HostGator Review
Reliable services from a well-known name in the hosting industry. More than 12,000 servers and 90% customer satisfaction.
Overview
HostGator has been providing web hosting services for over a decade and is well-known for easy-to-use shared hosting, consistent uptime reliability, and WordPress hosting. Although HostGator is mostly known as being a shared hosting company, you can still find decent VPS and dedicated options if you’re looking to scale your site.
With a bit of a higher price point than some of the more budget-conscious hosting providers, HostGator balances their costs out with a solid reputation for strong support and infrastructure. You’ll find respectable shared hosting features like free website templates, unlimited disk space, and a pleasant control panel.
Key Features
HostGator has some great features to help you get secure hosting services for your website or blog. The following are some of our favorite HostGator web hosting features.
Simple Control: HostGator comes with cPanel, which is the world’s most popular and easy-to-use web hosting control panel. Plus, you’ll get tons of support options, whether you’re a newbie or an expert.
Quick Site Setup: You can easily install WordPress or other software with just one click on the HostGator platform. Plus, there are tons of free and premium themes available for your website.
VPS and Dedicated Servers: HostGator also offers advanced options that more experienced users will be pleased to see, including dedicated servers and Virtual Private Servers (VPS).
Multiple Domain Management: Whether you’re running a single website or twenty of them, you’ll find what you need with HostGator, thanks to being able to manage an unlimited number of domains with their Baby or Business Plans.
Ease of Use
HostGator offers a simple but modern website builder and the familiar cPanel interface. This gives users an uncomplicated but powerful web hosting experience. You’ll be able to get started quickly and easily when using HostGator to build your website or blog.
- Drag & Drop Website Builder
- Uncomplicated Control Panel
- Powerful Security & Software
Reliability & Support
HostGator guarantees the industry-standard uptime of 99.9% and that means you can rely on them to keep your website up and running. While you might find other web hosting providers that claim a higher uptime, they also come with a higher cost and don’t have HostGator’s solid reputation.
- 24/7 Phone Support
- 24/7 Live Chat Support
- Online Knowledge Base
Pricing Plans
HostGator offers a variety of pricing options and comes with an industry-leading 45-day money-back guarantee to help you decide if it’s the right web hosting service for your needs.
Hatchling Plan ($2.75 a month)
- Supports 1 Domain
- One-Click Installation
- Unmetered Bandwidth
- Free SSL Certificate
Baby Plan ($3.95 a month)
- Supports Unlimited Domains
- One-Click Installation
- Unmetered Bandwidth
- Free SSL Certificate
Business Plan ($5.95 a month)
- Supports Unlimited Domains
- One-Click Installation
- Unmetered Bandwidth
- Free SSL Certificate
- Free Dedicated IP
- Free SEO Tools
Please Note: Prices listed are promotional and HostGator services will auto-renew at regular rates when your current subscription comes to an end.
HostGator for Blog and WordPress Hosting
Blogs are an important part of developing an online presence and WordPress is the chosen CMS (Content Management System) for most business and personal websites. That’s why we’re sharing the best features of HostGator WordPress hosting with you.
- One-click WordPress installation via cPanel
- 99.9% guaranteed uptime to stay online
- Unlimited “at your domain” email addresses
- Simple shared server WordPress hosting
- Includes $100 in Google Adwords credits
Overall, we found that HostGator provides a good WordPress hosting experience.
The Good
As with all of our editor reviews, we put HostGator through its paces, so you don’t have to waste your own time. Let’s take a look at some of our favorite HostGator benefits…
Quick and Easy Setup
HostGator provides their users with a drag-and-drop website building experience that will have you up and running in no time. You can choose from pre-built sections, tons of themes, and other helpful ways to get your website published fast.
One-Click Installations
With QuickInstall, you can create a blog, forum, photo gallery, or wiki site with just one click. You can also choose from Linux, Apache, MySQL, or PHP and thousands of applications and compatible software types.
Hosting for Top Platforms
No matter what kind of website you want to create, HostGator offers web hosting for the best site platforms in the world. You’ll get access to highly customizable designs for e-commerce sites, blogs, and more.
- WordPress Hosting
- Joomla Hosting
- Drupal Hosting
- Magento Hosting
- Wiki Hosting
- phpBB Hosting
Great Guarantees
HostGator guarantees 99.9% uptime for your site and you can try their web hosting services risk-free with a 45-day money-back guarantee. You’ll also get the confidence that comes with 24/7/365 tech support by phone, email, or live chat.
The Bad
HostGator offers pretty standard features but there aren’t many extras. You’ll have to handle all of the admin work on your end since they don’t provide managed hosting services. That means taking care of your own backups and additional security measures.
HostGator also displayed some mediocre page loading times. We found that HostGator hosted sites were 10% slower to load than those hosted with competitors. While this isn’t a huge difference, it’s definitely something to take into consideration when shopping for web hosts.
The Bottom Line
HostGator is a good fit for semi-technical users and provides tons of web hosting flexibility with a variety of platform options. They also offer SSH, root access, and support for Python, Perl, and Ruby for those that need it.
You’ll get nearly limitless options and control, but there is a learning curve involved and it might not be the best choice for web hosting beginners. But if you want unmetered bandwidth and need to host multiple sites, HostGator is definitely a solid option.
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