HostGator Review

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February 10, 2022 March 28, 2022

HostGator Web Hosting Review, Price, Plan & Deals

HostGator Web Hosting, The basic option for small and medium businesses

Pros

Excellent shared hosting offering
Numerous, feature-rich hosting plans
45 days money-back guarantee
Good for novice webmasters
Useful site-building software and e-commerce tools
24/7 support via phone and live chat

Cons

Not all plans have a Windows Server option
No free backups
Dedicated/VPS plans are very costly

HostGator Web Hosting Specification
Shared Hosting	Yes
VPS Hosting	Yes
Dedicated Hosting	Yes
WordPress Hosting	Yes
Cloud Hosting	Yes
Reseller Hosting	Yes
Linux Servers	Yes
Windows Servers	Yes
24/7 Customer Support	Yes

👉 View Best Deals On HostGator

HostGator Review

Based in the US, HostGator offers a wide variety of solutions including shared hosting, VPS hosting, dedicated hosting, cloud hosting, or even reseller hosting. While dedicated hosting plans give the option of Windows and Linux as the underlying operating system, all shared hosting and VPS plans are Linux-based. HostGator defaults to CentOS 7 for all of its Linux installations, but you can request CentOS 6 if that's more your speed.

Shared hosting plans start at $2.95 per month for a three-year subscription and may sound tempting due to no disk space and bandwidth. However, keep in mind that if your needs exceed 25% of the total available resources, the hosting provider will ask you to reduce the use of resources. Nevertheless, HostGator claims that its shared hosting plans should be sufficient for small and medium business websites.

Unlike many other hosting providers that allow backup out of the box, with HostGator you have to purchase the CodeGuardBasic service separately for $2 per month. The service offers daily automatic backups, 1GB of storage space, and three restores per month, and you can even restore an entire site, or a file, to a previous state with one click.

HostGator Hosting Pricing and payment methods

HostGator offers a wide range of hosting solutions, and regardless of your budget or needs, there is bound to be one that suits you best. These include shared hosting, VPS, cloud, and dedicated hosting in addition to reseller hosting.

HostGator's shared hosting plans start with the Hatchling plan, which costs $2.75 per month for a three-year subscription. As with most hosting providers, the initial purchase price is quite attractive, but the renewal cost is high. You have to pay $6.95/month for renewal. While most hosting providers work very hard to explain how their plans differ from each other, HostGator's Baby and Hatchling plans boast similar features, and yet the former plan costs $3.50 per month.

Some of the most used features are included in all shared hosting plans, including a free email account. This is quite surprising as most hosting providers insist that you pay extra for a professional email address that matches your chosen domain name. By its admission, HostGator claims that its shared hosting plans should be sufficient for most small and medium businesses, but the premium plan includes useful benefits like dedicated IPs.

HostGator also widely promotes its WordPress hosting plans. You can choose between three plans, with the cheapest Start plan at $5.95 per month for a three-year subscription, $9.95 per month with each renewal. The Start plan allows you to deploy a single website and limits the number of monthly visitors to 100k. It also includes a free domain name, professional support, SSL certificate, etc. Other plans increase the number of websites you can deploy to the shared hosting space, as well as the number of monthly visitors.

It is also possible to easily deploy additional applications and HostGator supports single-click installation of dozens of different applications across different genres such as e-commerce, podcasts, wikis, music, gaming, file management, and more.

HostGator pay-to-play

Users looking for more resources on their servers should opt for either VPS or dedicated hosting. HostGator offers three VPS plans, starting at $19.95 per month (renews at $79.95 per month). It is also not possible to customize the plans as per your needs, so you should opt for the next closest plan. For example, you should choose the plan that offers 8GB of RAM, even if you only need 6GB.

For larger businesses, HostGator also offers three managed dedicated hosting plans, ranging from $89.90 per month to $119.89 per month.

You can also use add-on services to improve your search engine rankings such as CodeGuard for daily backup, web design service to design a professional website, pay-per-click service to manage Google ads and even You can also opt for SEO service.

The money-back-guarantee only applies to hosting plans and not to other services such as domain registration, domain transfer, or add-on services. Per their refund policy, no refund will be given if the payment was made by wire transfer, Western Union money transfer, check, or money order. In addition, the refund request must be made in writing, and it can take up to 90 days for the refund to be processed.

Like many other hosting providers, HostGator accepts almost all major credit and debit cards, PayPal, money orders at their Houston addresses, bank wire transfers, and certain regional payment methods accepted through PayPal and some electronic gift cards. supports. Payment in bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies is not accepted.

HostGator Creating a website

After simple signup, HostGator's shared hosting package comes with a variety of tools to help you build and manage a website.

For example, there is an install WordPress link. This takes you to a page where HostGator offers to set up WordPress for a fee ($99 to $49 with WordPress theme credits), and if you're not paying attention, it's easy to assume you'll need one of these. You have to choose one of the options. However, those are just some overzealous upselling, and you can install WordPress yourself by just entering a few blog details: title, admin username, email, and so on.

A Softaculous setup enables quick installation of 400+ other apps, including Drupal, Joomla, Magento, PrestaShop, phpBB, MediaWiki, and more. It's probably the best of the auto-installers, but for some reason, HostGator also includes a similar (but more basic) one-click install tool of its own.

The shared hosting package also includes a free Weebly Builder plan. It has an excellent drag-and-drop editor, the site can be hosted on your domain, and has free SSL thrown in. Hold? Well, there are two: Your site is limited to 500MB in size, and it displays ads.

You can upgrade from $5.99 per month over three years to a shared hosting plan, which omits ads and space limits, and includes site search, password protection, HD video, and audio support, and more. But if you're after drag-and-drop simplicity, check out HostGator's Gator Website Builder first--prices start at $3.84 per month and you can get e-commerce support for under $10 per month in the initial term.

If you're an experienced user who doesn't need this handholding, no problem; A full-featured cPanel installation gives you all the FTP, SSH, database, file management, and domain functionality you need to get your site up and running.

HostGator Site management

HostGator's customer portal is an online dashboard where you can manage your account and have complete control over your webspace.

It's very text-heavy with a plethora of links, but many of these are related to optional extras. For example, 'CodeGuard Backup' sounds interesting, but unless you bought it during signup, you'll find it a tempting effort trying to convince you to buy it now.

Despite these annoyances, the dashboard scores for its many convenient touches. A 'Control Panel' section contains links to common site management modules - email accounts, webmail, databases, file managers - and with a single click you can upload files, create email accounts, or whatever else you need to do. is required.

Not sure how to do something? Start typing in the search box and the site immediately displays matching articles. There is a lot of content, sensibly organized, and we usually find what we need in a click or two.

If you're not so lucky, there is 24/7/365 support available via live chat and telephone (toll-free in the US).

We've always had great results with HostGator's support, and this time was no different. When we tried live chat, a helpful agent responded within two minutes, understood our question quickly, and gave us sensible and accurate advice: exactly what we needed.

HostGator Performance

We started our performance testing by setting up a simple static website on our Hostgator plan, then using site uptime to check its availability and response times for a week.

Our site never went down during the monitoring period. That's what we'd expect after only a week of testing, but it was still nice to see.

Response times average 378ms at the low end of the basic shared hosting market (most providers average between 200-400ms.)

HostGator has better news in 'worst case' times. In over 2,000 tests, the slowest response logged was only 556ms, which was significantly better than many hosts (the current average of our last 30 reviews is 891ms).

As a final check, we used dotcom-tools' website speed test to check our site's load times from 16 locations around the US and Europe. It delivered better results of around 870ms, placing it in the upper mid-range of the shared hosting competition.

This is good news for HostGator, but keep in mind that these comparisons are based on the low-tier shared hosting products for each provider. If you want to buy a VPS or other higher-tier plan, the results can be very different.

HostGator: Final Call

HostGator's high-end VPS and dedicated plans are short on configuration, but its shared hosting plans offer plenty of features for a very reasonable price, with high-quality support to make sure everything runs smoothly. and a generous 45-day money-back guarantee ensures there is no risk. A smart choice for shared hosting users who need more.

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