hostgator review

HostGator Review

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About HostGator

This is one hosting company I would really like to go in detail and hence I will start off with the company itself. HostGator LLC was established in 2002 by Brent Oxley. You can see the growth of the company from just a dorm room company to one that manages over 7000 servers currently and hosting over 2,500,000 domains. They serve all kinds of customers, from freelancers to even the fortune 500 companies. According to Inc. Magazine, HostGator is the 21st fastest growing private company in America, the second fastest growing private company in the “business services” sector, and the fastest growing private company in Texas.

HostGator Hosting Experience

I have had over 15 domains hosted with them over the past 3 years. I also have another 30 domains hosted with 8 different hosting providers which ranges from well known companies to possible resellers. In this Hostgator Review section, I will deal with the user experience of the person coming to my site. Here is what they will notice

  1. The site loads pretty fast. It is faster than most of the hosting companies I have worked with.
  2. The site has a great uptime and is available all the time. Last month one of my sites hosted there, HealthRuns.com had 100% uptime. Till now only RackSpace has given me that uptime. But it will be very costly and I do not recommend RackSpace to anyone starting out. It is only for huge business websites or if you have a sugar daddy.

Technical Details

In this section of the HostGator review I will deal with the technical details about HostGator.

  1. Control Panel: CPanel
  2. Order processing time: 5 minutes
  3. Pre-installed software’s: Yes, Fantastico Deluxe
  4. PHP version: 5.2.12
  5. MySQL version: 5.1.30
  6. GD library: 6.3.9
  7. Uptime Guarantee: 99.9%

Customer Support for HostGator Hosting

If there is anything HostGator is famous for, it is there customer support. I have had fast responses from their customer support team on whatever issue I have had. Most of the time, the issues were resolved in 5 minutes. One thing I liked is that the customer support staff is well trained. Once, when I hosted one of my affiliate sites with a small hosting company and I asked them what nameserver I must point to, the support staff was blank. She/he was like, “What do you mean by nameserver sir?” With regards to pre-sales questions or technical support or whatever you can think of, HostGator has an answer for you. For this HostGator review too I contacted the customer support with many queries and they were quick to respond to anything I asked them. Last time I made a chat with them, they had 58 chat representatives. Huge number I must say.

Customer Experiences with This Webhost

Till now I have mentioned about my personal experiences with HostGator. Just to make sure, I asked about 12 of my friends who I knew used HostGator and got the same positive feedback except for one. The problem with the one odd feedback was that HostGator took their site down. When I inquired about this to the HostGator team, they informed me that the action was due to a DMCA Notice and that the client had failed to respond within the stipulated time period. I asked my friend about this and he confirmed the issue.
Overall both my personal experience and those that I have heard sounds very good and looks promising for this company. For writing this HostGator review I browsed various sites and most of the sites have reported Hostgator as being one among the top 3 web hosts. You have 45 days to try out Hostgator and if you do not like it, they have a full refund policy.

Web Security

I have had one of my sites hacked and I was notified of this by the company itself. They took immediate action to rectify the issues. I am not too much of a technical person, but still if it hadn’t been for their help, my site would have been destroyed as I normally do not check on my sites every week.
Once I had an iframe attack where some person hacked my account and hid their links in my site using an iframe. I was not aware of this until my antivirus showed virus sign when I visited my site. I immediately contacted HostGator and they investigated the issue, found out the reason and resolved it for me.

This is what their customer support had to say

We are protected from hackers and DDoS attack (UDP flood).
We have an extensive custom firewall rule and large mod_security rulesets protecting our servers. If we do experience heavy flooding, we have our datacenter enable network level flood protection. Our datacenters are all highly secure facilities with restricted access.

Hosting Plans

HostGator has hosting plans that suit everyone. Their monthly plans start from 4.95$ onwards. That is fairly cheap for the kind of service you get. Most people fall for the cheap hosting plans other web hosting companies provide and after sometime they get fed up by the consistent downtimes, poor site load speed, horrible customer support and so on. I always choose the baby plan which lets me host unlimited websites. Go to their homepage and see the unlimited plans they offer, see the features and decide which one is the best for you. They also make the migration from one plan to another fairly easy.

Conclusion

HostGator is a reputed company and one which I will suggest to you anytime if you ask me. Here are some quick facts if you had been lazy in reading my entire HostGator review
Go for HostGator if

  1. If you run an online business and is in need of a world class business web hosting provider.
  2. You want a host with good uptime, reliability and great customer support.
  3. You want value for your money and avoid the hassles of switching hosts. If you are moving from another host, then the HostGator team will handle the entire migration process for you including the domains, files, scripts, database etc.
  4. You feel your website will grow too big for a shared hosting service. They have VPS, Dedicated hosting plans and it will be much easier to migrate within a hosting company.

Do not go for HostGator if

  1. You are not worried about site down times and are looking for a temporary site for your personal use.
  2. You are technically competent yourself to fix all errors and do not require customer support most of the time.

You can head over to the HostGator site, browse through their plans and choose one for your use. Use the coupon code businessheadache to get 9.94$ OFF.