Hostgator Overview

HostGator was founded in 2002 in Florida, USA and since then it has grown into the web's leading web hosting giants. According to the customers HostGator stands out in this competitive and populated industry of web hosting providers due to its exceptional, satisfactory and effective customer care and support.

Best of all HostGator provides an affordable group of packages with outstanding features that will suit one or the other businesses.

HostGator's key to success is their motto that is a reliable service, a customer support that never fails you and a pricing package that provides features that any site owner can only dream for.

Hostgator Features Explained

HostGator offers 3 different plans for the shared hosting. We select their Baby plan as our reviewed plan because it is the most value-for-money one.

With 5000MB diskspace, 75GB bandwith at $9.95, it may not look as cheap as our other top 10 hosts. But HostGator offers some features that are hardly found at other hosts. For example, you can host unlimited sites if you sign up for their Baby plan. HostGator is the first hosting company to offer this exceptional feature at such a low price.

Besides that, you'll also get unlimited MySQL database and unlimited subdomains.

There's no setup fee even if you sign up for 1 month period and just like our other hosts, you'll get 30-day Money Back Guarantee. Therefore, if you are concerned with the quality, you can just sign up for one month and evaluate their service level before going for longer terms.

If you want to have your own website design but you do not want to outsource the work, you can try out HostGator SiteStudio . With SiteStudio, you don't need to know anything about FTP, HTML, HTTP, or Designing. SiteStudio guides you step-by-step, providing simple choices regarding color, style and images. There is no software to download and no code to learn.

HostGator plans don't come with marketing package. If you need to promote your site with some useful marketing software, you can try out Powweb.

HostGator uses cPanel as the control panel. They have Fantastico Deluxe installed in the cPanel which allows you to choose among 36 popular scripts to be installed on your website. To try out cPanel, you can go to the demo page at http://67.18.39.34/cpanel
Login: demo
Password: demo

Hostgator Customer Support

One of the reasons why HostGator becomes a reputable host in just 3 years is because they place great emphasis on customer service.

As quoted from an interview with HostGator's CEO, Brent, "One unhappy customer is worth the weight of 1,000 satisfied customers in terms of how they can affect future business, so we strive to keep as many people happy as we can." Communication plays a big role in keeping Hostgator's customers happy.

Besides phone support, we are also very impressed with their live chat support. Even though they don't specify 24-hour availability for their live chat, we can still get hold of their live chat staff even on 5am Eastern Time. It's also amazing to see that their staff is able to address every single of our enquiry early in the morning.

If you need to send attachment or give more detailed information, taking advantage of their email support is the best way. Once your email has been sent, you'll expect to get reply within 24 hours.

HostGator does not yet have a huge knowledgebase . Though they claim that 99% of all questions can be found in their knowledgebase, we can't find the basic info like version of Php and MySQL. This is the area that we think HostGator could improve on.

In order to allow their customers to share information, they recently launched the community forums . This forum is not as active as PowWeb and Lunarpages and only have limited categories at the moment. However, just as they strive to give the best support to all customers, we are sure that the forum will one day become very popular and filled with happy customers.

Hostgator Popularity

In just 3-year in business, HostGator has built itself as a reputable brand and the customer base has grown from just under 100 customers to more than 10,000, with about 1,000 new customers signing up every month. They have won several awards such as:

- A 5-Star host recommended by Webhostmagazine.com (independent review was done on July 5, 2005)
- Assured Hosting Company by Findmyhosting.com
and many more...

Their Alexa ranking is the proof that they are getting stable increase in traffic ever since they launched the site. In fact, they have not experienced any traffic downturn since 2 years ago. This is a very good sign that HostGator is on the way to become the next "big guy" in the hosting industry.

Hostgator Datacenter

HostGator has chosen The Planet to provide its customers with superior network connectivity with minimal required downtime. Located in Dallas, Texas, The Planet's Data Center boasts over 35,000 square feet of raised floor space featuring state-of-the-art security, safety, and cooling systems and is second-to-none in the industry.

Just this summer, Hostgator purchased 620 servers from The Planet. This brings the number of servers handling Hostgator's business to more than 850.

* Reliability

Choosing HostGator means that your sites will be accessible via a fully meshed and redundant Certified Cisco Network featuring 10 backbone providers. These providers include:
o UUNet (GigE)
o Sprint (GigE)
o Level 3 (GigE)
o Global Crossing (GigE)
o Verio (GigE)
o AT&T (GigE)
o Time Warner (GigE)
o Allegiance Telecom (2 x GigE)
o Broadwing (GigE)
o AboveNet (2 x GigE)

* Speed

HostGator servers use high speed OC48 to connect to the internet. Their backbone is fully meshed and redundant.

Conclusion

If you're tired of bouncing from host to host then I would suggest you give http://www.Hostgator.com a try. They have tremendous support options that are second to none, including live telephone support, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Although the pricing is not exactly cheap, the cost isn't that bad considering the bandwidth and disk space allocations you are provided with, plus you can host unlimited sites, if you sign-up for their baby plan and we think it is still an ideal solution for personal web sites or small business websites.