So you’ve identified a company’s pain point in business management, and you want to develop a Software as a Service (SaaS) solution. Maybe you’re going to develop the next Shopify, Slack or Salesforce. Shit, you might even make the next Google Suite.  If you are,  you’re going to need a powerful web hosting service for your website. To help out in the creation of the best thing since Google Suite, here’s a list of the best web hosting for SaaS startups.

If you do end up with the next Google Suite, remember me when you think of (and invest in?) your first influences.

SaaS Web Hosting Requirements: You have no business if no one can access your product.

The specific appeal of SaaS products is that they can be accessed easily, from anywhere. Users of these products don’t have to purchase software licensing and download it onto their own computer. Instead, they just subscribe to your online product, and pay as they go.

There are several key advantages to using SaaS products instead of buying product licenses:

• Lower upfront costs
• Lower per-user costs
• The ability to quickly onboard new employees
• An easier shift to remote work (which is becoming increasingly important)
• The reduction of IT requirements and software issues
• Simplicity of use
• The ability to integrate social media experience

There are also several disadvantages, such as:

• Security and privacy concerns
• No physical copies of software
• The need for strong server management
• Downtime and performance concerns 

What does this mean for your web hosting service?

The bottom line is that your SaaS is only useful for your customers if they can access it quickly and reliably. Since a lot of that comes down to web hosting, your web hosting service must have:

• 24/7 reliability, with no downtime
• High speed response times
• Rapid scalability and customization options
• Dedicated, strong security
• Customer support and analytics tools to monitor your site

Some advanced web hosting features to consider:

• Automated backups
• Storage space
• Content delivery networks (CPNs)
• Virtual Private Networks (VPNs)

Best Web Hosting Models for SaaS

Most SaaS developers don’t have their own servers because—shit, they’re expensive, and time consuming, and I’d like to think you have something better to do. Instead, developers rely on managed hosting solutions that meet their needs. There are several types of hosting models.

Related: Brush up on what web hosting is here.

Shared Hosting: I see you cutting corners.

A shared hosting service offers you a portion of the resources on a server that is catering to the needs of several websites. These services include bandwidth, RAM, memory and processing power, among other things. 

Because you are sharing a server with others, you will be paying less for hosting in general. However, shared hosting can severely undermine your SaaS site’s speed, uptime and security.

Read: Be cheap elsewhere. Get off brand Doritos, get your furniture on Craigslist, whatever, this isn’t a financial how-to. Don’t cut corners here.

Dedicated Hosting: Make bank, then we’ll talk.

Dedicated hosting means that the information files from your website are managed by a single server that is rented only by you. All of a server’s resources are allocated to your site, therefore optimizing uptime, load time and security. When I say optimized, I mean lightning fast load speeds and just about 100% uptime.

You will have full control over your server settings, including software, configuration and any other custom features you may require. Keep in mind, though, that if you modify your server, you are primarily responsible for managing it on your own, which includes updates and security monitoring. 

This is obviously much more expensive than shared hosting. If you don’t have several thousands users of your site on a daily basis, this is probably overkill.

Virtual Private Server (VPS) Hosting: Chilling in that middle ground.

VPS hosting is like a hybrid between shared and dedicated hosting. A single server is split into several virtual servers that act as single dedicated servers, without the steep price tag.

Your website will have it’s own dedicated resources and you are able to customize your virtual server without affecting the shared physical server. If something happens to one website, yours will not be affected, which is not the case with plain old shared hosting.

Many site owners upgrade from shared hosting to VPS hosting once their site demands more resources, but not a dedicated-server-worthy amount of resources.

Cloud Hosting: You in the big leagues now, boss.

Cloud based hosting solutions store your website’s information on several servers throughout a service’s data centers. The responsibility of managing your website is spread out, so that if one server fails, another server can pick up the slack. This is appealing because if a disaster takes out a physical server, your data isn’t lost. Cloud hosting also allows for easy scalability: If your site suddenly increases in activity, several servers are available to help with the spike in traffic.

While standard, shared hosting solutions are convenient and cheap, they simply don’t have the processing capabilities that SaaS applications require. From here on out, I’ll focus only on VPS and cloud hosting, hosting that will grow your idea from the drunken recesses of your mind into something that large companies implement. And ideally something people won’t hate to have to use.

The best web hosting for SaaS is different for everyone, and it will be highly dependent on your volume of clients, and the size of your wallet. 

8 of the Best Hosting for SaaS Apps that aren’t Hatefully Slow or Broken

1. SiteGround: Straightforward and speedy
2. Liquid Web: Fast, secure cloud VPS plans
3. Hostinger: Cost-effective solution for startups
4. Kamatera: Flexible, tailored cloud services
5. Amazon Web Services (AWS): Massive Scalability
6. Google Cloud: The networking mammoth
7. DigitalOcean: By and for developers (and their budgets)
8. Render: Innovative new middle ground solution in terms of scale and ease-of-use

1. SiteGround: For fast, straightforward site management.

SiteGround is known largely for their fast network speed and fully managed hosting services. The company works largely with Google to maintain a vast network infrastructure, including four data centers around the world. Their physical servers run on SSD disks, also increasing speed for your end users. You can also take advantage of their free  Cloudflare Content Delivery Network (CDN), which currently has 152 locations, to make sure all of your customers are getting fast load speeds, no matter their physical location.

They’re so serious about their uptime, they’ll return a part of your monthly fee if it ever goes below 99.9%. It hasn’t gone below 99.98%, so they’ve never really needed to act on this policy.

On the security front, automatic data backup is performed every day, and backups can be made on demand. Every plan offers a free SSL certificate, to secure your site, and Secure Shell (SSH) to secure your hosting account and manage site files. Your SiteGround service is constantly monitoring for suspicious activities, and uses web application firewalls to protect your site. Server health checks are automatically completed every 0.5 seconds. Any current issues are fixed, and potential future issues are detected and prevented.

You are given your own dedicated IP to protect yourself from actions done by another site in the same hosting environment.

Siteground offers an excellent blend of speed and easy management, as well as 24/7 customer service. This makes it the best web hosting for site owners who wants to give full responsibility of site management to a reliable provider. And to a provider who has a partnered with Google to get incredibly fast speeds.

It is not the best choice for your wallet in general, but you get a lot of good service for what you pay for.

2. Liquid Web: Best VPS hosting for SaaS apps.

Liquid Web is known for their 100% uptime guarantee and industry leading support specialists. 

They have a wide range of plans that, for their price, offer a lot of bandwidth and SSD disk space. Most plans come with a Cloudflare CDN so your customers can access your site faster. 

They offer free migration, with the assistance of a team, and no cap on the number of sites you move to Liquid Web hosting. You have full root access to your server, and can choose which datacenter your server is in:  Michigan, Arizona or Amsterdam.

No matter your plans, your sites are all fully managed, with 24/7 support over live chat, phone or email. If you need urgent help, chat and phone support both guarantee a 59-second response time. For casual questions, using their ticketing system will get you a response in 2-7 days. Their “sonar monitoring team” scans for and identifies issues before they cause any downtime. 

In terms of security, Liquid Web offers DDoS attack protection,. They have optimized security protection, make automated updates, security deployments and implement firewalls, without any effort on your part. You can choose the parameters for automated data backups. You are also given your own IP address.

They feature auto-scaling, which allows you to cut down on costs by using only the resources you need, when you need them.

Liquid Web is, admittedly, not cheap compared to other VPS hosting plans. However, Liquid Web is for SaaS businesses that need 100% uptime and excellent customer support. And they’re willing to pay for it.

Their security features and vigilant problem detection capabilities are worth the money for businesses who have to hold sensitive information, like HR SaaS applications. Your clients can rest assured knowing their data is safe with you.

3. Hostinger: For low-cost, but decent, VPS web hosting.

If you are a small startup attracted to SiteGround’s offerings, but not their pricing, Hostinger may be for you. VPS hosting plans offer speed and reliability, without the steep price tag.

They have seven data centers around the world, in the US, EU, Brazil, Netherlands, Singapore, Lithuania, and Indonesia. Servers are equipped with SSD disks. The hosting company uses Litespeed caching, which is their own cache manager designed to improve load times for your customers.

Litespeed is a part of Hostinger’s custom hPanel, which is simpler than the standard cPanel most website owners work with. For new site owners, this isn’t a big deal. For the experienced, though, you may prefer familiarity over simplicity.  

All plans come with: a free SSL certificate, Cloudflare protection, daily to weekly backups, BitNinja smart security protection, and spam protection.

Hostinger VPS plans are easy to manage, but you have to do that management yourself. They do offer customer support, but you have to be logged into your account to access it. This is obviously a problem if you’re locked out of your account.

This web hosting service has an almost ridiculous number of very affordable VPS plans to choose from. This makes it easy to upgrade as your site needs. They have an analytics tool you can use to check whether your current plan meets your needs, or if you need to scale up to a higher one.

The catch is that you have to dedicate yourself to using Hostinger for a longer period of time (two years, whereas most hosting services have you sign up for one) to get the discounted rates they’re so famous for. If you’re comfortable making a long term decision, Hostinger is a worthy choice. 

And they offer a 30-day-back guarantee. If you try it out and find that you won’t be able to scale as much as you intend to with Hostinger’s services, then no harm, no foul.

Hostinger is the best hosting for SaaS startups looking for a good deal. These startups also have well defined ideas of their rate of growth, and know that they probably won’t see massive growth within the next two years.

Personally, I hope you grow so fast even Google can’t handle it (impossible, but you know what I mean). But there are times when being “reasonable” about growth rates are useful, especially when thinking about initial funding.

4. Kamatera: Flexible cloud infrastructure for SaaS developers who want complete control over server capabilities.

Kamatera has been in the web hosting game since 1995, and was one of the first hosting companies to launch cloud VPS servers. They have 13 data centers worldwide, and now focus mainly on scalable cloud servers. Their cloud infrastructure is high-performance, low-maintenance and low-cost for unmanaged hosting.

This hosting service is attractive for SaaS developers because Kamatera already thought about SaaS. They have split “the cloud” into different cloud computing products: cloud servers, an easy to use web-based hosting panel, cloud block storage, cloud load balancers, and cloud firewall.

You can get managed cloud services if you don’t want to manage your hosting yourself. But having someone else do anything for you makes it more expensive. Cloud web hosting is no different. Managed cloud services are an extra $50 per server add-on, on top of what you pay for just using their servers. This isn’t uncommon, but is definitely not the bargain that self-managed plans are.

As they have split their cloud infrastructure into different cloud components, users can customize pretty much everything about their servers. You can add or take away CPU, RAM, disc storage, firewalls, load balancers, and much more, within minutes. A new server can be added and deployed in under a minute. A server can be taken away with no extra fees.

Such high levels of customization offer unrestricted scalability, without having to jump to a new plan. You can find the perfect middle ground instead of having to choose between plans.

Just use their simple management portal, or API, and your servers are at your command. Pay only for what you want. And pay by the minute: Kamatara doesn’t believe in paying by the month or day for something that may take minutes, like a system check. 

If you’re managing your cloud hosting yourself, you’ll end up saving a lot.

If you’re looking to self manage your hosting, but don’t know how, take advantage of their cloud hosting training. If you’re not, managed cloud hosting handles site migration, data management, full firewall management and cloud consulting.

Kamatera’s Cloud Firewall provides industry leading protection from: intrusion from malicious sources, attacks such as DoS, code injection and viruses, spyware and data leakage. The company’s network experts also monitor your site’s activity and adjusts settings to keep security tight at all times.

Kamatera is for SaaS developers who want to use an industry leading worldwide cloud infrastructure at a bargain. They might not be the best hosting solution for those who don’t want to have to make a lot of decisions, or for those who want fully managed hosting and are not willing to pay extra to adding on more servers.

5. Amazon Web Services (AWS): Best web hosting for huge sites with spikes of traffic.

If there’s anything Amazon is known for, it’s that it’s going to take over the world — I mean, it’s excellent at massively scaling services and optimizing delivery times. 

AWS employs auto-scaling in their cloud based web hosting solutions. Extra resources for automatically deployed for high traffic spikes. Automated resource deployment also helps your site manage a lot of traffic in general. If you encounter high traffic and spikes in traffic, this feature will save you a lot, as you only pay for massive amounts of extra resources when you need them.

However, their auto-scaling can be tricky price-wise, and customers have reported being nervous to see what turns up on their bills. If you do not configure auto-scaling correctly, you may end up receiving worse performance per dollar than other hosting options.

They offer an almost unreal list of add-on features (some free and some paid) and a huge list of third-party integrations. Your hosting plan is completely customizable. But know that this level of freedom does require many decisions, installations and integrations on your part. If you’re not willing to put the work in, AWS is not going to work for you.

AWS is geared towards developers. This hosting provider offers developers a lot of flexibility in terms of modifying your hosting. But there is a steep learning curve involved with AWS, which has turned some developers away. Their customer support, while offered 24/7, is not as responsive as other services. This also turns less experienced web builders away, unless you pay their steep 1:1 support fees (if you’re the next Netflix, you probably want to tack this onto the bill).

What really draws people in is their extremely vast infrastructure. Amazon has spread throughout the world, and their web hosting services have followed suit. AWS has just narrowly beat out Google Cloud for the world’s largest worldwide network, with 24 regions and 216 points of presence in the world. (But Google is coming for blood these days.)

They offer essential security features by isolating resources, encrypting data and connecting privately on the AWS network.

Bottom line: AWS is the best hosting for SaaS companies that are very large or planning on getting there in the near future. They are not a cheap nor an easy-to-use web hosting solution. But if you have a very high and variable volume of visitors every day, then AWS may just be for you.

6. Google Cloud: Best web hosting for insanely fast network capabilities.

AWS is the de facto industry leader in big cloud computing — however, Google Cloud services, once used only by Google, is now available publicly. And they’re quickly catching up to AWS.

Data management is built into the fabric of Google. This makes them amazing at protecting and analyzing data. Data is in a fully encrypted format. The same security protocols protecting Google applications like Gmail are used to protect your SaaS application. They do automatic backups of data and have disaster recovery services. Basically, you’re covered in the event of anything short of the end of the world (and maybe even then).

Google Cloud in 24 cloud regions as of 2020. They have 130 points of presence in 35 countries worldwide. Data centers are secure and energy efficient. And 100% of the energy Google Cloud products use is matched with purchases of renewable energy, resulting in carbon neutral product offerings. 

In addition to sustainability efforts, Google Cloud is working towards the future on several fronts. They’re rapidly expanding their global network. They’re constantly adding more programming languages, and continually making improvements in UI experience.

While they may not have as many apps for integration as AWS, Google is an open cloud service provider, meaning that developers can innovate without being locked in by vendors.

Google Cloud offers a pay-by-the-minute plan, as opposed to AWS’s pay-by-the-hour ones. This makes them more cost effective than AWS. But again, they do not have all of the features AWS provides.

 Developers will find that Google Cloud is best for SaaS applications that require fast speed, vast reach and strong security protocols. 

7. DigitalOcean: For developers without a fortune to spend on big hosting providers.

DigitalOcean is famous for the freedom given to web developers in terms of hosting capabilities, and for their pricing. (They’re probably also known for their interesting terminology.) They operate on a completely open source model. They are a simple, low-cost alternative to larger companies such as AWS and Google Cloud. But, of course, you won’t get to use the massive network these giants run on.

DigitalOcean operates using droplets, which are equivalent to Virtual Private Servers. When creating a droplet, you are able to choose the amount of memory, number of vCPUs, transfer limits as SSD disk size.  They allow complete access to root code. The level of customization may be intimidating, but they have a “Help Me Choose” option to help you figure out exactly what you need.

The hosting service is very developer friendly. The downsides to this level of freedom are that you have to totally manage your servers yourself. Their customer support is also not great when compared to other services. They do, however, have a strong and helpful community of developers working on DigitalOcean’s open source platform.

Pricewise, you only pay for what you use. The easy addition of more VPSs makes it easy to scale your business up without having to jump to a new plan. “Standard droplets” start at $5 per droplet. “CPU customized droplets” start at $20. As everything, including servers, bandwidth, security options, etc., is customizable, your bill can end up pretty steep before you even realize it, if you’re not completely aware of what you’re adding on.

But if you are a developer who knows what you are looking for, and how to meet those needs, DigitalOcean is a very affordable cloud hosting option. DigitalOcean is the best hosting for SaaS developers looking for a lot of custom, advanced hosting options at a reasonable price.

8. Render: The middle ground between vast scalability and steep learning curves.

Render is the new(er) kid on the block compared to the companies they are trying to outperform: AWS, an Infrastructure as a Service, and Heroku, a fully automated Platform as a Service (PAAS) that takes all of the hassle of running servers away, so that you can focus on creating and deploying your application.

People use PAAS over IAAS so that they don’t have to handle any server management. PAAS provides a platform for software to be created online, without having to worry about operating systems, software updates, storage or infrastructure in general.

Heroku is a popular PAAS hosting solution. However, many developers have found that the solution is inflexible and expensive, and fails to rapidly scale as needed. They turn towards large providers like AWS for the scalability and processing power needed. But the platform is complex and requires a team of developers to manage, which is not feasible for startups.

Essentially, they’ve been stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Render offers a middle ground: a cost-effective automated cloud hosting solution that doesn’t require a team of developers to break through the steep learning curves of other hosting providers. Render servers run essentially on autopilot, and at a good price as well.

Your SaaS application can be written in several programming languages, and then automatically deployed by Render. 

Render relies on AWS, Google Cloud and other large providers for fast network speeds, and automatically sets up SSL certificates from Let’s Encrypt. They continuously run “health checks” for your app, which are defined by you. This is done with zero downtime.

Do bear in mind, though: with any new service, you won’t have as many features or consumer knowledge as you would with other larger, more established providers. However, despite Render only being deployed in April 2019, they now have over one million HTTP requests every week. They are planning on adding several features in the next year to reduce costs and offer a more vast range of services.

Render is the best hosting for SaaS developers in small startups who don’t have the developer team to take full advantage of cloud based services, and don’t necessarily want to pay the high price tag that comes with most completely automated servers maintenance providers. They seek to help smaller teams get onto the cloud, while continuing to focus on developing their applications. 

This is obviously not a provider for non-developers, or for anyone looking for a more established, “brand name” hosting solution.

Your web hosting provider factors into your success. A lot. Pick one that makes your SaaS application not terrible to use.

While every venture’s budget, technical know-how, and scaling expectancies are different, there is one thing that unites every single SaaS business: If your application does not run smoothly, safely and consistently for your users, you won’t have a business for long.

It’s very important, then, to choose hosting solutions that offer these features, as well as anything else you may need. It’s also important to choose a service that won’t drive you insane, so you can work on your business.