Small businesses are not supposed to have enterprise IT teams. Yet their customers still expect enterprise-level experiences every time a page loads, a form submits or a checkout completes.
Globally, more than 90% of enterprises are classified as small and medium businesses. In the United States alone, Puri notes, SMBs generate around 43.5% of GDP and create more than half of all jobs.
In other words, they carry enormous economic weight, yet often operate with thin teams, limited budgets and little technical support.
That is why “ease of use is prime” in our thinking. Enterprise-grade infrastructure on its own is not enough. It has to be wrapped in tools and experiences that non-technical business owners can realistically use.
In a recent conversation on Tech Impact’s special AI edition with Evan Kirstel, Bluehost CEO Sachin Puri outlined how the company is trying to close that gap.
From infrastructure investments to AI tools, his central message is simple: small businesses should not have to compromise on performance, reliability or support.
The hidden challenge most small businesses face online
For many small businesses, having a website was enough. Today, the expectations have changed. Visitors now judge every site by big-brand standards of speed and reliability, creating a quiet pressure for SMBs trying to keep up.
Customers expect big-company performance from every website
To an average visitor, there is no difference between a local bakery website and a global retailer. Every page should load quickly. Every checkout experience should be flawless.
This expectation is universal even if the resources behind it are not.
“Right from the beginning, Bluehost has been built around providing enterprise grade technology to SMBs and enterprises at large.”
This means that we offer speed, performance and reliability as the baseline, not a premium extra.
How infrastructure shapes every interaction: The unseen systems that drive real results
For small businesses, small lapses have big consequences. When a page stalls or the site goes down, even for moments, customers lose trust and are far more likely to abandon their carts.
Every online interaction relies on what happens behind the scenes. Server speed matters. Uptime matters. Overall stability matters. The foundation of a website is just as important as the design or content people see.
“End of the day, it really comes down to the infrastructure that is powering the system.”
Clearly, a solid technical foundation builds trust by delivering speed, stability and consistency. Without it, issues surface fast: slow responses, broken flows and an experience that signals unreliability to customers.
Which leads to a larger truth: enterprise-grade performance matters more than most businesses think.
Why enterprise-grade performance matters more than people think
Many hosting providers advertise 99.9% uptime. It sounds impressive until you compare it with 99.99%.
Bluehost has invested over time in what Puri describes as “enterprise-grade infrastructure,” which supports 99.99% uptime reliability.
“What that means versus the 99.9% offered by many other hosts is whether your site downtime would be potentially four minutes versus 44 minutes each month. Now that is huge.”
The difference between those two numbers is exactly that: roughly 44 minutes of downtime per month versus 4 minutes!
On a spreadsheet, that’s just a decimal point. In real life, this can determine if your website goes down during a peak traffic window or stays up when it matters most. Those moments reveal the true value of performance.
“You want your website to be up, secure and performant,” Puri says. For a small business, there is often no backup domain, no alternative landing page and no separate app picking up the slack. The website is the front door.
By pushing their uptime target closer to enterprise standards, Bluehost is effectively trying to remove those invisible leaks. For SMBs, that reliability is part of how they keep up with much larger competitors that rarely go offline.
But keeping a site online is only one part of the equation. The other, more significant part, is making it easier for SMBs to transform an idea to a fully launched presence. That’s where AI steps in.
From name to launch: How AI simplifies every step of the SMB online journey
Bluehost today is more than a hosting provider. The interview makes it clear that it is an AI-powered platform for the full digital journey.
“Most businesses start with an idea. Now we have AI domain generator where customers use our AI domain generator to play around and brainstorm with their ideas to choose the right name that represents their company and their idea.”
Once that name is chosen, customers can attach a business email with ready-to-use signature templates. They can then use an AI website generator, choose from hundreds of designs and refine them with AI custom blocks. If they want to sell online, an AI store generator handles products, checkout and catalog management. The final step is visibility.
“We have deeply integrated AI technology that allows customers to get their brand insight to show up well on search engines and AI assistant platform,” Puri says.
It sounds seamless. It only works if the underlying infrastructure is fast, secure and dependable. Without that, even the smartest AI workflow will feel slow, fragile or unreliable.
Enterprise-grade support, delivered at an SMB budget
Technology is only part of the promise. The other part is support.
Puri highlights that Bluehost has “hundreds of customer support agents” trained to handle both SMB and enterprise needs. Their role goes far beyond basic troubleshooting. “We even go beyond and help our customers in building their website, optimizing their website if they so choose,” he explains.
For small business owners without dedicated IT teams, this kind of help can function as a borrowed technical partner. It fills the gap between what they want their site to do and what they know how to do on their own. That hands-on approach shows up in customer feedback.
“When you look at Bluehost reviews on Trustpilot, we are 4.6 on the excellent spectrum. And that has been given by 26,000 customers saying every single day when they call customer support from Bluehost, they feel satisfied and they recommend us.”
This is how support becomes more than just a help desk. It becomes a crucial part of how enterprise-grade infrastructure delivers real results for everyday businesses.
A future where SMBs no longer compete at a disadvantage
Throughout the interview, one theme stands out: AI is giving small businesses a chance to compete on equal footing. Puri sees AI as “a very equal playing field” for SMBs.
While many companies are racing to build AI solutions, he argues that “not all AI are created equal.” The combination of human expertise, AI-driven workflows and strong infrastructure is what turns AI into a practical advantage for smaller players, not just a buzzword.
One agency partner described our new AI capabilities as a “game changer,” noting a 60% boost in content development productivity. For small teams, that kind of efficiency gain can open a world of operational possibilities.
Final thoughts: The unseen shift leveling the digital playing field
If Bluehost’s strategy works as intended, most customers will never have to think about data centers, uptime calculations or architecture diagrams behind their sites.
They will see the effects instead. Sites that are up when it matters. Stores that load fast during peak traffic. Pages that can be launched quickly with AI assistance and then refined over time. Support teams that feel like partners rather than distant vendors.
This success increasingly depends on infrastructure that used to be available exclusively to large enterprises. Today, the same level of performance is accessible to those who keep much of the global economy running; small and medium businesses.
And the mission behind it is simple, in Puri’s own words from his CloudFest conversation with Karim Marucchi: “Our mission is very simple, to help small businesses be successful online.”
By bringing enterprise-grade stability together with AI-driven simplicity, Bluehost is removing barriers that once held smaller teams back. The foundation does its work quietly, but its impact is loud, especially for SMBs ready to grow with the confidence of much larger brands.
And as AI levels the playing field, the real question becomes: which small businesses will seize this new advantage first?
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