Hostgator Web Hosting Review

In today’s world every business needs a website and to have a website you are in need of web hosting. It does not matter whether it is an e-commerce set up to full proportion or a simple page that has only some information for the contact. HostGator has attractive features at a low price that offers lots of tools for the webmasters too. They are a well-known brand in the world of web hosting. They have very high-quality VPS for web hosting packages.

When it comes to the web hosting, they stand out from the crowd due to their dedication to the service plan and client. They are so good and well-rounded in their server packages plan that they have won several awards in different categories. They are a great host for a web, and their features are interesting and helpful enough to keep them ahead of other competitors.

Like many other hosting sites they are not free from negative review as different persons have the difference in need, and it is not possible to fulfill every expectation of every client. We tried to review them by looking at their special features, plans and discussing them. So have a quick look at their history and background and their features too.

History & Background HostGator

Brent Oxley founded the company during the years of 2002, and he was still in university at that time. Now he works as the CEO of the company. They have more than 400,000 customers across two hundred countries, and they are now hosting more than 8 million domains. The Company started from Florida but due to the need for expansion, they had to move to Texas in the year of 2007. Now they are based in the Houston, and the office is in Austin.

HostGator also has a subsidiary office in India, and another office is also in Brazil. Under their payroll, there are around two hundred employees now, but it is going to be four hundred within the next two year. 225 million USD was paid by the EIG (Endurance International Group) in the year of 2012. They are also the owner of the HostMonster and The Bluehost.

HostGator are in the hosting business for a long time, and it makes them a good host where you can keep your faith. The platform has lots of services on their different offers. They have mostly known for their budget shared plans for hosting and they are quite competitive with their price ranges too. HostGator also provide service of reselling, and they also host for Dedicated Hosting and VPS Hosting. They also have a program for affiliation along with the other services.

Uptime of HostGator

HostGator as a company operates from their data centers that are placed in four different facilities, and all of them are owned by the Planet and all of them are placed in Texas. They have their technical staffs to ensure the power supply of UPS and fire detection, and they monitor for 24 hours of the day and seven days of a week to ensure the safety and the security of the 12,000 sites. The company uses the hardware that is provided by the AT&T and Warner. They are engaged with ten different fiber providers. HostGator gives the guarantee for the uptime of 99.9% and for the regular update of the services of the updates of status the customers can easily count on the RSS feeds of theirs which is pretty frequent.

Here are some pictures showing the Uptime average of the HostGator.

Uptime average of HostGator (March 26, 2015- April 27, 2015) – 99.99%

Uptime average of HostGator (January 10, 2018- February 11, 2015) – 100%

Reliability

Every week the backups are performed by the HostGator for each and every account of the bar dedicated servers. To restore every backup you have to pay the fee of $15 which is imposed by the HostGator. In the case where you are supplying the backup files then there is no involvement of levy. For the company who does the job of hosting more than 8 million domains their transparency about their service, staffs, and resources are quite extraordinary.

They have also been able to attract partners whoa very high profiles like Dell, Cisco, and AT&T. This names will give an idea that how professional they are about their job. The best thing about them that they have very strict policies that do not allow them from reselling and you have to keep up with the capacity you agreed with. There may be some exception in the case of dedicated server and VPS where you will find that you have all the control over the capacity and you can albeit with your risk.

Packages and pricing of HostGator

Packages for Shared Web Hosting

They will offer you monthly hosting plans, but they will keep pushing you to sign for longer periods and terms that start from six months. There is a default for three terms during the process of sign up. Pushing the clients for such long terms from the start is not that normal. It might seem a bit much for many users.

There are three different plans for the shared web hosting. The first one is Hatching Plan, which will cost you $5.21 per month. You will get unlimited disk space, email address, bandwidth database and the support of 1 domain. You will also get the third party applications for managing systems too.

The second one is the Baby Plan, which will cost you 7.46$ per month. It will give all the offers of the hatching plan and the inclusion of this plan is the unlimited domains. The top and third plan is the Business plan. It will cost you $11.21 per month. This will include several specialized features like a phone number that is toll-free, and you will get A Secure Socket Layer certificate too.

Cost and offers of different shared hosting packages offered by HostGator. See for yourself. Click Here To Getting The Discount Link

Packages for VPS

HostGator offers VPS hosting which is Linux based, and the packages start for $11.97 per month, and they have five different packages. These packages will give you lots of power and make you able to control lots of traffic volume. You will be able to get your specific required compliances for your servers. For the starting package, you will 512MB ram, disk space of 25GB, Bandwidth of 500GB and two different IP addresses. See the packages and prices for yourself.

Packages for Dedicated Server

The packages of the dedicated server of HostGator start from $104 per month and all of them have bundles of excellent features comparing to the price tag. There total four different packages available for a dedicated server named as Basic, Standard, Elite, and Pro. The simplest packages will provide you with Uplink of 100Mbps, 4 GB RAM, 500 GB RAID-1 Drives, two different dedicated IPS and 10TB Bandwidth.

Cost and offers of different dedicated hosting packages offered by HostGator. See yourself.

To meet all the demands of the market, they have packages for reseller hosting, Domain Hosting, and WordPress hosting too. To get all the listings go to their website. Please keep in mind that these prices may change time to time as there are option discounts and promotional prices too. You will also be able to find lots of coupons to use which are available on the web, and those will also help you to keep the price a bit down.

Control Panel of HostGator

For all the plans of Linux, HostGator will provide the Cpanel 11 which will work without any fail, and it also comes in multiple themes to choose from according to the choice of the user. This Cpanel will help you to represent the Universal access point for all features that are contained in the packages like the DNS Setting, Backups of one click and webmail. In the case of the reseller accounts, both the WHM and Cpanel will come in the bundle together.

The WHM and the Cpanel will be offered as optional in the case where your plan is in the VPS or their Linux dedicated server. Or the servers that are Windows-based the bundle will include the Plesk 11.x. Virtuozzo will be offered for the purpose of service administration for the users of VPS plans. HostGator provides the capability of individual billing so that the customer can easily organize their payments and they can also download the invoices too.

Customer Service of HostGator

The technical support provided by the HostGator is quite remarkable when you compare how low they charge as a hosting provider. They have technical support for you for the 24 hours of a day and seven days of a week. HostGator ensures the support service through different mediums like toll-free phone calls, email service, large collection FAQs. Moreover, they will not let you know about the support staff whether he is outsourced or locally based. There is a portal that is provided for the ease of getting the support system and billing. Through this, the customer can easily update his account or take part in the user forum or also get access to the knowledge base.

They can also check out the video tutorials too. The knowledge base lots of papers which talk about the general problems of the hosting and the tutorial videos can help the beginners to understand the tricks of hosting so they can easily start their sites. All these can easily solve the general problems faced by a customer. To use the portal login is required which is different than used for Cpanel. There is also a form that is built in so that the requests for technical support and be transferred quickly.

Security Features of HostGator

There is no protection on offer by the HostGator for the security of email that might be disappointing for lots of people. The hatching plan will give you the access to the SSL to protect the e-commerce store you have but to have an especially dedicated SSL site you have to upgrade to Business plan. When creating the account you have to give a PIN to your billing account. You can put in only numbers that have been to between four to eight characters. For someone, it might be a little bit itchy. In total, more protection should be provided for them to have maximum client satisfaction.

Extra Stuff provided by HostGator

For the US callers, the Business Shared plan will cover a number that is toll-free. In a case of the Canadian customer, they have to pay a charge for making that call. If the customer has canceled the hosting plan, he will not be able to get this support of phone. You can also contact with the HostGator and make the necessary arrangement so that you can get this as a paid service. In this case, to keep the active status you have to make at least one call in every month.

Features offered by HostGator comes in packages that will include WordPress, OSCommerce, one-click installs, Joomla, SiteStudio, SiteBuilder and the other host packages that will be needed by the builder. If you have the plan of dedicated service of Bluehost, you will be able to assign the individual account for SiteBuilders and give templates to the clients. For the services of shared hosting additional incentive of $100 Adwords credit is provided for the users. In the case of the reseller accounts, a free upgrade is given to an eNom domain of reseller account. For this, the additional menu of setup is required, but it is a very straightforward process. It is so quick that it will not take more than two minutes to complete.

Money Back Guarantee of HostGator

No matter which plans you have either the shared or reseller or the VPS you will have the power to cancel it, and you will have a time frame of 45 days to do it. You will be able to get a full refund when you cancel it. But keep in mind that this feature is not applicable or the plans of a dedicated server. You also have to keep in mind that the additional cost of the items like the installation fees and admin fees or the fees for the domain name you have given when purchasing it will not be refunded by HostGator. The company is strict about it that they will take the cancellation request if it is sent through by using the special online form.

Usually, it will not take more than two days for the cancellation process to come into effect. If you want the refund, then you have to make a request for it with the email of cancellation that you sent to the HostGator so that the refund will not be taken as granted. The refund you will get from the HostGator will be credited to you through PayPal account or a credit card.

Email Management of HostGator

There is no point of having a web presence if visitors to your site are not able to make contact with you. So from the start, HostGator will provide you an unlimited number of accounts of email to use. The job of setting an email account is really easy. You just have to you will be able to click on the Email Accounts which is in the customer portal, and you will be able to get the form open to create any number of email accounts. You will be able to create one email account at a time but don’t get disappointed. By using the Network Solutions, you will be able to make several ones at a time. HostGator will also let you the quotas of the mailbox. There is also a strength meter for the password and it is built in.

BBB Rating of HostGator

HostGator has been a BBB Accredited Business since the May of 2008, and they have the A+ rating that is the highest possible rating to get. If you go to the official website Better Business Bureau, you will be able to the profile of HostGator. There may be a few complaints there, but you will find that almost all they are solved. It is great to see that a company like HostGator who take complaints seriously and try to take care of the customers in all the ways possible. Not like other known companies who don’t have a headache about it. Unlike them, HostGator gives a response to every complaint made by the client.

WordPress on HostGator

Recently three tires of WordPress for web hosting are added by HostGator. They are Blog, Business and the last one is Pro. Blog. The blog will give you the ability host one site of WordPress, an unlimited amount of email and storage, 100,000 visitors and parked domains. The business will give you a chance to have 5 WordPress sites with 500,000 visitors and the Pro. The blog will give you the ability to have 20 WordPress sites and one million visitors. It is easy to set up WordPress in HostGator, and you don’t have to manage the route of WordPress too.

How To Set Up WordPress In HostGator

There is an option in the customer portal that is called the Quick Links, and it will open a dedicated interface so that third-party applications can be installed. There is also a shortcut that is very handy if you want to start WordPress in HostGator, which will lead you to the wanted Quick Link Interface. The path is set in the installation of the blog. You have just to enter the username for the account of WordPress Administrator, and then you have to click the install button. Then the site will be up and running, and it is as easy as said. WP-Super-Cache plugin is automatically installed by HostGator, and it will help to improve the performance of the blog.

The process of setting up WordPress will be very easy for a newcomer in this sector. At first, the interface of Quick Links may seem a little bit, but when you get accustomed to it, you will find that you just need to click to go. Under the services of WordPress, there is also a link to the Mojo Marketplace, which will come with the premium add-ons. By using the WordPress, the process of importing can be made really easy and the lack support of HostGator in this can be solved.

Setting Up a Site Hosted By HostGator

At the first, it is really good that HostGator will send you an email with the startup guide, and it has lots of links to help you. There is a login link for billing in the top of the HostGator site which will lead you to the customer portal. From there you will get all the necessary information about payment, and you will get all the details too. The options for the purchase add-ons are also listed there.

At the top, there are tabs on this page that are of the account and management of domain. In the hosting tab, you will be able to see the actual control panel where the building tools of sites are available with the other applications & website statistics. In the introductory email, you will find the direct link that will lead you to the control panel.

There are several options available for building a website in HostGator. You will find different add-ons that will help you to build the site. Having them will cost you a bit like you will get the Weebly for $4. With this, you will be able to build an attractive looking site easily by using the function of drop-and-drag.

You can also include the contact forms, slideshows and links to social media in your page with the Weebly. You can easily install the Joomla or Drupal or other CMS platforms or the WordPress easily. There is the tool for file manager too which will allow you to upload the files manually. This tool is far better than any available FTP client because you will have control to edit the files directly.

HostGator Dedication to Hosting

Their dedication to hosting is unlike others where they will help you in every step of the setting up process of the page that it will be like a walk in the park for you. The Quick Link is a pretty straightforward interface and has lots of options than other sources. They provide great support services and have lots of dedicated technical helpers to solve your problems. Although there are a few problems with their security system and a few slight errors in the interfaces, they are true to their clients and provide support any way the can. They provide all these at a low and reasonable cost.

Pros

A very much established company which has a decade of experience in the business.
You will have the power to cancel the contract and get the refund if you do the cancellation with the time period of 45 days.
Comes with lots of services in the packages which will satisfy the need of any website
The cPanel allows making easy navigation in the control panel and helps using the graphical interface. Several other tools are also there to make the hosting and managing job website pretty easily.
Provide support staffs which are very competent and all of them are native English speaker which makes the conversation more understanding.
You might have to wait for around 6 minutes to get the phone support. The agents take great care of the customers and help them solve the problems efficiently.
Has a very high Uptime average.

Cons

The starting packages are cheap but renewal will cost you a lot.
You will get no free domain here where many companies offer the free domain name. But it is not possible in HostGator. You have to pay $10 in order to have an individual domain name which might not be a catch for everyone.
The entry-level packages of shred will make you desire more as you will be entitled to have only one domain.
The CMS script software does not have enough similarities with the trends of the industry. They are still stuck with the QuickInstall where other companies are moving on to the Softaculous. It might not be better as you get all the basic things in QuickInstall.
You will have to wait a bit longer before getting on with the chat for support
The response time is longer than usual in the ticket system, and so you have to wait after submitting

Final Verdict

HostGator has made the excellent transformation from starting with only three servers to become one of the leading players in the marketing. It has been able to push aside lots of problems and obstacles to become such and overcome lots of technical problems. It is still one of the fast and reliable hosting sites present in the market. There is almost no problem with their support system, and they try to provide the best for their clients through lots of tools and features which make the customization and creation of website really easy. No hosting company is perfect, and it is the truth. But this HostGator will help you to keep getting the site up and to run it real simple and easy. The real bottom line is if you are looking a company that is reliable then HostGator is the perfect option for you.

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