Simple and reliable small business web hosting
Grow your small business without worrying about the complexities of managing your own web hosting. Let Cloudways, DigitalOcean’s managed web hosting service, take web hosting management off your plate, so you can focus on what matters most: building, scaling, and growing your small business. Let us help you with your small business web hosting!
Managed hosting tailored to small businesses
Cloudways by DigitalOcean is trusted by more than 75,000 small-to-medium businesses worldwide to manage their time-intensive web hosting needs. Cloudways is tailored to the needs of small businesses and what they look for in a web hosting service—simplicity, support, performance, and competitive pricing.
Get started quickly
With Cloudways you can spin up your small business website in minutes, easily enable powerful add-ons, and vertically scale your business on the web without added hassle.
24/7 hosting support
Expert support is available to you at any time, day or night. Need help? No matter your small business concern, Cloudways support is there for you.
Scale for success
Grow your business more effectively than ever before with industry-leading cloud security, 1-click scaling, proactive website monitoring, enhanced SLAs, and much more.
Start for free
Try our affordable web hosting without risk with $100 in free credit. Or check out our paid hosting plans starting from as little as $12/mo.
Running a business is complicated—your hosting shouldn’t be
DigitalOcean’s Cloudways managed dedicated hosting is convenient, fast, powerful, and affordable. Launch your feature-rich website in minutes rather than days. Unleash the full potential of your business’s online presence with expert help and support.
Want to use WordPress, Magento, WooCommerce, or Laravel?
Cloudways has you covered with CMS and eCommerce solutions that you can get running with just one click. DigitalOcean’s cloud infrastructure combined with Cloudways’ best-in-class managed hosting empower small business owners to deploy their favorite PHP apps with ease.
WordPress in one click
E-commerce in one click
Selling goods and services online should be easy. With Cloudways, we make it so with a tailored hosting experience optimized for e-commerce.
Don’t want managed hosting? Spin up your own virtual machines
While managed hosting is a great option for most small businesses, some businesses prefer completely managing and customizing their hosting themselves. If this describes you, learn more about DigitalOcean’s cloud website hosting and hosting plans with our Droplet virtual machines.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
What is managed hosting and how is it different from regular cloud hosting?
Cloud hosting is how any person or business makes their application (including their website) available on the internet to anyone, anywhere. But managing your own servers (aka computers for running your application) can be very expensive, time-consuming, and complex if you don’t have the right expertise.
This is why most businesses don’t host their applications themselves, instead hiring cloud hosting providers, like DigitalOcean, who sell space on shared servers as part of their web hosting services.
Managed hosting is a step beyond regular cloud hosting or shared hosting, which still requires the person or business to configure their virtual servers for their specific needs. Managed hosting takes the burden of managing these cloud servers away from you and your business, moving the responsibility to a reliable expert provider.
Cloudways, DigitalOcean’s managed hosting service, takes care of all the complexities of running your website or application on the cloud. Cloudways ensures your website is performant, secure, and scalable.
What content management systems do you support?
DigitalOcean’s virtual machines (called Droplets) can support any type of content management system (CMS). The most popular CMS on the internet is WordPress (followed by similar CMS’s like Magento, Ghost, or Laravel), and Cloudways, our managed hosting product, is specifically designed to make using these popular CMS’s as easy and seamless as possible.
It can be important to use a managed service like Cloudways, specifically for a WordPress installation, as without a service like Cloudways it can be difficult to update and maintain your WordPress installation on your own. Keeping track of updates needed for WordPress is critical for keeping your website secure, but managing all the different plugins this takes is time consuming and often complicated.
Our managed hosting product, Cloudways, takes this burden off your shoulders and can make sure your WordPress, Magento, Ghost, or other site is kept up-to-date and secure. Learn more about Cloudways WordPress hosting here.
What support do you offer?
DigitalOcean offers every customer free support in addition to our deep and expansive set of tutorials, product-based guides, and product documentation. Cloudways customers can also enjoy an always-available support team who is ready to help 24/7/365 and can troubleshoot or help you get set up in real time. As web hosts, we care about providing the best web hosting for small businesses.
What is a Virtual Private Server (VPS hosting)?
A VPS is a type of virtual machine that, of all virtual machines, feels the most like having a physical, in-person dedicated server to the end-user.
While with VPS hosting, you may still technically be sharing server space (referred to as shared hosting) with other businesses or users, your VPS is completely private, meaning it is basically its own dedicated computer even though you’re technically using shared hosting.
Why would a user want a VPS instead of conventional shared hosting? A VPS will give you more flexibility and control over how the operating system of your application is configured, what software versions you use, etc.
DigitalOcean offers many VPS hosting solutions, which we recommend as a great lower-cost way to take advantage of shared hosting for your business’s computing needs. DigitalOcean’s web hosting services are a great way to get dedicated hosting on your own VPS.
Is a Cloudways web hosting solution secure?
A managed hosting plan with Cloudways comes with many security features (even at the most basic plans). These features include dedicated firewalls, free SSL certificate, 24/7 real-time monitoring, regular security patching, Cloudflare add-on, automated backups, HTTP/2 enabled servers, and SSH and SFTP access.
These security features, such as the ssl certificate, are one of the many reasons DigitalOcean’s Cloudways is one of the best web hosting options, particularly when it comes to hosting for small business.
Do I need hosting for website building?
Website building does require hosting – as you’ll need your site hosted in order for it to be live on the internet. But for a simple website, you won’t need complicated server resources like unlimited bandwidth or unmetered bandwidth.
Cloudways, one of the best web hosting service providers, offers very inexpensive hosting services for small businesses, and it is easy to get started!
Does managed hosting come with a free domain?
Web hosting providers don’t typically provide a free domain with their web hosting services (even the best web hosting sites), and a free domain name that will also best serve your business will be hard to come by. There are many businesses out there that do provide cheap domain names.
Which web hosting company provides the best web hosting services?
We may be a little biased here when it comes to who provides the best web hosting for small businesses, but we think DigitalOcean is the best web hosting company, and our product Cloudways is the best managed web hosting provider.
We, as a very experienced web hosting company, have built products and tools that support web hosting for small businesses.
