Before taking the plunge and invest good money in a VPS hosting plan, you must first take the time to understand what VPS is, and what VPS is not. That will help you make the right buying decisions. Obviously, a VPS plan is not for everyone. Let's try to understand more about VPS first before taking a look at what HostGator has to offer.

VPS, which stands for virtual private servers, is hosting on a shared server. However, using special software, the server is able to "split" itself into several smaller sections, which can function without interference from one another. For instance, if one VPS goes down, the others can continue to function normally.


The benefits are obvious. Usually, when clients sign up for shared hosting, their sites are hosted on machines that already have hundreds or even thousands of sites on them. Sometimes, servers may be overloaded or even compromised due to unsecure scripts. Note that there is very little a client can do if the server is to go down, even though the client himself has done nothing wrong. Clients understand that they are undertaking such risks when signing up for shared hosting.

Virtually any kind of website can benefit from a blog, and to run a successful blog, it is important that you stay with the times. That means a regular supply of relevant content. It also means a format that is conducive to most forms of technology. The first and last word in blogging platforms these days is a service called WordPress. Most blogs are powered by this easy to use technology, and most hosting companies will integrate with it. However, the question that many users are left asking is this: How much will it cost.

Find the affordable WordPress blog hosting plan, and you have found the host to call home. While you can start and host your own WordPress blog for free, hosting it independently with a company you can trust has a number of advantages you cannot ignore.

The first is the freedom to customize. The more you learn about widgets and web programming, the easier it is to produce a versatile blog that looks and operates the way that you want it to. Personal blogs do not often need this extra touch, but when you own or operate a business, it makes more sense to pay a little extra and take your blog to an independent location. This helps in branding especially because it allows you to name a site "Yourbusiness dot com," instead of poking the "WordPress" title within the address. This makes a huge difference for potential clients or customers who need to find you on the web.

How to log into cPanel

Note: Depending on your operating system and web browser, your computer may display the login prompt slightly different that what is displayed in the video. Even though it looks a little different, it works the same way.

Please note that you only get one login per cPanel. If you create addon, parked and subdomains, then those domains do not have a separate cPanel nor a separate login. Hint: To login to the cPanel for your addon domain, just login to your main cPanel. It is all managed under one control panel.

If you recently purchased a new account with HostGator, you should type the following information into the address bar of your browser:

http://YourSitesIPAddress/cpanel

(Example: http://1.2.3.4/cpanel)


If your domain name is already pointing to HostGator, then you can use the domain name to log into cPanel. Here is an example:
http://www.yourdomainname.com/cpanel
or

http://cpanel.yourdomainname.com/

Click here to read secure login to cPanel.

The username and password to log into cPanel can be found in your welcome email. If you do not have the correct login, please contact HostGator via phone, live chat, or email sales@hostgator.com for help.

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

• 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.

To start creating your website, you can login to your Hostgator cPanel and browse the fantastico section. You can click any of the above CMS systems and start installing it. Hostgator provides all these services free with your hosting plan.

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.
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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
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You have decided to have your own website. Essential to that decision is buying your web hosting plan. That is where you will construct your site. Here are some practical tips in selecting the company that will provide you with a hosting plan.

SELECT A COMPANY THAT HAS A GOOD RECORD FOR MINIMIZING DOWNTIME

Downtime refers to those periods when for some technical reasons, your website will not be visible in the net. Of course it would be difficult to find a company that has zero downtime. Just as the best car in the market will sometimes need repair and maintenance, so will it be with your host company's capability to ensure your site's continuous visibility in the net. Do some research first. The best web hosting company in this regard will be the company that on a monthly averaging basis, has the least downtime. You can find statistics on this in the Internet.


YOUR WEB HOSTING COMPANY SHOULD HAVE GOOD CUSTOMER SUPPORT

You never know when you need to call up your web hosting company for some trouble shooting work. Customer support should be 24/7. And then, of course, aside from customer support's availability round the clock, you should experience basic courtesy from the support staff and promptness in attending to your needs. Do some research on this. Look for feedbacks from satisfied or dissatisfied customers. You can find a lot of these feedbacks from blogs and forums. You can weigh things based on preponderance of positive or negative comments in your selection process.

HAVE A HOSTING COMPANY WITH GOOD SITE BUILDING SUPPORT

You will need this specially if you are a non-techie. Be practical. Unless you have a bigger budget to enlist the help of professional web developers, you might as well tap the site builder component of your hosting plan. Some hosting companies have user friendly site builders that will put up your website in mere minutes after your registration. Look for this kind of support in your host.

SELECT A HOSTING COMPANY THAT PROVIDES IN ITS PACKAGE A BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY YOU CAN TAP ON

This is optimizing your returns from your website. Why not shoot two birds with one stone? Have a website and have an earning opportunity as well. There are a lot of really good web hosting companies who can meet the other criteria above. But will they meet this criterion?

FINALLY, GET A COMPANY THAT ALLOWS YOU TO TEST DRIVE YOUR HOSTING PLAN BEFORE YOU PAY YOUR HOSTING FEE

Well, this is one of the best ways to determine whether your hosting company really meets all of your expectations. Your experience during the trial period will be your best gauge in determining whether you're in a good company or not.
I suggest you research well on the above suggestions. Be practical and ensure your utmost gain in building and maintaining your website.

How to Choose a Web Host

If you want to build your home in the Internet, you'll want to engage the services of a Web host. They will give you the space and the connectivity you need to get your site up and running in the World Wide Web. While there are free web hosting services available, paid hosting services are infinitely better and are the preferred choice for those who need more "power" and stability for their online presence.

Before finding a hosting provider, make sure you know what your requirements are. This is because the fee you pay generally depends on the amount of disk space and bandwith you need. Knowing what you need first gives you the chance to be specific with your Web host so you don't have to pay for extraneous services you don't need.