HostGator.com review

To explore additional services and read a comprehensive analysis of HostGator, refer to the articles listed below.

HostGator Domain Registration

HostGator WordPress

HostGator VPS

HostGator Discount

First impression

HostGator, a Houston-based hosting provider, was founded in October 2002 by a young entrepreneur, Brent Oxley, a student at Florida Atlantic University at the time. From those early days of the interwebs, he had one goal in mind - to make a successful web presence possible for anyone, anywhere, through scalable solutions & expert support, and HostGator has been excelling at it ever since. The company is made up of more than 1000 highly capable administrators, engineers, and technicians, powering more than 2 million websites globally.

This giant of the hosting world provides easy, affordable, and scalable Shared Hosting, WordPress Hosting, VPS Hosting, and Dedicated Server Hosting plans.

Trial Period

They don't offer a trial run on their hosting services, but they do have a 30-day money-back guarantee. To qualify for the money-back guarantee on your shared, reseller, or VPS-hosting, you need to cancel your account within the first 30 days of purchase. 

If your plan includes a free domain registration and you request a refund, their standard fee for the domain name will be deducted from the amount owed to you. It is also important to note that packages paid for with checks, money orders, or bank wire transfers are not eligible for refunds.

Billing Cycle

HostGator offers numerous hosting plans, each with different features and pricing options to suit the needs and budgets of their broad client base. Like most big players in the industry, they offer a substantial discount for first-time customers.

They currently accept any credit or debit card with a MasterCard, Visa, Discover, or American Express logo as valid forms of payment.

Cash payments, Bank wire transfers, Cryptocurrency, Checks, and Money Orders (M.O.) are not accepted.

Control Panel

This provider offers a variety of hosting solutions to fit different needs, and as such, their plans have different control panels. In Shared hosting, you'll be allocated one cPanel and on VPS and Dedicated Linux servers, you'll have WHM (WebHost Manager), from where you can install multiple cPanels. Their Windows plans come standard with Plesk.

Limits

HostGator features three plans on their Shared Hosting, namely the Hatchling Plan, Baby Plan, and then lastly the Business Plan. The Hatchling plan is limited to a single website and 10GB disc space, the Baby Plan has 40GB space and allows you to host up to 5 websites, while the Business plan boasts unlimited space and websites, a dedicated IP address, Cloudflare CDN (content delivery network) and a free website migration service. All shared plans come standard with unmetered bandwidth and a free domain for the first year. Unfortunately, the Shared Hosting storage is still on standard HDDs and not SSD Drives as one would expect from a company of this stature.

Their VPS Hosting also offers three plans, that are named after their mascot Snappy. The entry-level plan is the Snappy2000, and it comes with 2GB RAM and 2 Core CPUs, the Snappy4000 has 4GB RAM with 4 Core CPUs whilst the Snappy8000 features 8GB RAM and 8Core CPUs allocated. Luckily their VPS storage runs on SSD Drives, and although it is not NVMe Drives, it is still way better than the outdated standard HDDs they use on their Shared Hosting plans.

Website Builder

They provide their clients with an easy-to-use, intuitive drag-and-drop website builder called “Gator Website Builder”. This builder is powered by web.com, and offers access to hundreds of beautiful, industry-specific designs, and more than 2 million free stock images, plus YouTube and Vimeo embeds, making it easy for individuals and small businesses to create a professional-looking website.

However, this builder is not free of charge and comes at an additional monthly fee.

Security

HostGator support comes in the form of DDoS protection as well as a free SSL certificate on all their hosting plans. On Shared Hosting the certificates are issued by Let’s Encrypt, and on VPS it will be a Sectigo SSL certificate. Should you feel that more protection is needed, there is also a paid-for service called SiteLock. This software addon scans your website for vulnerabilities like SQL injection flaws and cross-site scripting. It also submits forms and posts comments to find vulnerabilities hackers use to break in, in essence making your site a lot more secure and preventing blacklisting.

Their infrastructure also boasts a custom firewall, and significant ModSecurity rule sets, which is an open-source web-based firewall application (or WAF) supported by different web servers like Apache, Nginx, and IIS, offering protection from various forms of attack. 

Besides these measures, they employ additional server security methods and precautions, that are confidential and not made known to the general public.

OS

For Linux-based hosting, HostGator runs CentOS 7 (a free version of Red Hat) on their Shared Hosting, VPS, and Dedicated Server plans. Their Windows plans work with Windows Server 2016 on Shared Hosting and Windows Server 2019 on Dedicated Server packages.

Should your website be running an older version of PHP, you might run into problems as versions older than 7.3 are not supported on their servers.

Support

HostGator is well known for its excellent and efficient support. Customers can reach out to them 24/7 via Phone, Live Chat, or an Email Ticketing System. There is also a decent knowledge base that you can access from within your hosting dashboard, that will offer solutions to most common issues.

One thing I personally dislike a bit is the fact that you will first chat with a bot on their live chat before being transferred to a real person, however, one still gets friendly assistance fairly quickly. On live chat you can expect to be helped within a minute, emails take a bit longer though, and you should get a reply back within a few minutes.

Conclusion

HostGator is a reliable web hosting company that has been around for longer than most. They have a broad range of hosting solutions to suit most users, guarantee a 99.9% server uptime, and offer great discounts when first signing up. For me personally, there are a few drawbacks though, with the biggest one being the fact that their Shared Hosting still runs on standard HDDs, which isn’t what one would expect from such a big brand as HostGator. The second is their support on live chat, one gets the impression at times that the agents also need to check the knowledge base for answers, rather than be able to answer my questions right away. Overall, HostGator I still an excellent choice for hosting your site.