HostGator Web Hosting Review

HostGator offers shared web hosting, dedicated web hosting, and reseller web hosting accounts. Their website is straight-forward and offers easy comparisons of various plans. The company offers free setup, month-to-month terms, a 30 day money back guarantee and 24/7 support. In this review, we share our own personal experience in setting up web hosting with HostGator. If you sign up for hosting with HostGator, use the promo code 404page and get your first month for only $.01

Signup Process - HostGator Web Hosting

Signup Process Score: 92

Signing up for web hosting with HostGator was a breeze. From their homepage, they clearly break down three distinct levels of web hosting service - shared, reseller, and dedicated.

For the purpose of this evaluation, we chose to setup a shared hosting account. It is very important to click the LEARN MORE link, instead of the ORDER NOW link from the homepage, as the plan details are not displayed on the direct order page. This is particularly confusing, given the plan names - all following the gator theme (Hatchling, Baby, Swamp, etc).

Once we navigated to the proper page, it was simple to choose the appropriate plan - each offering is presented in a table for side by side comparison. The Baby plan looked like a great value (more on this in the Services evaluation), so we opted for this plan.

The remainder of the signup process was expectedly smooth - pick a domain name, choose your billing preference (more on this in Billing section), and submit. A confirmation email arrived in our inbox seconds later, and within 20 minutes, our account was live. Aside from the minor confusion surrounding the "Order Now" link, this process was streamlined and glitch-free. We gave the signup process a 92% score, for an A-.

Quality of Services - HostGator Web Hosting

Services Score: 100

HostGator's shared web hosting plan received a perfect score in our services evaluation for several reasons: flexibility of the offering, value added services, and site performance.

Compared to other hosts in a similar price range, HostGator offered more flexibility than expected. With our simple shared hosting account ($9.95 per month), we were able to host unlimited domains, unlimited subdomains, unlimited POP3 accounts, and unlimited MySQL databases. We also had 3 webmail programs to choose from and HostGator includes AWStats free of charge with the account. This upgraded, real-time stats package is typically provided by other hosts at an extra charge.

HostGator's offering continued to impress when we considered value added services offered. Our account came equipped with software that could be installed with the click of a button, including WordPress (the popular blogging software), 4 shopping cart options, web forum software, email list management software, and content management software. While we opted not to use most of these tools, their availability is certainly beneficial to many website developers.

The final, and most important, evaluation parameter in the services area is site performance. How did HostGator stack up in terms of website uptime, site load time, handling of complex php scripts, and responsive MySQL request handling? Flawlessly. In short, making use of HostGator's many features was easy, and the performance in all areas exceeded our every expectation.

Billing Evaluation - HostGator Web Hosting

Billing Score: 100

Billing for our shared web hosting account with HostGator went as one would hope. Their website clearly and accurately set forth the billing terms and pricing, and there were no surprises sprung on us. Payment options included Visa, MasterCard, Discover, American Express, and PayPal. Payment was conducted over a secure connection with a valid certificate, and the billed amount (on our credit card statement) matched the advertised price.

Support - HostGator Web Hosting

Support Score: 95

Given that we encountered no difficulty in setting up our website with HostGator, we didn't get to fully test the abilities of their support staff. We did however run a few test calls to evaluate wait time and to get several hypothetical issues resolved.

After dialing HostGator's support number, we are prompted for sales or support. It took roughly 25 seconds to make the call and listen to this opening prompt. From there, we averaged a 66 second wait time before being greeted by a support representative. During this wait time, we were regularly notified of our status in the support queue, which was helpful. We were quite pleased to speak with a live person after an average of only 90 seconds after picking up the phone.

On all of our test calls, our support representative was helpful, courteous, and knowledgeable. They always spoke clearly and were responsive to our needs. The only negative we experienced was a short delay (less than 90 seconds) in getting an answer to a question posed about the full path to our site location on the server. In fairness, it's probably a bit picky to take points away for this, but it's a fairly basic question that support representatives should be prepared to answer.

Our only other support related complaint deals with the lack of automation for account management. We were unable to find a way to upgrade, downgrade, or cancel a hosting account online. Any of these actions require a call to customer support. This is obviously less than ideal, and a considerable hassle.

On the whole, however, we were thrilled with HostGator's level of support, which was expected, given the exceptional quality we found in the other areas for evaluation.