Hostgator Review

Hostgator is a privately owned web hosting company founded in 2002. According to Hostgator official claims, they provide hosting service for more than 1,000,000 websites and lead in hosting reseller accounts with over 20,000 resellers.

Hostgator Overall rating

Hostgator Inc. Website: http://www.hostgator.com Features : Support : Pricing : Reliability : Hosting Cost : $7.95/mo Overall Rating : A+ *Recommended

What’s good with Hostgator hosting?

I’ve been hosting websites at Hostgator long before I started this website and I still run a couple of websites with them at current time. With its quality service, the hosting company is growing fast and was named top in Texas for the recent Inc 5000 Awards.

Indeed they are one of the best hosting companies you can ever get and they are in my ‘A list’ and here are the keypoints of Hostgator’s success.

*Updates: Hostgator is now my top choice of hosting. Hostgator hosting service is reliable, priced reasonable, environmental friendly, and best of all, their customer supports rocks!

Reliable server with guarnateed 99.9% uptime

Thru out the years Hostgator has never fail me as a reliable hosting service. I barely notice any downtime for my websites – while this was quite a surprise until I recently found out that Hostgator is running its own data center (huge plus point).

Also, it’s worth noting that every web hosting plan with Hostgator comes with a 45 day money back guarantee and 99.9% uptime guarantee. The deal is fully guaranteed by the company founder and CEO (Brent) himself – which is another huge plus point (responsible management team).

Host unlimited domain

Hostgator is now offering 600GB of disk storage and 6,000GB bandwidth unlimited bandwidth and disk storage!. On top of that, you will get unlimited domain hosting with Hostgator. In short, this actually means that you can host ALL YOUR WEBSITES in just one single web hosting account with Hostgator.

Unlimited MySQL and POP3 email account

While most other hosting companies will only allow you to have a certain number of MySQL database, you get unlimited (I repeat, unlimited!) MySQL database with Hostgator. That’s quite an advantage if you’re planning to build a huge web application.

Room to grow

Hostgator offers shared, dedicated, reseller hosting. Along with the recently launched VPS hosting plans, Hostgator offer great rooms for website growth. This makes server switching and upgrading possible within Hostgator – which in other words, huge money and time savings for you as the website owner.

Environment Friendly

Lately Hostgator had turned green by powering and cooling their server using wind power.

Potential drawbacks with Hostgator

Some users might be not very happy with the price tag of Hostgator hosting. Without doubt, Hostgator is a little pricey compare to most other web host (about $1/mo extra compare to the average).

In my opinion, however, this is absolutely okay as you get what you paid – quality web hosting server with top notch customer supports. Read further on the customer reviews and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

Hostgator Hosting Promotion

Hostgator hosting comes with tons of great addon features and promotions. From CPC marketing credits to discont for website templates – these promotions will definitely give a greater bang-for-the-bucks. In brief, here are the major promotions that come along when you signup with Hostgator hosting.

Free SiteBuilder	Free $50 Google Adwords credits
ChiliSoft ASP (Biz Hosting only)	Free 4,500 Site Templates

Click here to visit Hostgator online: Hostgator.com!

Hostgator Customers Reviews

Finest Hosting Around! "I have had a number of hosting companies – and have two now. I want to say the HG is the finest I have ever had the pleasure to deal with." Richx @ Sept 12, 2009.

Thanks security! "An old Wordpress installed on one of my sites got exploited and over-wrote my .htacess and caused google to report my sites as ‘this site can harm your computer’. HG went out of their way and did lot of work to fix all the problems. I have experiences with other webhosts before HG, who I know will not do this. Thank you (especially Michael Karr, Benjamin Davis, Christopher D.)" – Forum Poster CrazyFool @ Sept 22, 2009.

Happy with switch to Host Gator "How naive I must have been thinking my old hosting company was great. When the discontinued boxtrapper support, which is the only sure "bot" SPAM blocker, I switched to Host Gator. My web pages and email scripts are running so fast that I’m unable to follow some of the confirmation messages! Unlike my past hosting company that reduced allowable emails per hour when activity was high without telling anybody, (I have counters to keep track of them), Host Gator does not. In switching to them I had no problems except those induced by me not knowing something. Thus far I am very happy with Host Gator and while they don’t show on many of the "Top 10" lists, they should be. I believe they contract with "The Planet" for their infrastructure which may be one reason for their high speed performance. The Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston area communication infrastructure is highly fiber optic based, unlike other cities which still employ some cable and copper pathways. The first ever fully fiber "wired" city in the country is Keller, Texas, about 17 miles from "The Planet" in Dallas." – Cdmj @ Aug 22, 2009.

6 years with HG and hopefully many more… "I have been with Host Gator for around 6 years now and figured I should post my experiences with HG. In all that time I have never had an issue that was not resolved promptly and courteously. Support tickets have always been answered quickly and my issues resolved in a timely manner. I have never had to use phone support because the fast response to my tickets. Thank you HG!" – IntrepidHosts @ Aug 31, 2009.

HostGator Rules! Just wanted to say that I hardly ever ask questions in this forum because I hardly ever have any problems. After a couple of happy years on a Standard Dedi from HG I am now moving to an Elite Dedi ….. and wow what a spec it’s got. HG rules!" – Kim Carter @ www.Carsena-Tech.net.

Hostgator The Best! "I would like to thank you for providing the best hosting and having good uptime. I hope you can have even more Servers. Thank you!" – Computerwis @ Oct 30, 2009.

HostGator: You Had Me At ‘Hello! "After coming from such a bad experience at GoDaddy I had to post and share how really great HostGator has been just in the few days I’ve been a member. I so very much appreciate the minimalist design with HostGator’s web presence, including the home page and cPanel. Anyone who has a domain or host account with GoDaddy knows how busy their site is! It’s a mess IMHO. Maybe I’m just imagining it but I really think my site with HostGator is snappier. True, the account is only 3 days old and it wasn’t a site transfer; just a clean fresh WordPress install. But even when my site was fresh with GoDaddy there seem to be some lag. Perhaps they install more accounts per server on their shared hosting then HostGator does? At any rate, thank you HostGator!! WOOHOO!!!" – kevo777 @ Mac 3, 2009.

*Side Notes: In case you are not aware, Hostgator is also my pick in Best Business Hosting and Best Dedicated Hosting . There are so many great things to talk about Hostgator and if you wish to learn how the Gator folks works, check out my recent interview with Hostgator Manager, Douglas Hanna.

Hostgator Uptime Review

The Gator hosting uptime hit over 99.9% in my record.

Seriously, my years of experience with Hostgator tells me that they are great but I never knew they were this good! I started tracking their server after setting up this blog and I couldn’t believe my eyes when I see the numbers – 99.93% server uptime – for a $7.95/mo shared server! Isn’t that maginficient?

For your reference, image on the right shows Hostgator server uptime for the past 7 days.

Conclusion: Is Hostgator recommended?

Hostgator offers three different hosting pakcages, known as Hatchling, Baby, and Swamp. Each hosting plan has different features and we will be reviewing the most popular hosting plan here, which is the ‘Baby Plan’. From the features table, you can see that Hostgator hosting plan (Baby) is slightly expensive ($1 extra if compare to average price) however you’ll get what you’re paying for. Not many hosting companies are willing to offer unlimited MySQL connection as this will eat up server resources – however this is not the case with Hostgator. In case cost is a big issue for you, try out Hostgator’s Hatchling Plan where you get hosting with Hostgator in a cheaper price ($4.95/mo).

Hostgator is highly recommended – especially if you are looking for a reliable web host or a reseller hosting account.

Click here to order Hostgator online!