I have mentioned in one of my earlier posts about the 3 reasons I love hostgator. The post generated a good interest so here goes my in-depth review of Ho
stgator from shared web hosting point of view (not for VPS or dedicated servers though I have heard good words about them too)
Choosing between various plans on Hostgator
There are 3 shared hosting plans available on Hostgator. Hatchling, Baby and Business. All others parameters being same, Hatchling plan will only allow 1 domain to be hosted with Hostgator while Baby and Business plans will allow an unlimited number of domains. Business plan has an added advantage that you get a unique IP address for your website along with a free SSL certificate from Comodo.
Shared webservers are notorious for hosting “borderline illegal” websites. This may result in your website getting flagged by ISPs for no fault of yours. Having a unique IP address for your website would therefore be safer. Tip: Hostgator mentions that they provide a unique IP for $2/month for Baby accounts. Under new Hostgator terms, however, you need to remember that this will only be given out when you purchase it along with a SSL certificate. Hence, if you wish to get a unique IP for your website I suggest you to go with Business plan straightaway.
Hostgator’s Sign Up Process
It’s a zero hassle process. You would need to supply a domain name that becomes your primary domain name. (You can change this primary domain later). To make sure that you are the real owner of a genuine credit card, they may ask you some verification questions after the payment is made. Make sure you don’t store or host anything illegal on Hostgator servers. They are quick to remove such sites. In fact this is good for honest site owners like us, who don’t have to fear about their shared server IP address getting flagged by various internet service providers(ISPs).
Start a new site or transfer an already existing site
Once you’ve signed up with them, you can either start a new site or transfer an existing site from some other webhost. One website transfer is provided free of cost. Make sure to avail this facility within 30 days of opening a new account with them. I used this service for myself while I transferred my site from DreamHost to Hostgator and it was a real quick process. You just need to supply them with your FTP id of both the accounts (and leave any instructions) on this form
Customer Support
One of the best customer support I have seen in the web hosting industry. When a company cares for its customers it shows. At any given time you can find there would be more than 50 customer support specialists helping customers on LIVE chat support. It normally take 1-2 min to get connected to a real person and get polite and really helpful responses. Customer care folks do know what they are doing.
Strong Servers
With Dreamhost, my wordpress sites started generating all sort of errors and time outs at around 2000 page views/day mark. With Hostgator, I am comfortably sitting at around 4000 page views/day with no signs of errors and control panel looking as healthy as ever.
While Hostgator provides unlimited bandwith and storage for your servers, you need to take care that number of concurrent running processes should not go beyond 25 and CPU, Memory usage stays within 25%.
Bonus Offer for ReviewOfWeb Readers
We have partnered with Hostgator and are thus providing a super high bonus worth $600 if you sign up through this step-by-step process.
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. 