HostGator is regarded as one of the most popular providers when it comes to web hosting.
However, this one has contradictory feedback as well as every other business, which is natural as different customers have different needs and expectations.
I will also send you a brief rundown of the reviews which I read online from other clients. The review is based upon a personal experience with HostGator.
But let us get a brief summary of the history and context of this business before we reach what their offerings and hosting plans are all about.
Company Background
These days, HostGator remains private. During his University Days in 2002, Brent Oxley is the company's founder and remains the CEO. Today, the enterprise hosts over eight million domains and more than 400,000 clients in 200 countries.
It began in Florida, but the rapid expansion in 2007 required a move to Texas. The base in Houston has an Austin branch.
HG has an Indian subsidiary too (see http://hostgator.in). Moreover, a Brazilian office has been founded on http://www.hostgator.com.br.
The total salary headcount is estimated to be about 200, but in 2 years it will reach 400
.
Hostgator was paid 225 million dollars by the Endurance International Group (EIG). Bluehost and HostMonsters are both owned by EIG (here is my review of HostMonster). It is certainly a legitimate hosting company, although not all subsidiaries are successful web hosting companies, I personally believe.
HG has an interesting mix of services available, but they really are very competitive in the popular hosting budget.
In order to provide a comprehensive range of resources and support, three common hosting services are available – Hatchling, Baby, and Company.
The company offers, as well as an affiliate program, reseller plans, VPS hosting, and dedicated servers.
BBB Rating
I examined HG's profile on the official website of the Better Business Office and found that since 5/1/2008 HostGator has been an accredited BBB business, enjoying an A+ ranking (the highest possible).
With regard to consumer concerns, the company receives 128 complaints, 63 of them in fact deal with its goods and services (i.e, hosting, domain registration, etc).
Fortunately, however, all these problems seem to have been resolved. Whenever I see that, it makes me feel better about a business that doesn't care about its customers and the public reputation of crappy businesses, so that they don't bother to answer any complaint.
HostGator’s Plans and Pricing
HostGator provides a range of packages from 3.96$ per month for hosting websites. The prices are as follows for their usual website packages:
1. Hatchling Plan – Starting at $3.96/mo
- Single domain
- Unlimited disk space
- Unlimited bandwidth
- Shared SSL certificate
2. Baby Plan – Starting at $6.36/mo
- Unlimited domains
- Unlimited disk space
- Unlimited bandwidth
- Shared SSL certificate
3. Business Plan – Starting at $10.36/mo
- Unlimited domains
- Unlimited disk space
- Unlimited bandwidth
- FREE private SSL & IP
- FREE Toll-Free Number
In order to satisfy different market requirements, customers needing more than a common hosting package often need a variety of reseller hosting, VPS hosting, and dedicated server systems.
Please refer to your official website for a complete listing of individual packages.
Bear in mind, too, that these rates are changing and from time to time they provide sales and promotional discounts, without saying that there are many available web coupons which can bring down your total cost.
What About Reliability / Uptime?
HostGator runs its data center in Texas, all owned by The Planet, from four rented facilities. The in-house engineering team ensures security and safety for their 12,000 installations, UPS control, fire sensing, and 24/24/7 monitoring.
The company has 10 different fiber suppliers and uses Time Warner and AT&T hardware.
The guaranteed uptime is 99.9 percent (but on their website I can find no statistics). Customers may rely on daily RSS feeds for more routine service status updates.
Backups for all dedicated servers in the account bar are done every week at the data center. For any backup to be recovered, the company charges $15. There is no levy involved if you can supply the backup paper.
The company is fairly open regarding its employees, personnel, and facilities for a company with over 8 million domains.
It is also able to draw leading partners: Cisco, AT&T, and Dell are just a few examples of HG brands.
More importantly, a stringent policy prevents overselling of the business, so you must adhere to the agreed power. In the case of VPS or a dedicated server, there might be an exception where, albeit at your own risk, you have full capacity power.
Support & Customer Service
HostGator offers robust technical support, which is impressive because of its low-cost, shared hosting provider status. Support is provided for live chat 24/7, a FAQ, email support, and telephone support free of charge (for U.S. customers only). If the support personnel are local or outsourced is never evident.
An easier support and billing portal is given. Customers can update their accounts, engage in user forums, access the knowledge base, and view video tutorials on several technical issues that can hit them.
A different login is needed for the portal then that for Cpanel. A built-in online form also allows fast transfer requests.
👉 Also, you can read: HostGator Review – Still Plenty of Room for Improvement
Control Panel
HostGator will include Cpanel 11 without fail with all Linux plans, with multiple user theme options. Cpanel represents the universal access point for all functionality in the kit, such as webmail, single-click backups, and DNS settings (by the way, a good reading that will help you better understand what DNS is for Google Apps).
Both Cpanel and WHM are grouped together for reseller accounts. CPanel and/or WHM are provided as an alternative if your plans are on VPS or its Linux dedicated server. The package contains Plesk 11.x for the Windows server.
Virtuozzo for service management purposes will be provided to users on VPS plans.
HG offers the right to individually charge; payments and invoices may be organized by customers.
Extra Stuff
A free US caller-free number is included in the business sharing package. The call fee is paid to Canadian customers. Clients who cancel their hosting arrangements no longer have the right to this telephone assistance.
Alternatively, the organization may be contacted and arranged to become a paid service. You need to have a minimum call every month to keep your status active.
Most of the packages provide several functionalities, like osCommerce, WordPress, Joomla, one-click downloads, SiteBuilder, SiteStudio, Fantastico, and a host of compatible stats packages.
You have the opportunity to assign individual SiteBuilder accounts and models to your clients when you go for their dedicated server plans.
A $100 Adwords credit is an extra reward for shared hosting users. A free upgrade to an eNom domain reseller account is provided for reseller accounts.
The manual set-up is additional, but the process itself should not take more than two minutes to complete, it is straightforward and simple.
Money Back Guarantee / Cancellation Policy
Regardless of your contract (shared, retail, or VPS), you can get a full refund if you cancel it within 45 days. This does not happen on the dedicated servers. Please notice. Additional costs such as administrative and installation charges and acquired domain name shall not be reimbursed.
If it is submitted via a special online form, the company will entertain any cancelation request. Normally, the cancelation should not take longer than 2 days.
If you want a refund, you will be required to submit the refund by means of the company's cancelation email – so that a refund cannot be taken for granted. A credit card or PayPal account may be used for your refund.
HostGator Reviews by Other Customers
As always, when I was looking at HG, I did not want to focus on my own experience, so I did a little bit to find out what other people had to say about the business and the services that they provide.
Of course, it was not easy to sort through actual reviews of web hosting written by real clients and affiliates or people employed by a company (yes, many firms pay people to leave good reviews on them).
After I had read over 100 reviews on websites such as Cnet, I got a few points that were shared by most reviews. They're here:
Pros
- Established a corporation with more than ten years of operation.
- A reimbursement on cancelation. Unfortunately, this is not a common protocol in the industry as reasonable as this policy is.
- If any deal you sign up for is deceptive, you can cancel the agreement and be fully reimbursed as long as it is in the first 45-day period.
- A good range of services for every website.
- The inclusion of cPanel, recognized as simple to use graphical interface control panel. Moreover, there are some valuable tools to facilitate website hosting and management.
- Skilled support personnel. Both of them are native English speakers concentrated in Austin and Houston.
- Typical phone support will take you about 6 minutes, but your call will be handled with such wonderful professionalism after the call has passed.
- Very high uptime. Very high uptime. I've been under close scrutiny for 6 straight months on 3 separate HG servers, resulting in a rather remarkable one-hour cumulative downtime. I believe that other hosting shared companies can boast such a flawless record.
Cons
- It's not cheap.
- No free domain – no free domain. Other hosting firms can give a name free of charge for a domain, but not this one. While, individual domain names can not exceed $10, which is not a show stopper for me exactly.
- The popular kit on the entry-level leaves something to be desired and only one domain is available to you.
- It does not seem to be moving with market trends in CMS script software. HostGator stubbornly sticks to QuickInstall at a time when everyone comes together on Softaculous. After all, this does not matter much, but I personally would prefer Softaculous, because you still get the same stuff (i.e. WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal).
- In the world of customer service, HG once was a bar of excellence. I realized, however, that 2013 was a worrying trend; it now takes far more time to talk and anticipate a longer response time. Overall, in comparison with the competition, customer service is still marginally decent, but it no longer meets the standards it used to hold in.
Conclusion
HostGator is a great story about wealth rag, a startup with 3 servers that have become the leading marketer in the region.
This web host has been lucky to overcome the many teeth problems so often linked to aggressive growth paths: it remains smooth, reliable, and stable today.
You should not worry about help and you will never have to use the well-designed control panel and a range of resources to facilitate the development and adaptation of your website (including even the simple plans).
Though it isn't the perfect web hosting company (is it any?), it will help you get your site up and running fast and, most importantly, it will keep you safe and easy on your site.
The end result is that if you're looking for a trustworthy business, I suggest HostGator.
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