Hostgator Review

Started in 2002 by a university student from his dorm room, hostgator is one of the top 15 hosts in the world. They claim to host over tow million domain names which make up around 1% of worlds internet traffic. Independent agencies put this as nearly 800,000 domains and 0.74 % of the global market. In any case, hostgator is one of the top 5 specialist host – excluding domain registrars, domain parking service etc. - , in terms of total domains hosted.

In spite of their spectacular growth, fortunately hostgator retained the qualities that one would normally associate with smaller / medium sized hosts. Their customer support still provides personalised care, you can even contact their CEO via email, in case you belive the customer support is not being helpful. They will help you with even issues that are not directly related to hosting – like something with your script etc.

Hostgator deals with almost all types of hosting – shared, reseller and dedicated hosting. Still, they are more focused on the shared and reseller hosting area. Even though they provide pretty good dedicated hosting services, you may not be able to find all the flexibility and upgrade options one would normally find at specialized dedicated hosts.

Hostgator is also a “green” host – they purchase renewable energy credits up to 130% of the total power they consume. Also, they offer free hosting for non-profit organizations. We are not sure if these would make a difference, but the management at hostgator believe in giving back to the society.

Hostgator Hosting Features Review

Hostgator offer threee plans for shared hosting. The basic one comes with the limitation of only one domain allowed where as the other two allow unlimited number of add-on domains. Space, bandwidth etc. are unlimited for all the plans, and they have a restriction based on i-nodes. The inodes limit is pretty high for any normal user and can be ignored. The only real restriction they have is CPU usage, as there is a limit on the number of processes and percentage of CPU that can be used by a single account. What this ulimately means is – if you have a reasonable traffic on your website, hostgator shared plans should not have a problem accomodating you. On the other hand, sites with millions of host per month will not be allowed to stay on the shared server and will be asked to move.

If you are interested in other features, hostgator provides almost everything you need : Unlimited parked domains, unlimited mysql databases, script installers and so on. They use cPanel 11, so you have the most powerful control panel on the net with all the bells and whistles. We would recommend a baby package for an average website, you get almost everything you need.

Hostgator Datacenter and Uptime

Hostgator-Review.com is hosted on hostgator since Feb 2008 and we had been monitoring the uptime using a third party tool. We never experienced any real downtime and the monitoring tool confirms the same. Click on the thumbnail for a detailed view or click here for live uptime data, directly from thr uptime auditor site. As I write this, it is showing 99.95% uptime, which is above the industry standard 99.9% - which most shared hosts fail to give. Let me also make it very clear that we are monitoring our own website hosted in a normal hostgator account and not the website of the host itself – which would naturally be hosted in a better server with load balancing etc.

Hostgator doesn't own their datacenter, which is actually a surprise. Their ideology is to outsource and hardware, networking, scalability issues to a speclized company and concentrate on what they do well – customer support, monitoring the server etc. Their partner in hosting is thePlanet, a leading dedicated host and colocation provider. So far this partnership seems to be working out very well, each doing their job to perfection.

Hostgator Support Review

Support has been one area that separates Hostgator from the rest. They provide good support, which includes ticket system, live chat, phone support – all these are 24/7. Personally I never had to use the phone support, and used the live chat only once. There was not much delay in live chat and it the issue was sorted out. Over last 2 years, I had to use support ticket 3 times and the average response time was around 1.5 hrs to 2 hrs. They also have a peer support forum, which can be quite helpful if you have a tricky issue. On forums, you can get help from hostgator staff as well as other hostgator users. You can also check out the forum in case of any pre-sales question etc.

Hostgator Price and Billing Review

Hostgator pricing is very much reasonable, starting from $4.95(paid in advance for three months, we recommend paying monthly @ $8.95 to start with). New users can start with a hatchling package and upgrade to baby as they need or directly go for baby package - $9.95, paid monthly – to support add-on domains. Dont forget to checkout our hostgator coupons page to get some discount.

They use modern bill for billing software, which is unfortunately not integrated to the control panel. Personally, I din't like it and had some problems changing my payment from paypal to credit card. To be fair with them, hostgator support was quick in solving the issues when contacted.

Hostgator Speed Test

If you are planning to host heavy files or media, download speed becomes an important critera for host selection. Download speed in fact can be affected by a number of parameters : location / country of the host and the user, connection speed at host's datacenter, traffic /load on the particular server, maximum port speed of the server and of course the connection speed of the user. But the bottom line is, the user is only concerned about the download speed he is getting and so you should actually be downloading something from the server to test it.

We have set up a file to downloaded from our server, which is obviously hosted by Hostgator. Please note that this is not same as the download tests set up by many of the hosts themselves - which would be hosted on special server with practically no other load. This is speed test as real as it can get - hosted on a normal shared server and tested by the end user.

Right Click Here and Save the File : You will be downloading a zipped file of Picassa3.5 which is around 9 MB in size.

Hostgator Overall Review

Hostgator Pros

• Excellent 24/7 Support
• Flexible payment : Pay monthly / yearly / 2 or 3 years for lower price
• cPanel Based Hosting - cPanel and Fantastico brings the best control panel and script installer
• Cheap Shared Hosting Packages - Prices range from $5 - $10 depending on your package and payment mode
• 99.95% Uptime

Hostgator Cons

• Expensive domain registration.
• Billing software - ModernBill - is not integrated well and can be a pain sometimes.
• PostgreSQL is not supported on shared hosting accounts.

Hostgator User Reviews

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