In the article HostGator – Web Hosting Review 2019, I’ll be reviewing HostGator in terms of its Reliability, Performance, Features, Customer support, and Pricing.
HostGator is one of the largest and popular web hosting companies in the world. HostGator has been around for more than a decade and is well-respected for its large number of servers and consistent reliability. Known mostly as a shared hosting provider, HostGator still supplies decent dedicated and VPS options if you need your site to scale.
What makes HostGator customers non-reluctant to approaching it is its constant updating feature. HostGator might be one of the biggest, oldest web hosting companies in the industry. But they’re still making improvements, posting an average uptime of 99.98% over the past 16 months. HostGator’s consistently strong uptime was, frankly, surprising (in a good way). We’re also fans of their uptime guarantee. Beyond that, their beginner-friendly approach and helpful customer service mean there’s a lot to like about their service.
HostGator costs slightly more than some of the other budget-minded shared hosts. But that echoes the brand’s reputation for strong infrastructure and helpful support. HostGator offers decent features in its basic shared hosting offerings. Such as unlimited disk space, a nice control panel, and free website templates. Plus, you get the flexibility to add numerous add-ons for privacy, security, and productivity as you see fit.
With that, we’ll start our HostGator – Web Hosting Review 2019.
HostGator – Web Hosting Review 2019:
I’ll be breaking down the review in five simple steps:
Pros: To give you a slight idea if it’s worth your time and interest.
Cons: It should be obvious though. Nothing comes easy (without cons) in life.
Hosting Plans: One important aspect of every web hosting – it’s plans.
Pricing: Another important aspect of any web hosting – it’s price.
Quick facts: To provide a summarized opinion to our readers.
Pros of HostGator:
- HostGator provides a knowledge base, phone, email, and live chat support. The last option is the fastest, connecting us to a service rep within about 15 seconds.
- HostGator is tailor-made for beginner bloggers or webmasters.
- HostGator guarantees an uptime of 99.99%. They’re consistent for a reason. Their uptime guarantee says that if they drop below 99.9%, your account will be credit for that month.
- HostGator offers 45 days money-back guarantee. Normally, web hosting companies do not offer a money-back guarantee exceeding 30 days.
- They offer a few extra security features like the ability to add SiteLock monitoring to your site. This service will run daily. Looking out for any potential site breaches or hacks. And let you know instantly when they find it.
- They also offer Spam Assassin on their email plans to help prevent spam from hitting your inbox in the first place.
- You can choose between monthly and yearly billing periods. Longer billing periods will get you the most discount.
- Their site is full of tutorials, walkthroughs, and more to help you navigate the murky world of DNS’ and data centers.
- The customizable templates are all pretty modern, to begin with, and you can easily customize how they look by dragging and dropping each feature. You’ll also get site analytics and a free SSL certificate to help safeguard your visitors’ personal data (like their physical location).
- HostGator offers free migration service with all new accounts. Their expert team will transfer your website from your previous host at no extra cost during the first 30 days of signing up.
Cons of HostGator:
- The first problem that we came across is that their servers are consistently slow.
- Their average page loading time over the past 16 months has only been a 1007ms average. That’s over a second to load relatively simple, text-based content pages. So just imagine what would happen if you loaded these pages up with thousands of words and dozens of high-resolution images. Definitely not pleasing.
- Unlike many other hosting companies, HostGator does not offer a free domain registration upon signing up.
- All of the ‘extra’ stuff, like site backups, Gmail access, SiteLock Monitoring, and SEO tools will all cost you extra when it’s time to checkout.
- You need to review the additional services pre-selected during the signup process. If you are unsure, then uncheck them anyways. You can always add them later when needed.
Hosting Plans of HostGator:
Shared hosting plan
Shared hosting plans are incredible for new sites and beginners. They enable you to effortlessly set up your site. So you can begin dealing with getting more traffic and developing your business. You can later update your hosting as your site develops. HostGator’s shared hosting plans come in three distinct levels. All plans incorporate boundless capacity and data transmission. The fundamental contrast is the number of sites you can have.
Hatchling Plan: This arrangement begins at $2.75 every month. You get one domain name, unlimited disk space and storage, SSL certificate, and unlimited subdomains.
Baby Plan: This arrangement begins at $3.95 every month. It bolsters unlimited capacity, bandwidth, and domain names.
Business Plan: This arrangement begins at $5.95 every month. It supports unlimited storage, bandwidth and domain names. It accompanies a free devoted IP, SSL, and a toll-free number.
VPS hosting plans
With VPS hosting, you get comprehensive features, for example, full root access for controlling your whole hosting environment, various system security layers to guarantee server unwavering quality, and moment adaptability with a click of the button. Also, believe that your information is housed on servers that are secured with RAID 10 plate setup and accompany repetitive power and HVAC units.
Get week by week off-webpage reinforcements of your whole site, a full suite of advancement devices to help in website usefulness and structure, and as usual, grant-winning help for any inquiries you may have. VPS hosting plans comes valued as pursues: $29.95/month, $39.95/month, and $49.95/month separately.
Cloud hosting plans
Hatchling Cloud: Starts at $4.95 per month. 2 Cores & 2GB memory, 1 site allowed, unmetered bandwidth & storage space.
Baby Cloud: Starts at $6.57 per month. 4 Cores & 4GB memory, unlimited sites allowed, unmetered bandwidth & storage space.
Business Cloud: Starts at $9.95 per month. 6 Cores & 6GB memory, unlimited sites allowed, unmetered bandwidth & storage space.
Dedicated hosting plan:
For those with heavily trafficked websites, as well as a larger budget, dedicated hosting may be what you need. Your site’s data will be housed independently on your own dedicated server, meaning there is never a need to share resources at any time.
Moreover, run Linux or Windows, choose between HDD and SSD hard disk options, receive data center level DDOS protection and enjoy full root access, unlimited databases, RAID-1 configuration, and 3-5 dedicated IPv4 IPs. To get in on HostGator’s dedicated hosting plans, expect to shell out either $119/month to $149/month.
Pricing of HostGator:
HostGator’s pricing is in the middle of the road when it comes to shared and VPS hosting. Good customer service and live chats cost money, and most good beginner web hosts fall in this range.
HostGator’s shared hosting plans are shoddy, with basic introductory pricing at just $2.75/month (for three years).
Their least expensive arrangement (“Hatchling”) accompanies a single domain name, one-click installations of popular apps like WordPress, Joomla, and more, unmetered bandwidth, unlimited storage, and a free SSL certificate. Fundamentally, the majority of the center highlights your requirement for a total site.
But, that is pretty much all they give in their default plans. The majority of the ‘extra’ stuff, similar to site backups, Gmail access, SiteLock observing, and SEO instruments will all cost you additional when it’s time to checkout. It can be disappointing in light of the fact that many of these features are word carefully on the site, like “available,” to make you think they’re included. Browse the other top hosts we’ve reviewed and you’ll see that many of them, in fact, do throw these into their basic pricing. It’s just when you get to the very end of the procedure, when you go to enter your billing data, that you’ll understand these additional features will cost you, well, extra.
Gmail is the standard $5/month or $60/year per user, which is their normal pricing. But then SiteLock will cost you $19.99/year, CodeGuard (to backup your sites) will cost you $23.95/year, and they don’t even keep many previous versions of your site on file in case you run into any problems.
So while the underlying arrangement appears to be economical from the outset, it begins to turn out to be entirely costly when all is said and done.
Quick FACTS about HostGator – Web Hosting Review
With a 99.9% uptime guarantee, HostGator performs admirably when it comes to reliability. This level of service is the industry standard and while there are hosts with a higher uptime rate, they also have a much higher cost. HostGator has been in the industry for a long time, so you can feel safely assured that they are not a scam and will be around for the long term.
HostGator includes extensive online nowledge base for common hosting issues and 24/7/365 Live Support via Email, Phone, and Chat.
From a modern drag-and-drop website builder to the familiar cPanel interface, HostGator excels in providing a simple, yet powerful, user experience. The setup process is easy to get going with HostGator, given the company’s quick provisioning system and clear icons. We found the experience to be straightforward, and when we had questions, we could easily start a live chat to get them answered quickly.
There are a lot of freebies that HostGator throws in with each hosting plan, including unlimited disk and bandwidth, a free website builder and website building tools, several hundred website templates, free domain transfers, and unlimited MySQL databases.
Additionally, new site owners can call attention to their web property utilizing the $100 worth of Google AdWords credits, courtesy of the HostGator team.
I really hope this information about HostGator – Web Hosting Review 2019 is of great use for you. For more such articles visit our official website Webful Creations.