We have experience with hundreds of small businesses in Columbus Ohio and that many websites over the years. We have seen the best small business hosting and the worst. In this article we cover low cost small business hosting plans that are usually under $10 per month and why you should avoid them. A much better plan described here offers superior hosting for better ranking and SEO as well as the best support and reliability and the price for website hosting is only $23 per month. When you consider the overall cost savings and avoiding headaches it is well worth it. This is your business and your website is your 24/7 sales person so make it count and make sure that it shows up on time for your prospective customers.
From the SEO side, the recent Google algorithm leak in May 2024 showed that site speed is a major ranking factor or rather a connected factor in overall SEO scores so we know that having reliable small business hosting is essential. Further LLMs or GPTs use similar methods when taking in data that often relies on finding the top ranked sites that SEO well so by all means have reliable hosting!
Here are the top case studies from actual clients we had that made us write this piece.
We wanted small businesses to learn the perils of going with cheap website hosting and the best one we found.
Top 4 case studies for best small business hosting
Below, we explore four case studies that illustrate how switching from cheap or generic shared hosting (like Bluehost or GoDaddy) to a managed host transformed our clients’ businesses.
Most reliable wordpress hosting for small business. Best small business hosting tips and factors in choosing.
Case Study 1: Bad Backups if any on cheaper hosting vs Rock Solid Easy Restores
Client Challenge: Backups were not reliable and would not backup daily. More backups cost money based on their plan.
Client Issues:
- Hosted on Bluehost with unreliable WordPress plugin backups.
- Manual FTP and Dropbox backups took hours and often failed.
- A theme conflict led to a catastrophic site crash—no quick rollback option.
Impact & Costs using cheaper hosting cost the client:
- $900 in development fees.
- One full week of downtime and site recovery.
Our Solution:
We migrated the client to WP Engine’s daily automated backups. Now:
- 1-click restores complete in under 3 minutes.
- IT costs dropped by 80%.
- Downtime is virtually eliminated—even if a plugin or theme update breaks the site.
Result: Rapid recovery and predictable IT budgets thanks to a managed WordPress hosting environment.
Case Study 2: Client Site hacked from outdated WordPress, backups active but did not work.
Client Challenge: Site Hacked and no valid backup or rollback; eventhough Bluehost backups were enabled in practice they did not properly work.
Client Issues Cost them:
- Client chose a sub-$10/month host and shared single site credentials with multiple contractors which was a security risk overall – no user management at hosting level (WPengine allows user access).
- Site was hacked; credentials stolen. The hack from a vulnerability in an older version of WordPress.
- No staging environment, no development workflow. WPengine has both and makes it super easy to test and quickly rollback anything that was broken prior to releasing it live.
Impact & Costs from Client to “save money” by using the cheaper hosting option:
- Total rebuild and content copy cost: $3,000+.
- Weeks of lost revenue and customer trust from site being down and the experience was scary for the end user to see a site that was down.
Our Solution:
We switched the client to WPEngine’s dev, staging, and production workflow, which provides:
- Collaborative user access—no shared passwords.
- One-click staging site creation for testing updates before push live.
- Logging and audit trails for every user action.
Result: A fully secure development pipeline that prevents credential leaks and dramatically reduces rebuild costs. This worked very well to give peace of mind to the client as well.
We use WPengine on our own website. If you found value in what we said today please support us and use this link to purchase WPengine hosting as it helps us and gives you a discount on hosting, win win.
Case Study 3: Rescue Support That Saved $10,000 in IT Costs
Client Challenge: Code Injection resulted in their site being hacked and in danger. We had to act fast.
- A manufacturing reseller’s site was injected with malicious code.
- All product pricing, SKU data, and updated content were at risk.
- GoDaddy and Bluehost email support took days—or never responded. I will note that Bluehost online chat support is often very good and timely. The only issues we had were that they tried to upsell us on services the client didnt need. Unfortunately, the client did contact them a separate time and this ended up charging them more than 4x what they should have paid monthly from a lower plan they need. Also, from this call their entire emails were deleted and Bluehost put them on a new plan. The nice thing about WPengine is they only do what they do well and not email so you will have to find another provider for emails which I strongly recommend Google Workspace.
Impact and Cost Issues for Client:
- Potential re-entry of data valued at one month of work (~$10k).
- High risk of SEO penalties if malware remained, malware is a serious issue for Google search and Google Ads. If malware is detected on the site it will stop running your ads and your accounts can be suspended. Further, a malware detection can massively impact your rankings and if detected can even remove your site from search results.
Our Solution:
We contacted WP Engine’s expert support via live chat:
- WP Engine engineers identified malicious snippets within minutes.
- They walked us through a targeted removal and internal security audit.
- The site remained live; no data entry was lost.
Result: Averted catastrophic data loss, maintained SEO health, and eliminated a potential $10,000 IT recovery bill.
Having site backups further gave us rollback options if we wanted. The WPengine engineers really helped here big time and removed the bad code from the site and allowed the site to be active while we did further diagnosis, code adjustments, and updates to prevent further meltdown and containment.
Case Study 4: Guaranteed 24/7 Uptime to Keep Your Store Open
Client Challenge Cost the Customer:
- Frequent outages on Bluehost and GoDaddy—15–30 minutes of downtime every few days.
- Online orders were lost; visitors bounced when pages failed to load.
Customer Impact:
- Direct revenue loss from closed “digital doors.”
- Damaged brand reputation and frustrated customers.
Our Solution:
We moved the site to WP Engine’s high-availability infrastructure, which includes:
- Round-the-clock monitoring with zero outages in the past three months.
- Global CDN for lightning-fast page loads—beneficial for both user experience and SEO.
Result: Consistent site availability, higher conversion rates, and improved organic search rankings thanks to faster, more reliable hosting.
The Bottom Line: Invest in Managed WordPress Hosting
There are other great solutions out there we just cant vouch for them since we haven’t used them all. In the past we have used Amazon S3 and Cloudflare integration which were excellent but required a lot more hands on IT work to get working and are not for the common business owner. In our experience, the most reliable, easy to use, best interface was by far WPengine. It is also why we stopped using Amazon S3 and other services and use WPengine for this site. There are promo codes below if interested to get started, if you like what we wrote please use the link below and support us you will also get 3 months free for signing up.
As these case studies show, cheap hosting can introduce hidden costs:
- Unreliable backups
- Lack of top-tier support
- Lengthy support delays
- Frequent downtime; this was confirmed with use of Uptime Robot.
By contrast, a managed WordPress host like WP Engine offers:
- Automated, rapid backups and restores (takes usually less than 3 minutes).
- Secure user management and staging environments
- Expert, support with limited wait times.
- Rock-solid uptime and performance verified through uptime robot with less frequent outages.
WPengine Coupon Codes and Promotional Coupons Link – Get 3 Months Free