I have been very impressed with HostGator. So much so that I thought I’d take some time and write up a HostGator Review.

Currently I host 20+ websites under one hosting plan (with more than 25 GB of space usage) at HostGator.

I’ve never been one to believe all that “unlimited space / bandwidth” hype.  During the 13 years I have been online, web hosts that offer ridiculous plans fail within 6 months.  After doing some serious research, I came across a blog post by HostGator’s founder.  It sounded a lot like how I started to get into hosting.  Where I gave up my hosting business and did not take the next step of expanding outside a one person show, HostGator’s founder decided he was going to take that next step and dropped everything else to become the best web hosting service around.  That was over 5 years ago. Today they are boasting 200,000 clients.  WOW!  That’s a lot.

My HostGator Review

If you do some googling on them, yes, you will run into negative HostGator reviews – all web hosts have negative reviews.  You can’t please everyone all the time.  It’s impossible.

What you need to do is read through the negative review and determine why the poster gave the negative review.  Did the host promise something they shouldn’t have and then couldn’t deliver?  Or did the reviewer expect something that was unrealistic?

All web hosts will experience outages and hardware failures.  It’s the nature of the hosting business.  The real test is how they manage to overcome the difficulty.

• Do they communicate with their clients during the bad times?  How?
• Do they expect realistic turnaround times on getting back up?

A very common theme I saw with negative reviewers stem from a web host not helping them figure out why some remote script on their website isn’t working – or stopped working.  I’m sorry but that’s not a web host’s job.

There could be many reasons why scripts stop working, the biggest one being that the script developer hasn’t done any updates to their script in several months – and in some case years!

Yes, there are times when a web host needs to change something or give insight on a configuration setting.  But server technology changes all the time and script developers need to be on top of that (as do hosts with software patches).  But in my opinion, it is the script developer you need to be tracking down not the web host.  I always go to the script developer site (and often find the solution right there) before ever contacting the web host.  It is not a web host’s job to manage scripts on your website.  So when you read those negative web host reviews read them with realistic glasses.

With HostGator I was concerned that their “unlimited” wasn’t going to be the case.

In my case, running a digital download store, I have larger files and need space – serious space.  Would they shut me down when I started really using their “unlimited” product?  After reading their terms closely (which I advise everyone to do before signing with a web host), I found a term I had not come across before.  The term “inode”.

HostGator does limit their accounts but not bandwidth or space.

Finding out that they actually do place limits on their accounts was a good thing for me. A server that has no restraints will get itself into trouble.

1.  They limit using inodes. With HostGator, you can have up to 250,000 inodes per account.  Basically an inode is like a file counter. So one file equals one inode. You can upload a file that is 1 MB in size or a file that is 1 GB in size and they are treated the same way. E-mail and statistic counters are included in that file count.  For my needs, space is important because I have websites with downloadable products and very large files.

2. They impose process limits. You can only use 25 processes.  After uploading 5 of my websites, I saw the sites were running 2.  Maybe if they get overly busy (hopefully) I might see an issue with this one but for now its a good limit.

3. The last limit I saw was CPU usage. They watch the usage to make sure one site is not dominating the server’s processing time.  Personally, I think these are all great limits.  They protect me just as much as they protect other clients on the server from my sites going crazy.

HostGator offers SSH access which is really helpful if you are transferring your site.

I was able to move all my sites and a few client sites very quickly.  I did have SSH access on the old server though which is also important.  But basically, I zipped them up on one end and used SCP to move the zips over to the HostGator server. Quickly and painlessly. Then unzip on the HostGator side and do a little directory finagling because these are now add-on domains at HostGator and no longer the main domain of the account.

The only other major thing that needs to be considered is moving databases. If you are moving databases from a “main” domain account to an “add-on” domain account (which is the premise of HostGator’s plans), the database names will be affected and your config files will need to be changed to address that.  But it’s a rather small thing in the grand scheme of moving websites.

HostGator Review

If you are looking for a web host, try them out. They advertise $7.95 in all their graphics but it’s really $9.95 per month.  The $7.95 price is if you pay 3 years in advance.  I would not recommend signing up for that many years to anyone.  Maybe a year if you get a price break but never more than that.   So many things can change in that time period.

So, in my opinion, HostGator’s $9.95 per month plan gets you all you’ll ever need.

The $14.95 plan comes with a personal SSL cert so if you have a merchant account and want your domain to appear on the secure page at checkout you would need that plan. They do offer shared SSL (which has their domain in it) on all of their plans and that works good enough for the bulk of small business e-commerce websites out there.

Check HostGator out if you are looking for very affordable web hosting.  If you found my HostGator Review helpful to you, please click on one of my banners as I am now an affiliate for them.