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Hostgator Website Hosting

Hostgator (http://hostgator.com) is a mega popular web hosting company. Started in 2002 out of a college dorm room, Hostgator has become one of the best web hosting services in the world. This web host is home for over two million domain names, making up about 1% of the world's websites. Host Gator is easily one of the top 5 best web host options.

Even though this company has seen enormous growth over the past eight years, www.hostgator.com has managed to remain customer friendly, providing all sorts of personalized services that you wouldn't expect from one of the big hitters in the website hosting world. "Gator Host" customer support allows you contact the company's CEO via email -- try that with any other web site hosting service. I tried it myself last year -- I had an issue that customer service was having trouble resolving, so I used Host Gator's famous "email the CEO" service and had a response inside of a week. Gator hosting is also known for offering assistance in areas not related to web hosting, such as problems with scripts or installations.

Hostgator handles all types of hosting – from shared and reseller hosting to Linux web hosting based dedicated server hosting. Dedicated servers are available for clients who need that level of service, but Hostgator's emphasis seems to be on shared and reseller hosting. A big "thumbs down" for people looking for dedicated server hosting is Hostgator's lack of upgrade options at that level. Specialized dedicated hosting sites offer more flexibility in their plans.

Hostgator Hosting Features Review

Hostgator offer three plans for people interested in shared hosting. The first plan is "basic", and it comes with a single domain allowance. The other two plans will give you an "unlimited" number of add-on domains.

Unlike their main rival, GoDaddy.com, web hosting with Hostgator offers unlimited space and bandwidth for all their shared hosting plans. The big restriction placed on Hostgator accounts is a limitation on CPU usage -- Hostgator places a limit on the number of processes and percentage of the CPU that can be used by a single shared hosting account. This is not a problem for people whose web sites have a normal amount of traffic moving through them -- even the most basic Hostgator shared plan shouldn't give you any problems in terms of CPU usage. If your site starts to get millions of hits per month, you won't be allowed to use shared hosting services through Hostgator.

Hostgator Hosting Options - hostgator.com deals

Whether you're interested in something simple like Wordpress hosting or blog hosting or something seemingly more complex like forum hosting, Hostgator's shared hosting plan has you covered.

A few other web hosting options that mesh particularly well with Hostgator's services:

Joomla hosting
Drupal hosting
Magento hosting
VBulletin hosting
phpbb hosting.

Hostgator Uptime

According to Hostgator's own uptime review service (and third party reviews), Hostgator simply doesn't experience noticeable amounts of downtime. The industry standard for web hosting uptime is 99.9%, and third party auditors say that Hostgator easily surpasses that. Looking at real time figures as I write this, they are sitting pretty at 99.95% for the year. Shared hosting sites are not always great about uptime, but this is one area in which Hostgator shines.

Hostgator Customer Support Review

My experience with customer service from Hostgator (and many other reviewer's experience) proves that customer support is another of this company's strong suits. You can get ticket system, live chat, email, and phone support, all of them available every day, all day long. I have personally used the live chat support system twice, and both times I was surprised with the absence of lag time and the speed with which my issue was resolved. If you're wondering about the support ticket program, in my experience the average time for a response is about two or three hours. Hostgator's "peer support" forum is helpful, though most of the time I end up using live chat anyway, since it is so convenient. There are Hostgator staff members that participate in the forums as well as other Hostgator members. That customer support forum was really instrumental in convincing me to sign up with Hostgator.

Hostgator has more ways for you to get customer support than any other website hosting service. You can learn more about the Hostgator system or get answers to questions in many different ways, including:

Toll-free telephone number for both sales and technical support
Live Chat. I have never seen their live chat system offline.
Email support ticket system
A community forum.
A network status monitoring section on the customer forum to check for server trouble
Video tutorials for assistance with cPanel, reseller hosting, and other details.
Direct email links to send an email via your email client
A company blog where Hostgator posts company news and information

Hostgator Price and Billing System Review

The pricing plans at Hostgator are the definition of "reasonable" -- you can get your web hosting setup for as little as $4.95 -- that amount must be paid three months in advance. This low price package is basic, best for small personal websites or people who just want to "test" the Gatorhost service.

The next rung up on the ladder is $9.95, paid monthly. This "second level" of payment plans supports add-on domains and a bunch of other features.

One dark cloud over my Hostgator experience has been their billing software. I had some trouble setting up my payment plan, and switching my monthly payment from my Paypal account to my bank account was a bit of a headache.

Hostgator uses a system called "Modern Bill" for their billing software. Modern Bill does not integrate at all with Hostgator's own control panel, meaning you have to move "off site" to deal with billing issues. This is one time that I was glad for Hostgator's excellent customer service and live chat. Both were helpful in fixing my billing problems.

Hostgator Pros & COns

Pros

"Green" company -- Hostgator is a “green” host because they purchase renewable energy credits worth 130% of the energy they consume.
Free hosting for non-profit organizations.
Great customer support
Flexible payment plans -- monthly, yearly, or even 2 to 3 years ahead of time for lower cost
The best control panel and script installer out there
An incredible 99.95% uptime

Cons

Somewhat expensive domain registration, especially compared to their competitors.
ModernBill billing software is full of hiccups.

hostgator video review

This is a review of Hostgator's website hosting service that I found on YouTube. Unlike a lot of Hostgator reviews I've found online, this one seemed like a legitimate review from a real person with real opinions. (The reviewer is also kind of handsome.) At any rate, I thought that sharing the Hostgator video review would add value for our site visitors, so here it is.

hostgator images

HostGator Images and Pictures

This is a reasonably large and high resolution picture of HostGator's logo. I thought including some HostGator images on the page would also be useful for our visitors.

HostGator.com Screenshot Image

This image is a screenshot of the HostGator.com homepage as it appears on August 2, 2010.

hostgator blog posts

I like to include links to real people's real opinions of the services we review here, so here are a few blogs and blog posts about HostGator. (I've eliminated the ones that were obvious advertorials, in favor of providing real links to real conversations.)

HostGator Official Blog
The official HostGator blog includes a monthly customer newsletter, video tutorials for how to get the most out of your customer experience with HostGator, and events where HostGator has a presence.

HostGator or GoDaddy at TessRobinson.com
This blogger had a less-than-stellar experience with HostGator, but she doesn't blame HostGator for it. It's an interesting anecdote and an interesting comparison between hosting with HostGator and hosting with GoDaddy.

HostGator Starts Charging Sales Tax
This blogger, at SlingBlog.com, discusses his experience getting an email from HostGator founder Brent Oxley about sales taxes and what's going on in Texas. Brian seemed very happy with his HostGator dealings.