Web Hosting Ratings Methodology

At Forbes Advisor, our team of experts selects and tests web hosting services across 23 key metrics that matter to small businesses. This covers everything from affordability and value for price to features and inclusions, ease of use, support quality and firsthand experience. We analyze dozens of the most highly regarded hosting services and with the help of our experts’ experience using these hosts, we determine which are the best web hosting services across a variety of industries and use cases.

To determine the best web hosting services for small businesses, Forbes Advisor analyzed over 17 providers in the space across five main categories, for a total of 23 different metrics. These were then weighted to favor features that small business owners value most in a web host—whether that’s budget-conscious startups seeking low-cost, high-value hosting plans or well-established companies seeking highly customizable plans with unmatched performance.

Our team considered dozens of web hosting services—including both the biggest names in the industry and rising stars—before conducting our in-depth research, which involves analyzing each of their plans across nearly two dozen metrics. Each of these considers the key features users need to host a professional website without a headache, such as speed, security and reliability. The metrics are then weighted based on their importance to the average small business to score and rank the overall best web hosting services for small businesses.

In order to create a highly comprehensive scoring model, our team analyzed each of the plans for all of the included web hosting services across five overarching categories: pricing, general features, unique features, support and our expert analysis. Together, five categories span 23 metrics, including every key aspect of building, hosting and maintaining a professional business website to ensure that the top-rated providers offer a well-rounded feature set with a high uptime, solid performance and quality support at a competitive price.

Pricing

Pricing and, more importantly, value for price are key elements in the determination of the best web hosting services. While the average host offers entry-level plans in the ballpark of $3 to $15 per month, not all are created equally—nor do all offer the same reliability, performance and extras that can make a difference to users. Additionally, introductory and renewal rates, contract lengths and the length of the available uptime guarantee were also considered.

Key Features

Our key features category covers all of the core features that businesses need out of a web hosting service. This includes storage and bandwidth limits, the number of websites included, the inclusion of a cPanel, whether there’s an uptime guarantee and if so, how many days it is, support quality and availability and must-haves such as a domain name and SSL certificate.

Storage and Bandwidth Limits

Every web hosting plan includes storage, essentially the amount of data your site can contain, and bandwidth, the amount of traffic (or site visitors) your site can handle per month. However, every host and hosting plan offers varying amounts of storage and bandwidth. Together, these factors play a major role in a site’s speed and performance. For that reason, providers that offered plans with high and unlimited storage limits were given preference in terms of scoring.

Domain Name and SSL Certificates

In order for a website to be live on the web, it needs a domain name, which serves as a website’s address—giving users a way to find it online. While domain names can be purchased through a domain name registrar, such as GoDaddy, Namecheap or Google Domains, many of the leading web hosting providers include a free domain name with web hosting plans. Additionally, the same is true of SSL certificates, which enhance a site’s security and are required for any site that processes online payments, such as an online store.

Uptime Guarantee

The top web hosting providers stand by their service by offering an uptime guarantee. While the industry-average uptime guarantee is 99.99%, some providers are as low as 99% and as high as 100%. Granted, it is worth noting that uptime guarantees do not necessarily equate to a provider’s average uptime—and users may not get compensated for this in the instances where the downtime is due to scheduled maintenance.

Customer Support

Hosting plans include customer support, but it varies greatly in terms of availability, channels and, of course, quality. We considered support hours and whether it’s available 24/7, the number of support channels available (i.e., live chat, phone, email, tickets) and how quick and helpful support representatives are.

Unique Features

In addition to the core features, hosting plans often include a variety of unique features. These may include the inclusion of automatic backups for peace of mind, CDNs to improve site performance, free domain name privacy and website builders to help make the process of building a new website easier.

Third-Party User Reviews

To gain a better understanding of what hundreds—if not thousands—of other users have experienced and encountered when using these different web hosting services, we analyzed third-party reviews from reputable platforms, such as G2 and Capterra. To gauge user satisfaction and product quality, we not only considered the average rating, but the number of reviewers to ensure that we have full optics on any given provider.

Expert Score (Hands-On Testing)

To quantify soft—but crucial—metrics, such as ease of use, popularity, value for price and feature quality, we included our expert score, which is based on our own firsthand experience building websites using these web hosting services. This includes building basic business websites as well as online stores, directories, online courses and membership sites. This helps us to provide a deeper degree of insight for users with information that you cannot necessarily obtain without using the platforms. This helps further inform our overall scoring and rankings.

Forbes Advisor Small Business helps small businesses of all kinds make the best decisions for their growth and success. We strive to help entrepreneurs across industries make sense of complex products, services and concepts so that they can make the best choices and focus on growing their businesses.

We may earn a commission from select partner links on Forbes Advisor. However, the compensation we receive does not influence our editorial decisions, nor does it impact our product recommendations or any advice we offer in our content.

The team at Forbes Advisor consists of experienced in-house researchers, staff writers and editors. Every data analysis and ranking is carefully reviewed by multiple team members—at multiple levels—to ensure our scores reflect the product quality for small businesses. Data is periodically updated, along with our rankings and guides, to verify that all information is accurate and up to date. In return, we give our readers valuable information they can depend on to help them decide the best products for their unique needs.

Being a software as a service (SaaS), website builder marketing is constantly evolving with new features and functionalities—and prices to match. Additionally, new providers are often entering the space, creating more competition and alternative options. For this reason, the experts at Forbes Advisor monitor the market, test new products and update our scoring accordingly to help ensure that our rankings remain accurate and up to date based on the latest pricing and versions of each provider considered in our in-depth analysis.