Everything about HostGator

Hostgator Introduction

Hostgator, founded in 2002 is one of top shared hosting companies, ranking consistently among the best by most of the review sites. What makes hostgator stand out from the crowd is their excellent support and customer friendliness. If you are not satisfied with the support, you could even get hostgator president Brent Oxley to personally take a look at your problem.

Recently hostgator went green, probably making them the first main stream host to do so. They purchase renewable energy credits up to 130% of their total power consumption.

Hostgator Features Review

Hostgator offers linux hosting only(even though they are expected to start windows hosting in the near future). All their packages come with all the features needed for a serious website. Baby and Swamp packages allow unlimited domains(add on), which makes a lot of sense if you have multiple websites. They use cPanel, which is the best control panel around. You get Fantastico script installer which will install most of the popular open source scripts with few clicks.

They support PHP4 & 5, SSH, Cron jobs, Python, Ruby On Rails etc. Also, all the packages include enough POP3 accounts(20 for Hatchling and unlimited for others).

Hostgator Performance Review

Hostgator host their sites on top-of-the-line Dual Xeon servers in their data centers (thePlanet) at Dallas. The data centers are well equipped and connects to 10 backbone providers. They offer 99.9% uptime Guarantee which is the industry stand ard.

We started realtime testing of hostgator uptime on Feb 2008. The test is done on a site hosted with hostgator, using a third party uptime monitor service. Overall, hostgator had been the best performing host from all the hosts monitored. Th ey provided consistently high uptime, month after month. There has never been a single case of site being down for more than 10 minutes at a stretch. Hostgator indeed lived up to their reputation.

Hostgator Price Value

They have three hosting packages starting from Hatchling ($6.95 pm) to Swamp ($14.95 pm). The price is reasonable for the features and space/bandwidth provided. Recently Hostgator increased the space and bandwidth to unimaginable levels. They also reduced the price of all plans, by introducing 24 and 34 month pre-payment options. The monthly payment now have a small set up charge and is costlier than 12 month rates. Our advice - don't get excited by the unlimited space and bandwidth. They do have limits on file numbers (inodes) and CPU usage to make sure that only reasonable sized accounts remains in the shared servers. But for any site with a reasonable traffic, hostgator plans are more than sufficient. You obviously can not expect a site with few million page views a month to run on a shared host, no matter what bandwidth they offer.

Overall, hostgator is fair priced and provides enough resources for a shared web host. Give it try.