Hostgator Review

HostGator Editor Review

World Class Data Center = Service Uninterrupted

Hostgator choose Softlayer as their exclusive data center and network provider and now is their largest customers. Softlayer own one of world best data centers which features redundant power, HVAC, fire detection systems, and accessible via a fully meshed and redundant Certified Cisco Network with 10 backbone and fiber providers. And the long term partnership between 2 companies allows Hostgator to utilize the best part of network from Softlayer.

The whole infrastructure are monitored and managed by on-site technicians dedicated Hostgator engineers to ensure maximum uptime and reliability.

Hostgator guarantee 99.9% uptime.

Rich features and Easy to Use

With over 5 million domains under management, Hostgator know what their customer really need. Each of their solution come with rich features to help their customer setup a site quickly. Let’s take their shared web hosting as an example. You are not limited in bandwidth, disk space and MySQL database. Their server will support all the popular scripts available in Linux, like php, python, perl, ruby on rail, and etc.

cPanel is offered by default, this icon-based could help their customers to manage their web server easily with almost no learning curve.

HostGator is No More Expensive

Hostgator was started with a focus on business hosting, but soon become very popular in individual freelancers and web  developesr who have higher needs on reliability and performance. The price is a little bit higher compared with some cheap web hosts in the industry, and no free domain is included. But now, Hostgator is offering 25% off on the first invoice with them, which could get the Hatchling plan low to $3.71/month and the most popular Baby Plan at $5.96/month. This price is affordable to most of people now.

Courteous and Professional  Technical Support

Hostgator offer a very comprehensive customer system which include online knowledge base, Live chat, email ticket support, toll-free phone call. As their customers ,you could choose one of these according to the urgency of your issue.

Comment: add 2012/2/16

And Live Chat is my favorite one. In most cases, I could get connected with 1-2 minutes. But since Hostgator upgrade their Live chat application, we do see a longer waiting time. Not sure why, and we will continue monitoring this. Once we see the issue is resolved, we will remove the comment here.

Hostgator is Green

Hostgator is the largest web host who announce to be GREEN. They switch to 36% more efficient servers and also take  steps to minimize the environmental impact at the office. Besides these, Hostgator purchase certified Renewable Energy Credits representing 130% of the electricity used to both power and cool every last one of their shared and reseller servers, which means by working with Hostgator, you are not just neutralizing the environmental impact, you’re reversing it!

Hostgator Uptime Review

Hostgator guarantee 99.9% uptime. We have met 30 minutes server down in 2011, which is caused by a mistake made by their engineers. But that’s the only case  we see our site down. Even we consider this unexpected server down case, Hostgator still met their guarantee on 99.9% uptime last year. From below, you could find their latest uptime report for the past 30 days:

What Hostgator doesn’t Offer

First, Hostgator doesn’t offer free domain. This might not be a big issue for businesses as normally those companies will register the domain before looking for a host. For for individuals or web developers, you might appreciate a free domain, in this case, you could go to GoDaddy, or Namecheap to find a cheap domain and then point the DNS servers to Hostgator.

HostGator Shopping Tips

Product line from Hostgator covers shared hosting, VPS hosting, and dedicated server. This is perfect for a Business owner as they could upgrade their hosting solution according to the growth of their business. Below are the guide on how to choose those services.

For Hostgator Shared Hosting

Shared hosting package from Hostgator is perfect for web developer, Blogger, or small businesses. We have confirmed with Hostgator that the difference between those solutions are in features and price. An expensive one won’t be put in a more powerful server with lower shared account. In below, we have listed out the features different between those 3 products.  Think about what features you really need, and pay for them only!

For Hostgator VPS

Hostgator VPS is great for a busy site. It start at Level 1 (0.57 GHZ cpu and 384MB memory), could be scaled to Level 9 (5.94 GHZ cpu and 4435MB memory) . The price is also very affordable. But for Level 1 and Level 2, no control panel is include or even supported, which means you have to be with very good knowledge on Apache and other server management skills to use it well.

So, normally, we would suggest to start with VPS Level 3, in which Plesk control panel is offered as free and managing this VPS server is no more an issue even for a newbie.

For Hostgator Dedicated Server

Hostgator offer fully managed dedicated server with cPanel included. Their Basic Server Package include only 2 GB memory, if you consider to purchase this one, I would suggest to consider Hostgator VPS first, or spend a little bit more to get their Standard Dedicated Server.

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HostGator Customer Review