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Big Tech Alternatives for Small Business

Independent hosting, email and tools you actually own. Where to start, and what to move first.

Big Tech or an independent provider

Where your data lives and who answers the phone.

Big Tech platformsLarge, standardized, remote
Liberation Technology ServicesIndependent and US-based

Big tech alternatives you can switch to today

These are the products behind this page. Each one is owned and run by LiberationTek on servers in the United States, so no upstream platform can close your account without us knowing. Start with the service you can least afford to lose.

Instead of GoDaddy, Bluehost or Wix hosting

Shared Cloud Hosting

Host up to 9 sites on servers we own in the United States, with a free domain on annual plans and a 30-day money-back guarantee.

From $7.99 a month

See details

Instead of WP Engine or Kinsta

WordPress Hosting

Managed WordPress with staging, daily backups, a CDN and automatic updates. We move your site for free.

From $29 a month

See details

Instead of AWS, Linode or Vultr

Private Cloud Hosting

Dedicated resources, a managed server and 24/7 U.S.-based support, with an unlimited monthly transfer allotment and no egress fees.

Four managed plans

See details

Instead of Gmail or Outlook

Liberation Email

Business email on your own domain. Your messages are never scanned for ads or used to train AI.

From $1.95 per user a month

See details

Instead of Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace

Hub For Teams

Email, calendar, files, chat, projects and video in one private workspace with more than 20 apps.

30-day free trial

See details

Instead of Mailchimp or Constant Contact

Email Marketing

Own your list. Pay for emails sent, not contacts stored, with the full feature set from the first email.

First 1,000 emails a month free

See details

Instead of Wix or Squarespace

Website Builder

A drag and drop builder with hosting, SSL and daily backups included, and a free domain on annual plans.

From $10.99 a month

See details

Leaving any host

Transfer Your Website

Our Migration Team moves your site for you after reviewing it and sending a quote, so you never rebuild from scratch.

Moved by a person

See details

Not sure which to move first? Talk to our team and we will tell you where to start.

Everything on this page is about big tech alternatives, from first principles to specific tools and providers.

A Big Tech alternative is an independent provider — hosting, email, storage or marketing — that owns the infrastructure it sells you rather than reselling one of the large platforms. For most small businesses the practical move is not leaving everything at once. It is replacing the services where a sudden account closure would stop you trading: your website, your business email and your customer list.

This page collects everything LiberationTek has written on that subject, grouped by the decision each guide helps you make, so you can start where your own risk is rather than reading the lot in order.

Big Tech alternatives for small business are worth considering when one provider controls your site, your email and your customer list at the same time. Spreading those across independent providers limits how much a single policy change or outage can cost you. You do not have to move everything at once. Start with the service that would hurt most to lose, usually web hosting or email.

Moving off a big platform is mostly planning. Export your data first, test the new service alongside the old one, and switch over when you are confident. Our guide on migrating a WordPress site yourself or hiring help walks through that decision. The NIST small business cybersecurity resources are a useful reference whichever providers you choose. This is general information and not advice for your specific situation.

A short note on how to use this page. The guides below on big tech alternatives are grouped by the decision they help with, so you can go straight to the section that matches where you are. Nothing about big tech alternatives has to be tackled all at once.

Big tech alternatives: a map of the sections in this guide

If you are starting from scratch with big tech alternatives, read the first guide in each section and come back for the rest as questions come up. Small businesses rarely need every topic under big tech alternatives on day one.

We keep these pages on big tech alternatives current, and our team is happy to talk through big tech alternatives for your particular situation.

Start with the service you cannot afford to lose

Most businesses arrive here after something went wrong for somebody else — a competitor deplatformed, a mailing list frozen, a payment processor closing an account without warning. That is the right instinct, but it makes for a scattered response. The useful question is narrower: which single service, if it disappeared tomorrow morning, would stop you trading?

For a retailer it is usually the website. For a consultancy or a ministry it is almost always email and the contact list. Whichever it is, move that one first and get it stable before touching anything else. The sections below are ordered roughly that way.

Hosting that will not take your site down

Hosting is the first thing to move, because it is the only service whose loss takes everything else with it. These five cover what to check in an acceptable-use policy, how independent hosts differ from the mainstream, and what the terms in this space actually promise.

Email and marketing you actually own

Your customer list is the asset a platform can take away fastest, and the one that is hardest to rebuild. Both of these deal with who owns the sending infrastructure behind your mail.

Building and running your website

Owning the hosting matters less if the site itself is locked inside a builder you cannot export from. These two cover the build decision.

Keeping the business secure

Moving off a large platform means taking on security decisions the platform used to make for you. These five cover the ones that matter for a small team without dedicated IT staff.

Ready to move the first service?

Start with hosting or email, whichever you can least afford to lose. Our team handles the migration.

Where LiberationTek fits

LiberationTek is a US-owned provider of hosting, business email, collaboration tools and payment processing. We own the infrastructure behind those services, which is why this topic has a page on our site rather than only a stack of blog posts. If you want the product pages rather than the reading:

Frequently asked questions

An independent provider of a service you would normally buy from one of the large platform companies — website hosting, business email, cloud storage, email marketing or payments. The defining feature is not size or politics. It is that the provider owns the infrastructure it sells you, so your account is not subject to a policy decision made several companies upstream.

No, and it is usually a mistake to try. Move the services where an account closure would stop you trading: your website, your business email and your customer list. Documents, calendars and internal chat can follow later, once the critical services are stable and you know the migration process works.

Reliability comes from architecture and support, not company size. Ask for the specifics: where the data centers are, what the backup schedule is, how restores are tested, and who answers the phone at 2am. A provider that cannot answer those questions plainly is the risk, whatever its size.

Not inherently. Large platforms invest heavily in security, but they are also the highest-value targets and their scale means a breach reaches further. What matters for your business is the same list either way: encryption in transit and at rest, enforced multi-factor authentication, tested backups, and clear answers about who can access your data.

Less than most people assume. Every host has an acceptable-use policy, and all of them prohibit illegal content. The real difference is what sits between illegal and permitted — whether the policy is narrow and specific, or broad enough that it can be applied to lawful content later. Read the acceptable-use policy before the marketing page.

For most small businesses the recurring cost is comparable to what they already pay, and the real expense is the migration itself: DNS changes, mail transfer, and a short window of careful monitoring. Ask whether migration is included before you compare monthly prices, because that is where the difference usually sits.

With email, if your customer list matters to your revenue, because that is the account with the most to lose and the longest rebuild time. With hosting, if your website is your storefront. Everything else can wait until one of those two has moved cleanly.

Not sure which service to move first?

Tell us what you run and where it currently lives. We will tell you which single service carries the most risk for your business, and what moving it would actually involve.

What moving away from big tech actually involves

“Alternatives to big tech” covers two quite different motivations, and they lead to different decisions. One is about control: you want your data somewhere you can reach it, with a provider you can hold accountable, and without your business depending on a platform that can change its terms unilaterally. The other is about cost and support: you are tired of being too small to get a human on the phone. Both are reasonable, and they do not always point the same way.

Be clear about what you gain. On your own domain with an independent provider, the addresses belong to the business rather than to a platform account, administrative control sits with you, and there is somebody specific who answers when something breaks. Contracts are readable and prices are published.

Be equally clear about what you give up, because a provider who pretends otherwise is not being straight with you. The large platforms have enormous engineering budgets, and that buys scale, uptime records, and an ecosystem where every third-party tool already integrates. Leaving means some integrations need configuring rather than clicking, and some features are simply not replicated anywhere. For most small organizations that trade is comfortable. For some it is not, and we would rather establish which you are before you move than afterwards.

The practical sequence matters more than the philosophy. Identity and email first, because everything else authenticates against them. Files second. Chat and project tools last, because they hold the least irreplaceable data and the most habit. Attempting all of it in one weekend is how these projects earned their reputation.

What we actually do: mailboxes, shared calendars and contacts on your own domain through Hub For Teams; websites on hosting you can leave; domains registered in your name; and support from people in the United States who will tell you when the honest answer is that you should stay where you are. Book a call and we will go through what you run now before recommending anything.

Custom Solutions

Take your business to the next level with Liberation's full suite of services & solutions.

Custom Management

Don’t like managing? We offer managed services for hosting, ecommerce, web sites, and more.

Custom Websites

We build custom, professional websites for small to large organizations. 

Custom Apps

Our team of expert developers can design custom applications for a wide variety of purposes.

Payment Processing

Cancel-Free payment processing for a variety of industries and custom solutions.

Expert Consulting

Liberation offers consulting on strategy, infrastructure, e-commerce, and more.

Custom Ecommerce

We customize your e-commerce to fit your business needs and goals for maximum profits.

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