarantees, but brick-and-mortar stores need hosting providers with local servers close to their place of business or where their customers come from.

I looked at scores of web hosting providers to find the top picks that offer the best in reliability, scalability, features, and ease of use. They have uptime guarantees of as high as 100%, plans ranging from shared servers to multiserver cloud hosting, and one-click installers for popular website builders like WordPress.

What is the best small-business web hosting service right now?

GoDaddy has got to win my pick for the best small-business web host of 2025. Its flagship Web Hosting Deluxe plan is packed with value at $14 per month. It lets you host up to 10 websites, and it offers 50GB of storage space on an NVMe hard drive, unlimited bandwidth, a free domain name, cPanel, and SSL security for encrypting your website traffic.

Also: The best small-business CRM software

As a B2B tech journalist and software reviewer, I’ve analyzed scores of web hosting providers just in the last year. I’ve written detailed accounts of my experience with hosting providers like Hostinger, Bluehost, DreamHost, ScalaHosting, and many more. For this list, I’ve focused on the web hosting features that matter most to small businesses: affordability, reliability, and the ability to scale.

The best small-business web hosting services of 2025

Show less

GoDaddy’s web hosting dashboard makes it easy to manage multiple websites and servers, no technical expertise needed. GoDaddy also offers decent performance during rush hours, even on its shared hosting plans. Recently, the company has introduced a suite of business tools that it offers for free with all its hosting plans, under the umbrella of GoDaddy Airo. This new AI-powered platform adds a number of functionalities, including website building, social media management, and LLC incorporation.

Review: GoDaddy: Easy and reliable web hosting for small sites and beginners

During my performance tests, GoDaddy maintained a 100% uptime with no outages, surpassing its advertised uptime guarantee of 99.99%. Its average server response time was around 180 milliseconds, while its page loading speed was well below 1 second on every occasion. I also liked that GoDaddy offers strong security features, like SSL certificates and DDoS protection, across all plans, along with spam protection for its mailbox service.

Pricing starts at $6 per month on the Economy plan, which gets you 25GB of NVMe storage. But for shared hosting users, the Deluxe plan offers a lot more value for an initial cost of $8 per month, letting you host up to 10 websites with over 50GB of NVMe storage in total. GoDaddy also offers WordPress and VPS hosting solutions for more advanced users, which can offer better performance for high-usage scenarios.

Show Expert Take Show less

Show less

DreamHost, one of the few web hosting companies that gets an official recommendation from WordPress.org, offers the best in reliability, backed by a rare uptime guarantee of 100%. During my tests, I found that the hosting provider keeps those promises while maintaining a fully loaded time that’s well below the recommended maximum from Google.

This hosting provider is very easy to use, thanks to its modern design with straightforward navigation. Plus, there’s a vast library of resources and tutorials available for advanced use cases. DreamHost even offers a 97-day money-back guarantee on all its hosting plans, which is the most generous offer in the entire industry and three times more than the market standard.

Also: The best WordPress hosting services

What it struggles with, however, is volume. Performance seems to be significantly reduced during active hours on shared hosting plans. And since DreamHost has only three data center locations, spread across the US and the Netherlands, people in other parts of the world will notice a performance drop, especially when the servers are under duress. Luckily, DreamHost’s entry-level plans are very affordable, so you can easily opt for something on the higher end of its shared hosting plans for better performance.

Show Expert Take Show less

Show less

Much like DreamHost, InMotion Hosting is a vendor that gets a lot of love from the WordPress community. Its service comes with an uptime guarantee of 99.98%, which translates to just 8 minutes of downtime per month on average. InMotion does similarly well in performance tests too, but unlike DreamHost, its speed is unaffected by traffic spikes and server activity.

Review: InMotion Hosting: Capable web hosting with a 90-day guarantee

InMotion’s entry-level shared hosting plan starts at just $2.24 per month when billed annually, but prices go up a lot after the first year. However, you can also subscribe to a three-year initial plan for a slightly higher price to make the discount period last longer. Even the Core plan, which is cheapest among the various shared hosting plans, offers 100GB of SSD storage coupled with the ability to host up to two websites on a single subscription plan. You also get a free domain, SSL certificates, and a 90-day money-back guarantee.

Apart from the usual hosting features, InMotion comes with cPanel for its web hosting dashboard and a website builder called BoldGrid that’s custom-built for WordPress.org users. Its customer service is incredible too, with minimal wait times and capable support agents. However, the upselling attempts can be a bit too nosy at times.

Read More –>

Show Expert Take Show less

Web host	Starting cost	Storage space (in GB)	Bandwidth	Interface
GoDaddy	$6 per month	25GB	Unlimited	Custom dashboard
DreamHost	$2.95 per month	Unlimited	Unlimited	Custom control panel
InMotion Hosting	$2.24 per month	100GB	Unlimited	cPanel and AMP
SiteGround	$4 per month	10GB	Unmetered	Site Tools
ScalaHosting	$2.65 per month	50GB	Unmetered	SPanel

Choose this small-business web hosting service…	If you want or need…
GoDaddy	An all-in-one solution with a user-friendly interface and a built-in website builder that’s perfect for beginners who need simplicity without sacrificing performance.
DreamHost	A reliable, budget-friendly hosting option with excellent US performance and a generous 97-day money-back guarantee to test the service thoroughly.
InMotion Hosting	Rock-solid reliability with comprehensive features including the BoldGrid website builder, making it ideal for businesses that need dependable performance and US-based support.
SiteGround	Premium WordPress hosting with advanced caching technology and Google Cloud infrastructure for businesses willing to pay more for superior performance and optimization.
ScalaHosting	Affordable, scalable VPS hosting with exceptional security features and perfect uptime, ideal for growing businesses that need room to expand without technical complexity.

Small to midsize businesses have specialized web hosting requirements that not all services can satisfy. Here’s what I look for when choosing a web hosting provider specifically for small businesses:

Uptime guarantees: Look for an SLA-backed uptime guarantee of at least 99.9% in your web hosting provider. Anything more than 10 minutes of potential downtime per week is generally unacceptable for any kind of business use.
Loading speed: Not only do loading times affect user experience, but even search engines consider them a crucial factor when determining your page rank. So aim for a web host that offers a server response time of under 600 milliseconds, along with NVMe SSD storage and built-in CDN technology to improve real-world performance.
Scalability: As your business grows, you’ll need a web hosting service that can keep up, with upgraded plans that offer more storage, better performance, and greater customizability. Look for a web host that offers a mix of shared, virtual, dedicated, and cloud hosting plans at different prices.
Essential security features: Daily backups, SSL certificates, and DDoS protection are just some of the security features you should look for in your web hosting provider. Small businesses need to prioritize customer security, so choose a platform with a clear and transparent security policy that details exactly how the provider handles and safeguards data.
Storage and bandwidth allocations: Your monthly data transfer requirements can be calculated by using this formula: monthly visitors × average page size × pageviews × 30 days. This is the total amount of content your website serves each month, so look for a hosting plan that offers a higher storage amount than whatever number you get.

For each web hosting service I reviewed, I conducted several different performance tests under multiple scenarios to see how it held up during situations businesses might face in the real world. I also looked at things like server locations, storage capacity, caching tools, and CDNs — all of which can affect performance.

Apart from judging platforms by reliability and speed, I also looked at their overall value for money, the quality of their web hosting management interface, and the availability of security features like SSL certificates and DDoS protection. I also looked at SLAs for upholding uptime guarantees and checked whether a 30-day money-back guarantee was available.

Basically, a web hosting service is just a company that rents out remote servers from its physical data centers so you can host a website on them. These servers provide the necessary hardware and software infrastructure you need to establish an online presence for your small business.

Small businesses have a range of hosting options to choose from, depending on the hardware specifications and level of support they require. This includes shared hosting, virtual private servers, dedicated hosting, and managed services for CMS platforms like WordPress and Drupal.

Depending on the nature of the server your website is on, not to mention the level of support offered and any paid add-ons you might need, small-business web hosting can cost as little as $1 to $2 per month, all the way up to hundreds of dollars.

Most experts agree that an SLA-backed guarantee of more than 99.9% is pretty good for most small-business scenarios. But there are exceptions to this depending on how important it is for your website to not go down during normal activity.

Other small-business web hosting services to consider

–> –>

Source