Short answer
The best small-business hosting is the plan that keeps your site fast, keeps your email on your own domain, backs itself up and gives you a real person to talk to. For most small businesses that means a business hosting plan rather than the cheapest shared option.
Start with what your business actually needs
A small business website usually has to do four jobs: load quickly, look trustworthy, collect enquiries and send email from your own domain. Any hosting decision should be judged against those four jobs rather than against a specification sheet.
The six things worth paying for
These are the features that change how your business runs day to day. Everything else is a nice extra.
- Speed — visitors leave slow pages, and search engines notice.
- Business email on your domain, so quotes do not come from a free address.
- Automatic backups you can restore yourself.
- An SSL certificate so browsers show your site as secure.
- Support that answers at the hour you actually work.
- A clear upgrade path for when the site gets busier.
Which Ayuni Host plan fits
Web hosting suits a brochure site or a first shop. Business hosting suits a site that brings in enquiries or orders and cannot afford to be slow. Cloud or VPS hosting suits a site with steady traffic, a busy store, or a developer looking after it.
If your site runs WordPress, managed WordPress hosting keeps the software and plugins updated for you, which removes the most common cause of small-business site problems.
Questions to ask any hosting provider
Ask these before you pay — the answers separate providers far better than a feature list does.
- What is the renewal price, not just the first-term price?
- Will you move my existing site across, and does it cost anything?
- How do I restore a backup, and how far back do they go?
- Who answers support at 10pm on a Saturday?
Hosting built for a working business
Business hosting includes the speed, backups and email your customers never see but always feel. We will move your current site across for free.
See business hosting