Hostgator Review: A Hosting Company that Actually Doesn’t Piss Me Off

Alas it's true - I'm in love with the web hosting company that "eats up the competition".

The Mr. and I design websites for a living (among other things). When asked "where should I host my website" I don't hesitate to recommend Hostgator. Of course we would never recommend any company to our clients that we hadn't tested thoroughly ourselves; we've put the shared-server hosting accounts with Hostgator to the test and been very happy with the outcome.

We began working mainly with CMS type sites back in early 2006 when Joomla forked from Mambo and that is when we decided to give Hostgator a try. Before 2006, The Mr. and I had several static sites that we either owned or managed for clients scattered across several different hosting companies -- The names of which escape me because they have all gone out of business in the years since we left them in the dust. We've dealt with all kinds of problems with these shoddy hosts to top it off -- You name it, we've dealt with it: downtime, file loss, hosts that don't keep software up to date, intrusion into one shared account via another, major security issues and very poor to non-existent customer service across the board.

Crappy hosts pissed me off so bad that I thought very seriously about getting out of managing client's websites all together.

So come 2006 we were toying around with a new Joomla install for a personal project and needed a place to host it. After some lengthy research I found that Hostgator offered what we needed at a decent price (actually I wondered if the price was too good to be true at first). I scoured forums and found some people bitching about Hostgator issues, but the issues I found seemed in many cases to be operator error (ID10T) and not security or downtime issues. I figured that in the worse case scenario I would sign up month to month and move the site elsewhere should they end up totally sucking - it was a personal site anyways, so it wasn't like we were testing out a clients site on a new host.

Once we signed up with Hostgator things went surprisingly smooth.

The first time I actually needed to contact their tech support was due to a cron job that was acting up with the above mentioned Joomla installation. When I started having a problem and realized I needed to contact support, the thoughts that ran through my head were anything but pleasant. Up until this time, I'd had nothing but horrible support experiences with the various other hosting companies I had dealt with. I bit the bullet and submitted a ticket via support@hostgator.com. Lo and behold, I got an email response within about 20 minutes (the email was even legible and written in English I could decipher without my craptastic email support decoder ring!). I explained the issue I was having and the tech support rep handling my ticket had the problem figured out within a couple of hours. I was pleasantly surprised, but the coolness didn't end there...

Soon after that experience I had an issue with my email and credit card. I needed to contact their support to get it straightened out, so I hit up the live chat feature. The CSR was very helpful and directed me to the correct department I needed. Got the my billing info all updated within the day and our site was set. For the next several months I monitored the website downtime using monitoring software and found that if the site went down it was down for such a small amount of time that I could never actually catch it while it was down. In a way, I was kind of (evilly) hoping to catch Hostgator slippin' because you see HostGator has a 99% uptime guarantee and apparently you can email them if your site was down for a period of time and get a refund...I couldn't comment on this feature however, because I have never been able to catch a site while it was down for longer than maybe a minute.

So fast forward over 3 years - We now manage about 20 separate hosting accounts through Hostgator for our clients.

I hate to admit it, but over the past 3 years I have probably contacted Hostgator's tech support department more than 50 times for various client accounts as well as my own. Some of the emails I sent were for really stupid (my bad) errors and some them were issues with the server/CMS, htaccess, php.ini configuration. Thankfully, none of which were major problems such as "HELP MY SITE'S BEEN HACKED!1!!!1" However, each time they were generally urgent requests and for each time I contacted them, I heard back within the hour; Lately the norm has been within about 15 minutes!

I have also used Hostgator's phone support on two separate occasions when I didn't feel like typing out a long detailed email to explain an issue I was having. YES I said phone support. That's right ... a host ... with real live ... English speaking people ... you can talk to (pause to catch my breath). In both cases their phone support was great. I got the matter resolved quickly, the tech support person was able to follow the progression of my tickets and pick up right where the email support left off.

Overall, in the past 3 plus years, I can't think of any negative experiences with Hostgator.

There was only one time (in my over 50 times of contacting them) that it was for a major glitch on their end. Apparently a server bit the dust mid-day on a client's website and her domain was showing another website. It was pretty hairball and I was highly pissed off when I called to ask what was going on. The tech support person assured me they knew about it and told me the problem would be fixed as soon as they could restore everything on another server. I started thinking the worst or something along the lines of: "Son of a ..... this is going to take all day. Great, I need to inform my client and she's going to go off on me --  I can hear it now. And if I get yelled at by my client, then Hostgator can rest assured they will hear from me - because I'm not taking sh*t on their behalf...". I think it was probably before I finished that thought when I refreshed the page and everything was working normally.

Needless to say, I can get a bit spastic on my client's behalf. It's truly because I care about them and the services we provide to them - it's for this reason that I have no problem recommending Hostgator to my clients.

HostGator Quick Review:

Purchased: My first site was hosted with them over 3 years ago - since then I have referred and manage about 20 websites on separate Hostgator shared hosting accounts.

Hostgator Benefits:

• Tech support available via the live chat, email and telephone
• Great prices
• Quick response time on support tickets
• 99% uptime guarantee - if their server bites it and your site goes down - get a free month
• 45 day guarantee - if you don't like it, get a refund
• Unlimited bandwidth
• Free domain and website transfer - spare yourself the trouble and let them do it, trust me on this, they get it done super fast
• Unlimited domains (on all but the $8.95 per month hatchling plan)
• Software is generally up to date - granted it's not usually the bleeding edge latest release of php , mysql etc. But the version is still secure and most compatible with all the php scripts available
• Up to date cPanel installs with Fantastico one click installs for popular php scripts such as WordPress, Joomla, etc.

Hostgator Drawbacks:

• Their logo is funny looking. (what? I had to put something here I guess)

The Mrs. gives Hostgator 5/5
You're looking at the reason I give Hostgator a 5/5 review - that's right, this site is hosted on Hostgator along with several other personal websites we own. They have great service and practically never any downtime. Give 'em a try if you don't believe me - I don't think it will be long before you too sing their praises.

They offer a some really awesome specials too for first time orders  - so check here before ordering!