The Only Web Hosting Review To Read Before Considering Hostgator

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Have you heard of the saying, “Servers are created equal but hosting companies are not?”

This is especially true for the people managing and working for Hostgator. I personally think Hostgator has the best service out there, but before I get into the details of the good and bad about Hostgator, let’s see what Hostgator has to say about its service.

“HostGator has been a world-leading provider of web hosting service. Although our office is in Houston, Texas, we provide top-notch service to clients from over 200 countries internationally with our staff of over 400 employees. We offer Shared, Reseller, VPS, and Dedicated server packages for both beginners and professionals alike. Each of our shared Web Hosting plans includes 24/7/365 support, a 99.9% uptime guarantee, and a 45-day money-back guarantee. If you would like to learn more, please visit our company page.”

To break it down for you, Hostgator comes with 4 plans and they are:

• Web Hosting Plans
• Reseller Hosting Plans
• VPS Hosting Plans
• Dedicated Server Plans

These 4 different plans are pretty much standard plans that almost every hosting company should provide but Hostgator provides all these services at very competitive prices although I must mention that they are not the cheapest but let me explain later on why you shouldn’t judge them based on their pricing plans.

Hosting companies like to attract new customers with fancy features and good stats. Stats like

• 99.9% uptime,
• unlimited domains,
• unlimited bandwidth,
• unlimited emails and
• unlimited disk space is found in almost every hosting company in the world.
• Google Adwords $100 credit (US & Canada only)

So don’t choose a hosting company based on JUST these stats. Besides the above, there are also a few hosting companies out there providing you with money back guarantee if you are not happy with their services.

Hostgator offers a 45-day money back guarantee while Dreamhost offers a 97-day money back guarantee. Bluehost has no money back guarantee but Justhost has an anytime money back guarantee.

Before choosing a hosting company, there are several things you have to consider. Let’s look at them and choose Hostgator as an example:

1. Features & Performance

Features

Features are also a very important feature not to overlook. Although the features might sound a little technical, you must not exclude this part from deciding which hosting company to go to. I wouldn’t be able to comment much on that because these technologies change quickly and constantly improve. Hostgator has the benefit of having a very comprehensive list of up-to-date features with frequent updates available.

• cPanel
• Unlimited MySQL Databases with phpMyAdmin Access,
• CGI, Fast CGI, PHP 5, Ruby on Rails, Perl, Python, SSI
• Curl, CPAN, GD Library, Image Magic
• cPanel, Virtuozzo Panel
• SSH Access and Cron Job Scheduling
• FrontPage Extensions
• Fantastico

One feature that I really like on Hostgator is Fantastico. Fantastico is a commercial script library that automates the installation of web applications to a website and its easy to use. If you are lost, just ask their support team and they will definitely help you with it.

Apparently Dreamhost has a really unintuitive control panel and quite a lot of people are unhappy with it. Bluehost use simplescripts which also seems to be good, Hostmonster also has a simple and easy to use interface that won’t make you pull your hair out.

Performance

Hostgator uses very up to date hardware for their servers and this is especially true if you were to use their VPS plans and Dedicated Server Plans. You will experience Dual Nehalem CPUs, DDR3 ECC RAM, backup power generators, HVAC units, 20Mbit Gigabit uplink for their VPS plans with DDos protection. If you choose a Dedicated server plan, you will have the full power of the Intel Xeon 3450 Quad Core processor, 8GB ram and 1TB hard drives and 2.5TB bandwidth ( ALL UPGRADEABLE).

All these features are great if your website gets a huge amount of traffic. Bear in mind that if your website traffic gets too high, your account will run the risk of suspension. If you fall into this category, Hostgator will advice you to upgrade to these plans for better website speed and handling.

2. Reliability & Support

Have you heard of cleaning companies claiming that their products are able to kill 99.9% of bacteria? I’ve actually lost count on the number of products claiming so. Yet if it’s true or not I can’t comment but I really DOUBT it. Similarly, like I’ve mentioned before, you cannot judge hosting companies based on stats.

You need to look at a couple of things.

Track Record – Hostgator has been around for 8 years and using Hostgator as my main hosting company for less than a year has made me really happy. I’ve never had any issues with them.  I’ve got a couple of friends who’ve used it much longer than me and they never had major issues with setting up their hosting account, adding domains, problematic downtimes and data corruption.

Support – I’ve heard nightmare stories of poor customer support with a few hosting services out there. To name one of them, Dreamhost seems to take a long time addressing customer enquiries and issues. This is a VERY important issue to consider before you sign up for any hosting company. Bluehost has good customer support according to most reviews out there but the one thing that makes Hostgator stands out as the cream of the crop is their support. They have live chats, support ticket feature, Q&As, support topics, quick response to problems and troubleshooting. They also seem to be available all the time 24 hours even though they are based in US. I’ve had several minor issues with setting up and domain transferring before and they did it without any problems and it was surprisingly a breeze.

3. Pricing

Hostgator may not be the cheapest hosting company around but it has a lot of features and excellent support services. I believe these 2 features will certainly offset the price you pay for it. A starter hatchling plan costs you $4.95/ month but it still comes with a lot of great features. I personally recommend going for the baby plan which is a bit more but the added advantage is unlimited domains/parked domains and private SSL allowed.

You only need to pay $0.01 for the whole first month using this coupon hgc25 for the baby plan and $9.94 off any the other 4 plans I’ve mentioned earlier.

Is there anything negative I can say about Hostgator? Hmm maybe prices, but I’ll be sure to let you know what else if I find out. Until then this post might be a little more biased towards Hostgator but I highly recommend using it.

Tagged as: hosting companies, web hosting services, website hosting