HostGator Review: Stable Uptime and Excellent Features
HostGator is one of the most popular and professional web hosting companies on the internet, and when reading various customer reviews and looking at the excellent features that HostGator has to offer, it's no surprise that HostGator is an excellent choice for anyone serious about running a website or blog.
What is HostGator's background?
All the way back in 2002, a Florida college student decided to start a web hosting company with just three web servers and a very big dream to launch what would later become one of the world's largest hosting companies. That dream finally came true and turned into a hugely successful company that now has over 12,000 web servers, with over 400,000 customers spanning over 200 countries worldwide and over 9 million hosted domains! Some of these customers include Fortune 500 companies and popular websites that we all probably visit every day. According to the Inc. Magazine 5000 (2009 report), HostGator was the 239th fastest growing company in America. HostGator is now headquartered in Houston, Texas.
Why is HostGator top-notch?
HostGator is well-known for their fantastic service, and there are plenty of customers who will agree. In fact, in a 2008 customer survey, around 90% of HostGator's customers said that they were happy with the service that they receive. Those numbers clearly reflect that it's possible for a hosting company to balance quality and affordability in one sweet package! The sheer number of awards and recognitions that HostGator has is also no surprise!
One of the main reasons customers are so happy, is due to the overall outstanding level of support that each customer receives (if they need help). HostGator not only offers live chat support, but also e-mail, and telephone based support (toll-free) as well. In addition, they also have an impressive collection of video tutorials and a large user community too, where customers can share knowledge and learn about recent announcements, network status, and much more. The billing center is also very well organized and provides useful features that enable current customers to easily pay for their hosting services, view past invoices, and get help from support staff with the integrated support ticket system.
HostGator is great for people starting a brand new website, and HostGator also makes it easy for new customers who are switching from another hosting company as well. Nobody likes to move tons of files and other important data to a new host, because it can often be difficult and time-consuming, but with HostGator it's easy! In fact, HostGator offers a free website transfer service for new customers within the first 30 days of registration! This service alone has the potential to save hours of redundant and difficult work, and is definitely worth its weight in gold.
They also offer a 99.9% uptime guarantee! This is great, because every website should have the reliability and speed that it deserves. If we take a look at other hosting companies, many of them might offer an impressive uptime gurantee, but are these uptime stats accurate and trustworthy? That's why it's always important to observe what the current customers of a hosting company are saying before making a purchase decision.
There's also a generous 45 day money-back guarantee that gives customers well over a month to evaluate HostGator and their services.
Lots of excellent features
In addition to some of the features that we already mentioned above, here are some more:
- Unlimited disk storage for all hosting plans (including the lowest priced plan), which will give you plenty of web space.
- Unlimited bandwidth for all hosting plans (this also includes the cheapest plan), which gives both large and small sites a big advantage.
- Unlimited domain names hosted for the "Baby" and "Business" plans, and one domain name hosted for the "Hatchling" plan. The ability to host unlimited domain names offers a flexible and economical solution for people with more than one website, so if you have multiple websites, consider the plans with this feature.
- Instant or scheduled site backups, which makes backing up your site and important files a breeze and worry-free.
- Secure and stable access to cPanel web-based file manager and control panel, which makes managing your website easy. They also offer a large collection of cPanel themes featuring different layouts and colors, including the popular HostGator theme which features current CPU/Memory usage and backup status!
- Secure and fast FTP access, which offers a great alternative to cPanel's web-based file manager.
- Website visitor statistics, offering real-time stats about your visitors using AWStats, Webalizer, or raw access logs which show detailed info about each visit.
- For all "Business" plans, HostGator will even include one free dedicated IP address, private SSL, and a toll-free telephone number.
Wrapping things up
All in all, HostGator is a wonderful choice for anyone that currently owns or wants to start a small or large website. The abundant amount of features and time-tested reliability offer an excellent value for anyone great web hosting at an affordable price.