Hosting Website » Reseller Hosting

GoDaddy Reseller Trial Closed (sort of)

Paul Zannucci — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 22:41:52 +0000

Okay, so you may have followed my trial of GoDaddy’s reseller product, as I was updating periodically on how the attempt was going. It was an expensive trial, and one that I completely flubbed. Below you will find what I did, what I didn’t do, and how I may try to tackle it again with a new marketing plan.

After spending $199 for an annual reseller account, I did absolutely nothing with it. Well, that isn’t quite true. I tried to pick a name that people would search for occasionally. I ran some ads on Live, Google and Facebook; but as it turns out, that is very close to doing absolutely nothing. What I can say about the GoDaddy reseller plan with absolute confidence is that if all you are going to do is run a few sidebar ads here or there and come up with a searchable name, then you aren’t going to get anywhere. You’ll make no money at all.

That’s what I did, and I got less than 50 visits to the site in an entire year, and no one bought anything. Don’t do that. You are wasting your money.

Since canceling out the account, I’ve actually put a little more thought into it, though, and there may be ways we can get this to work (I say “we” because I am assuming you are interested in possibly opening an account and making some money). We’ll divide my thoughts into a couple of different topics.

Site Name: Don’t do what I did. I selected ushosts.us. I selected this because after checking Google’s keyword search tool I found that people were apparently looking for U.S. based hosting companies by using the keywords “us hosts.” In retrospect, people using that search phrase may have been looking for women who work the world’s oldest profession (oops), but it didn’t really matter because Google never let me come up anyway. After a full year, you could type in my site name exactly and never see my site. Why? Likely for a few very good reasons, which we’ll get into next.

Search Engine Marketing: Running ads on search engines didn’t work for me. Why? Partly because I was so cheap. I wasn’t willing to pay $7 per hit to get my ad up front for good searches, so I never got any business. Why wasn’t I willing to do that? Well, perhaps my math was wrong, but if only a small percentage of people who clicked on those ads bought, but I paid $7 every time the ads were clicked on, I would have gone broke pretty quickly. The break even on such a thing would have been years given the relatively low prices I was offering.

So, if search engine ads don’t work for me (because I’m either too cheap or too confused), what is left? Well, that would be may favorite sort of marketing, the free kind. This is where you get yourself to show up in search engines without spending any money on it. But after a year I still wasn’t showing up in search engines? How could that be? It’s pretty simple, really.

See, everyone in the world who has a GoDaddy reseller account has the same, more or less, site up. That means when Google goes to index your site, all it sees is a site that looks exactly like a thousand other sites it already knows about. You see, with the GoDaddy design interface, you can’t really change your site enough to make it distinguished from other GoDaddy reseller sites. This is a real problem if you are trying to get free search engine hits. So what is the solution?

The Solution: So far as I can tell, the best way to work this would be to purchase two identical domain names, one with a .com and one with a .net suffix. Use the .net as your GoDaddy site, where all the GoDaddy software is put, etc. and then create your own site with the .com address that has your own website that you can design and manage any way you like. This .com address is the site you are now able to market and try to get onto search engines, using all the usual tricks to get decent traffic (see my series on generating web traffic).

Will this work? Well, I said that this site wouldn’t be afraid to put up its money to attempt to avoid you having to waste yours, so I’m going to give it a shot.

I’ll be much more responsive this time and give you the blow-by-blow details as they occur. This trial will start either in late August or early September.

Meanwhile, if you are feeling particularly inspired and want to try it yourself, please follow the link below. By purchasing from links on this site, you help to pay for all these web hosting trials, and you can’t get a better price anywhere else anyway.

Pronet Hosting Review

Paul Zannucci — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 11:25:41 +0000

Until the end of July 2009, Pronet Hosting is offering a pretty amazing deal. If you click the banner above, you can get a full year of hosting for $4.95.

Consider this a preliminary review. I’ve only been with Pronet Hosting for about a week, as of July 19, 2009, so this review may be subject to change. I sped the process up a little because of the current hosting sale they are running. So far, I’m really surprised at how happy I am with them. I’m not the easiest webmaster to please. However, it should be noted that my test site only has an empty shell, WordPress installation running. Still, I’ve seen some hosting companies who couldn’t even handle that properly.

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:	★★★★½
Bandwidth and Storage:	★★★★☆
Power Rating:	★★★★¼
Customer Service:	★★★☆☆
Ease of Use:	★★★★¾
Overall:	★★★★¼

Hosting Plans and Scalability: ★★★★☆

Pronet Hosting offers both Windows and Linux shared hosting solutions, dedicated servers and a reseller plan. According to the “terms of service,” you aren’t allowed to use “extremely high amount of server resources” or you will be contacted to pay additional fees. To the uninitiated, this probably sounds a little vague and harsh, but while I won’t argue about the vagary, I’ll argue that this is a very positive, and unusually good, response to sites that use too many resources. Many shared hosting companies just shut you down. At Pronet Hosting, they seem willing to work with you. And this creates added scalability. Either you pay more or you can go to their dedicated servers, which are well-managed and reasonably priced. Overall, I would say this is very solid. You have a chance to start on the cheap and move up if you ever need to. Can’t beat that.

Pricing: ★★★★½

If I were only rating their prices as of right now, their pricing can’t be beat. At $4.95 per year for their least expensive plan, you aren’t going to be able to find better than that no matter how hard you try. Once the sale is over, I assume that their pricing will go back to $4.95 for the lowest priced plan, on up to $99 for their dedicated servers. Considering the price to value quotient and class of hosting, I would say that Pronet Hosting offers a very reasonable price.

Speed and Uptime: ★★★★½

I have only been with Pronet for about a week (as of July 19, 2009), so I can’t give any more than the simplest estimate here, but I will say that their servers seem to be well designed and very responsive. I’m running a dynamic WordPress site there and the speed has been consistently exceptional, even when factoring in the very low traffic loads. Some shared hosts start slow, not Pronet. As of yet, my site hasn’t gone down, and they offer a 99.9 percent uptime guarantee.

Bandwidth and Storage: ★★★★☆

I give them a higher rating than your average shared hosting company because of their seeming willingness to work with you on your server usage and the availability of dedicated servers. Again, I will have to come back and address this issue more knowledgably as I continue to use them.

Power Rating: ★★★★¼

Because of the speed of their servers and the availability of the dedicated servers, Pronet Hosting comes in very well here. The vast majority of websites could not outgrow Pronet Hosting.

Customer Service: ★★★☆☆

I had made a mental note that I was going to give their customer service a 1 star out of 5. After all, you don’t have the option to call them, which will drive some users crazy, but after trying their ticket customer service, I have to say that I was pleased with the result, and that is what is most important.

Essentially, I created a ticket at 4:36 pm on a Sunday afternoon, labeling it as “low priority,” and I recieved a knowledgeable response in under half-an-hour. For me, this kind of customer service is great. I’d rather submit a ticket and get a good response back in half-an-hour than to call a phone number and get someone who is clueless, but you do need to be aware that calling clueless people is not an option with Pronet Hosting.

Ease of Use: ★★★★¾

cPanel with Fantastico De Luxe is as easy as it gets. You can easily install, to the root directory, over 50 popular software platforms, from blogging and forum software to ecommerce and photo gallery solutions. The only thing you don’t get is FTP within the cPanel, but that is easily handled by downloading a free program like Filezilla. If you are going to run your own site, you need to be able to run FTP programs, anyway, and Filezilla makes it easy enough for nearly everyone. They also offer instant backup and restore, which is a great feature, and a number of other nice touches.

Overall: ★★★★¼

I’m shocked, really. I’m such a grumpy hosting user that I was certain this company, because of the cost, would drive me batty. I’ve already, after all, skewered Bluehost and PowWeb. How could I like a much smaller hosting company like Pronet Hosting? Well, they are working hard to create a great solution and seem to be pulling it off, that’s how. Very, very good so far.

You can’t get a better price anywhere. If this honest review was helpful to you and you are interested in more information, please click below to take a look at Pronet Hosting:

GoDaddy Reseller Review

Paul Zannucci — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 14:58:03 +0000

Click below to see the specifics from GoDaddy’s reseller program:

Overview: So here’s the deal. I never really expected to run this test, but from looking at my statistics, there are a lot of people interested in becoming resellers. I’m not one of them, but as I looked over the reseller program at GoDaddy, I decided that it was worth a good look. For one thing, I could do it for $199, which is a solid price for such a thing, and also it is very easy to use, so it won’t take up too much of my already strained time.

Here’s another deal, though. Because of my contract with GoDaddy, I can’t acknowledge my own site here. This is rather frustrating because it would be more helpful to you if you could go take a look, but there is a way around it, as you will see in the “Set up and Maintenance” section.

Also, I’ve had to develop a new rating system that is more appropriate to being a reseller. I should point out, however, that I DO NOT intend to try any other reseller programs at this time, so this is comparing GoDaddy to my expectations rather than to other programs.

Reseller Plans:	★★★★★
Pricing:	★★★★★
Set up and Maintenance:	★★★★★
Product Selection:	★★★★☆
Consumer Pricing:	★★★★½
Client Customer Service:	★★★★★
Marketing and Earnings Potential:	☆☆☆☆☆
Overall:	★★★★¼

Reseller Plans: ★★★★★

There’s really not more you could want here. The basic reseller plan is $99.99 per year and might include everything you need. What you don’t get on this plan is the ability to sell your own reseller plans, “the best buy rates in the industry,” and earning PPC money off of clients’ parked domains. I’m not sure what “the best buy rates in the industry” means, but at the time that I was setting up my account, I assumed that meant I would get better pricing with a higher priced plan, so I picked the middle plan, the Pro Reseller. With that, all I can’t do is sell reseller accounts. The cost for this middle plan is a reasonable $199.99 per year. The highest level, the Super Reseller plan, adds the ability to sell reseller services to your customers. Since it doesn’t seem to add “downstream” income to sell reseller plans, in other words, you don’t get a share of what they sell, I decided I wasn’t all that interested in it at this time. I can see that once your reselling account becomes successful, that you may want to add this ability and offer it to your customers.

Pricing: ★★★★★

GoDaddy is as inexpensive, or more so, than the other resellers I checked. One thing to note here, though, is that you can’t pay monthly, but if you are that cash strapped, you shouldn’t be getting into reseller hosting at this time. It is not a “quick fix” for money problems, and you will likely have to spend more money to make money down the road (see Marketing and Earnings Potential section).

Set up and Maintenance: ★★★★★

Not sure I’ve ever done anything as easily as I set up my account. I paid and had a site. From there, I was easily able to redirect it to a domain name that I owned, played with the colors using their design wizard, and added a custom header. Then I went through and made sure I was offering all the products I wanted to offer, and that the prices were where I wanted them. You can go in and select various sales and promotions if you like. It’s all very simple and intuitive. Maintenance is nothing unless you want to run sales and such.

So what sort of site do you get for money? Well, since I can’t link there due to the terms of the agreement, let me describe it to you. It’s easy to do. The site looks exactly like GoDaddy.com with regular models instead of celebrities. Change the colors a bit with the design wizard and add your own header, and you have a very, very professional looking site that will inspire confidence in your customers.

Consumer Product Selection: ★★★★☆

Very, very robust. Essentially, you are offering everything that GoDaddy offers with a couple of minor exceptions. Their newest products are a special WordPress hosting and grid hosting. I don’t know if you can’t offer them because they are new or if they don’t intend to ever let you offer them. I will call them later to clarify. Still, you can offer three levels of shared hosting. VPS and dedicated hosting. And you also have something called blogburst hosting. Obviously, you can sell domains, and there are a lot of add-ons that customers can purchase. It’s a full range of products that dwarfs many “one-size-fits-all” companies.

Consumer Pricing: ★★★★½

The prices your customers pay are very good. In fact, on the lowest hosting plan, you are actually cheaper, if you want to be, than GoDaddy themselves, as you are on the blogcast hosting. You won’t compete very well with GoDaddy on domains, but you can come in lower than most providers. VPS hosting starts at just $29.99 per month. Your customers are going to feel as though they are getting a good deal, and really they are.

Client Customer Service: ★★★★★

This is really sweet. You have the option to handle customer service yourself (why, oh why, would anyone ever do that?) or you can let GoDaddy do it for you. You get your own phone number so that their 24/7 support team can identify what host the customer is calling from. You can add your own logos to the support tickets. Basically, your customer gets the benefit of GoDaddy’s customer support without ever realizing they are working with GoDaddy, and you never even realize that they’ve had a problem. Most resellers leave your customers to you, but not GoDaddy. If you can think of a better solution than this, I’d like to hear about it.

Marketing and Earnings Potential: ☆☆☆☆☆

This non-rating has nothing to do with GoDaddy. I would rate all resellers the same. GoDaddy has many resellers earning 5 figures per month, but to do that isn’t easy. Pay $199 and leave and you’ll earn nothing. You are going to have to market your site, and probably not in the usual ways. This is a very crowded market. Go to Google and type in anything useful for website hosting, and you’ll see all the usual people come up. You will never surpass GoDaddy or Bluehost or HostGator, etc. in the search engines, so you have to take another path. One useful method might be to try to secure a domain name that is distinctive yet will still get traffic for hosting. For instance, if you live in Atlanta, you could use variations of AtlantaHost.com until you find one that isn’t taken.

The other thing you are probably going to have to resign yourself to, and I will post more on this as I get more experience with my reseller account, is that you may well have to pay for advertising, for instance through Google Adwords. That way, you get to put yourself at the top of search engine results, just for a price.

Done right, the earnings potential is staggering, but it won’t be easy.

Overall: ★★★★¼

I did my research and picked GoDaddy. I would have never tried this as a review topic had I not had confidence in GoDaddy and their set-up. I’ll keep you updated as I go along.

Click below to take a look at GoDaddy’s reseller program:

UPDATE: Go here for my first monthly update of how I am doing with my GoDaddy Reseller Account.

Media Temple Review

Paul Zannucci — Tue, 05 May 2009 20:56:22 +0000

So these are the big boys, the really, really big boys. They do hosting for some of the largest companies in the world, like ABC, NBC, Sony and Starbucks. Whether you want to fun one huge site, or a bunch of sites on one account and have immense power behind them, Media Temple is your spot.

Hosting Plans and Scalability:	★★★★★
Pricing:	★★★★★
Speed and Uptime:	★★★★½
Bandwidth and Storage:	★★★★★
Power Rating:	★★★★★
Customer Service:	★★★★☆
Ease of Use:	★★★★☆
Overall:	★★★★¼

Hosting Plans and Scalability: ★★★★★

Media Temple offers full grid hosting, along with dedicated and reseller hosting, but it is the grid hosting where they truly shine and the only thing you should consider outside of the reseller hosting. For this one, infinitely scalable plan alone, I would give them a 5. Using distributed hosting across their vast network of servers, your sites stay up and fast. You are given a generous portion of CPU units, storage, and bandwidth, and if you exceed your amount? Well, you just get charged a tiny bit extra.

Generally speaking, I’m not reviewing reseller programs at this point, but I should mention that you cannot resell, or cannot officially resell, grid hosting.

Pricing: ★★★★★

To be able to get this type of cloud hosting for $20 per month is unbelievable. You essentially get the most powerful solution available for less than $1 per day.

Speed and Uptime: ★★★★½

At the basic grid level, it’s not what I would consider blazing fast, just fast. But in some ways it is better than blazing fast. By that I mean that your performance is unrelated to the amount of traffic you are getting. That’s special. Obviously, you can put a stupid site design up that takes forever to load no matter where you go, but if you are looking for consistent performance that can handle incredible traffic, Media Temple is what you are looking for.

As for uptime, I run a bunch of sites there and am constantly on them. In the last six months, I went down briefly for a scheduled maintenance (middle of the night on a weekend), and had one other time when I was down for about 2 seconds. That’s pretty darn good.

Bandwidth and Storage: ★★★★★

Unlike shared hosting companies that promise “unlimited” bandwidth, Media Temple puts a limit up, though you are unlikely to ever use it. But what happens if you do? They don’t shut you down, they just contact you and tell you that you will pay, for instance, 10 cents per extra GPU, which is very good.

Power Rating: ★★★★★

It doesn’t get better anywhere.

Customer Service: ★★★★½

A lot of people mistake customer service for the people who fix all their problems, and they become bitter when customer service only does the thing they are really supposed to do. Like most power hosts, however, Media Temple has people who really know what is going on. I’ve called them twice and used the support ticket once and had very fast resolutions to my problems. They have toll free customer support 24/7.

Ease of Use: ★★★★☆

You get automated installation of three software platforms, WordPress, Drupal and ZenCart. It is very easy to manage your domains and databases with their custom control panel. Overall, they are very easy to use, and this rating would be higher if they had more software installations available.

Overall: ★★★★¼

Media Temple grid service is truly the end all solution for people looking for brute strength. You simply can’t outgrow them, and their pricing is fantastic at this level.

100 GBs of premium storage
1 TB of short-path bandwidth
100 unique sites / alternate domains
64MB Ruby on Rails (RoR) GridContainer (for accounts opened on or before September 1, 2008)
A free 30-day trial for any entry-level sized GridContainer. (RoR, Django, MySQL)
1,000 GPUs (that’s a good number)
100 databases
1,000 email addresses

If you would like to check out a site hosted on Media Temple, you may go here: Funny Emails (very high traffic and relatively complex site) or here Web Hosting

GoDaddy Review

Paul Zannucci — Sat, 02 May 2009 16:22:22 +0000

Was this honest review helpful for you? You can’t get GoDaddy any cheaper anywhere else, so if you decide to check them out, please follow the link above:

(Note: Before I distract you with everything else, I just want to mention that the very best grid-hosting plan available on the web right now is at GoDaddy, who is offering grid-hosting at just $4.99 per month. That comes with something completely unprecedented: Unlimited Compute Cycles. If you don’t know what that means, just know that it is incredible. The only downside to GoDaddy grid is that you can currently only host one site per account. Also, you should be aware that the price will increase at some point to about $20 per month. At that time, I have been told that you will be able to host multiple sites on the same grid account.)

Many moons ago, I hosted my first site on GoDaddy. I hopped on and registered a domain and used their free hosting credit to put up a website. They ran a few ads on there, but I was happy with it. I was on the web!

I’ve since moved on from those free hosting days, but I still have accounts with GoDaddy. Why? Well, there are some great reasons to go with GoDaddy, now more than ever.

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 a tough grader (that also means that if you see a really good rating you know I meant it). Please read the review to see the explanations and reasoning behind the ratings.

Hosting Plans and Scalability:	★★★★☆
Pricing:	★★★★½
Speed and Uptime:	★★★★☆
Bandwidth and Storage:	★★★★½
Power Rating:	★★★★½
Customer Service:	★★★★☆
Ease of Use:	★★★½☆
Overall:	★★★★¼

Hosting Plans and Scalability: ★★★★☆

I always put this rating first because it is so important and GoDaddy has the potential to eventually reach a 5 star here once they finishe up the beta of their grid service. If you go with a standard shared hosting company and grow your site significantly, chances are you are going to have to change your type of hosting, which many times means moving your site to another host, which can be either very time-consuming or very costly just depending upon whether you decide to move the site yourself or have someone else move it. At GoDaddy, there are a wide variety of ways to incrementally improve the power behind your site as it grows. The lowest price plan starts at just $4.99 per month, and the options incrementally go up from there all the way to grid hosting. VPS and dedicated hosting is also available, but that shouldn’t be necessary once the grid hosting comes out of beta stage.

Two other types of hosting they offer are a plan that is specifically designed for WordPress users. From their marketing information: “Harness the combined power of WordPress® and Go Daddy Web Hosting to create your own personal, state-of-the-art Internet blog. The WordPress publishing platform has thousands of free plugins, hundreds of free themes and is completely customizable. WordPress and Go Daddy Web Hosting – the winning combination for your blog.”

The other type of plan that they offer is reselling. You can read my review of this here: GoDaddy Reseller Review.

One other thing of note here, regarding scalability, is that if you end up going to grid computing, you will have to move your site yourself, although I was assured by a customer representative that they will help in the transfer.

Pricing: ★★★★½

Pricing is very competitive. You can, of course, get cheaper hosting if you really want cheap hosting (not recommended). While the grid is in beta, that’s only $4.99 per month, which can’t be beaten. You can do slightly better at Ultrahosting if your needs are for VPS or dedicated hosting. Domain name pricing is great. And if you buy a domain name, you get free hosting. I haven’t tried that, and it may come with GoDaddy ads. Overall, I would say their pricing is exellent.

Speed and Uptime: ★★★★☆

If I’ve said it before, I’ve said it a thousand times, ALL HOSTS GO DOWN and experience slow times. That is simply the way it is. That said, GoDaddy is very good. I have their uptime at 99.98% for 2009, and their servers are quite fast, pretty much competitive with the few top-of-the-line hosts out there. Their grid service is not as fast as I expect from grid, but that probably has something to do with why it is still in beta stage.

Bandwidth and Storage: ★★★★½

I hate this one because people tend to want to emphasize their “unlimited” packages. Remember that with shared hosting you can’t get “unlimited” bandwidth no matter how many times the hosting companies advertise it. You only get so many resources allocated for your site. On the other hand, there is one rare exception to this rule. With the beta GoDaddy grid, you get unlimited use of resources, unlimited compute cycles. I have to think they’ll limit that once the product goes to its new status. Otherwise, the bandwidth and storage offered by GoDaddy is near the top.

Power Rating: ★★★★½

Because of their great flexibility and scaling, you are much more likely to get all your “bandwidth” at GoDaddy than you are at most hosts. They are one of three companies, along with Media Temple and Ultrahosting, that I now put into the true, power hosting category.

Customer Service: ★★★★½

Customer support is 24/7 by both telephone and email ticket. I’ve called GoDaddy customer support several times, and the wait time has always been minimal, and the people I talk to are friendly and knowledgeable. I was never transferred around. At one point when I had a site go down for no apparent reason (beta grid), I was placed on hold while my representative conferred with a technician. When the rep came back, he said, “Try it again.” and sure enough it worked. I would give GoDaddy a 5 here except that their customer service line is not toll free. While that has no impact on me because of my cell phone plan, it could cause problems for others.

Ease of Use: ★★★½☆

Whenever I go around and read about people’s experiences with GoDaddy, there are two things that stand out beyond everything else: One, that they are confusing to use; and two, that they are confusing to use.

There is some truth to this. The last time I signed up a GoDaddy account for a client, which was in April of 2009, I went to the site and registered the requested domain and navigated the ads they throw up for “add-ons” and thought I had declined everything. When I got to the check out page, I was presented with over $3000 in charges–FOR REGISTERING A DOMAIN NAME!

It was easy enough just to deselect all the extras, and I found it pretty funny, actually, but for a new website owner, that would probably be pretty scary. And I do think that the sales process is intentionally tricky, but I think it is probably a little trickier than they imagine that it is. I don’t think they really wanted to trick me into paying $3000 for a domain.

Once you have properly purchased what you need (and only what you need), users still complain about confusing control panels, but I haven’t seen a problem there. You may have to get used to their set-up, but that is the same with any host. I don’t find their panels difficult at all. To be sure, they are different from everyone else, but you just have to look around a little bit, and you’ll find your way pretty quickly.

Really, they get a bad rep here where I don’t think it is fully deserved. They simply are not that hard to use, and they have plenty of one-click installations of the stuff you are likely wanting to run. If I were rating this just for me, I’d give them 5 out of 5 stars, but since other people seem to find them confusing, I’ll go ahead and hedge downward.

Overall: ★★★★¼

I think that GoDaddy is a host that I would recommend for pretty much any of their hosting plans, from shared and reseller to grid and dedicated. And if you are looking to host one site (for the time being) that needs a lot of power, I would make GoDaddy’s grid service your top selection. In any event, the incredible ability to scale your hosting to almost any need you could ever imagine having makes GoDaddy a very smart choice.

You can check out a site that is actually run on the GoDaddy grid here: Tee Shirts

Was this review helpful for you? You can’t get GoDaddy any cheaper anywhere else, so if you decide to check them out, please follow the link below:

Host Gator Review

Paul Zannucci — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 23:24:17 +0000

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

Hosting Plans and Scalability:	★★★★½
Pricing:	★★★★½
Speed and Uptime:	★★★★★
Bandwidth and Storage:	★★★★☆
Power Rating:	★★★★☆
Customer Service:	★★★★★
Ease of Use:	★★★★¾
Overall:	★★★★¼

Hosting Plans and Scalability: ★★★★½

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: ★★★★¾

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: ★★★★¼

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.