HostGator Review
What is HostGator?
HostGator is a popular hosting company and is one of the largest in the world. They provide, VPS hosting, shared hosting, dedicated servers, and managed WordPress hosting plans.
Founded in 2002, it became one of the largest hosting companies with impressive growth, they support businesses of all sizes and experience, providing 24/7 customer support.
Performance Of HostGator
When signing up to a host it is important to find one that is reliable and fast with stable performance in order to prevent the headache and money of having to switch providers.
In terms of speed test results for HostGator the site is fast loading at roughly 1.03 seconds which is great as speed is a vital performance indicator, having a faster website is great for users and also helps with SEO rankings.
Server response time is also a big performance indicator, the content on your website such as images affects the overall page load time. Large quantities of content will increase the overall page load time. With HostGator the site has a great performance as the server response time was less that a second which gives us the result of a fast loading site.
HostGator Features & Hosting Plans
There is a wide range of hosting plans which include shared hosting, cloud hosting, VPS hosting, reseller hosting as well as dedicated hosting. There is also hosting available for other platforms such as Magento and Joomla. The main offering as well as most used is shared WordPress hosting which is what most users tend to use.
Hosting plans – There are three different levels that the hosting plans come in, all of these plans include unlimited storage as well as unlimited bandwidth under terms of use. The difference between these plans is the number of websites that can be hosted.
- Hatchling: The Hatchling plan is the first tier, it allows you to host only one website, a one-click WordPress installer is included, and it comes with a standard set of features. The pricing starts at $2.75 a month
- Baby: The Baby plan gives you the opportunity to host unlimited domains and subdomains. All features of the Hatchling plan are included as well as addons such as private SSL. The pricing starts at $3.50 a month
- Business: The Business plan is suitable for small business websites, it includes unlimited emails, unlimited websites, dedicated IP address, SEO tools all great for starting an eCommerce website.
Other than web hosting services, they also offer a fully hosted website builder; the Gator website builder.
The hosting plan features that are included with each hosting plan includes:
- Free SSL Certificate
- 1 Click WordPress Installer
- Free email accounts
- An easy to use control panel cPanel dashboard to manage hosting services
- 99.9% uptime guarantee
- 24/7 customer support
Multiple website and domain names can be hosted under the same hosting account for the Baby & Business plans.
In terms of security features, the free Cloudflare CDN can be activated to protect your WordPress site against any attacks/malware. There is also additional performance boost from the Cloudflare CDN caching.
You also have the option to purchase CodeGuard and SiteLock addons during checkout.
Pros & Cons Of HostGator
As with every other service, there are always pros and cons, these are some for HostGator:
Pros
- Reliability of hosting: There is a guarantee of 99.99% uptime and any downtime below that will result in you getting back one month credit on your account
- Flexible billing periods: There is the flexibility of choosing between monthly or yearly billing. You can save money with longer billing periods.
- Moneyback guarantee: There is a generous 45 day moneyback guarantee, which is different to the usual 30 days offered by most web hosting companies.
- Free Migration: There is a free migration service with all new accounts, the team of experts at no extra cost will transfer your website from your previous host during the first 30 days of signing up.
Cons
- Upselling: The additional services that are pre-selected during the sign up process will need to be reviewed.
Conclusion
There are a variety of hosting plans that are offered by HostGator to suit all budgets and requirements, making the process easy to build a website, whether you are a beginner or an expert you will find all the tools you would possibly need to build an effective and high quality website so select your HostGator plan today!
