HostGator

A basic website hosing option for small and medium businesses that Shashank Sharma thinks should be on your short list.

- Shashank Sharma

Panel gives you everything you need to control and manage your site.

Based in the US, HostGator B offers a range of solutions including shared hosting, VPS hosting, dedicated hosting, cloud hosting or even reseller hosting. While the dedicated hosting plans give the choice of Windows and Linux as the underlying operating systems, all shared hosting and VPS plans are Linux-based. HostGator defaults to CentOS 7 for all its Linux installations, but you can request CentOS 6 if that's more your speed.

The shared hosting plans start at $2.95 per month for a three-year subscription and might seem tempting because of the unmetered disk space and bandwidth. However, the hosting provider will ask you to scale down usage of the resources if your needs exceed 25 per cent of the total available resources.

Unlike many other hosting providers that allow backups out of the box, with HostGator you must separately purchase the CodeGuardBasic service for $2 per month. The service provides daily automatic backups, 1GB storage space and three restorations per month, and you can also restore the entire site, or any file, to a previous state with a single click.