Online presence is pretty much a given in the age of Web 2.0. It does not matter if you are a blogger, an entrepreneur, a startup founder, freelancer or even an individual. People around the world have online presence, by way of social media or hosted websites.

Compared to social media, your own website nets you full control over your content as well as your data. The difference is, you have to host the website yourself. Fortunately, the competition between hosting providers is fierce. And that’s always good news for you, as their customer. So which hosting providers give the most bang for your buck?

Here’s a comparison…

InMotion Hosting

InMotion Hosting is one of the top hosting providers in the big league. They provide shared, VPS, reseller and dedicated packages. However, their shared hosting packages have some of the lowest costs in comparison. Top it up with legendary customer satisfaction and 99.99% uptime for your websites, and you are good to go.

They’ve got Linux as well as Windows hosting solutions, which are bundled with managed hosting and WordPress or BoldGrid website development, which are packaged as ‘addons.’ InMotion can also register your domains, and you get a free domain with some of their hosting plans, which is a bonus. If you need the best value for your money, you can rely on InMotion hosting without hesitation.

OVH Hosting

OVH Hosting was a startup itself, so they know the problems faced by small business owners and bootstrapped entrepreneurs. With their Digital Launch Pad, they select promising new startups and offer professional help, hosting solutions.

Their unique selling point is the GeoCache CDN solution, which ensures that their network of servers always delivers content to your audiences with the least amount of latency.

With prices starting at Euro 1.99 for 100GB storage and a free domain, you can’t go wrong with OVH. If you have doubts, just check for OVH Hosting review on any search engine and see for yourself.

Pagely

If WordPress is your weapon of choice, then Pagely is a worthy contender to choose. Pagely has been touted as the first managed WordPress hosting provider.

Their entire back end relies on Amazon Web Services, which is what Netflix and Amazon itself uses. With a base this strong accompanied by load balanced clusters, your website should get all the performance it can ever require.

And if AWS security was not enough, their PRESSARMOR will shield all sorts of malicious attacks on your website. If, somehow, your website does get compromised, their mission is to clean and restore it for free.

Hostgator

HostGator is placed among the top ten heavy hitters in web hosting. They have extensive experience in the hosting sector and have remained consistent in the face of stiff competition. So much so, that they’ve established their brand like InMotion.

It’s a premium hosting service, which might mean that you have to shell out a bit more. But in return, you get all the services offered by the top hosting providers, plus a customer service which rivals that of InMotion.

It’s not quite the ideal one for starters, because even if you get discounted pricing for an initial period, the subsequent pricing increases substantially. They also faced some problems after their acquisition from EIG, but they are improving steadily.

A2 Hosting

If you are really strapped for cash, but still need a worthy web host for your needs, consider A2 hosting. It offers a faster and more reliable service than some of the popular free hosting providers. They even have a special developer access program for companies who need access to the servers for their web development teams.

A2 provides options for managed or unmanaged hosting in addition to the standard features offered by others. But they have some nifty upgrades, like the automatic configuration of security and your website software for optimum loading times.

If there was one thing to complain about, it would be the extra charges for cPanel and Softaculous auto-installer for unmanaged hosting. But if you compare them with most other service providers, you’ll realise that this is standard practice for unmanaged VPS packages.