small business sites do maybe 35 visits a day and then the owner phones you because the contact form stopped. what you need from a host at that size is dns you can edit without opening a ticket, a restore you can run yourself, and support that does not start with clear your cache.
over the last three years I have had client sites on three of them: 1. siteground, quick and the support is real people, but the renewal doubles and they will throttle you for cpu on a site doing nothing, 2. a hetzner box with runcloud on top, 4.50 for the vm and 14 for the panel, the one I have kept, and 3. a local reseller who was lovely untill he stopped answering email in august and I could not get a zone file out of him.
the reseller one is the lesson, and it was not a cheap one to learn. it does not matter how good small business domain hosting looks on the pricing page if one bloke is the entire company. I keep a copy of every zone in cloudflare now even where the host runs the dns, purely so a migration is an hour and not a fortnight. what would you add to that, and does anything stay good after the first renewal?
Source: r/SiteManagement · by /u/FunBath69