HostGator Review

HostGator is one of the best known and well respected web hosting companies operating on the internet today. They have been around for quite some time now, and presently host over 9 million websites. Today it is a buyer’s market when it comes to choosing a web hosting firm. The prospective purchaser has virtually an unlimited number of options to pick from, and the selection that one eventually makes can and does play a part in the success or failure of a website.

When you are attempting to figure out what web hosting firm to utilize, there are many other factors besides price that you need to take into consideration. Some of these are downtime, the speed of the servers, customer support, ease of use, and the free tools that are made available to make your life simpler. Our firm did an extensive review of HostGator’s benefits and shortcomings and you will find that information below.

HostGator Pros

HostGator offers their visitors the chance to try their service for only a penny! Numerous upgrade paths include VPS and dedicated solutions if needed. Activate penny offer and purchase the “Baby” hosting plan for one month, use coupon provided from link.

HostGator Cons

HostGator’s $3.96 plan only allows a single domain. Other hosts at this price point allow unlimited domains. The nearest unlimited domain hosting price point is $6.36 with the Baby Plan. Use our coupon above to get this for 1 penny for your first month.

We Have 2 HostGator Coupons Available!

Save 25% off your HostGator shared hosting package when ordering for 6 months or longer. If you are unsure, try HostGator’s Baby plan for just a penny on your first month. Click here to go to our HostGator coupon page on Top Five Advisor.

Web Hosting Packages

As with most web hosting companies today, HostGator has a wide array of different packages to select from. For the first time buyer, it can be a daunting task to appraise each alternative and choose the one that best suits all of your websites needs.

Their basic package starts at $3.96 a month, and in most instances it will be sufficient for websites that receive a moderate level of traffic. If your website receives a great number of visitors each day, or your homepage is quite extensive and you need it to load quickly, you might want to consider their virtual private server (VPS) hosting alternative which starts at $15.96 a month.

If you have a large number of websites, or you run software on your sever that uses a great deal of RAM, you might want to consider their dedicated severs, which start for as low as $139 a month. Whatever option you initially select, HostGator allows you to upgrade in the future if you find your online business has grown to the point that you require a more powerful plan.

Web Hosting Customer Support

As every experienced website owner knows, a knowledgeable and helpful customer support staff is an absolute must in today’s market place. HostGator really shines in this department, and is head and shoulders above most of their competition.

Because the company has been in business for so long, their personal are extremely well trained and very experienced. In addition, most of them have been on their jobs for a very longtime and have confronted and overcome most of the problems that a website owner will ever experience. They provide 24 hours a day 7 days a week telephone and chat support. In addition, if the issue is not too serious, you can send them an email.

Web Hosting Price Value

You might have heard the term, “You get what you pay for”, previously. Without question, there are less expensive web hosting companies that you can use. That being said, there are many reasons that some companies can offer lower rates than HostGator, and none of them are beneficial for their clients.

A few of these could be that they load their servers up with far too many websites, which makes them operate slowly. Or, they have old servers that they do not update in a timely fashion when new technology becomes available. Maybe, they just pay their employees very poorly and because of this, they are constantly experiencing a high turnover of their staff.

It really does not matter what the reason is, there are only a very few exceptionally well run web hosting firms in existence today, and HostGator happens to be one of them. We strongly believe that their products and services are fairly priced, and we suggest that you research them yourself very thoroughly.

Ease of Use & Quality

For the novice, the first time you look at your website hosting company’s website, you are going to be in for a shock. It is going to seem extremely complicated with information all over the place. However, after you start working with their control panels for a while, you will quickly get the hang of it. That is until they change everything around to try and improve it, but in reality all it does is confuse you even more.

HostGator does a pretty good job in this area, but there is a learning curve with all of the web hosting companies, and it will be no different with this firm. Thankfully, they provide exceptional customer support that should be able to walk you through any of the difficulties that you might be experiencing getting everything setup properly.

Allison - June 13, 2015

HostGator Is Unreliable, Unprofessional – Stay Away.

I honestly cannot say enough bad things about HostGator’s shared hosting. At one point — prior to 2012 — I was very pleased. Then June 2012, CEO and founder Brent Oxley announced the impending sale of HostGator to Endurance International Group (EIG).

It has been a nightmare ever since.

In April 2014, a major network issue at the data center in Provo, Utah, affected EIG customers of Bluehost, HostMonster and JustHost, and took down many of the dedicated servers owned by HostGator customers. This was an apocalyptic event costing many businesses money and extended down-time. No concessions were made.

I preface my review with this: if you have 2 visitors per week, you’ll be okay with using a bad web host like HostGator. But if you run a growing website and business HostGator is worthless and will cost you down the road.

First, HostGator is always down! Not convinced? Checkout the hashtag #hostgatordown across social media — Twitter mainly.

I honestly got tired of my site going down. And while their marketing claims promise “unlimited” this and “free” that — keep in mind, nothing is unlimited.

They will throttle your site, prevent you from doing full cPanel backups (over 10GB) and worst of all at one point they’d pull down your site completely if a plugin is tapping out CPU resource intermittently without notice or recourse. Now they cache your site, but that’s still not ideal.

We ran our WP site that was completely optimized, used a CDN and WPSuperCache — and we optimized databases weekly — and still experienced numerous Error 500 pages and our back-end operating at a glacial pace. If it takes 60 seconds or more to load your wp-admin page there’s a problem.

Sadly, if you are uneducated about web development basics you’ll get taken for a ride with HostGator — as their support offers canned and scripted responses as to why your site is slow (and basically it’s your fault).

Even when escalating an issue to a CS supervisor named Jason, I was told it was an administrative restriction that would be lifted soon and taken care of. The next day, to check his story, I called and elevated my request to a CS supervisor at HostGator named Chris, who confirmed no such restriction ever existed.

Meanwhile, HostGator’s customer support is not knowledgeable at all. They offer no real solutions or help — only forward your ticket to an Admin — that takes light years to respond.

HostGator is a collective cluster … and this is coming from a successful business owner who rarely leaves bad reviews without giving a company ample time to redeem itself. I get it — things happen, but how you handle it is essential.

After HostGator’s continuous lies, slow hosting and utter disregard I switched to another web host. It may seem daunting to switch hosting providers, but the fact that I sleep at night now is totally worth it. I’m no longer checking if my site has been down each morning.

I had to search high and low for a web hosting provider because most web hosting reviews are affiliate (paid). I found a honest and unpaid write-up on another provider and made the switch within 24 hours — no downtime and they migrated everything without a hitch. We ran into minor DB configuration issues which were promptly addressed.

I can never — with a straight face — ever recommend HostGator to any business owner or entrepreneur. HostGator is a monstrosity. And from what I hear from other business owners, anything owned by EIG (Bluehost, HostMonster, JustHost, and HostGator) is a nightmare.

Talk to developers before choosing HostGator — they’ll tell you the problem with companies like EIG. They oversell their servers and you end up with a slow site while HostGator blames you for it all.

I recommend having a third party monitor server uptime — we use SiteUptime. This way a HostGator rep can’t answer the phone and say “Your site is up now, I don’t see the problem?”

Also, sites like Pingdom are helpful to diagnose if it is actually a site problem or if HostGator servers are slow. They can’t argue with data. Meanwhile, GTmetrix will help you assess your site — because at times it may be your fault.

Keep in mind, with shared hosting you get what you pay for, but at a basic level they should be able to keep your site running and prevent your cPanel from taking more than a minute to load. Even their other products (VPS and dedicated) are poor — just read the (non-paid) reviews. Any review that offers a HostGator coupon is likely an affiliate (paid) review and highly biased since the blogger is compensated to say “HostGator is great!”

However, at the end of the day I will never use HostGator again and I will tell every business owner I know to stay far, far away. Funny, we don’t have any problems at our new web host — interesting how that works.