HostGator Reviews

Advantages

HostGator is an iconic, privately-owned web hosting company based in Texas. It boasts of being one of the world’s best and top rated hosting providers and carries over 8 million web domains for its nearly half a million users, who are located across 200 countries. While HostGator offers a broad range of services, , the company is undoubtedly best known for its reasonably priced shared web hosting plans. In addition, hostgator.com also offers VPS hosting, dedicated servers and reseller plans, as well as an affiliate program. Service highlights include a free domain name, unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth, cPanel/ WHM control panels and 100s of free extras.

The company is also well known for having comprehensive support options where users can access their team 24/7 through live chat support, email and phone support. Most of the packages offered by hostgator.com come with Site Studio, Site Builder, osCommerce, Joomla, WordPress and one click installs. They also have a very fair cancellation policy and a 30 day money back guarantee.
HostGator Hosting Packages
HostGator offers customers 3 options for shared web hosting: the Hatchling, Baby, and Business plans.

• The Hatchling plan features unlimited disc space and bandwidth under a single domain.
• The Baby plan comes with an unlimited number of domains, disc space and bandwidth.
• The Business hosting plan also includes these unlimited features, with the addition of a free private SSL certificate and IP address.

For those in need of elevated VPS hosting, HostGator has six VPS packages available for consideration: the Snappy 500, 1000, 2000, 4000 and 8000 plans. The Snappy 500 plan offers 512MB of RAM, 25GB of disc space and 500GB of bandwidth, while the intermediate Snappy 2000 plan, the company’s most popular VPS plan, comes with 2GB of RAM, 120GB of disc space, and 1.5TB of bandwidth. For maximum resource allocation, be sure to look over the Snappy 8000 plan that affords customers 8GB, 240GB of disc space and 3TB of bandwidth.

Find 4 dedicated hosting plans from Host Gator to accommodate your growing website needs. The company’s Basic plan offers 4GB of high-performance RAM, 10TB of bandwidth, and 2 dedicated IP addresses, while their Standard plan also provides 4GB of RAM, but with an additional 15TB of bandwidth and 3 dedicated IP addresses. The company’s most elite dedicated plan, the Pro plan, offers 16GB of RAM, 25TB of bandwidth, and 5 dedicated IP addresses.
HostGator Hosting Features
HostGator hosting services run on both Linux and Windows operating systems and accommodate 11 of some of the most widely-used server-side scripts. Unlike many other providers, HostGator affords its users a relatively large number of control panel options, which include: cPanel, Plesk, Virtuozzo and WHM. Shared hosting plans include an unlimited number of MySQL databases with phpMyAdmin access and FTP accounts, with the Business plan offering anonymous FTP accounts.

All VPS hosting plans are available with unlimited domains, sub domains, MySQL databases, and include full root access to servers. These supermicro servers run on Linux operating systems that also make use of an Apache web server and AMD Opteron 6,000 series CPUs. HostGator dedicated servers can run on both Linux and Windows operating systems, and depend on Intel Xeon Quad core processing units with up to 8 threads. Each dedicated plan also relies on RAID-1 drives and come with free cPanel licenses, along with WHMCS and WHM AutoPilot billing systems.
HostGator Data Center Location and Acceleration
The HostGator’s four data centers are all located in Texas and house approximately 12,000 individual servers. These data centers are protected with HVAC units and a backup power system, and rely on a redundant network that operates without any one point of potential failure. These data centers are also eco-friendly, as they heavily utilize wind power and have committed to sustaining low emissions. Host Gator doesn’t mention any use of a speed-enhancing content delivery network or any other type of accelerating feature to increase website performance, but it does guarantee a 99.9% uptime and a 20 mbit Gigabit uplink connection for customers of its VPS hosting plans.
Protection and Installation
All shared web hosting plans are protected with an SSL certificate and SSH secure shell protocol for added security. HostGator plans are also SafeHarbor certified, which means that they meet standards agreed upon between the U.S. and the European Union for privacy protection, a benefit to the webmaster with a site that depends on international business relations. Shared web hosting plans also come with password protected directories on their cPanel control panels, as well as custom error pages.

VPS plans include weekly data backups conducted off-site and round-the-clock server monitoring, while HostGator dedicated servers are protected with IPTables firewalls and numerous layers of network security. These dedicated servers are further equipped with private SSL support for e-Commerce sites.

All HostGator hosting plans also come with free installations of site builder programs and tools to make website deployment even easier. The company also grants access to approximately 75 one-click scripts for running applications like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Magento and even Wiki. HostGator also offers 4,500 different website templates to customers free of charge.
HostGator Webmail Options
Options for HostGator webmail include an unlimited number of email accounts that come with standard auto response features and spam prevention (through Box Trapper) that verifies that all incoming mail was sent from an actual person, and not a robot. Users can also set up filters on their email accounts and take advantage of the company’s email delivery route testing option to determine how the server will deliver the email.

Automatic forwarding can also be set up on HostGator webmail, but for those interested in creating email aliases or who want to forward domains, this will have to be done from the cPanel. HostGator webmail also comes with:

• IMAP
• POP3
• SMTP
• Catch-all email addresses

vMailing lists

• Email aliases

Additionally, customers can choose from Horde, SquirrelMail and RoundCube webmail solutions.
Is HostGator Good?
HostGator typically receives strong reviews for its consistently reliable service, competitive pricing and extensive promotions/discounts. Many have also remarked upon its fast uptime and server speed, as well as its 1 click script installations.

Given the breadth of this large hosting provider and its impressive growth since its founding in 2002, there’s little reason to doubt the quality of HostGator service. HostGator is a particularly suitable choice for those looking for convenient shared web hosting, but can be a strong option for those interested in VPS and dedicated hosting too (although shared hosting seems to be its specialty). HostGator could also be a great choice for a customer of shared web hosting seeking scalability within the shared web hosting level, or for the user who anticipates needing to upgrade to a VPS or dedicated server down the road.