Hostgator Review

Founded in 2002, HostGator is based in Houston, Texas. Since then, HostGator’s rise to fame has been meteoric. In just 10 years, it has grown to become one of the most popular and well-known web hosting companies in the world. In fact, as of 2012, www.hostgator.com hosts over eight million domains on their servers.

Types of Hosting Offered by HostGator

HostGator.com provides three basic types of webhosting, including shared, VPS and dedicated.

Shared hosting is the most affordable option. With shared hosting, many different customers share one server. Shared hosting isn’t always as reliable as other hosting types. However, shared hosting is perfect for personal sites, blogs, and perhaps small business sites.

The most expensive hosting type is dedicated hosting. With dedicated hosting, a single customer gets a server all to themselves. This is the most reliable hosting type because, with only one user, less stress is placed on the server. While some might be willing to pay more for the added reliability, dedicated hosting is usually more than the average customer needs.

Some consider HostGator’s VPS (or Virtual Private Server) hosting to be the best of both worlds. While it’s more affordable than dedicated hosting, it’s more reliable than shared hosting. With VPS hosting, a physical server is partitioned into several virtual servers. While customers share a physical server, they each get their own virtual servers, which has many of the advantages of a dedicated server.

VPS hosting is best for businesses websites that can’t afford to be down for even minimal amounts of time. While HostGator’s shared hosting is among the most reliable in the industry, VPS hosting gives customers added peace of mind.

HostGator Hosting Packages

Host Gator offers hosting packages to fit any need or budget.

With the shared hosting plans, customers get:

• Unlimited Disk Space
• Unlimited Bandwidth
• Unlimited Sub Domains
• Unlimited FTP Accounts
• Unlimited MySQL Databases
• Email Hosting

With the Baby and Business plans, users also get unlimited domain hosting. (With the Hatchling plan, users can only host one domain.) Customers who opt for VPS or dedicated hosting get the same benefits, and also enjoy more advanced features.

All customers receive:

• A free site builder.
• Free website templates.
• Free scripts that allow them to install programs like WordPress, Joomla and Drupal with just a few mouse click.
• The latest version of the cPanel control panel.
• Web merchant tools.
• A 45 day, money back guarantee.

What Customers Say About HostGator

Host Gator attracts users of all kinds, including small and large businesses, web developers, bloggers, and even individuals personal, hobby websites. When asked why they chose www.hostgator.com, most users cite its affordability and reliability.

One of the things customers praise most is Host Gator’s uptime. When someone is using a website to make money, their site being down for even half an hour can mean losing hundreds, or even thousands, of dollars.

According to tests done by both industry professionals and customers, HostGator.com has an uptime of more than 99%. Compared to other hosting companies in the same price range, that’s an amazing uptime percentage. Rarely is a site hosted by this company inaccessible.

Another thing customers like is how easy Host Gator is to use. Some webhosts use control panels that have steep learning curves, and are too complicated for daily use. But Host Gator customers can use the cPanel Control Panel to login to their accounts and maintain their websites. cPanel is flexible, intuitive, and easy to use, even for beginners who’ve never had websites before.

No webhosting company can please everyone. But the large majority of customers who review the company give www.hostgator.com high marks.

HostGator Customer Support

Many seem to believe customers shouldn’t expect great customer support from an affordable webhosting company. But HostGator.com doesn’t seem to agree.

Host Gator offers support to their customers 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. Users can contact them at any time, day or night, by phone, by email, or by using the live chat option.

HostGator has a large and well-trained support staff, and each individual support representative is knowledgeable, helpful and friendly.

The speed of the response to customer queries can depend on the time of day. Sometimes the response is immediate. During peak hours, when Host Gator is flooded with customer queries, response time might be a little slower. However, once contact is made, the support staff goes out of their way to make sure issues are resolved quickly and to the customer’s satisfaction.

After they’ve helped a customer to solve a problem, a www.hostgator.com support representative will often contact them a few days later, usually via email, to see if they need more assistance.

HostGator’s customer support is top-notch. In fact, most customers say HostGator’s customer support is the best they’ve ever experienced from any webhosting company.

HostGator Coupons

Host Gator is already quite affordable. But they offer coupon codes to help customers save even more. One of their best deals is offering new customers their first month of hosting for a penny. This allows them to try the service and decide whether www.hostgator.com is right for them.

It’s possible for a customer to find a coupon code that will give them a discount on almost any of HostGator’s services, including hosting, domain name registration, and website transfers.

What Sets HostGator Apart

HostGator.com is reliable and affordable, a combination that can be hard to find in the world of webhosting. They also seem dedicated to giving all of their customers, large and small, the best service and support in the industry.