HOSTGATOR REVIEW 

HostGator might be one of the biggest, oldest web hosting companies in the industry, but they’re still making improvements, posting an average uptime of 99.98% over the past 24 months.

Their basic shared hosting plans come with unlimited storage, bandwidth, free domain (for the first year), and a free SSL certificate. They also have great customer service, who connected through a live chat instantly and answered each question within a few seconds each.

Unfortunately, HostGator’s average page loading times let them down (1191ms average). Many extra services, like backups and security, will be tacked on as additional fees. Plus, the renewal rates rise aggressively after your first term expires.

HOSTGATOR PROS AND CONS

Like every other product and service, each hosting company has its pros and cons. Here are the pros and cons of HostGator that we learned.

Pros:

Reliable hosting: HostGator guarantees an uptime of 99.99%. If you experience downtime below that, then you will get back one month credit on your account.

Generous money-back guarantee: HostGator offers 45 days money-back guarantee. Normally, web hosting companies do not offer a money-back guarantee to exceed 30 days.

Flexible billing periods: You can choose between monthly and yearly billing periods. Longer billing periods will get you the most discount.

Free migration: HostGator offers free migration service with all new accounts. Their expert team will transfer your website from your previous host at no extra cost during the first 30 days of signing up.

Cons:

No free domain: Unlike many other hosting companies, HostGator does not offer a free domain registration upon signing up.

Aggressive upselling: You need to review the additional services pre-selected during the sign-up process. If you are unsure, then uncheck them anyways. You can always add them later when needed.

HOSTGATOR PERFORMANCE

What would you do if you sign up for a host and find that your website is painfully slow and often disappears? You’d have to switch providers, and this will cost you more money and headache.

That’s why you want to choose a web hosting company that is reliably fast with stable performance record all around. But how would you get this information?

We decided to check HostGator’s performance by running our own tests. Let’s find out how well it performed.

The green line in the chart is page load time and the blue line shows the number of users on the site. As you can see, our test site performed really well up to 80 users, after that it started to slow down.

These results are particularly good for a shared hosting account. Remember that on a shared hosting account, you share server resources with other sites hosted on that same server. You will need to upgrade your hosting account if you start getting more visitors at the same time.

Another remarkable thing to be noticed is that our test site didn’t go down during the test. As you can see in the screenshot below.

FINAL THOUGHTS

HostGator is a good choice for those who want a cheap hosting option. Its best feature is the unmetered hosting, which is perfect for a smaller website. The support is also excellent, even if their knowledge base is a little difficult to navigate.

HostGator is a good, solid, easy-to-work-with host nonetheless. Its user-friendliness and good support make it a good choice for smaller sites.