HostGator Review

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Updated 9/15/2010: The site you are reading has been hosted by HostGator for well over a year now, and I’m just as happy now as I was when I wrote this review.

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Finally Updated! I’ve had enough time now with HostGator to fully review them.

Please note: if you have been to other website hosting review sites, you should realize that I rate based on personal experience (rather than hosting company marketing) and am usually a tough grader. Please read the review to see the explanations and reasoning behind the ratings.

Hosting Plans and Scalability:
Pricing:
Speed and Uptime:
Bandwidth and Storage:
Power Rating:
Customer Service:
Ease of Use:
Overall:

 

Hosting Plans and Scalability:  

For a company that has made its name as a shared hosting provider, HostGator actually has a tremendous amount of flexibility and scalability, particularly if you are a bit creative.

Shared hosting begins with “Hatchling” then goes to “Baby” then to “Business.” From the bottom to the top, the Hatchling package is a tremendous value for those who would like to put up a single site. Baby gives you the option for more sites. Business goes as far as to give you your own toll free number. It should be known that ll three of these are still shared hosting, and your compute cycles, or the amount of your server’s CPU that you can use, it the same at all three levels.

If you run out of room with shared hosting, you have a couple of options, one of which might not occur to most people, which is to purchase a reseller account from HostGator. They have five different levels of reseller packages, starting at $24.95 per month.

The other option is their dedicated servers. They are more expensive, here, than most places, but they offer a fully-managed solution, which means that running your own servers at HostGator will be a whole lot easier than at most places.

By the way, HostGator’s reseller plan seems, on the face of it, to be a great thing, although it wouldn’t be right for me because I have no intentions of running my own Customer Service. Still, to be able to offer your customers HostGator’s speedy servers for whatever price you like would be great if you were into such things.

Pricing:  

HostGator, with plans starting as low as $4.95 per month, is very affordable, and for what you get in terms of service, reliability, speed, etc. HostGator is great.  And you don’t have to pay for a year or more if you don’t want to.  The price does go down for paying in bulk, so to speak, but you can also pay monthly if that is easier for you. 

Speed and Uptime:  

Comparing with other shared hosting companies, HostGator is at the top of the mountain. All shared hosts will eventually have down time and periods where they are slow, but I have been running this site on HostGator for about three months as of this writing, and I have yet to have the site go down, and I only noticed one small time, in the middle of the night on a weekend, when the site got a bit sluggish. Overall, HostGator is the fastest, most reliable host I’ve ever used for running one average site–and that’s even in comparison with the big boys of power hosting, like Media Temple.

Bandwidth and Storage:  

For me, the best that a shared hosting company can do is 3 stars out of 5, regardless of how much “unlimited” bandwidth they promise.  The reality is that you only get a certain amount of CPU usage, or computing cycles, with a shared host, and once you start to get close to that, you can’t transfer anymore bandwidth, even if you haven’t used that much for the month.  This is why scalability is so important, and I list if first.  With HostGator, you have the normal amount of bandwidth and storage that you would expect with a shared host, but you can also scale up.  That’s great.

Power Rating:  

  This would be the overall ability of a host to handle all you can throw at it.  Compared to other shared hosting companies, HostGator is clearly superior.  Compared with companies that specialize in dedicated, grid and cloud hosting, obviously they can’t quite get there.  Still, for most users, HostGator is going to be much more than sufficient.

Customer Service:  

  Honestly, you can’t get any better than HostGator without going to fully managed hosting, which most people never will, so I’m going with 5 out of 5 stars here.  Why?  First of all, they have everything.  You can get in touch with HostGator 24/7 by toll free number, by live chat, and by submitting tickets.

HostGator has the best live chat support I’ve tried.  Unlike most companies that offer this, when I have contacted them via live chat, I have been the only customer that support employee was talking to.  I didn’t have to wait for minutes in between questions.  He was right there reading and responding as I typed.

Not only that, but they are honest, too.  When I contacted them for setting up a site and gave them an idea that I was going to need maximum power (I greatly exaggerated my needs), they went through my plans with me and recommended, sadly, that I would probably be better off going elsewhere.  The only other place that has been that honest (that I’ve tried that trick with) has been GoDaddy.

These folks are just awesome, sincerely.

Ease of Use:  

  If you are having a hard time deciphering those stars, it’s because I gave them 4.75 out of 5.  Why so harsh?  Well, the only thing that HostGator doesn’t do is provide FTP within cPanel, although they explain how to use FTP very well.  Everything else is fantastic.

cPanel itself is very easy to use, and HostGator also supplies Fantastico De Luxe, which offers easy installation of tons of free software, like WordPress.

HostGator also has one of the easiest free site builder software programs out there.  You can even take it for a test drive before signing up.

HostGator also offers flash tutorials, a support forum and an extensive knowledgebase area.  If you can’t figure it out with HostGator, you can’t figure it out anywhere.

Overall:  

  It should be evident by now that I’m completely smitten with HostGator.  They are my favorite spot for shared hosting.

I initially became interested in HostGator after reading a lot of honest reviews out there from users that seemed strangely positive.  Usually, you will find that most people have unreasonable expectations for their hosting companies, and so you will see a lot of complaints.  HostGator’s reviews were different.  Their customers actually seemed committed to the company.  That is quite unusual, to say the least.

This site is run on HostGator, which gives my a great chance to continue to evaluate them.  If you are reading this post, and I’m not complaining bitterly, you will know that things continue to go swimmingly.

You can’t get a better price anywhere than through the link below. Whenever they offer specials, I’ll put that information here.