In this video, I'm going to talk about what are the best web hosting providers
for you as a small business and no it's not the
most popular, well-known companies that get
recommended in all of the lists, videos and so on
let's get started.
In my opinion, your best options are Cloudways and
Hostinger. However they're best suited for different kinds of businesses
so let me go over what can you expect from these web hosting providers
and how your business will specifically benefit from using
these web hosting companies over other solutions.
Cloudways is probably a company that you've never heard about
and they have quite an interesting business model that allows you to get
very effective usage of the money you're spending on
hosting. Even though they advertise monthly or yearly prices
it's actually a pay as you go system. Basically,
you buy a server and pay based on how much space you take up on that server
and how many users you're getting. That means you're never in a situation where
you have to pay for resources you're not using
it's just extremely cost effective and the monthly prices they have on their
plans are actually an estimate of how much it
would cost to run that server at maximum efficiency. So, you're never gonna
have to pay more than that. And, if you're not using your hosting at
maximum efficiency at all times you're actually going to pay
less than what's shown every month. By clicking the links in the description
you can get a free 3-day trial for any of the Cloudways
plans and there's no hidden catches, you don't need to attach your credit card or
something shady like that. But I want to be super transparent here
and mention that if you do make a purchase after that
i might make a commission. This allows me to buy and test more web hosting plans
and improve the quality and accuracy of my content and simply
continue doing what i'm doing. Since I want to do honest reviews I
can't really take sponsorships so these affiliate commissions is the best way
for me to monetize my content but enough about
that let's get back to this video. Getting started is quite user friendly
as well. All you need to do is select which content management system you want
for example i'll use WordPress then name your project and server to keep track if
you have multiple ones. Select which company you want your
virtual private server to come from. I personally found vulture to be a good
choice between price and performance, then select the server size using this
slider. The smaller your server size the fewer
resources you get and the cheaper it is. The best part is
you can actually increase your server size
if needed at any point, which means these plans are
excellent once your business starts scaling and you need more resources
and finally choose the physical location of your server
and remember to always choose the server location that's going to be closest to
your users not you because it's them who's actually
going to be using your website. And by reducing the physical location
between the server and the users you actually make your
website faster for that specific user. Once you click
launch now you will have your server automatically
configured for you in around 10 minutes after is complete your website will be
already online and you can work on the design or
content using WordPress. Using Cloudways you'll get your own
private server without all of the complicated setup and you're
in control of resource usage also managing your website is gonna be
super easy since Cloudways gives you a unique
dashboard or like a control panel in my opinion you're getting a very good
bundle deal on hardware and software for a bit of an extra cost
and this is worth it because normally virtual private servers offer really
good performance but they're a nightmare to work with
there is no user interface, you can only communicate to your server
via the command prompt or the terminal using commands and coding it's a
nightmare for beginners. Another notable difference that makes
Cloudways a better choice for small business owners is the way they
handle permissions. For example, if you have an accountant
and he needs invoices you can just give him access to the
billing area that means he will be able to reach invoices by himself
but won't have access to any other aspects of your website.
It's a really good utility tool when you have multiple team members,
but you don't want for everyone to have the same exact access
to your company's website, you get to pick and choose
which team members get what kind of permissions when managing your website.
And 1 crucial feature that often gets overlooked when you're managing a
business are the email addresses. Cloudways allows
you to create professional email addresses, for example, I've created
emit@protechwear.com for my business,
you can create unlimited email accounts, but you will have to pay around
$1 per month for each email box that you plan to add.
You can then check your email box by accessing it through the webmail client
but if you don't want to have an additional email box where you need to
go and check everything manually you can actually link that with your generic
gmail account and have everything in one place
i have a tutorial on how you can do that yourself right here.
And not a major deal as other web hosting companies also do this as well
but Cloudways does offer a free ssl certificate
for every single website you're hosting on your server.
You can activate the ssl certificate by simply typing in your website name
and Cloudways will generate everything for you completely automatically.
An SSL certificate adds this lock next to your domain name
and basically encrypts the connection between the server
and your users. But the reason that I think that Cloudways is great for small
businesses is because there are no renewal fees there, are no
hidden costs you can always check exactly what you're
paying for in the real time billing section.
For example, here it shows that my bill is estimated to be
$8.50 cents next month if you're interested in the performance
I did a couple of tests and Cloudways was faster than even the most
expensive shared web hosting solutions like SiteGround or A2 Hosting.
Cloudways loaded my website in 1.6 seconds and this is some serious
business these are really good results to get even close to
this kind of performance you would need to buy plans for around
$15-20 a month from the top speed-focused web hosting providers like
SiteGround or A2 hosting of course if we were talking about
shared web hosting. But there are several drawbacks if you choose Cloudways,
for example you don't get a domain name a domain name is your
website name so if you need to buy that somewhere else and then attach it to
your Cloudways server by pointing the domain to the correct IP
address and if you want for the email service to work you'll need to edit
some settings on your domain as well this can be done in a couple of minutes
if you have the technical knowledge and Cloudways even has a tutorial on
their website but it's still an inconvenience that you
will have to deal with. And honestly I could probably list other
advantages as well but i think at this point
you get the point they're just a really cost effective
feature packed web hosting provider that lets you have a lot of control over your
team members and your resource usage. I actually plan
to upload a full Cloudways review sometimes in the future
I just haven't finished editing it yet but when it's available
if you're watching this in the future maybe it'll be
somewhere around here.
Another company i suggest you strongly consider if you feel like Cloudways is
a bit too technical or too expensive for you or maybe you
just won't use the features that it offers
is Hostinger. I've already talked about Hostinger on this channel
a lot so if you want a super detailed review that I did for
2020 you can find a full Hostinger review right here. But in this video, I'll still
go over the top points why I think they're a great solution
for small business owners. First of all it's the price
Hostinger has some seriously cheap but powerful plans for you to choose from
their starter plans go for around 1$ a month but you can get that
price down to 89 cents a month if you use the links in the description
and use the code EMITREVIEWS but as a small business I would not
recommend choosing the shared web hosting plans
at all. And go with the cloud hosting plan for $7.45
or the business share plan for $3.99 if you're
really tight on budget. Keep in mind that these prices are for your first purchase
only when it's time to renew your plans the
cloud hosting goes to around $16 a month and the business plan goes to
around eight dollars a month it's in your best interest to buy for a
longer period of time to get a cheaper price and I would say
it's worth it if you have the money and you know that you'll need the website
for a long time. Once you get a plan the setup process is
extremely simple as well and as a bonus you do get to register a
domain name for free. So, you get absolutely everything you
need to start right out of the box. Hostinger also comes with some tools
that will help you manage your website and the business side of things easier.
For example, Hostinger also has an access manager
where you can give different permissions to different team members.
And similar to Cloudways you can create professional looking email accounts
the main difference being, Hostinger allows you to create as many accounts as
you want for free. But these are a bit more prone
to getting blocked by spam filters than the
way ones if you want more secure less spammy email boxes
they'll also cost around $1 per email per month
if we would look at the performance that Hostinger is offering
the cloud hosting plan is around a full second
slower than the Cloudways hosting plan but 2.2 seconds is still
an extremely fast result
In my opinion, Cloudways has tools that are better suited to manage your
business and you wouldn't need to buy their plans
for three or four years so there's less upfront costs you only
need to pay a small amount each month. But all of that comes with a little bit
of technical knowledge it's not as easy to use but still pretty
simple. The biggest drawback of Cloudways I
would say is that a lot of the additional functionality
also comes at a price, Hostinger is a good
cheaper if you got the money to buy 4 years in advance
easier to use alternative that still offers absolutely everything you need
to manage a successful website on a budget. A lot of people would recommend
you use a SiteGround, Bluehost or Hostgator. But in my opinion
these either cost too much, don't offer enough or lack the performance
and scalability for your business. So, if you're ready to get started and create a
website for your small business I recommend you choose Cloudways and get
the free 3 day trial to try it out see if it's the right choice for
you you can get that by using the links in the description down below.
And if you want to go with a simpler solution right out of the box that's not
gonna cost you a lot of money then you can choose a Hostinger I
also have Hostinger coupon codes in the description down below my name is
Emit and as always good luck creating your websites
you