Today’s topic is about HostGator hosting and explains the most important advantages, disadvantages and available hosting plans in detail..
HostGator is one of the oldest and most popular web hosting companies in the world, founded in 2002.
HostGator hosts over 8 million websites, and is one of the most popular hosting companies around the world.
With one-click WordPress installation, a 99.9% uptime guarantee and 24/7 tech support, HostGator is a smart solution for anyone looking to host a website on a budget.
HostGator offers reliable web hosting at economical prices, with a free domain and a free SSL certificate.
The different types of hosting at HostGator
- Shared Hosting
- Virtual Private Hosting (VPS)
- Dedicated Hosting
- WordPress Hosting
- Cloud Hosting
- Reseller Hosting
I will explain each of them in detail later in this review.
HostGator Hosting Review
In this HostGator hosting review these are the most important points we’ll be looking at:
- Advantages and disadvantages: What distinguishes it from other hosting companies? And what are the main drawbacks of HostGator?
- Uptime: Will your site be available 24/7 without any downtime?
- Performance: How Fast Do Your Website Pages Load on HostGator?
- Pricing: Does HostGator offer the best prices on the market? Are there any offers that can save you money?
- Technical Support: Can you count on technical support? Can you easily get help when needed?
But if you want to skip the details:
We have found that HostGator offers a premium hosting service with the famous cPanel control panel and many more features.
HostGator’s hosting prices are also among the best in the market given the quality of service provided.
HostGator also offers good customer service that you can count on to help you when you need it.
That’s why we’ve added HostGator to our list of the best WordPress hosting services.
And now we start reviewing HostGator in detail to help you know whether it is suitable for hosting your website or not.
About HostGator
HostGator was founded in 2002.. It has grown rapidly to become one of the largest hosting companies in the world.
The reason for this growth is due to the low prices of the shared hosting packages, the provision of reliable and reliable hosting service, in addition to the good technical support service.
HostGator is headquartered in Houston, Texas, USA.
It also hosts more than 8 million websites around the world.
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Advantages and disadvantages of HostGator hosting
Each hosting company has its advantages and disadvantages, and you have to analyze all the advantages and disadvantages and balance what you really need and what you can overlook for the price.
Here are the main advantages and disadvantages of HostGator hosting in detail:
Features:
- Cheap hosting prices: HostGator hosting is characterized by its low prices, especially their shared hosting at only $2.75/month, which is a low price compared to other global hosting companies.
- Reliable Hosting: HostGator guarantees 99.99% uptime.. and if you experience less uptime you will get 1 month free credit in your account!
- Money-Back Guarantee: HostGator offers a 45-day money-back guarantee if you don’t like the service provided, hosting companies usually don’t offer a 30-day money-back guarantee.
- Flexible subscription periods: You can choose between monthly or annual subscription periods, but long subscription periods give you a bigger discount of course.
- Free Site Migration: HostGator offers a free site migration service for all new customers, where their team of experts will move your website from your old hosting at no additional cost within the first 30 days of subscription.
- Free Domain Name: HostGator until recently did not offer a free domain, but the company announced some time ago that it would provide a free domain with hosting without additional fees, and this feature is only available when you purchase the hosting service for at least one year.
- Unlimited Resources: HostGator offers unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth, and unlimited databases.
cPanel Control Panel: HostGator provides a cPanel hosting control panel to be able to easily manage your website hosting and it supports the Arabic language as well. - $200 ad credit: HostGator offers $200 ad credit to be used in advertising on Google and Bing search networks with all hosting plans.
- Free Technical Support: HostGator offers free technical support to all customers, and you can write to technical support via live chat, email, or phone to help you solve the problems you face.
Defects:
- The control panel is somewhat confusing: the hosting control panel has a lot of information, most of which you do not need, which makes it difficult to navigate, but over time you will get used to it, as it is still the famous cPanel control panel.
- Sometimes the technical support response is slow: Although technical support varies from one user to another and from one technical support employee to another, and even according to the time you call technical support, there are some indications of the quality of the support provided, the most important of which is the large number of customer complaints about the slow response of technical support.
- Restore backups is not free: If you want to restore a backup copy of your site, there is no possibility to do it manually, but you have to write to technical support and they will restore it for you, but for a fee.
- The lack of multiple data centers: they have one data center in America, and as you know, the closer the hosting service is to the site visitors, the better in terms of download speed, there are some other hosting companies that allow you to choose the location of the server that will host your site, but you can solve this problem by By using the CDN service.
HostGator Hosting Performance
Certainly if you subscribe to a hosting service and find that your site is slow on the Internet or sometimes stops working, this will cause you a lot of frustration, and you will have to change the hosting company, and this will cost you more money, not to mention the disruption of your work.
This is why you want to choose a fast and reliable hosting company with a stable performance record at all times.
So we decided to check the performance of HostGator hosting by doing some special tests.
First: Test the hosting speed
The most important indicator of hosting performance is speed.. The faster website is preferred by users, and it helps search engines rank your site better.
Studies show that a one-second delay in a page load will cost you 7% less conversions, 11% fewer pageviews, and 16% lower visitor satisfaction.
For our HostGator hosting review we created a test site to measure its speed.
The demo site is powered by WordPress and using the default template, we have also added dummy content including images.
After that, we used the popular website speed test tool Pingdom to run the tests.. and here are the results:
(Note: These tests were conducted in the USA)
As you can see, the site loaded in less than one second to a server in Dallas, Texas, USA.
That’s faster than 94% of all sites tested.
That’s great, but how will your site perform in peak hours?
To find out, we used another tool called LoadImpact.
This tool sends virtual users to the site, and gradually increases the number of users until it reaches 100 users at one time.
You can see the result in the graph below:
The green line in the graph is the page load time, and the blue line is the number of users on the site.
As you can see, the beta site performed well up to 80 users, after that the performance started to decline.
These results are especially good if you are using a shared hosting package.
Remember that in a shared hosting account, you are sharing server resources with other websites hosted on the same server.
And you will need to upgrade your hosting account if your site starts to grow and get more visitors at the same time.
Second: the response time of the hosting server
Site content greatly affects page load time.. If your site contains many images, the page load time will increase significantly, and this will affect the results of the server speed test.
Now we want to measure how quickly the HostGator server actually responds, regardless of the content of the site.
To find out, we used another tool called Bitcatcha that works differently from other site speed testing tools.
Instead of loading content, it only tests the server response time.
The test is also conducted three times from different locations around the world to get the actual average response time for each location.
Here’s how HostGator performed in these tests:
The test site performed very well with the server response time remaining less than 1 second in the US (it was only 37 milliseconds)
Overall, this result indicates that your site will load at a reasonable speed from anywhere in the world.
HostGator types
As mentioned before, HostGator offers a variety of web hosting services, where you can choose between shared hosting, VPS, cloud hosting, WordPress hosting, and more..
Let’s take a detailed look at the types of hosting offered by HostGator..
1- Shared Hosting
Shared hosting is the best way to start a new website with low traffic.
Where your website shares resources with other websites hosted on the same server, that is, simply when one server hosts multiple clients.
Shared hosting is the most popular and most cost-effective option for hosting a new website.
2- cloud hosting
While your shared hosting account is limited to a single server, cloud hosting uses multiple server resources.
This type of hosting is suitable if your site is large and has high traffic.
You can allocate additional resources easily and take advantage of the resources of multiple servers, allowing you to expand and grow, and you have complete control over your usage without surprises.
3- WordPress Hosting
This is the enhanced shared hosting plan for WordPress sites, the difference between it and regular shared hosting is that it is a dedicated WordPress hosting that improves performance and protects your site from common WordPress hacker attacks, with some features specific to WordPress sites only.
4- VPS Virtual Server Hosting
VPS hosting allows you to manage virtual resources on a cloud hosting platform, which is a suitable hosting type for large websites that have high traffic most of the time such as “e-stores”
VPS hosting is an excellent choice when you’re looking for more control and flexibility over your site’s performance, whether it’s the ability to leverage resources to meet the needs of your growing business or the ability to install a custom app or custom programming to make your site work the way you want it to.
5- Distributor hosting
It is a plan dedicated to HostGator hosting services resellers and it is a way to make money by reselling hosting services to third parties (mostly clients of web design companies)
6- Private server hosting
Here you get a private server to host your site, with dedicated hosting you rent an entire server dedicated to your website only.
A private server is much faster than shared hosting because you don’t share server resources like space and bandwidth with other websites hosted on the same server.
HostGators . Shared Hosting Package Details
Shared hosting packages are great for newbies and beginners.
It allows you to set up a website easily, and then you can start working on developing your site and get more visitors, and then upgrade your hosting plan at any time and according to your needs.
At HostGator shared hosting comes with three different packages.
All packages include unlimited bandwidth, a free domain, and a free SSL certificate.
The main difference is the number of websites you can host on your account.
This package allows you to host only one website.
You can install WordPress in one click, with a free domain name and SSL certificate, and a number of other features.
This plan allows you to host an unlimited number of websites.
Plus all the benefits of the Hatchling plan
Suitable for relatively large business websites, this plan includes a free dedicated IP address which you will need to set up an e-commerce site.
In addition to all the features of the Baby plan and some other features..
Support and Customer Service
HostGator offers 24/7 tech support via phone, live chat, and email support with a ticket system.
Inside your hosting dashboard, you’ll find a support portal to help you find quick answers from a knowledge base of over 680 articles and 500 video lessons.
Conclusion
Is HostGator the Right Choice for You?
Now that you’ve read a detailed review of HostGator hosting, maybe you’re still thinking if it’s right for you?
To help you let me remind you that HostGator offers a variety of hosting plans to suit all budgets and requirements.
It also provides all the tools you will need to create a website easily and without any problems.
Over 2 million customers have already trusted HostGator!
Whether you are a professional or want to get started, HostGator hosting will be a good solution to create a website and start working in the least amount of time.
Are you ready to build your website with HostGator today? Click here to choose the right package for you.