What is SaaS Hosting? Who’s The Best For Your Site

SaaS Hosting is a specific type of web hosting service where your SaaS software and files are stored on the hosting provider’s servers instead of your own servers. So, your customers and users can access your software solution (your SaaS product) via the cloud.

The Benefits of SaaS Hosting

With a proper SaaS hosting, your customers wouldn’t need to have a copy of your software on their devices, while the hosting service will also provide maintenance and updates at the server level. So, the customers won’t need to update or patch the software.

Hosting for WP SaaS will also provide various benefits to the software developers. For instance, the developer wouldn’t need to host the software in-house, which may require certain infrastructures and management. Some companies also opt for Iaas hosting that maintains the infrastructures.

SaaS hosting can also provide the following benefits:

• Security: the more widespread your SaaS software is and the more popular it gets, the more exposed your business is to cyber criminals and other threats. A good SaaS hosting service will also offer dedicated protection against various cyber threats like DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks, malware and ransomware, hacking, and other threats.
• Content delivery network (CDN): a CDN is a network of servers that distribute the content, so users can receive the content (and SaaS service) from a server that is located closer to them, allowing better latency and faster processes
• Scalability: you can easily add more web hosting service with virtual SaaS hosting as your company grows, which is more cost-effective and would save more time rather than investing in more physical hosting and servers.

Who’s The Best For Your Site?

1. SiteGround

Key features:

• cPanel access
• Included SSL certification (HTTPS)
• Free website transfer
• Unlimited data transfer
• Free website backup
• WB-CLI

Pros and cons

Pros:

• Very fast servers with the latest technologies and software
• Excellent customer support with 24/7 live chat, phone, and support ticket
• Free CDN (by Cloudflare)
• Free SSL certification
• Multiple data centers in three continents, so you can choose according to your needs

Cons:

• Limited/fixed storage, although the initial storage is quite large
• Extra fee if you choose monthly billing

SiteGround is our top recommendation for a SaaS hosting for several reasons. First, its VPS cloud servers are based on super-fast SSD architecture, allowing very low latency and excellent reliability.

SiteGround also offers a very powerful CDN service to allow better deliverability of your content and SaaS software, and you can choose between five data centers. Also, SiteGrould will perform automatic daily backups of your site.

Arguably, however, the best reason to choose SiteGround is their excellent customer service: very fast, responsive, and reliable with almost no hold time on live chat and phone. 

2. Liquid Web

Key features:

• Fully managed VPS and dedicated hosting service (all updates and security fixes are handled by Liquid Web
• 100% uptime
• For WordPress websites, Liquid Web automatically updates your plugins
• PHP 7 and Nginx to boost your site’s speed and performance
• Manage all your sites from a single location via iThemes Sync Pro

Pros and Cons

Pros:

• Fast and secure technologies (SSD, PHP 7, Nginx, HTTP/2, and more)
• Fully managed hosting infrastructure for various platforms (WordPress, VPS, dedicated servers)
• Automatic daily backups and updates
• 100% uptime money-back guarantee
• Free SSL certification and CDN
• Free site migration and DDoS protection
• Premium tools included (iThemes Sync Pro, BeaverBuilder, Jilt, and more)

Cons:

• Expensive option
• Need to pay more for an email hosting
• US and Europe data centers only

Liquid Web is definitely one of the best managed hosting services out there, and actually offers more features than SiteGround. Also, a very attractive selling point is its 100% uptime money-back guarantee (they will credit you 10x the amount when you were down).

However, LiquidWeb is relatively expensive (it is not a shared hosting service) and doesn’t automatically include email hosting. If you do have the budget, however, Liquid Web is a very interesting choice.

3. Heroku

Key features:

• Fully managed runtime environment
• Reliable and secure PostgreSQL
• GitHub integration
• Various add-ons like New Relic, MongoDB, SendGrid, Searchify, Fastly, Papertrail, ClearDB MySQL, Treasure Data, and more
• Heroku CLI for interacting with the cloud environment

Pros and cons

Pros:

• Very easy deployment and environment configuration, very fast to launch
• Very affordable especially for smaller-scale SaaS apps
• A great free option, where you can deploy demo or test applications
• Great interface with the Heroku CLI
• Excellent mobile-responsiveness

Cons:

• Does not offer static IP addresses, which can make Heroku limited in some applications
• Pricing can be high for larger SaaS apps
• Not very versatile for advanced developers

Heroku is a great choice due to its ease of use, allowing us to deploy apps to the cloud very easily. With Heroku, you don’t really need to manage your servers at all and you’ll also get extremely fast software launch times and intuitiveness. You can use Heroku’s Git push feature which will automatically detect your stack and automatically deploy your app.

Not as versatile as other options on this list, but one of the easiest to use.

4. Digital Ocean

Key Features:

• Various data center locations across many different continents
• Managed Kubernetes cluster in just a few clicks
• Real-time alerts
• Various resource metrics and summary stats with time-series graphs
• Flexible compute options with various infrastructure options for your workload

Pros and Cons

Pros:

• Easy to use, developer-friendly tools and APIs
• Great documentation features
• Great user interface allowing easy cloud management
• Excellent customer service and support

Cons:

• No South American servers
• Don’t offer enterprise-level options (no MS SQL, Oracle, Windows Server).

Digital Ocean is another great hosting company for SaaS projects, especially for smaller SaaS businesses with their great pricing versatility and a very easy-to-use hosting environment. Fast, reliable, and secure SaaS hosting at a fairly reasonable price.

While it is not the most versatile hosting service, you get a great load time, decent server uptime, and excellent customer service.

5. Cloudways

Key features:

• Choice of 5 IaaS providers
• Fully managed cloud hosting platform
• Optimized stack for fast load times
• Auto-healing servers

Pros and Cons

Pros:

• 1-click installation for apps like WordPress
• Free SSL integration
• First site migration is free
• Fantastic support
• Pay as you go pricing

Cons:

• No root access
• Add-ons cost extra
• No support for cPanel or Plesk

Cloudways is one of the best companies that offers SaaS hosting solutions right now. They have a fantastic, highly optimized stack for fast speeds, and the company is known for its range of support options. Their pricing varies depending upon the provider you choose, making them an ideal choice for most companies big or small.
However, you don’t get root access to your web apps, and since they provide their own platform, you can’t use Plesk or cPanel.

End Words

A proper SaaS hosting can significantly improve your SaaS product’s deliverability and usability, by allowing a faster, managed cloud service from the hosting service instead of your own server.

Above, we have also discussed four of the best SaaS hosting options available today, each with its own advantages and disadvantages.