HostGator Review

User Rating: 9.5/10
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HostGator, since their inception in 2002, is one of the ten largest web hosting companies in the field with more than 8 Million hosted domains under their belt, a fact which tells a lot about the company's reputation, credibility and reliability. Its clientele is spread throughout 200 countries and offers several web hosting packages, as well as products for both business and personal needs. With one of the largest customer support services, if you are not satisfied with the representatives that you deal with, you will be assigned a ticket to speak to the CEO himself. If that's not an enough incentive to sign up, what is?

Service Details

Disk Space: Unlimited
Traffic/Bandwidth: Unlimited
Domain Name: Free
Starting Price: $3.47/month
Money Back: 45 Days
Advertising Credits: $200

Core Hosting Features

  • Free Domain Registration/Transfer
  • Unlimited Space and Bandwidth
  • Shared SSL Certificate
  • Flexible, Easy to Use Control Panel
  • Unlimited Sub Domains, FTP Accounts, and Email Accounts
  • Unlimited MySQL Databases with phpMyAdmin Access
  • Programming Language: CGI, Fast CGI, PHP 5, Ruby on Rails, Perl, Python, SSL
  • Programming Modules: Curl, CPAN, GD Library, ImageMagick
  • System Management: SSH Access and Cron Job Scheduling
  • FrontPage Extensions
  • Automatic Weekly Off-Site Data Backups
  • Online Support Portal with over 500+ Video Tutorials and 680+ Help Articles
  • HostGator Community Forum Access
  • No Contract with a 45 Day Money Back Guarantee
  • 99.9% Guaranteed Uptime
  • 24/7/365 Server Monitoring
  • 24/7/365 Premium Support via Phone, Live Chat, and Ticket System

Marketing and Bonus Features

  • $100 Google Adwords Offer
  • $100 Yahoo!/Bing Credit
  • Free Weebly SiteBuilder and Website Building Tools
  • 4,500 Free Website Templates
  • Free Website Transfer, Domain Transfer, MySQL Transfer, Script Transfer
  • Website Statistics: AWStats, Webalizer, Raw Log Manager, Referrer and Error Logs
  • Instant Shopping Carts, Blogs, Portals, Forums, Counters, and Formmail
  • Instantly install over 75 open-source scripts with just a click!
  • WordPress Hosting - Host your very own WordPress blog
  • Joomla Hosting & Drupal Hosting - Professional CMS Solutions
  • Magento Hosting - Free E-commerce platform for your own store
  • Wiki Hosting - Start a Wiki web site with MediaWiki

Summary & Extras

HostGator offers cPanel for its control panel with trained individuals who can help you walk you through cPanel if you are unfamiliar with it. cPanel is popular for allowing people to directly control their domain, e-mail accounts, web site accounts, and a lot more. In addition, HostGator provides consolidated monitoring capabilities, management capabilities, as well as statistics generators. At HostGator, cPanel is already bundled with Fantastico, to give you the easiest approach to use the content management system on your web site.

Website Building Tools

Each hosting plan of HostGator comes with Weebly Site Builder from Weebly, and other tools for building web sites. You have access to 4,500 web site templates for free.

Reliability

The datacenter for HostGator is situated where its company is based at--Houston, Texas. The datacenters are equipped with cutting-edge security, sophisticated equipment, 24/7 monitoring, and a lot more, which lets HostGator to provide its clients with 99.9% uptime. Besides being the fastest growing web hosting provider in the country, HostGator is among the first to respond to the going green campaign. The company invests in alternative sources for energy to complement its regular usage of power. HostGator, too, offers redundant power for the continued running of its systems, especially during power outages and unforeseen catastrophes.

Pricing Concerns

Indicated on its homepage is HostGator's primary goal--to give its customers cost-efficient web hosting services without compromising service quality. In fact, HostGator does an exceptional job on this aspect of the World Wide Web. HostGator offers a starter plan called the "Hatchling Plan," which enables you with a superb shared hosting setup that comes with unlimited bandwidth, unlimited space, unlimited subdomains and more. The plan starts at $3.96 each month, with consistent special offers.

Customer Support

In order to help HostGator become more efficient in helping its clients solve their web site concerns through its customer support, it initiated a survey among its clients to rate its product satisfaction. The undertaking raked in an approximate 90% satisfaction rating with HostGator's hosting, and overall service.

HostGator's customer support representatives are reachable through a telephone, e-mail or ticket system, live chat, or fax. It also provides a huge database for video tutorials, online forum, help section, FAQ page, and other helpful articles for common issues or inquiries. HostGator is dubbed by its customers as truly responsive. Its representatives are very helpful and knowledgeable when it comes to efficient and quick fixing of issues.

Ease of Use

When it comes to Linux platform hosting, HostGator is among the best and easy to use. It is ideal especially for small-scale and medium-scale entrepreneurship, but it specializes in large-scale entrepreneurship with heavy traffic. Its web site templates are easy to use and it guarantees uptime for up to 99.9 per cent all throughout the year.

Money Back Guarantee

HostGator offers money back guarantee within the first 45-day period of your subscription. But, this feature does not include administrative fees or installation fees when you have had custom software, dedicated servers, and a domain name is bought.

Bottom Line

In web hosting, HostGator is already a household name. Its hosting services include reseller hosting. It is best for large-scale businesses, and environmentalists will definitely be pleased with its 130 per cent wind power.