The first webhost I signed up was Dreamhost which was around 4 years back – 2007. In the mean time, the portfolio of my websites grew and services imp
arted by Dreamhost went from worse to worst. Though I still maintain an account on Dreamhost but I have now transferred most of my websites to Hostgator.
Having been with Hostgator for more than 9 months, here’s my review –
Courteous and helpful support
Whether you are an existing customer or someone who wants to become one, with Hostgator polite help is just a click away. They have a huge team of chat support specialists who are ready to answer all your queries ranging from basic to advanced. It would never take more than 2-3 mins of wait time before you can chat with a customer care exec at Hostgator. Compare that to Dreamhost, they only provide chat support to VPS and dedicated customers and even then at times it would take ages to connect. Moreover, I find the Dreamhost customer support way too rude to handle. The sentiment is echoed by two other friends of mine who are with Dreamhost. They have stopped using Dreamhost customer support altogether!
Servers that would never go down
I monitor all my websites using a nice service called AreMySitesUp. My sites hosted on Hostgator have been down for a total of 10 mins or so in the past 9 months. Compare that to Dreamhost where websites are down for an 1/2 hour on average (modest) in every 15 days. Sum that up and you get around 9 hours of average downtime for last 9 months! Which one will you choose? 10 mins or 9 hours?
Transparent with Statistics
Okay, when it comes to control panel user interface, I think Dreamhost is a clear winner. I find the Dreamhost control panel UI quite slick compared to the boring cPanel UI offered by Hostgator and most others shared webhosting service providers. Having said that, Hostgator’s cPanel offers you a quick glance over your real time RAM usage, CPU usage and number of concurrent processes running. This is something, which, for some reason beyond me, Dreamhost wants to hide from their customers.
If I have to choose a new shared hosting provider today, I think I will ONLY go with Hostgator.
Ankur Jain is a Software Engineer in Test Automation. After a 5 years stint with Accenture and Oracle, he started his eLearning company. A long-time blogger and proud owner of the "Learn" series of websites. 
I run my websites at my own dedicated server. But though i have heard a lot of Hostgator and i cam using a Hosting account with them. And its going great , The uptime is near to 100% and no network outage. I am using this account basically to backup my server and all hosting account via FTP transfer. I am doing so as the Additional Disk space with my dedicated service provider need lot of money for doing so and its a good option to use FTP to backup the server at different location.
Do anyone also using Hostgator for some other purpose than hosting sites ?
Hi Ankur!
Read this article on Hostgator. Would like to know if you are hosting at Hostgator.in , the indian arm? Would you recommend Hostgator.in for a new e-commerce site? How is the speed/response time, reliability, downtime etc?
I had earlier sought your advise on payment gateway and chose EBS as per your advice 🙂 We are submitting the documents this week, the experience has been fine so far.
Thanks a bunch,
Ashni
@Ashni: Do let us know your experience once EBS is up and running. I’m looking for the transaction failure rate in particular.
Regarding Hostgator, I know they have come up with an Indian arm and I guess they provide servers in the US only but still I would suggest you to go with Hostgator US. I can vouch for they service US folks provide. I normally avoid new offshoots for such services.
I have been advised that for sites which are targeting Indian audience, it might be better to host in Indian servers since there is a definite reduction in latency. What is your take?
Considering NetSpace India, Netmagic and Net 4 india. Any inputs on these?
@Ashni – In ideal scenario Yes, Google does pay attention to Page Speed as one of the ranking factors when it comes to SEO BUT I have considered many such options in the past and trust me – I hate to say this – when it comes to providing support most of the Indian web-hosting providers suck. You won’t want to see yourself in a situation where your website is down and there is no responsible person who can hear your grievances. Moreover if you’re worried about speed you can always use CDN (Amazon etc) to speed up things for the end user.
Remember – choosing a good host is a big decision that you would need to take while starting out, shifting web-hosts is always a pain.
Good Luck!
I agree with you,i have one of my websites hosted with hostgator vps and in 2 months hasnt been down once,that is pretty good,i love pretty much everything in hostgator,starting with the costumer support that is very helpfull and when i have a doubt they always manage to please me.
I used to have an account at bluehost and it was hoorible.
I have some websites on dreamhost and you are right,on average,hostgator beats dreamhost,but still,dreamhost is not bad.
Great review