Hostgator Review

Hostgator is one of the biggest Web Hosting companies in the world, they are in the Top 10. From shared hosting to dedicated hosting you can find the plan suitable for your needs.

In this HostGator review it will soon become obvious that Hostgator is a very well known (and generally well-regarded) web hosting company based in Houston, Texas. It was founded in 2002, and has grown explosively over the years. Recently, it was recognized by Inc. Magazine as one of the fastest-growing privately held companies in the USA. Over 90% of their customers report high levels of satisfaction with the services that the company provides. Additionally, though do offer bargain-level shared hosting for individuals and small businesses, the company also offers a diverse range of hosting options for more serious users, such as resellers, or businesses looking for high-powered Virtual Private Server (VPS) or even dedicated server-hosting solutions. Impressively, they currently host over 7 million domains and counting, which account for approximately 1% of the huge amount of daily Internet traffic. Their current customers range from individuals, to small businesses, to Fortune 500 companies.

Hosting Services

HostGator offers 3 different entry-level shared plans that vary in price according to the sorts of features that you need. The three plans – Hatchling, Baby, and Business – correspond with increasing numbers of features. All shared plans include unlimited disk space and bandwidth, which is on par with offers from competitors. The cheapest plan – the “Hatchling” – allows hosting one domain on the account, whereas the next step up the “Baby” plan offers an unlimited number of domains to be hosted on the plan for slightly more per month. All hosting packages offered come with the ability to add unlimited subdomains and FTP accounts, all the necessary backend technologies like PHP, MySQL (unlimited databases), CGI, Ruby on Rails, Perl, and Python, and unlimited e-mail accounts with webmail, IMAP, POP3, spam filtering, and mailing lists. Every account is managed using cPanel, the industry standard control panel, which includes instant setup of web applications for blogs, bulletin boards, content management systems, photo galleries, and much more via Fantastico, the automatic script and web application installer. The “Business” plan, which offers the most perks, is the best choice for businesses that wish to sell items online. Business accounts get a free dedicated IP address, and a free private SSL certificate (used to encrypt sensitive customer information such as credit card numbers or bank details during online transaction processing). One thing that HostGator includes with the Business plan is not a feature seen almost anywhere else, especially for the low price they charge – a Toll-Free number that can be used to forward calls to your business’s local number from anywhere in the USA. They also offer reseller packages, which are attractive for web designers or other entrepreneurs. This allows you to resell shared hosting resources that you lease from HostGator for a flat fee each month.

VPS solutions are also available. The VPS plans offered are fairly flexible. Depending on your needs, you can pick the amount of CPU power, RAM, disk space, and bandwidth that best fits your particular needs. Plans at the Level 3 level or above can also choose the control panel they want to use when managing the VPS – either cPanel + Virtuozzo, Plesk+Virutozzo, or simply Virtuozzo.

Fully-managed dedicated server hosting solutions – either based on Linux or Windows – are available at very competitive rates.

Support

HostGator prides itself on outstanding support services. Their support team is based in the USA, and addresses questions, concerns, and problems via live chat, e-mail, and telephone 24 hours per day, 7 days per week. They are known for a high degree of technical expertise that isn’t always seen among some of its competitors’ support staffs. The support team maintains an extensive support website online. This site makes it extremely easy to initiate contact with a support agent within minutes. Additionally, there is a small self-service section where you can deal with things such as account addons and changes on your own, without needing to deal with a person. Aside from that, you’ll find that support staff have put together a number of detailed, carefully-written explanations of features that come with an account, and almost all features are covered by an ongoing series of video tutorials that are quite helpful in learning webmastering skills and techniques. The support website also offers a public forum for discussion with other customers (and staff). The support forums offers a place to seek opinions, ideas, and assistance from other people with like-minded interests and website goals.

Stability and Hardware

HostGator’s datacenters are driven by 130% wind-generated green energy. That’s right – they actually purchase more renewable energy credits than it needs to cover the power consumption of its datacenters. Four datacenters house top of the line server equipment, and are served by redundant power, cooling, fire prevention, and security measures. Each datacenter is constantly monitored by their staff for stability and security concerns. Every day, each server’s data is backed up to ensure redundancy in the event of a harddrive or server equipment failure. However, this sort of failure is very unlikely, given the constant monitoring that each server is subject to. In fact, they are quite confident that such events will not occur. They offer a 99.9% uptime guarantee. To be fair, most web hosting providers promise a high degree of uptime.

Coupons

At the time of writing, HostGator is running two coupon promotions. The first: hostingpricedrop can be entered when signing up for an account so that the first month costs just 1 cent. The other code – hostingfloorprice – can be entered to get 25% off any hosting plan that HostGator offers.

Overview

As the millions of satisfied customers (and 90% of them are!) can attest, HostGator is a great company to use as a web host. Their explosive growth –both in the size of their business and the number of customers – over the past 10 years means that they’re certainly taking all the right steps to build a successful web hosting firm, and are keeping their customers happy. Check out their diverse range of offerings, and see if they’re right for you.

Check out some HosGator Reviews from actual customers below.