Hi! Alan here, back with another web hosting review. Today I’m going to take a look at HostGator, a web hosting company that has been in the hosting game for a long time – since 2002 (in tech this is like being there when then dinosaurs lived). This is a company that has hosted quite a few of my websites in the past. My two first blogs ever were actually hosted with HostGator up until recently. Why I switched you may ask? I outgrew a shared hosting environment. But for many of you budding web masters a shared hosting account is exactly what you need.
HostGator is an American born and bread company that now serves a worldwide client base. HostGator currently uses more than one data center to house their servers. Most of their servers reside in Provo, Utah, and Atlanta, Georgia, with some residing in other locations. My experience has been that their servers are very reliable. My websites haven’t had any downtime at all in all the many years that I hosted them with HostGator. If I’m not mistaken, their servers use CentOS, the popular Linux server distribution, and for a web hosting control panel they rely on cPanel.
Shared Hosting Plans:
Hatchling Plan
Now 65% off!
- Single website
- One-click WordPress installs
- Email included
- Unmetered bandwidth
Free SSL certificate Free domain included
$2.75 /month – promo price for 36 month term
Baby Plan
Now 73% off!
- Unlimited websites
- One-click WordPress installs
- Email included
- Unmetered bandwidth
Free SSL certificate Free domain included
$3.50 /month – promo price for 36 month term
Business Plan
Now 69% off!
- NEW Cloudflare CDN with up to 2.5x faster page load times
- Unlimited websites
- One-click WordPress installs
- Email included
- Unmetered bandwidth
Free SSL certificate Free upgrade to Positive SSL
- Free dedicated IP
- Free SEO tools
Free domain included
$5.25 /month – promo price for 36 month term
Those are some amazing prices, but please be aware that there is some fine print (as is always the case it seems). These prices are for the first month of service as per the fine print here:
“HostGator often offers promotions, coupons and special offers to customers during their initial term. Please note that special offers are limited-time promotional prices that are available to new customers and are valid for the Initial Term only, and not for successive or renewal periods. Promotional rates apply to GATOR, Shared, Cloud, VPS, Dedicated, WordPress and Reseller hosting plans and will automatically renew after initial term at regular rate found in your control panel. Note: If you register a free domain through us and wish to cancel your account, there is a fee to retain your domain.”
You have to go for their 36 month term to get these amazingly low prices. If you pay month to month their most basic hosting account is priced at $11.95 a month. For one site that’s not really a good deal. I recommend looking only at their 12 month or 35 month terms to get the best price. Also do yourself a favor and go for the Baby plan, go at least for the Hatchling plan so you can host as many websites as you need and not be limited to just 1.
Support – Support is there 24/7/365. I rarely had to use their support but when I did I found that they were helpful and I got my issue resolved.
They also do offer a 30 day money back guarantee if you’re not happy with your hosting experience. I doubt you’ll resort to getting a refund but hey it’s there in case you need it.
WordPress Hosting – If you’re in love with WordPress and you want specialized managed WordPress hosting they’ve got that too. Prices are a bit higher than with your basic shared hosting plan but they’re not that much more expensive than the competition.
Dedicated Servers, Reseller Hosting, and VPS servers – I’d love to get into this but this being a shared hosting focused site I don’t think you dear reader are interested in hearing me blather on about such nerdy hosting details. If you need a dedicated server – they go it. If you need a VPS which is something in-between a shared hosting account and a dedicated server – they’ve got it. If you want to start your own web hosting business by becoming a Reseller – they’ve got it.
I could go on and on about the various features that this hosting provider offers, but I would bore you to death. I suggest you checkout the HostGator website and checkout all the details there. Let me know what you think of this company by leaving a comment.
Cheers,
Alan