Hostgator Review (shared web hosting) - Why I Love Hostgator!
Hostgator offers 3 types of web hosting services: shared hosting, VPS hosting and dedicated hosting. In this review I will focus on the Hostgator shared web hosting - it's pros and cons.
Choosing a cheap and reliable shared web hosting provider can be a taunting task because there are literally thousands of competing hosting providers out there. After surfing months in forums, reading reviews and trying out many different hosts, I sticked with Hostgator, because it was cheap enough for me, worked better than others that I had tested and every time I had a problem, the Hostgator support staff amazed me with the speed that it is able to solve the problem (I just fell in love with their live support).
Now, 3 years later, I am hosting 12 medium traffic websites under the same shared hosting account with Hostgator. And although I am very satisfied, I have to say that Hostgator shared hosting is not suitable for every type of website and for every type of traffic. So please continue reading my Hostgator review to find out what you should keep in mind when deciding whether to join Hostgator or not.
You can find technical details for Hostgator hosting packages here: http://www.hostgator.com/
Pros and Cons of Hostgator (based on my 3 years of experience)
Pros
1) Very fast support with 3 different options:
- 24/7 live chat support
- Regular ticket support
- Phone support
Phone and live support guarantees you almost instant access to level 1 technicians who are able to help you with all common issues. The ticket support is better suited for more complicated problems like opening some specific ports for you scripts or installing some Blog/CMS software. You can expect a response from ticket support in about 1-3 hours. That is amazing taking into account how large the Hostgator company is and how many clients they have.
2) "Unlimited" disk space, domains and bandwidth
The term "unlimited" is used by most shared web hosting providers as a marketing trick. Strictly speaking there is no such thing as unlimited hard drive and bandwidth but in reality it comes pretty close, because Hostgator will let you host almost 9999GB of data and unless you happen to own website that receives hundreds of requests every second, Hostgator shared hosting can handle it. And if for some reason there happens to be many clients on the same shared server with large mounts of data and high
loads websites then they are either relocated to different servers or asked to upgrade to another hosting package.
I am currently hosting 12 websites with Hostgator, but I have had as many as 39 domains running under the same account without any problems.
3) Great Uptime (99,9%)
Few years ago I had some problems with my server uptime - it got crashed a couple of times because of DOS attacks on some websites on the server. But it got fixed the same day and I haven't experienced any downtime since then. I am really pleased.
4) Secure SSH access option
If you are familiar with telnet like clients, you can request Hostgator to activate SSH access and backup and manipulate your files safely from your favorite SSH client. I haven't seen many other shared hosting providers that offer this pretty essential option.
5) Easy to use control panel
If you are not that tech savvy, you can easily get everything done with the popular cPanel control panel that Hostgator provides. It is very intuitive to use and supports all the functions that most medium traffic website owners require.
Cons
1) Live Chat support can't solve complex problems:
Sometimes you might encounter level 1 support technicians on live chat who can't solve your complex problem. But you will always get them solved by using a ticket support where the problem is forwarded to advanced technicians.
2) The unlimited isn't really unlimited.
You can't host very high traffic and CPU load intensive websites. But that is something you can't expect to do with any other shared hosting provider either. Shared hosting is meant for medium and low traffic websites.
Conclusion
With the relatively long experience on the web hosting market (since 2002), Hostgator has managed to hold his reputation as the best "unlimited" shared hosting provider for medium and low traffic websites. I hope that as Hostgator keeps growing even bigger they are able to handle the increasing client base as effectively as they have been till now.
I hope you enjoyed my Hostgator review and found it helpful!
If you decide to give Hostgator a try, you can get a huge discount for the first month, if you enter a Hostgator coupon during the order process.
