Best UK Small Business Hosting Companies 2025

How to find the best Webhosting service for a small business website

This article is about small business owners who have either created their own website or had a website made for them by a web designer and need to find a reliable webhosting company to host their site.

In particular, I would like to clarify the issue of unlimited features offered by many hosts and how these have (or have not) an impact to a small business.

What are the main factors to consider when buying hosting for a small business?

Over the years I have started many small businesses - each one with its own website. Here are the 6 parameters I take into consideration in the decision making process when studying various hosts:

Uptime guarantee, Customer Service and Disk Space

I have already written a lot about these 3 factors in my article on how select the best shared hosting provider. I would recommend you go there and read this post. Once you have read about Uptime, Service and Storage please come back here.

This article is about hosting your business site, and not a personal blog or a family site. For this reason I am going to refer to 3 additional webhosting issues that are important to you as a business owner and a must have in any reputable webhosting service for a small business.

1.      MySQL

MySQL is a database management system. “SQL” stands for Structured Query Language and “My” is a name Michael Widenius, the cofounder, gave to this particular system. MySQL is a free resource that is usually provided by a webhost as part of a webhosting package.

To host a website in a server you need to have at least one database system. The system consists of a number of programs that help a webmaster name, manage and retrieve forms of data. For example, if you publish blogposts on your website MySQL manages the posts, stores them and lists them by post title, publication date, size, author name, keywords and seo tags. If you own an ecommerce site, MySQL would manage your product database. It would allow you to export your product list by product name, colour, size and price.

What does Unlimited MySQL Databases mean in webhosting

When a webhost promises more than one MySQL database as part of their package, i.e. 10 MySQL Databases or unlimited MySQL databases, this means that you have many database management systems at your disposal. This allows you to host more than one website in your hosting facility.

Most small business owners will never need this feature which will only be useful if they host many websites in the same shared hosting facility. For example, it is useful if you have a different website (a different domain) per product.

2.      Email accounts

Usually when you buy webhosting the host would provide the tool for you to create an email account using your domain name. For example, [email protected] or [email protected].

Having an email address with your own domain name is far more professional than using a web mail address, such as Hotmail or Gmail, i.e. [email protected] Most hosts would allow you to create more than one email accounts. If you have employees in your business then you can create email addresses for each of your employees.

What does Unlimited email accounts mean in webhosting?

Unlimited email accounts means that you can create unlimited email addresses. However, this alone does not mean you have a better webhosting service. As a small business owner it is unlikely that you will require a big number of email addresses. What you need to consider is the amount of data you can have per email address. For a small business you may not need more than 20 email addresses. However, it is good to have at least one GB of space per email account. Most providers that offer unlimited email accounts do not offer more than 100MG of space per account. If you expect to receive a lot of emails every day with heavy files then 100MG of email space may not not enough.

3.      cPanel

cPanel is a feature offered as part of every good webhosting product and can make your small business operate much easier. Named after the company that created it, cPanel is a control panel designed to manage your webserver. Its purpose is to facilitate the management of all hosting services from one point of interface. This includes email addresses, storage, domain names and generally everything related to your webserver.

What makes cPanel the most popular control panel is that it is easy to be used even by inexperienced webmasters. Its user interface is self-explanatory.

What does cPanel do in webhosting?

A common cPanel has at least 5 sections and each section manages different aspects of your online business.

• Files. This part of the cPanel manages your file Backups, Disk Usage, FTP Connections, FTP Accounts and Images.
• Databases. In this section you will find an icon link to MySQL Database.
• Domains. Here you can manage Redirects, Subdomains and Addon Domains.
• Email. This interface will give you tools to manage your Email Accounts, Email Forwarders, Autoresponders, your Mailing List, Calendars. This is the area where you can add more emails for your business.
• Metrics. This is a very useful tool for a small business. Here you can get information about your visitors, pages they visited and links they clicked.

Conclusion

When trying to find the best webhosting service for your business do not be misled by “unlimited” features. You will never need unlimited MySQL datagases. If you are hosting one website then one MySQL database is enough. Also, you do not need unlimited email accounts. Ten to twenty email accounts are enough for a small business. Ensure that the allocated space per email account is no less 1000 MB, especially if you expect to receive more than 100 emails a day. Use your cPanel to create and allocated disk space for each email account.