HostGator is a Houston-based provider of shared, virtual private server, reseller, and dedicated web hosting with an additional presence in Austin, Texas.
HostGator was founded in October 2002 by Brent Oxley, who was then a student at Florida Atlantic University. In year 2006, the company moved from the original office in Boca Raton, Florida to a new 20,000 square foot building in Houston, Texas. In June 2006, the company opened its first international office in Canada.
HostGator Pros
- A variety of feature-packed hosting plans
- Excellent shared hosting offering
- Good for novice webmasters
- Useful site-building software
- Good customer service
- Outstanding uptime
HostGator Cons
- No Windows-based VPS hosting
Every business needs a website, whether it’s a fully functional e-commerce setup or a simple blog to post daily updates. In either case, you need a web hosting service. Full-featured HostGator is a top choice, quality cloud, reseller, virtual private server (VPS), and dedicated server packages, but they are the most widely distributed shared hosting plans from the most complete web hosting package. In fact, the packages assigned to HostGator are so robust that the service gains our Editors’ Choice rating in that category below.
Shared hosting, if you don’t know the category, is a type of web hosting that sees multiple sites residing on a single server. In this setting, the sites share server resources (hence the name), so the increase in high traffic to Site A, unfortunately, could negatively affect Site B performance. Collaborative hosting is a great option if you want cheap hosting; If you want more dedicated server resources on your site, you need to go for a VPS or dedicated hosting routes.
HostGator offers shared web hosting plans every month, but is hard pressed to sign up for longer terms, starting at six months. I don’t like that during HostGator’s automatic subscription process up to three years. It is one thing to encourage users to skip the monthly service, but pressuring them three years from the start is very small.
That said, HostGator offers shared hosting packages via Linux- or Windows that provide small and medium-sized businesses with room for growth. The Hatchling program (starting at $ 10.95 per month) offers unlimited disk space, monthly data transfers, information, and email addresses, as well as one-on-one support for third-party applications such as content management systems and e-commerce platforms. The Baby plan (starting at $ 11.95 per month) builds on the Hatchling offer by adding unlimited domains. The Business top-tier plan (starting at $ 16.95 per month) includes special options, such as a free number for your business and a private SSL certificate (secure socket).
Excellent Uptime Results
Website downtime is one of the most important aspects of hosting service. If your site is down, clients or customers will be able to find you or access your products or services.
I have used a website monitoring tool to track our test time hosted by HostGator within 14 days. Every 15 minutes, the tool catches my website and sends me an email if it can communicate with the site for at least one minute. Test data reveals that HostGator is remarkably stable; in fact, it did not drop once in the two-week trial period. You don’t have to worry about your HostGator site going down for too long.
WordPress Web Hosting in HostGator
HostGator allows you to install a WordPress Content Management System (CMS) on any of its servers, but the webmaster also offers three WordPress-managed web hosting services: Starter, Standard, and Business.
Starter (starting at $ 14.95 per month) offers 25,000 visits per month, the ability to host one WordPress site, 50GB of storage, and unlimited email. Standard (starting at $ 20.95) offers features for two WordPress sites, 200,000 monthly visits, and 150GB of disk space. Business (starting at $ 27.95 per month) offers three WordPress sites, 300,000 monthly visits, and unlimited storage. All programs come with page maintenance and customized WordPress customization environment.
A2, our Editors’ WordPress Hosting Choice, tops HostGator and the competition by offering three of the best WordPress WordPress-Lite, Swift, Turbo-includes unlimited storage and monthly data transfers across the board. Its pre-built environment comes with many features for WordPress, including live malware protection and selected plug-ins designed to enhance your experience.
WordPress is easy to set up on HostGator even if you do not follow the WordPress managed route. Customer portal has an option called Quick Links that opens a dedicated interface for installing third-party applications. There is also a usable shortcut called Get Started with WordPress Today which leads to the Quick Links interface. I set the path to the installation of my blog, entered the username for the WordPress administrator account, and clicked the installation button. As simple as that, my site was functional and functional. HostGator has also automatically installed the WP-Super-Cache WordPress plug-in to help improve blog performance.
In the test, the process of setting up my WordPress site was simple, because the database already existed. There was also a link to the Mojo Marketplace under WordPress services, with premium add-ons and services for my blog. HostGator doesn’t have a blog import button, but WordPress makes the import process easy enough.
