Hostgator Review
HostGator is a U.S based hosting company established in 2002. Created by Brent Oxely, the company has their servers located in Texas.
Though the beginning was quite humble, HostGator has become one among the best web hosting companies in the world. At first glance, you might take HostGator for any other web hosting services, However, you would certainly be in for a surprise when you begin learning about the various features and services they offer.
Features That Set Hostgator Apart
HostGator’s official website claims that their hosting services are used by 1,000,000 websites and reseller account holders are as high as 20,000. All this is not without a reason. There are numerous features that make hostgator the most sought after web hosting services. They are
Reliability
The reliability of hosting service is amazing with Hostgator. The great plus point is that, Hostgator is running a data center of its own; this makes it easy for them to maintain an uptime guarantee of 99.9%. You would never notice any downtime for your websites. The company’s CEO, Brent Oxely himself, signs the guarantee certificate, which gives you enough proof of genuineness with the service.
Unlimited Bandwidth
Well, for the less techie people, the amount of bandwidth gives you the freedom to use the website elaborately. For example, if a web hosting company allocates 1GB of transfer per month, you would be able to use about 100,000 page loads per month assuming that your web page is 10kb in size.
If your traffic is high and you have many visitors on a month, your allocation would get used up very soon. This will lead to too many hassles. With Hostgator you would never face any such situations.
Unlimited Web Hosting
All the Hostgator plans provide unlimited disk space. You don’t need to spend anything extra for more storage.
Unlimited Domains
Although most web hosting companies advertise that they would allow unlimited number of domains in a single account, most companies at a later point of time will ask you to upgrade to a better plan. However, Hostgator doesn’t do that.
All the plans except hatchling plan allows unlimited domains. The Baby Croc plan allows unlimited number of domains in the account for just $7.99 per month(currently 20% off)
Sub domains
You can have any number of sub domains that you want in a single account. You also get unlimited MySQL database.
HostGator Backup Service
Backups are essential for any website and not every hosting company provides ways that can help you in instant backups. Hostgator provides both manual and automated backups that would make your work simple and easy to handle.
You can have a backup of your entire ‘cPanel’ with the control panel set up instantly, which can be used later to restore your account if needed. You can get every single detail of your website such as the e-mail account along with the password and stored messages, FTP accounts, add on/sub/parked domains, databases, mailing lists and so on that you have used in your website.
The automated backup service of Hostgator carries out the function once in every week giving a backup of all your web files and data at a remote server location. This ensures that your data is secure preventing any losses due to accidental events.
HostGator cPanel
It is very important for you to have an idea of the web traffic that your website is attracting every day. This helps you to know how your marketing approach and the SEO efforts are working. This can be easily done on the awstats or the webalizer from the Hostgator cPanel, and you can successfully analyze the web traffic and their sources.
This would help you to plan your strategies to widen you traffic, by understanding the number visitors who have visited your website and which part of the world they are from. The awstats also gives an idea of the browser used by the visitors along with the webpage they are visiting from.
The now, newly released cPanel is even simpler to handle. It is designed and packed with more features and numerous shortcuts such as search for a new domain name, whois search, register new domain name and so on from the cPanel itself.
The cPanel also has features that help you in paying Hostgator bills, search for answers through FAQs and Forums, use website templates etc.
The cPanel Demo
Hostgator Provides individual demo of’ how to use’ all of its features, along with video tutorial. This explains clearly and exactly what has to be done when you work on a feature that is completely new to you.
Also to people who are new to hosting and do not have much knowledge about the technicalities involved in web hosting, this feature is a real boon.
Free Web Site Builder
Most web hosting services offer hosting services but do not provide website builders. Well, Hostgator has one click website building tools that is inbuilt and unique for Hostgator web hosting services.
The free website builder tool works wonders and helps you to build an entire website in just few minutes. All you have to do is choose the theme you like and begin adding pages. All the technicalities related to the website are inbuilt and you do not have to worry about them at all.
Even a newbie can build attractive and theme oriented websites without much effort.
HostGator PHP
PHP is a HTML embedded scripting language for the server and is very important to your website. Hostgator uses the most advanced version supporting your account for 5.2.0. This enables Hostgator to enable as many as 25 simultaneous MySQL database connections at one time even if your cPanel account is small.
Thus you can have any number of visitors on your website at a particular time without any disturbance while uploading your files or carrying out other online operations.
HostGator .htaccess Support
.htaccess files are the ones that support your URL redirection or perform any permanent redirection of your website. With this feature you would be able to set up permalink feature to your blog or website or redirect a non-www page to a www extension page. You can also set up folders protected by passwords.
HostGator Cron Job and Cron Manager
Cron Job helps you in performing certain scheduling tasks, which in Hostgator comes through your cPanel control panel. The Crontab is a UNIX system process and uses Daemon called Cron to execute all the commands for you at any particular time.
You can prefix the command and the time you want it to be carried out such as publishing a particular article, your cron would carry out the task exactly as you have scheduled without any external support.
You could schedule your cron to perform an action for every few minutes, hour, day or even a month.
You could send automatic emails to your customers or subscribers, periodically or send training material at prefixed dates and so on. All that is required is to execute the script and take rest. The cron does the job for you.
HostGator Content Manager
If you are a newbie and are unaware of creating a website and the process involved in its designing, but still wants a personal/commercial website running in real time, Hostgator has a solution to you too. The Content Management Tool of Hostgator helps you in programming a website with zero html knowledge.
You don’t even need to understand the basics like creating a login page, contact form, blogs, news, seo, and so on. All these have become really simple now. There are many built in CMS scripts which you can install and run in no time.
You can start adding your content and publish them on par with any professionally built website.
Some of the one click website options provided by Hostgator are
HostGator FTP Services
From Hostgator cPanel you can setup your ftp account. FTP or the File Transfer Protocol is used to upload files to your server, to the Hostgator server in this case. The ftp features provided by hostgator are
FTP Accounts – This can control the uploading process of your content.
Setup Anonymous FTP Access – used to control the anonymous FTP users and how to treat them.
Anonymous FTP Message – used to show an anonymous welcome message that users would see as soon as they login to your ftp site.
FTP Session Control – this utility gives you the control over FTP sessions, you may grant permission or time out the FTP session.
Hostgator Green Hosting
Showing their concern over global warming and changing climatic conditions all over the world, Hostgator web hosting services have gone green.
They have started purchasing wind power credit to offset power usage for hosting and cooling their servers. Thus lowering the carbon emission and making a green energy environment.
Hostgator Plans
Depending on your necessity you can avail one of the shared, reseller, vps or dedicated web hosting plans.
The hostgator plans are as follows
You can use coupon codes to get some discounts from the below pricing.
HostGator Customer Support
By far, hostgator web hosting services have the best customer support with fully trained and patient customer support executives. You can reach them 24 X 7 with your queries and get them solved immediately. If you want the chat to be saved you can opt for it and the complete conversation is sent to your mail address for further reference.
Hostgator Coupon Code
Use coupon code “1centonlytrial” to try Hostgator web hosting for just 1 cent. You get all the features and 24×7 support. You won’t be disappointed. We are using it for the past 3 years with zero down time.
Conclusion
HostGator is a reliable and trustworthy hosting company that provides top class support and affordable pricing without any sort of marketing ploys or disguised money stripping.
There is an answer for every call of yours, replies to your e-mails, instant response whenever you want to chat, quality hosting and affordable plans. These are just a handful from the ocean of their services which we would be reviewing in detail.
———————————————————–
If you need any kind of help related to web hosting, please contact us at help@hostgators.net
We will share our expertise for free. No strings attached
———————————————————–
Though the beginning was quite humble, HostGator has become one among the best web hosting companies in the world. At first glance, you might take HostGator for any other web hosting services, However, you would certainly be in for a surprise when you begin learning about the various features and services they offer.
Features That Set Hostgator Apart
HostGator’s official website claims that their hosting services are used by 1,000,000 websites and reseller account holders are as high as 20,000. All this is not without a reason. There are numerous features that make hostgator the most sought after web hosting services. They are
Reliability
The reliability of hosting service is amazing with Hostgator. The great plus point is that, Hostgator is running a data center of its own; this makes it easy for them to maintain an uptime guarantee of 99.9%. You would never notice any downtime for your websites. The company’s CEO, Brent Oxely himself, signs the guarantee certificate, which gives you enough proof of genuineness with the service.
Unlimited Bandwidth
Well, for the less techie people, the amount of bandwidth gives you the freedom to use the website elaborately. For example, if a web hosting company allocates 1GB of transfer per month, you would be able to use about 100,000 page loads per month assuming that your web page is 10kb in size.
If your traffic is high and you have many visitors on a month, your allocation would get used up very soon. This will lead to too many hassles. With Hostgator you would never face any such situations.
Unlimited Web Hosting
All the Hostgator plans provide unlimited disk space. You don’t need to spend anything extra for more storage.
Unlimited Domains
Although most web hosting companies advertise that they would allow unlimited number of domains in a single account, most companies at a later point of time will ask you to upgrade to a better plan. However, Hostgator doesn’t do that.
All the plans except hatchling plan allows unlimited domains. The Baby Croc plan allows unlimited number of domains in the account for just $7.99 per month(currently 20% off)
Sub domains
You can have any number of sub domains that you want in a single account. You also get unlimited MySQL database.
HostGator Backup Service
Backups are essential for any website and not every hosting company provides ways that can help you in instant backups. Hostgator provides both manual and automated backups that would make your work simple and easy to handle.
You can have a backup of your entire ‘cPanel’ with the control panel set up instantly, which can be used later to restore your account if needed. You can get every single detail of your website such as the e-mail account along with the password and stored messages, FTP accounts, add on/sub/parked domains, databases, mailing lists and so on that you have used in your website.
The automated backup service of Hostgator carries out the function once in every week giving a backup of all your web files and data at a remote server location. This ensures that your data is secure preventing any losses due to accidental events.
HostGator cPanel
It is very important for you to have an idea of the web traffic that your website is attracting every day. This helps you to know how your marketing approach and the SEO efforts are working. This can be easily done on the awstats or the webalizer from the Hostgator cPanel, and you can successfully analyze the web traffic and their sources.
This would help you to plan your strategies to widen you traffic, by understanding the number visitors who have visited your website and which part of the world they are from. The awstats also gives an idea of the browser used by the visitors along with the webpage they are visiting from.
The now, newly released cPanel is even simpler to handle. It is designed and packed with more features and numerous shortcuts such as search for a new domain name, whois search, register new domain name and so on from the cPanel itself.
The cPanel also has features that help you in paying Hostgator bills, search for answers through FAQs and Forums, use website templates etc.
The cPanel Demo
Hostgator Provides individual demo of’ how to use’ all of its features, along with video tutorial. This explains clearly and exactly what has to be done when you work on a feature that is completely new to you.
Also to people who are new to hosting and do not have much knowledge about the technicalities involved in web hosting, this feature is a real boon.
Free Web Site Builder
Most web hosting services offer hosting services but do not provide website builders. Well, Hostgator has one click website building tools that is inbuilt and unique for Hostgator web hosting services.
The free website builder tool works wonders and helps you to build an entire website in just few minutes. All you have to do is choose the theme you like and begin adding pages. All the technicalities related to the website are inbuilt and you do not have to worry about them at all.
Even a newbie can build attractive and theme oriented websites without much effort.
HostGator PHP
PHP is a HTML embedded scripting language for the server and is very important to your website. Hostgator uses the most advanced version supporting your account for 5.2.0. This enables Hostgator to enable as many as 25 simultaneous MySQL database connections at one time even if your cPanel account is small.
Thus you can have any number of visitors on your website at a particular time without any disturbance while uploading your files or carrying out other online operations.
HostGator .htaccess Support
.htaccess files are the ones that support your URL redirection or perform any permanent redirection of your website. With this feature you would be able to set up permalink feature to your blog or website or redirect a non-www page to a www extension page. You can also set up folders protected by passwords.
HostGator Cron Job and Cron Manager
Cron Job helps you in performing certain scheduling tasks, which in Hostgator comes through your cPanel control panel. The Crontab is a UNIX system process and uses Daemon called Cron to execute all the commands for you at any particular time.
You can prefix the command and the time you want it to be carried out such as publishing a particular article, your cron would carry out the task exactly as you have scheduled without any external support.
You could schedule your cron to perform an action for every few minutes, hour, day or even a month.
You could send automatic emails to your customers or subscribers, periodically or send training material at prefixed dates and so on. All that is required is to execute the script and take rest. The cron does the job for you.
HostGator Content Manager
If you are a newbie and are unaware of creating a website and the process involved in its designing, but still wants a personal/commercial website running in real time, Hostgator has a solution to you too. The Content Management Tool of Hostgator helps you in programming a website with zero html knowledge.
You don’t even need to understand the basics like creating a login page, contact form, blogs, news, seo, and so on. All these have become really simple now. There are many built in CMS scripts which you can install and run in no time.
You can start adding your content and publish them on par with any professionally built website.
Some of the one click website options provided by Hostgator are
- Drupal – An advanced portal enables with collaborative book, search engine friendly URLs, threaded comments, blogging, news aggregator, easy accessibility to online support and so on.
- WordPress – a very helpful and the most popular open source platform that gives you easy themes and templates to choose from. You can develop simple websites with many pages and categories or even authority sites. WordPress gives you full support with FAQ and forum. Numerous plug-in are available to make your website the best.
- Joomla – one of the most powerful and diverse CMS source and helps you to develop simple single page websites to complex corporate web applications.
- Mambo – a more professional system featuring inline WYSIWYG content editors, banners, content archiving, modules and components, mailing users and link managers.
- PHP Nuke – most popular for community based portals with a wide range of modules and languages.
- TYPO3 – Free open source content management system and is widely used for enterprise purposes in corporate offices and educational institutions for internal communications. It is made up of a set of readymade interfaces, functions and modules offering complete flexibility to the user.
- Siteframe – A simple and straightforward CMS used by community based websites. The templates are pleasing and well designed, targeted for document sharing purposes and thus have a neat interface.
- Geeklog – Another portal with numerous modules oriented towards community based templates and user friendly interface.
- PhpWCMS – this is the perfect Content Management System for professional, public and private users. It is very simple and can be easily learned by anyone. The separate layout and content gives you enough flexibility to work and is popular amongst web designers, programmers and web developers.
- PhpWebSite – the most sought after CMS for document management, announcements, menu management, album uploading, FAQ, web page making, polls, information categorizing and so on.
- Xoops – another popular and advanced portal system giving you easy installation with features to set up web pages, calendar, form generation and link management.
HostGator FTP Services
From Hostgator cPanel you can setup your ftp account. FTP or the File Transfer Protocol is used to upload files to your server, to the Hostgator server in this case. The ftp features provided by hostgator are
FTP Accounts – This can control the uploading process of your content.
Setup Anonymous FTP Access – used to control the anonymous FTP users and how to treat them.
Anonymous FTP Message – used to show an anonymous welcome message that users would see as soon as they login to your ftp site.
FTP Session Control – this utility gives you the control over FTP sessions, you may grant permission or time out the FTP session.
Hostgator Green Hosting
Showing their concern over global warming and changing climatic conditions all over the world, Hostgator web hosting services have gone green.
They have started purchasing wind power credit to offset power usage for hosting and cooling their servers. Thus lowering the carbon emission and making a green energy environment.
Hostgator Plans
Depending on your necessity you can avail one of the shared, reseller, vps or dedicated web hosting plans.
The hostgator plans are as follows
You can use coupon codes to get some discounts from the below pricing.
Plan | Platform | Price | Space | Bandwidth | Domains |
Hatchling | Linux | $ 6.95 | unlimited | unlimited | 1 |
Baby Croc | Linux | $ 9.95 | unlimited | unlimited | unlimited |
Business | Linux | $ 14.95 | unlimited | unlimited | unlimited |
HostGator Customer Support
By far, hostgator web hosting services have the best customer support with fully trained and patient customer support executives. You can reach them 24 X 7 with your queries and get them solved immediately. If you want the chat to be saved you can opt for it and the complete conversation is sent to your mail address for further reference.
Hostgator Coupon Code
Use coupon code “1centonlytrial” to try Hostgator web hosting for just 1 cent. You get all the features and 24×7 support. You won’t be disappointed. We are using it for the past 3 years with zero down time.
Conclusion
HostGator is a reliable and trustworthy hosting company that provides top class support and affordable pricing without any sort of marketing ploys or disguised money stripping.
There is an answer for every call of yours, replies to your e-mails, instant response whenever you want to chat, quality hosting and affordable plans. These are just a handful from the ocean of their services which we would be reviewing in detail.
———————————————————–
If you need any kind of help related to web hosting, please contact us at help@hostgators.net
We will share our expertise for free. No strings attached
———————————————————–