Hostgator Review

Best known for having cheap shared web hosting plans with unlimited resource availability, HostGator has made its name in the hosting industry among small and medium-sized business.

In addition to shared hosting plans, HostGator also offer other types of hosting packages including VPS hosting, managed WordPress hosting plans, and dedicated servers that suit businesses of varying sizes.

Keep reading our detailed HostGator review to find out if this is a great choice for you.

A Brief HostGator Hosting Review

Founded in 2002, HostGator has quickly grown to become one of the biggest hosting companies in the world. You can credit its rapid growth to their affordable and reliable shared hosting plans as well as their quality customer service.

Today, it hosts over 10 million domains and serve businesses of all sizes thanks to its wide range of hosting packages.

Let’s have a closer look at different aspects of this hosting service;

Uptime and Speeds

HostGator has an uptime guarantee of 99.99%, which means your site will rarely experience downtimes. Obviously, planned maintenance and unpredictable hacks aren’t factored into this uptime guarantee. Having a dependable uptime is great since you will rarely lose a visitor to your competitors.

In terms of speed, HostGator is quite reliable. Although it may not be the fastest web host in terms of page load times, they have decent server load times.

Slow page loading times not only increases bounce rate but also impact on your visitor’s experience. It is good to see HostGator takes speed seriously.

Customer Support

HostGator provides support via phone, email, and live chat. All these options have great response time and you will often find a customer care rep to attend to you.

In addition, they have an exhaustive knowledge base where you can find plenty of issues addressed.

Security

HostGator’s shared hosting plans, especially the Hatchling Plan, lacks basic security features such as the ability to add SiteLock monitoring to your websites, which means you will need to pay to get these security features.

However, other plans have dependable security features that will keep your site safe and secure.

Interface

HostGator admin dashboard is known to be intuitive. All the crucial details such as domain name management, support, billing, and plan details are just a click away.

In terms of interface, HostGator has one of the most uncluttered and user-friendly dashboard in the market. They have cPanel to help you manage your site. This is a big plus as many people are used to cPanel, and thus will find it easier to navigate the HostGator admin dashboard.

HostGator Pricing Plans

HostGator offers different hosting plans, including shared hosting, cloud hosting, WordPress hosting, VPS hosting, and Reseller hosting.

Here is an overview of the different hosting plans it offers;

Shared Hosting

VPS and Dedicated Hosting Plans

If you would like to advance from shared hosting plans, HostGator offers VPS and Dedicated server plans.

Its highest VPS package offers 8GB RAM, data transfer capped at 3TB/month, and 240GB storage.

On the other hand, dedicated server plans can be customized up to 16GB RAM, 1TB of storage, and monthly data transfers capped at 25TB.

Cloud Hosting

All the cloud hosting plans include;

• Unmetered bandwidth
• Unmetered storage but you shouldn’t exploit it
• Email hosting
• MySQL included in all the plans

WordPress Hosting

HostGator also provides hosting plans dedicated to WordPress users with the cheapest package offering 1GB backups and allows your site to have up to 100,000 visitors a month. Higher plans accommodate up to 3 sites and can accommodate up to 500,000 visitors a month.

There is also Reseller Hosting package that comes with up to 60GB of disk space, 600GB of bandwidth, and ability to host unlimited number of domains.

These are the main hosting plans offered by HostGator. As you can see, the plans caters to everyone.

Pros and Cons of HostGator

Pros

• Generous money-back guarantee. HostGator offers a solid 45-days money-back guarantee. Many hosting companies offer 30-days money-back guarantee
• Reliable hosting. HostGator has an uptime guarantee of up to 99.99%. They promise to give you a month credit on your account if you experience downtime below this
• Free site migration. If you want to transfer your website from your current host to HostGator, there is an expert team that will transfer your site for you at no extra cost
• Flexible billing periods. HostGator offers monthly and yearly billing periods. The longer billion period you choose, the more discount you enjoy

Cons

• Lots of upsells and extra fees for malware, Gmail, and Backups. The shared hosting plans are cheap and give you all that you need to set up a website. However, additional security features such as site backups, SiteLock Monitoring, SEO tools, and Gmail access will cost you extra costs. These are crucial website hosting services you will need to run a safe site
• Pricing tricks. HostGator plays pricing tricks, whereby they have a low first subscription rate for their plans but pricier renewal prices

Do We Recommend HostGator?

Well, HostGator is a solid choice for websites with medium traffic. Their cloud infrastructure delivers amazing speed and uptime.

Overall, it remains to be a great website hosting company thanks to its modern, reliable servers that delivers excellent site loading speeds and great uptime guarantee.

If you are looking for a reliable and affordable hosting company for your new WordPress site, then HostGator is a great platform.

The good thing is that it offers a 45-days money-back guarantee to allow you to test their platform risk free.