Top 5 Web Hosting Services to Host Your Business Online in Singapore
21/10/2020
If you are running a business in Asia or thinking of bringing your business online, here are the best web hosting service providers that you can find, based from Singapore.
Hosting your business on the Internet can be a daunting task especially if you’re doing it for the first time. If you’re looking to build an online store, create a blog or digitise your business, you’ve come to the right place. If you’re looking to change web hosting service providers, read on too. This article will guide you through the process of how to select the ideal web hosting service provider for you based on costs, server speed and features.
What is Web Hosting?
If this is your first time building a website, or if you have only created websites through Wix or Squarespace, then web hosting might not be familiar to you. Web hosting is a process where you can get your website uploaded onto the internet for worldwide access. Below are some of the key considerations that are listed:
Key Factors |
||
| Speed | If your target audience is locally based, it would be advisable to get the service with the fastest speed locally but sacrifice on international speeds.
If your target audience is regional or internationally based, it would be best to get the speeds which are generally fast across different regions. Load time plays an important role in SEO optimisation, so bear that in mind when choosing a hosting service. |
|
| Costs (With add-ons) | Web hosting services usually come with additional plugins which can provide additional add-ons (like SEO optimisation) as a bonus. It is good to take a look at which plugins might be best suited for your business. | |
| Bandwidth | Bandwidth refers to the ability of a website to accept visitors within a set timeframe i.e. a month. Although some services may offer ‘unlimited bandwidth’, it may not always be true, so it is always good to check for the details. In fact, if your website gets too much traffic, the service provider may request that you upgrade your website to a higher plan to accommodate the increase in web traffic. | |
| Uptime | Uptime refers to the amount of time (usually listed as a percentage) that the server hosting your website is up and running. Having at least 99.99% uptime would be ideal; it probably is not a great experience for your users to reach an Error 404 domain at any given time. | |
| Customer Service | Having 24/7 customer service is ideal just in case there are problems with your website that need to be solved immediately. In cases where service providers do not have 24/7 customer service, you might have to call them during their operating hours if your website faces problems. | |
| Shared Hosting vs Cloud Hosting |
Shared hosting is much cheaper than cloud hosting but there is a limited bandwidth that you can have. With cloud hosting, you are making use of multiple servers, so that can help manage the web traffic and also can automatically port to another server when the current web server is down which could have almost 0 downtime. | |
| Security | Almost all hosting services have some sort of malware and spam protection, but it is also good to check what other add-on security features might be available, e.g. SSL Certification. | |
Why the Choice of Web Hosting is Important
The rise of Asia as the fastest growing region in the world is no surprise; Asia is home to the two most populous countries in the world, namely China and India, and also boasts the fastest growing region in the world; Southeast Asia. As tensions between China and the US escalate, many companies are shifting their operations to Southeast Asian countries like Vietnam. With this tidal wave will come new opportunities for entrepreneurs and startups to explore new markets and the biggest opportunities will come in the digital realm.
Being situated in the heart of Southeast Asia, Singapore is uniquely positioned as a HQ for international businesses in the region. If you are running an online business, Singapore has the best internet infrastructure for you to scale your business, with internet servers from major web hosting service providers stationed here. From Singapore, you can then expand across other Southeast Asian countries.
Choosing a good web hosting service provider will ensure that your customers can reach your digital channels quickly and securely, with any problems able to be quickly resolved on the back-end through customer service. With speed, your customers will have slower waiting times, which is especially vital for some Southeast Asian countries that have limited Internet infrastructure.
Top 5 Web Hosting Services to Consider
Having tested more than 20 web hosting providers, 5 main web hosting services were shortlisted for having their data centers located in Southeast Asia, which means they’re fast for Asia-based businesses and within the region (at <120 ms!). This makes them all excellent choices for entrepreneurs targeting Southeast Asian markets.
We will be going through shared hosting services as they are usually more secure and good for SMEs and startups; cloud based hosting can be cheaper but the price difference usually is not worth the quality difference once you get a substantial amount of internet traffic. By the time your business gets to a certain size, changing the web hosting service can be tricky.
Shared hosting, if you’re not familiar with the category, is a type of web hosting that sees multiple sites living on a single server. In this setup, sites share the server resources (hence the name), so a large traffic surge on Site A can, unfortunately, impact Site B’s performance in a negative fashion. Shared hosting is a good option if you’re looking for cheap hosting; if you want more server resources devoted to your site, you need to go the VPS or dedicated hosting routes.
- GoDaddy: popular and high-end
- BlueHost: cheap, offer high-end speed, highest uptime percentage
- SiteGround: expensive with medium speed
- HostGator: cheap with great customer service but slow speed
- A2 Hosting: cheap and fastest speed but lower uptime percentage and poorer rated customer service
Shared Hosting Services |
|||||
| GoDaddy | BlueHost | SiteGround | HostGator | A2 Hosting | |
| Global Speed | 554 ms | 405 ms | 673 ms | 1,191 ms | 317 ms |
| Cost per month (Starting prices for basic plans in SGD) | Starting from $5.99 /mth | Starting from $2.95 / mth | Starting from $6.99 / mth | Starting from $3.95 / mth | Starting from $2.99 / mth |
| Bandwidth | Unmetered | Unmetered | Unmetered | Unmetered | Unmetered |
| Uptime | 99.97% | 99.99% | 99.98% | 99.94% | 99.93% |
| Customer Service | 24/7 | 24/7 | 24/7 | 24/7 | 24/7 |
These are the top 5 web hosting providers which provide relatively fast speed internet access globally, with prices kept below $8 per month, relatively high uptime (high availability) above 99.90% and 24/7 customer support. It would be good to take note that companies SiteGround and A2 Hosting have servers in Singapore, so web access will be even faster (3-6 ms). In terms of security, some service providers offer free SSL certificates when you upgrade for a higher plan, so you do not have to spend additional money in ensuring that your website is secure for users.
GoDaddy
GoDaddy is an American Internet registrar and web hosting company. As of June 2020, it has over 20,000,000 customers worldwide. Needless to say, it is one of the largest domain name registrars. With them you can get almost any domain extension you are looking for: .com, .net, .org, .law or even .today.
Like many other hosting providers, GoDaddy has a WordPress optimized shared hosting service. They seem to prepare their servers for a higher WordPress performance, offer WordPress pre-installed and have a selection of themes available. Nothing too exciting if you ask me. It starts at $9.99 a month when you renew.
GoDaddy also offers email hosting plans, so you can have a professional-looking address like info@your-business.com. They start at $5.99 per user per month for 10 GB of email storage.
Bluehost
Powering over 2 million websites worldwide, Bluehost is a recognized brand name in bargain web hosting. By doing a large volume of business they’re able to offer steep price discounts.
In addition to offering a full range of web hosting services, Bluehost provides marketing training, SEO services, social media marketing, content creation, graphic design services, email, domain names, and local business listings to grow traffic.
Bluehost offers a range of products and services to help you get started with your website or online shop: from shared and WordPress hosting to website builder tools. They have a special focus on meeting the digital marketing and training needs of small businesses.
Bluehost is also among the cheapest web hosting services in the market at $2.95/mth, which makes it a highly attractive service provider to consider given its reputation as a good service provider and the variety of tools and integrations you can build for your website.
Siteground
Today, SiteGround has data centers in 6 countries, services more than 2,000,000 domains worldwide and has over 500 (and growing) people under their employment.
There are two directions web hosting services can take with their low-end shared hosting. One is to sell on a spectacular headline price, and hope users don’t notice the cuts you’ve made to reach it. SiteGround takes the other route, charging a little more, but delivering a capable product with far more features than you might expect.
The Startup account – $6.99 a month initially, $14.99 on renewal – ‘only’ has 10GB of storage, but gets you unmetered traffic and unlimited sub and parked domains, email accounts and databases. There’s easy installation of WordPress and other apps, the free edition of Weebly’s website builder and free SSL to secure your site.
SiteGround’s plans are more comparable with the best managed WordPress plans, where if anything they give you more features than many competitors (free site migration, custom WordPress speed optimizations, automatic updates of WordPress and plugins, on-demand backups, staging, and support for adding collaborators.)
Due to the more sophisticated features that Siteground offers, it is no surprise that Siteground charges a little higher than its competitors but it still delivers value for money with its WordPress integration, site management tools and overall performance.
HostGator
HostGator is one of the most user friendly web hosting services that is tailor-made for first-time entrepreneurs or small businesses that are making the shift to digital. The site is full of tutorials, walkthroughs, and more to help you navigate the murky world of DNS and data centers.
Gator by HostGator comes with an eCommerce plan, so you can set up a fully-functioning online store with inventory and more, all without worrying about payment gateways, plugins, or any other messy technology. It just works.
It offers month-to-month shared web hosting plans, but pushes hard for you to sign up for longer terms, starting at six months. During the signup process, you should be aware that HostGator defaults to a three-year term. It would be best to opt for a shorter term at the beginning if you are just starting out in an eCommerce business or in the process of bringing your business online.
With that in mind, HostGator offers Linux- or Windows-based shared hosting packages that give small- and medium-size businesses room to grow. The Hatchling plan offers unlimited disk space, monthly data transfers, databases, and email addresses, plus support for one domain and third-party applications such as content management systems and e-commerce platforms.
The Baby plan builds on the Hatchling offering by adding unlimited domains. The top-tier Business plan includes highly specialized options, such as a toll-free number for your business and a private SSL (secure socket layer) certificate.
A2 Hosting
A2 Hosting’s high-end shared hosting plans deliver way more speed-boosting technologies than we’d expect for the price you’re paying. Well worth a look, especially for experienced users.
A2 Hosting is an experienced provider with products for just about every web hosting need: shared hosting, WordPress hosting, VPS, cloud hosting, dedicated servers, reseller hosting and more.
The company has a strong focus on performance, with website talk of ‘blazing fast web browsing’ and ‘20x times faster’ ‘Turbo Servers’, but it also has plenty of other features on offer.
Shared hosting begin with the Startup plan. Baseline hosting products often have some major restrictions, but the limits here are relatively minor: 100GB storage, 5 databases and support for a single website, no problem at all for many users. And the rest of the plan is seriously impressive, with features including unlimited bandwidth, free SSL, unlimited email accounts, basic Cloudflare integration, cPanel, a choice of four data centers (Michigan, Arizona, Amsterdam, Singapore), a template-based website builder, 1-click install of WordPress and hundreds of other apps via Softaculous, and 24/7 support via phone, ticket and live chat.
Prices look great at a headline $2.99 a month, but that’s due to steep introductory discounting and a three-year term – on renewal the costs leaps to $8.99.
Need help designing or developing your website? We got you covered.
You might be wondering how to build your website after hosting it. For this, we provide a range of services that help you optimise your website to increase sales, and you can pass the inconvenience and hassle in digitising your business to us. Head over to our Contact Us page to let us know how we can help you further.
