If you have a small business website with a modest number of visitors, shared hosting is probably the ideal solution for you. However, just because these entry-level services come with a low price tag doesn’t mean you should settle for second-class hosting. Look carefully at the market and you’ll find some plans come with incredible features. Here are some of the things a good shared hosting plan should offer.
- High-performance hardware
Ensuring your website loads and responds to user interaction at speed is vital for preventing visitor abandonment and for helping the site rank well on search engines like Google. For this to happen, your website needs to be hosted on high-performance hardware. When you look for a shared hosting plan, seek out those hosts that provide Intel Xeon powered servers and high-speed SSD hard drives. - cPanel control panels
Small businesses generally lack in-house IT experience and it is often down to the owners or admin staff to manage the website. If you want to make this task much easier, then you’ll need hosting that comes with a great control panel. cPanel is the industry leader and ideal for small businesses as it has an easy-to-use dashboard, is intuitively laid out, has a huge range of management tools and even has built-in help in case you get stuck. It makes tasks like adding new websites, creating email addresses, managing files, enhancing security, etc., quick and easy to do. - 24/7 technical support
Being offline can cause all kinds of problems, not least, losing out on sales. If there are issues with your hosting or your website, you’ll need them fixed quickly. Small businesses often find these technical difficulties hard to rectify without experienced, external help. Buying in that expertise can be very expensive, but a good web host should provide 24/7 technical support free, as part of their plan, so that if you need help, an expert will be on hand, around the clock, to deal with your problems. - Free daily backups
If a cyberattack, technical issue or human error leads to you losing your website, the impact on your business could be catastrophic. Rather than having to wait to have a new website built from scratch, having a backup solution in place could help you get back online in no time at all. However, while creating backups is essential, some hosts charge more for the service than they do for their shared hosting plans. Ideally, you should look for shared hosting that comes with free daily backups included in the price. - Unmetered bandwidth
If your hosting plan has a set bandwidth limit, it means your site could go offline if you have a lot of visitors and use that bandwidth up. Alternatively, you might need to pay extra to upgrade your bandwidth. This seems very unfair, as it punishes businesses when their websites get more successful.A host that puts its customers before its profits will not do this. So, look for hosting plans that come with unmetered bandwidth. Here, you can have all the bandwidth you need, as long as you follow the host’s fair use policy.
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Host multiple websites
While VPS hosting is a far better solution for businesses wanting to run multiple websites, having a shared hosting plan shouldn’t restrict the number of sites you want to host. Some plans, unfortunately, limit the number of sites you are allowed. To avoid this, look for a host that doesn’t set limits on how many sites you can run. -
Email hosting included
The low cost of shared hosting means that some hosting plans don’t come with email hosting, so if you want to make use of your professional email, e.g., [email protected], you’ll need to pay for a separate email hosting account. To avoid this, look for plans with email included.Besides looking for shared hosting that includes email hosting, also look at the quality of the email service. At eukhost, for example, you can access email using webmail and apps like Outlook, make use of calendars, contacts, tasks, forwarding and autoresponders, and have the assurance of virus, malware and spam filtering.
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Guaranteed uptime
If your website goes offline, it could cost money and damage your reputation. To ensure this doesn’t happen, you need a host that will guarantee high levels of uptime, i.e., the percentage of time a website remains online during each accounting period.For shared hosting, there are some genuine reasons a site may go offline, for instance, a web host may need to restart the server after installing a security patch or updating the operating system, both essential to keep your server secure. Even with this taken into account, however, you should look for an uptime guarantee of 99.9%.
Conclusion
Small businesses deserve better when it comes to shared hosting and at eukhost, we’ve turned the market on its head. Our low-cost plans provide all the features and resources your website needs to help your business prosper. And with free migration, SSL certificates, and even a free domain included, we’re confident we have the best shared hosting for small businesses.
For more information about our shared hosting, visit our cPanel Web Hosting page.
