With eye-catching low prices and unlimited storage, bandwidth, and page view allowances, the shared hosting plans from HostGator are very tempting.
However, as this review will show, there’s more to think about than low prices, seemingly generous allowances, and name recognition when it involves choosing an internet host.
Below, we not only explore the features you get access to with their shared hosting but also what quite loading times and other sorts of performance levels you'll expect when paying just a couple of dollars a month for one among their entry-level plans.
By the time you’ve read our evaluation of their features, checked the info from our Pingdom site speed monitoring, and seen the performance results from our Load Impact tests, you’ll have all of the knowledge you’ll get to decide whether or not HostGator is that the right host for your website.
About HostGator
According to their marketing materials, HostGator is one of the world’s ten largest web hosting companies.
They’ve hosted quite 8 million domains, and have quite 850 employees to support their customers round the clock. In fact, as their shared plans include 24/7/365 access to their support staff — via live chat, email, and telephone — if support may be a top priority, then HostGator might be corporate for you.
However, HostGator won’t be for everybody. For starters, they’re now owned by the sometimes controversial Endurance International Group (EIG), alongside many other hosts, including Bluehost. Therefore, if you’re trying to find a little boutique or independently owned web host, HostGator might not be the proper choice.
That being said, when it involves value for money, HostGator, on paper a minimum of, is tough to beat. So, thereupon in mind, let’s start by watching what proportion the shared hosting plans from HostGator cost.
HostGator Pricing
If affordability is one of your key criteria when choosing an internet host, HostGator have some very appealingly priced shared hosting plans:
Hatchling: Starting at $2.75 (and up to $10.95) a month for one website.
Baby: Starting at $3.95 (and up to $11.95) a month for unlimited websites.
Business: Starting at $5.95 (and up to $16.95) a month for unlimited websites and access to additional tools.
All plans include a free SSL certificate that you simply can easily apply to your website via the account dashboard. There’s a 45-day money-back guarantee in situ, too, supplying you with time to undertake this service without financial risk.
You can also get a free transfer of a WordPress website and/or a cPanel website and account to HostGator, and if you buy 12 months or longer upfront you’ll get a free name registration — something that would prevent around $10. If you would like domain privacy, though, you’ll need to pay $14.95 a year for that, so it's going to make more financial sense to get your domain separately.
We’ll cover the opposite features and what you get access to on these plans throughout the remainder of this review.
HOW DOES THE HOSTGATOR PRICING WORK?
As you'll see, the costs of the plans vary because a reduction is applied to a customer’s first invoice. Also, the more months of hosting you buy upfront, the greater the discount you’ll receive.
As you'll buy up to 36 months beforehand, it’s possible to lock within the promotional rate for up to 3 years. However, the downside of this is often that, after the 45-day money-back guarantee period, you’re locked into a contract that would be up to 3 years long.
When you renew your plan, otherwise you plan to buy fewer months upfront, you’ll pay a better rate. This non-promotional rate might be as high because of the amount within the brackets above, counting on what percentage months you buy beforehand when renewing.
While this is often a touch confusing, the HostGator website has the complete details of the pricing rates of the shared plans.
Another eye-catching detail of the HostGator plans is that, unlike other popular shared hosting providers, there are not any storage, bandwidth, or page view limits or allowances. Instead, consistent with the marketing information, everything is unlimited to make sure your website is in a position to grow as large and as popular because it can.
IS IT REALLY UNLIMITED HOSTING?
While no limits for everything sounds great, in practice this isn’t exactly unlimited hosting.
HostGator customers must suit the Terms of Service and ‘only utilize disc space and bandwidth within the normal operation of a private or small business website’. While this is often a touch vague, they are doing give an example to assist to clarify what this means: ‘Customers who are using 25% or more of system resources for extended than 90 seconds would be in violation of our Terms of Service.’ However, even that doesn’t clear things up completely.
WHAT HAPPENS IF TOO MANY RESOURCES ARE USED?
If HostGator has concerns about what proportion bandwidth or disc space your account is using, you’ll receive an email asking you to scale back usage.
According to their marketing materials, ‘It is extremely rare for a customer who is managing a private or small business website to exceed our usage policies.’
While this is often reassuring, some readers may like better to know the bounds on what proportion use is suitable, in order that they can make an informed decision when choosing an idea for his or her website. for instance, SiteGround has storage and monthly visit limits on their shared hosting plans, while the shared hosting plans from GoDaddy have storage limits.
However, if you’re just starting out with a replacement website, otherwise you want to host a little local business site or an identical project, then complying with the Terms of Service of HostGator shared plans shouldn’t be a drag.
As your website and audience grow, you'll either switch to a replacement host or upgrade to at least one of the higher-performance HostGator plans.
HOSTGATOR WORDPRESS HOSTING
Although this is often a review of the HostGator shared hosting service, it’s worth mentioning that they also offer WordPress-focused plans.
While you'll host WordPress websites on the regular shared hosting plans, the WordPress hosting service from HostGator includes a couple of extra features WordPress users may find useful.
For slightly more in price — $5.95 for the entry-level WordPress plan versus $2.75 for the entry-level shared plan — you get access to a rather more simplified account management dashboard that’s optimized for WordPress users and their websites, extra security measures via a SiteLock subscription (more thereon later) and better backup functionality via a CodeGuard subscription. These two subscriptions, which are included with the WordPress plans, are available as paid extras with the shared plans.
Customers who check-in for the WordPress plans will apparently have their websites hosted on services optimized for this software, which should end in faster loading times. However, as covered within the performance tests section of this review, we didn’t find this to be entirely the case.
As well as watching the features of the shared HostGator plans during this review, we’ll also mention any key differences between the WordPress plans.
HostGator Shared Plans Key Features
As mentioned, all of the shared plans include a free SSL certificate, a transfer of an existing WordPress website or cPanel account to HostGator, and a free name if you buy a year or more upfront. because of this, you ought to have everything you would like to urge started on your new website as soon as you check-in.
However, that’s not all you get with HostGator. Before we get to the results of our HostGator speed test results, this part of our review will explore exactly what features are included in their low-cost shared hosting plans.
EASY WORDPRESS INSTALLER
If you’re getting to create a replacement WordPress website and aren’t getting to use the free migration service to maneuver an existing WordPress website or cPanel account to HostGator, the quickest thanks to starting is to use either the Softaculous or QuickInstall apps to put in WordPress in only a couple of clicks.
Both options are very easy to use, and, after entering a couple of details, you’ll have a replacement WordPress installation up and running.
Once you’ve installed WordPress this way and logged in to your dashboard, you’ll notice that some additional plugins are automatically installed, including MOJO Marketplace (owned by an equivalent company as HostGator) and therefore the free versions of WPForms and Google Analytics for WordPress by MonsterInsights. A plugin that permits you to use OptinMonster on your website is pre-installed too, but you’ll need a premium OptinMonster account to use this service on your site.
WORDPRESS INSTALLATION SERVICE
If you’d rather not install WordPress yourself, you'll buy HostGator to try to do it for you. From $99, you'll have HostGator install WordPress, get a $49 theme credit, then have HostGator install your chosen theme.
You can pay extra to possess the demo content for your theme found out and a couple of extra website setup tasks completed, too.
However, because QuickInstall and Softaculous are both very straightforward, paying for this service shouldn’t be necessary for many people.
INSTANT BACKUPS
All of the HostGator shared plans to offer you the power to make a backup of your cPanel account at any time. As your cPanel account includes all of the small print of your account, including any email addresses you’ve found out, files you’ve uploaded, and your WordPress website, this is often a method to copy your site.
As well as doing a full cPanel backup, you'll also individually copy the house directory, the MySQL databases, and therefore the email configurations from inside your HostGator account dashboard.
However, if you’d wish to copy your WordPress website on its own, separately from all of your other HostGator account details, one option is to feature CodeGuard to your account for an additional monthly or yearly fee. an alternative choice is to put in a third-party backup plugin, like the free-to-use UpdraftPlus or the premium VaultPress.
Using CodeGuard — or another backup service or plugin — gives you more options when creating backups, like the power to copy just the WordPress database or the website files also. It also makes it more convenient to revive your website should something fail. You’ll even be ready to enable automatic daily WordPress website backups and store your backup files offsite for safekeeping.
As mentioned earlier, CodeGuard is included on the marginally costlier HostGator WordPress hosting plans at no extra cost.
MULTICHANNEL 24/7/365 SUPPORT
Impressively, all of the HostGator shared plans include 24/7/365 access to the support staff, and, unlike another host, support is often contacted via telephone, live chat, and email.
Hosts that provide comparatively limited support channel options on their similarly priced shared plans include Bluehost (live chat and telephone only) and DreamHost (24/7 email and office hours live chat). Although, as seen in our review of SiteGround, this host also offers 24/7 live chat, email, and telephone support.
Even some costlier premium managed WordPress hosts, like Kinsta (chat and email support only) and WP Engine (chat support only on the entry-level plan), don’t match HostGator and their three-channel 24/7 support provisions.
During testing for this review, the live chat channel support and staff were responsive and helpful. Therefore, if you’d wish to be ready to contact the support staff via these three channels at any time of the day or night, HostGator would be an honest option.
NOT JUST WORDPRESS HOSTING
Unlike managed WordPress hosting and other sorts of WordPress-only hosting services, with the HostGator shared plans (and many other shared hosting providers), you’re liberal to create websites employing a range of software — not just WordPress.
The Softaculous and QuickInstallers you get access to with HostGator shared hosting make it very easy to put in a good range of software for creating blogs, websites, forums, eCommerce stores, and far more.
You can also upload your own HTML, CSS, and other files to your webspace if you’d like, to create your own custom website. because the shared accounts include SFTP access to your server and a web file manager, getting your files online is extremely straightforward.
HOSTGATOR OPTIONAL PAID ADD-ONS
That covers the most features of the shared HostGator plans. However, there are a couple of paid add-ons that are available.
SITELOCK SECURITY ADD-ON
One of the available add-ons may be a subscription to SiteLock. This optional Security Service is out there to all or any website owners, but HostGator customers receive a reduction when adding it to their hosting plan.
Depending on which plan you select, SiteLock will scan your website daily to seem for malware and other vulnerabilities. There’s also a malware alert and removal tool to assist you to get over an attack, also as an internet application firewall that will protect your website from malicious traffic and harmful requests. SiteLock features a content delivery network (CDN) feature too, helping to hurry up your website and make it more resilient to downtime.
While HostGator provides you with a secure server, a subscription to SiteLock can assist you to secure your website.
As mentioned, SiteLock is included on the HostGator WordPress plans at no extra cost.
CODEGUARD BACKUPS ADD-ON
While the shared plans allow you to copy your HostGator account, it’s almost equivalent as employing a WordPress-focused tool to copy your website.
One such tool is CodeGuard, and, by adding this paid extra to your shared hosting plan, your website is going to be protected automatically a day. you'll also use the machine feature to revive your entire site — or individual files — at the touch of a button, plus access a couple of other backup-related features.
Although anyone can check in for CodeGuard, HostGator customers do get a reduction.
Again, like SiteLock, CodeGuard access comes with the HostGator WordPress plans at no extra cost.
Some of the opposite add-ons available include G Suite, Microsoft 365, and SEO Tools. Although the shared plans include a free SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt, you'll purchase a special certificate via HostGator.
HostGator Shared Hosting Performance
So far, we’ve seen that HostGator has competitively priced shared hosting packages with unlimited storage, bandwidth, and page view allowances — provided you stick with the Terms of Service.
They also make it very easy to line up and manage a WordPress website. But what levels of performance are you able to expect from these low-cost shared hosting plans from HostGator?
To find out, we measured the typical load times of our two test sites, one running a heavyweight theme featuring video backgrounds, images, and other elements, and therefore the other employing a lightweight theme configured a sort of a basic blog.
We also monitored our test sites for downtime and tested how they performed when multiple virtual users were accessing them at an equivalent time.
HOSTGATOR LOAD TIME TESTING
To give you a thought of how briskly your website might load if you check in with one among the HostGator shared plans, we used the Pingdom service to record the speed of our two test sites. The speed of the sites was recorded every hour for seven days to offer us a median average load time.
LIGHTWEIGHT THEME SPEED TEST RESULTS
For our first test site, we installed the lightweight, free and popular Twenty Twenty WordPress theme. If you’re getting to create an easy blog employing a minimal theme, these test results should offer you a thought of what loading times you'll expect from HostGator.
The average loading time of the blog post containing a picture and a few texts on the test site using the lightweight Twenty Twenty theme was 1.03 seconds.
Here’s a breakdown of these loading times over the seven-day period of testing by Pingdom:
While a one-second loading time is suitable, generally other comparatively priced shared hosts we’ve reviewed, including GoDaddy and SiteGround, have delivered faster times — although we recorded slower times in our reviews of Bluehost and DreamHost.
HEAVYWEIGHT THEME SPEED TEST RESULTS
If you’re getting to create a more feature-rich website, perhaps for your agency or business, and you propose to use popular web design trends, like animations, video backgrounds, and sliders, then you'll want to settle on a topic like the best-selling Avada. These themes tend to possess a bigger footprint than a more minimal theme like Twenty Twenty, and, therefore, usually, load more slowly.
As you'll see, from the results below, consistent with Pingdom, the page being tested from our site using the Avada theme and its Agency demo had a file size of 6.45 MB, and, due to this, it had been slower than the page monitored on our first test site, which had away from the smaller size of 199 KB.
Here’s a breakdown of the loading times that were recorded by Pingdom for the test site using the Avada theme over the seven-day testing period:
Although the typical loading time of our test site using the heavyweight theme was 1.63 seconds slower than that of our site using the lightweight theme, it still performed well compared with the opposite hosts we’ve tested within the same bracket, including Bluehost and SiteGround.
However, if you are doing decide to use a heavyweight theme, like Avada and one among its feature-packed demos, then you'll want to think about upgrading to a managed hosting service. supported our previous reviews, you'll achieve loading times of but a second when using hosts like LiquidWeb, Pressable, and WP Engine.
HOSTGATOR SHARED VERSUS WORDPRESS PLANS PERFORMANCE
As mentioned earlier, HostGator also offers WordPress-optimized plans that claim to deliver greater performance than the shared plans that are the main target of this review.
Better performance should translate into faster loading times, so, to check this, we found out two sites on the HostGator WordPress-optimized service. Once the results were in, though, we didn’t find this to be entirely the case.
👉 Also, you can read: How To Fix A Slow Website On HostGator’s WordPress Hosting
When using Pingdom to match the loading times of two identical sites using the essential Twenty Twenty theme, the location hosted on the shared plan was actually faster than the location hosted on the WordPress plan, with a mean speed of 1.03 seconds versus 1.25 seconds for the location hosted on the costlier WordPress plan.
On the opposite hand, for the sites using the resource-hungry, heavyweight Avada theme, the location on the WordPress plan was faster, with a mean loading time of two .53 seconds, compared with 2.66 seconds for the location hosted on the cheaper shared plan.
If these results are representative of those two services as an entire, then you'll recover performance from the costlier WordPress plans if you’re getting to create an outsized website with an enormous footprint. On the opposite hand, if you’ll be employing a lightweight theme, you'll get faster loading times on the cheaper shared plans.
LOAD IMPACT PERFORMANCE TESTING
As our test sites weren’t receiving any visitors, the above loading time results don’t give the complete picture regarding the amount of performance a live website might experience when hosted by HostGator.
So, to supply you with more performance-related information, we also used the paid Load Impact service to simulate multiple visitors accessing our test sites. Load Impact measured the response times of our sites during the test to ascertain how well they might handle an increasing number of virtual users.
Here are the results from Load Impact for our two test sites…
LIGHTWEIGHT THEME LOAD IMPACT TEST RESULT
During the five-minute test, the number of virtual users accessing the test site increased from one to 199, and therefore the response times were recorded by Load Impact.
For the primary test, the homepage of the location using the lightweight Twenty Twenty theme was put through its paces by Load Impact:
As you'll see, the reaction time (blue line) didn’t substantially increase because the test progressed. Even when 199 virtual users (represented by the green line) were accessing the location at an equivalent time, the reaction time (represented by the blue line) remained stable. This compares favorably with many of the opposite low-cost shared hosts we’ve reviewed thus far.
HEAVYWEIGHT THEME LOAD IMPACT TEST RESULT
For the second load simulation test, the homepage of the location using the heavyweight Avada theme and its Agency demo was monitored by Load Impact.
As mentioned within the Pingdom speed test section, the file size of this page was much larger than the page of the location using the Twenty Twenty theme. This had a clear impact, and therefore the first time this test was run with a maximum of 199 simultaneous virtual users, the test failed because the site became unresponsive.
Because of this, the utmost number of simultaneous virtual users was decreased to 29, and therefore the test was run again. The chart below shows that, even with this reduced number, it didn’t take long (12 simultaneous virtual users) for the reaction time to rise above two seconds.
The blue line on the above chart shows that, because the number of virtual users (represented by the green line) simultaneously accessing the location increased to 29, the reaction time (represented by the blue line) increased to an unacceptable 6.82 seconds.
HOSTGATOR WORDPRESS HOSTING LOAD IMPACT TEST RESULT
As the site using Avada hosted on the shared plan didn’t delay alright, a site using Avada but hosted on the costlier HostGator WordPress plan was also tested by Load Impact.
The maximum number of simultaneous virtual users was set to 199, but this point, unlike with the identical site hosted on the lower cost shared plan, the reaction time wasn’t significantly affected. Although there have been a couple of spikes, the reaction time never went above a powerful 289 milliseconds.
Again, this shows that if you would like to use a heavyweight theme and one among its demos, you'll want to believe in investing in something more powerful than low-cost shared hosting.
HOSTGATOR UPTIME MONITORING
Pingdom was also wont to monitor the uptime rates of our test sites hosted by HostGator.
During seven days of monitoring, the 2 sites did experience some downtime. However, the downtime only lasted two minutes, and, therefore, the uptime percentage didn’t fall below the 99.9% guaranteed by HostGator.
Pingdom was also wont to monitor the uptime rates of our test sites hosted by HostGator.
During seven days of monitoring, the 2 sites did experience some downtime. However, the downtime only lasted two minutes, and, therefore, the uptime percentage didn’t fall below the 99.9% guaranteed by HostGator.
Technical Details and Other Features of HostGator Shared Hosting
While the above covers the most features of the HostGator shared hosting plans, here are some technical details you'll find useful:
- Website caching: In-house Endurance Cache service with three levels of caching. Site caching is managed through your WordPress dashboard via an in-house plugin.
- Content Delivery Network (CDN): Use your own choice of CDN or purchase the SiteLock add-on for your plan.
- PHP: Ability to modify between PHP versions 7.0, 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, and 7.4 via cPanel.
- HTTP/2.0: There’s no support for HTTP/2.0 on the HostGator shared plan. you'll view an inventory of compatible technologies here.
- SSL: Use the free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate, import your own certificate or purchase a special certificate through HostGator.
- SFTP: Ability to make multiple Secure FTP accounts to access your webspace for uploading and editing files.
- Server file manager: Online browser-based file manager accessed via cPanel.
- Database access: Ability to access the WordPress database via phpMyAdmin through a browser.
- Email service: Email service on all HostGator shared hosting plans, including webmail, POP3 and SMTP.
- WordPress website management: Optional automatic WordPress software, theme, and plugin updates.
- Plugin restrictions: No list of disallowed plugins, unlike some managed WordPress hosts.
- Security measures: SiteLock is out there at a reduced rate as a paid add-on for the shared plans and includes daily malware scans, automatic malware removal, and more security measures.
- Post-hack clean-up services: If your site has been hacked, HostGator can perform a root cause analysis of your account for $37.50. The optional SiteLock paid add-on includes post-hack clean-up services for sites that are infected with malware or suffered other security breaches.
- Datacenter locations: Websites on the shared plans are hosted within the HostGator data centers in Texas, South Central USA, or Utah, Western USA.
- Staging sites: There’s no staging tool or feature on the HostGator shared plans.
- WordPress website migration: The shared plans include the free migration of 1 WordPress website or cPanel account to HostGator.
- Uptime checks and guarantees: HostGator monitor their servers for downtime, but don’t check the status of the sites they host. HostGator guarantees server uptime of 99.9% (which allows for around 8h 45m of downtime per year). If uptime falls below 99.9%, you'll receive one month of credit for that account.
- Support channels: The support desk is staffed 24/7/365, with live chat, telephone, and ticket channels available on all plans.
If you’d wish to know more, you'll view additional information and therefore the main differences between the shared hosting plans on the plan comparison page of the HostGator website.
Final Thoughts
HostGator undoubtedly has a number of the foremost affordable shared hosting plans around, especially if you manage to lock within the promotion rates for a maximum of three years.
The performance is pretty good, too, compared with other shared hosts within the same bracket. However, as our test results showed, if you propose to use an outsized multipurpose WordPress theme, like Avada and one among its feature-rich demos, you'll want to think about upgrading to costlier hosting, like a managed WordPress service, to stay your loading times during a more acceptable range.
Apart from that, though, HostGator features a lot going for them.
The lack of bandwidth, storage, and visitor limits on their plans could also be off-putting for a few, as, regardless of how unlimited the service is, your website could still find itself using too many resources and obtain taken offline. Choosing a number that clearly states its limits, like SiteGround, may offer you more peace of mind if you’re worried about getting punished for accidentally breaking the HostGator terms of service.
It would be nice if there has been a far better WordPress-focused backup system in situ. However, this will be easily mitigated by purchasing the CodeGuard add-on or installing your choice of free or paid WordPress backup plugin.
So, if you’re trying to find affordable shared hosting without having to form many sacrifices, HostGator may be a good option.
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