Why HostGator is NOT the Best Web Hosting Company

Hosting Services are not free of charge. Building blogs or websites require domain and space. You need to spend around $10 for .com domain and $100 – $150 per year to host your website. HostGator WordPress hosting is one of the cheapest in the industry. But you need to manage it all.

Investing in a US based web bosting company is more beneficial than buying space from a local company. Initially in the year 2012, I tried some Indian companies (my local country), but had to shun them for bad support to WordPress plugins and themes.

HostGator Hosting Review – Now and Then

Before EIG took over in 2012, the uptime, speed and tech support were good. Based on that I took 3 year plan for it’s reasonable pricing. But after 1 year, concerns related to customer support, server issues, wordpress problems and slow speed started cropping up. I immediately stopped their hosting and changed to SiteGround.

In 2022, after ten years, I was looking back at the article I wrote in 2012. It was a completely positive review. When I searched other blogs and forums, I found that there are some improvements and shortcomings.

In 2022, response times seem to be better than 2014. But customer support is to the dissatisfaction of the loyal user base. Server issues still there.

Cheap hosting services exist like $1 per month, but they lack proper speed and technical support. You can also get Linux or Windows Server support based upon your plan.

In this HostGator review, we shall see whether you can purchase a plan from their sales team. Pros and Cons, Complaints mentioned on other blogs.

HostGator WordPress Hosting Review

Whether you want cloud hosting or wordpress hosting, HostGator comes at affordable prices. 99% uptime and easy refunds. Customer support and speed are it’s weakness.

– Palla Sridhar

cheap wordpress hosting
Shared Hosting
Customer Support
Price
Features
Speed

Summary

The crocodile will eat you up to the neck. Yes, there are lot of complaints about HostGator after EIG’s acquisition of the company. PC World has lot of comments for poor customer support. Redditors are also not happy with the issue resolution. The only best thing you can hear about HostGator is its cheap price. WordPress install is breezy and cPanel is like a heart refresher. Nothing great to talk about this hosting. But it’s making money from marketing and discount sales.

2.6

HostGator WordPress Plans, Pricing and Comparison

WordPress Hosting is fully supported by HostGator. They have affordable plans with upto 70% discount during season sale. It is supported free WordPress Install by using cPanel scripts. All you have to do is run the script and input your desired login data.

wordpress hosting plans pricing comparison
Why HostGator is NOT the Best Web Hosting Company 10

If you are changing from another host to HostGator site migration is also provided based on the plan. For Starter, only 1 site, up to 2 sites for Standard and up to 3 sites for Business. It makes your life easy copying all the files and database from another host to theirs.

Also, the server configuration is well taken care of by the support team. But if you need additional migration you either need to pay extra charges or do it yourself. Make sure you talk about the price before you incur cost on this service, as it may lead to long tech support battles later.

wordpress customer support hostgator
Why HostGator is NOT the Best Web Hosting Company 11

The support team is also available 24/7/365 throughout the clock. But it is not that techie and helpful while giving resolution to your problems. Many comments on different blogs, narrate the pain in language communication and waiting time. Though different channels like call, chat, tweet, knowledge base and learning are provided, make sure you have enough time to resolve your query.

HostGator Reviews Complaints

  1. Customer team has not enough knowledge. They are difficult to handle their own upgrades. Getting back the money is hard when you once paid for their services.
  2. Long holding times over phone and chat. Disconnection even after waiting for that long. They don’t even understand simple English. SSL errors are not resolved quickly.
  3. Privacy is not available. Sharing of customer information with third-parties.
  4. Not easy to do business and run small business websites. Email hosting may be down for somedays and quick resolution will not take place.
  5. Slow loading pages and slow WordPress panel make it tough to edit, create and save posts and pages. This results in poor ranking and TTFB times are very high.
  6. Site security is not handled well by the HostGator tech support team. Even after changing usernames, passwords, SFTP credentials, still the site gets malware, hacking etc kind of attacks.
  7. Servers fail quickly when the loads reach peak. Shared Hosting Plan is not that effective in performance and resources.
  8. Search engines may not index your site due to HostGator’s poor reputation. Outsourcing of tech support doesn’t solve this problem. As a result loss of revenue and business.
  9. No time frame to solve server and technical errors. WordPress support is not good. DreamHost and SiteGround are recommended hosting of WordPress.
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hostagor cons 2
Source: WebSiteSetup.org comments

HostGator Customer Support

In my experience, I have raised many questions with HostGator Technical Support. I received correct answers to my problems and the support team was also friendly in answering queries. This was in 2014.

For example, some-times I had problems with my WordPress Dashboard becoming very slow due to plugin conflicts. Even for such non-related problems the technical support team used to give me good advice.

There are three types of support for convenient use.

  • Chat
  • Ticket System
  • Phone

Compared to Blue-Host I find these solutions very attractive. I recently made an enquiry with BlueHost, for which there was no response and was difficult finding their contact numbers.

To contact through Chat, all you need to do is click the “Live Chat” button available at the top of the website.

This is very useful feature missing with many Hosting Companies as they have to maintain separate team for such Chat support.

You need to provide your name, primary domain and billing details before you proceed for this type of support. The draw-back is that it can take several minutes (sometimes 30 minutes) for the representative to come in contact.

Once you get an account with HostGator, you can raise a ticket for your query. This is somewhat fast some-times compared to the Chat support.

The best part is to directly call the representative using the Toll-Free support. If you are using Skype, you can do this from anywhere in the world for free.

Get to know the facts of HostGator and its features in 2022

HostGator Hosting Plans

HostGator is a web hosting company that offers a variety of hosting plans, including shared hosting, VPS hosting, dedicated hosting, WordPress hosting, and cloud hosting.

We’ll take a closer look at each of these plans to help you decide which one is right for you.

Shared Hosting:

Shared hosting is the most popular type of web hosting.

It’s ideal for small businesses and personal websites because it’s affordable and easy to use.

With shared hosting, your website shares server space with other websites. This can lead to slower speeds and down times during high traffic periods.

The below are the prices in 2014.

VPS Hosting:

VPS (Virtual Private Server) hosting gives you more control over your server than shared hosting. With VPS hosting, your website is still on a shared server, but you have your own virtual space that is isolated from other users.

This isolation provides you with more control over your server resources, including CPU usage and memory allocation. However, VPS hosting can be more expensive than shared hosting. You can see the current plan prices.

hostgator vps hosting
Why HostGator is NOT the Best Web Hosting Company 12

Dedicated Hosting:

Dedicated hosting means that your website has its own physical server. This gives you complete control over your server resources and ensures that your website will never be affected by other users on the same server. Dedicated servers are the most expensive type of web hosting.

HostGator Review - What nobody tells you
hostgator affiliate team

The secret sause of HostGator popularity is its affiliate bonus and false marketing. Those who had experience with this hosting could easily tell the difference between a good and poor service. If you are looking for native English customer support then you are on the wrong foot. Tech team is situated in some Asian country and they don't understand your problems. Even to resolve simple queries like 404, 503 errors, they take lot of time. They try to sell VPS and dedicated server plans even for small spike in traffic. Scalability is not available with resources at reasonable price. The response time (TTFB) is very slow and WordPress panel takes too long to operate. Best recommendation is to avoid this hosting.

Price: 2.59

Price Currency: USD

Operating System: Windows, Mac

Application Category: Design, Business, Multimedia

Editor's Rating:
2.49

Pros

  • Number of plans are more.
  • Plans under each type of hosting are more.
  • Low cost of basic hosting plans
  • Good uptime
  • Healthy refunds.
  • Free migration to their hosting
  • Easy to use for beginners
  • Availability of cPanel
  • Email hosting is available

Cons

  • Lack of LiteSpeed Server option.
  • Extra fees for normal backups and other free software
  • Upselling of higher end plans for simple resources and traffic
  • Monthly prices are costlier
  • Customer support is poor
  • Shared Hosting plans are slow in speed.
  • TTFB times are slow
  • Core Web Vitals are not met for bare site.
  • Servers are not reliable.
  • Sites are prone to malware and viruses.

HostGator Plans

Observe the home-page of HostGator and you can see all their hosting plans. You can also get a comparison of different plans.

It just takes a simple-click to order your Hosting plans. There are 3 main web hosting plans.

  • Hatchling Plan
  • Baby Plan
  • Business Plan

Each suits a particular user needs. Common User who just wants to host some websites on the server may generally go for “Baby Plan“.

hostgator shared hosting price
Source: HostGator.com

The advantage is that you can host unlimited domains and you also get unlimited MySQL databases, 24×7 support, unlimited parked domains and many more.

The only dis-advantage with HostGator plans are that when you renew your plan, the prices will be little high. No Discounts are available on renewals. This is the con that I observed with any web hosting plan or service. 

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There are also other hosting plans like reseller hosting, vps hosting, dedicated servers etc.

These are more specialized and will require more bucks to spend. Go for these plans if your intention is developing any web service or require faster speeds or have huge amounts of traffic for your site.

LiteSpeed Cache Posts

HostGator Performance Test

To know the load capacity of HostGator, a test with 50 virtual visitors on the server was taken up. Though it’s only 50, but it is a good way of stress testing. The purpose of it is to know whether the response times will behave normally under load.

It was found that the metric is reliable and constant over a period of time. It adheres to the policy of good response times. Compared to 2012, the response times are good in 2022. So, HostGator is an ideal hosting when it comes to performance and additional traffic.

How to Upload Website to HostGator

There are two ways that you can upload your website to HostGator. The first way is to use FTP, and the second way is to use the File Manager in cPanel.

To use FTP, we recommend that you download and install FileZilla. Once you have FileZilla installed, you will need to open it and enter the following information:

-Host: This will be your domain name (ex. example.com)
-Username: This will be your FTP username (ex. username@example.com)
-Password: This will be your FTP password
-Port: 21

Once you have entered this information, click on the “Quickconnect” button and you should be connected to your account. From there, you can simply drag and drop your files from your computer to the server.

To use the File Manager in cPanel, first log into your cPanel account. Once you are logged in, scroll down to the “Files” section and click on the “File Manager” icon.

When the File Manager popup window appears, make sure that the “Web Root (public_html/www)” option is selected and then click on the “Go” button. This will take you to the root directory of your website. From there, you can upload your files by clicking on the “Upload” icon at the top of the page.

HostGator Hosting Uptime

In my experience of 10 years, I have never seen down-time for my sites.

I hosted almost 10 WordPress sites and all have almost 100% up-time.

Even during maintenance, there was no downtime and HostGator support was good to inform if there were any trouble-shooting tasks.

HostGator employs around 1000 people specifically for this task.

Also the load on the servers never spike above 0.03 and the CPU time is well-balanced even on shared hosting.

You almost get 999 GB of disk-space, even though HostGator boasts of unlimited space. Also, monthly-bandwidth transfer is unlimited. 

A typical picture of my CPU usage with my primary domain handling 1000 sessions per day is like this.

But you have to be careful if you are using scripts or any CPU workaholic programs on your server. HostGator recommends that you keep your CPU and memory usage below 25%, as this may impact other users.

HostGator Pricing

For different plans and for different years, the pricing varies. If you buy a plan for 3 years, then the price per month is less. But if you are buying on a yearly basis its more.

Read the HostGator policy page, before you pay for their hosting.

The following shared hosting plans are useful for those webmasters who wish to use HostGator for less traffic.

If you buy for 3 years, which is the favorite pricing structure for many users, you would likely get huge discount. It costs only $105. That is, you are getting $35/year. In addition you get 45 day money back guarantee. But beware with the support. They may refuse to refund the money giving different reasons and trying to upsell other products.

Also when its holiday season and during Christmas offers, there are several discounts ranging from 20% to 75%. So if you have 10 websites hosting on HostGator, the pricing for domain management and hosting charges comes to around $180 per year. This will still reduce if you are using discount coupons.

So its only around $15 to $18 per year per site that you are required to shell for maintaining a website. This again reduces if you have more number of websites using the hosting space, which is worth the money.

Free Migration to HostGator

Sometimes you are required to transfer your domains hosted on a particular web host to another host. For example, if you find that BlueHost is incredibly slow and has less features than HostGator, you can transfer your cPanel to another host.

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Some hosting companies, require you to pay some $$$$ for this kind of transfer service. But on HostGator this service is totally free. Though there are some objections for this kind of service, its almost negligible.

So if you plan to change from another host to HostGator, the transfer is free and smooth. But if you are planning to change cPanel wide transfer with different accounts then lateral migrations may incur some charge.

Discount Coupons for Plans

As mentioned earlier during festive season there is reduction in hosting prices with lot of discounts. If you search for the keyword “HostGator Discount 2014” in Google you will get different offers.

As you can see, in July, 2014 there are various coupons that offer 30% discount on hosting plans. Sometimes it can increase to 75% during December and Christmas season. It is one of the main sales reason HostGator sells well among wordpress beginners. Even in 2022, you can get 60 – 70% discount on first payment.

HostGator Review – Features

One of the review sites “besthostingsearch.net” which provides reviews on Hosting services has this infographic which will be useful if you want to put money on HostGator.

As you can observe there are 147 reviews who are all satisfied and verified customers of HostGator. Also the uptime is mostly 100% when you see the image above. The features list is also endless.

But in 2022, TrustPilot shows that 32% of 2738 reviews on HostGator are 1 star rating. About 47% ratings are below 5 star rating. Though the overall rating of 4.2 is good, the number of 1 star reviews show that it is not best in the hosting industry.

hostgator trustpilot review
Why HostGator is NOT the Best Web Hosting Company 13

HostGator Affiliate Income

Not only can you incur some money into the hosting company, but you can also make some money. On the top right-hand side of the menu, there is a link called “Affiliates“. This is for people who want to spread a word about this amazing hosting company – HostGator.

As you can observe from the above screenshot, you can generate an income of $2625, if you are able to refer 21 customers to HostGator. They need to buy the hosting plans through your Affiliate link URL, which will be provided once you sign up with their system.

In 2022, the Gator affiliate commission rate has not changed much.

hostgator affiliate sale commission 2022
Why HostGator is NOT the Best Web Hosting Company 14

HostGator Policies regarding Uptime and Downtime

I literally give my word to date regarding uptime. I never seen any downtime and HostGAtor support team clearly mentions when they are doing any maintenance tasks. So if you are having a website that brings 1 million hits per month and you don’t want to loose money, than this will really give impetus to buying plans of HostGator.

45 Day Money Back Guarantee

OK. You don’t like what I said and you don’t believe the above review. You think that its one of those Internet scams, made to make money by giving you an affiliate URL and bringing you to buy this plan.

Well, I also have to make a living using online income. But that doesn’t mean cheating other people. So I give my  best of reviews in this regard, which I have used and comfortable with.

So if you don’t like it, you can get back your money within 45 days. It is only available with annual plans.

For monthly plans you have 30 day refund period.

All you have to do is send a mail or a ticket to the support team and they will refund the money. You can see a proof of their mail in this screenshot.

HostGator Refund
Email showing the refund status of my HostGator account

The reasons for asking refund for this package was that I bought a discount, but it didn’t apply to my account which was on “renewal” mode.

HostGator Frequently Asked Questions

Is HostGator good ?

Hostgator is a popular web hosting company that offers different plans for different needs. Their prices are cheap, and they offer a wide range of features. However, some users have reported bad support and high lcp (latency, connection timeouts, and related errors). Additionally, their response time isn’t as good as some of their competitors.

Where is HostGator company located ?

HostGator is a web hosting company founded in a dorm room at Florida Atlantic University in 2002. It is now headquartered in Houston, Texas, and employs over 1,000 people. The company offers shared, reseller, virtual private server, and dedicated server hosting plans.

Where are HostGator servers located ?

HostGator’s servers are located in both Atlanta, Georgia, and Provo, Utah in the United States.

Conclusion

Always buy packages for a longer duration. This will save money. I also asked a question with a friend of mine regarding hosting companies (who is a big name in blogosphere) and he too referred me the same company.

If you are planning to invest in websites and want a hosting service, HostGator can become your good partner. You can buy domains from other resellers like GoDaddy, Name. com etc, but hosting is economical from HostGator.

In my honest opinion, there are better wordpress and shared hosting alternatives to HostGator.

Why HostGator is NOT the Best Web Hosting Company
Why HostGator is NOT the Best Web Hosting Company

4 Comments
Show all Most Helpful Highest Rating Lowest Rating Add your review
  1. Reply
    Rajni Rastogi at

    I liked this article very much… the way you just tell everything is simply amazing… Simple yet compelling way of writing… i m looking forward for more such article specially on adsense topic and other ad networks as i am a newbie and getting knowledge from different sources… Thanks for this wonderful article…. keep up the good work.. Cheers

  2. Reply
    Zachery Bent at

    Excellent post. I was checking constatly this blog
    and I am inspired! Very useful info spedcially the last se–tion 🙂 I handle such information a lot.
    I used to be looking foor this particular information for a long time.

    Thanks and best of luck.

  3. Reply
    pankaj kamariya at

    Well written post keep sharing

    Actually Hosting is depend on how they are supporting and amount they are taking. But hostgator give very high amount for affiliated people so most of people praise this hosting.

    Am i correct?

    • @pankaj kamariya: This post was written when I was having no problems with HostGator. Also I think the company that owned HostGator at that time was different from now. Later on, when the real crunch situation came like traffic spike, I had problems contacting their technical support. You could see that review here – http://wpreviewtips.com/4428/hostgator-review-bad-technical-support-my-experience-july-2015/. So any hosting review changes from time to time. The same host that is good in 2012 could be bad in 2017. It depends on so many factors. Do you agree?

    Leave a reply

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