11251 Northwest Freeway, Suite 400
Houston, TX 77092
1-866-96-GATOR
HostGator was founded by college student Brent Oxley in 2002. The privately held company is now one of the ten largest and most successful web hosting companies online today. With more than 7,000,000 domains under their care, HostGator offers shared Linux web hosting, reseller hosting, virtual private servers and dedicated server hosting.
Review
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Sales
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Sales questions are answered by live chat, telephone, email and online forum. I used both the phone and live chat to get in touch. HostGator’s live chat service has a helpful feature that lets you know how many sales reps are taking calls and what your place is in line. This gives the client at least a general estimation of what their wait time may be. When I first connected with live chat, there were 33 reps on-call and I was 66th in line. It took approximately ten minutes before I was chatting with an agent. Impressive! Both sales reps I spoke with were polite and helpful, and both offered me a coupon to reduce the price of my overall hosting fees.
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Setup
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Sign-up for a new account is done from HostGator’s website. It takes about five minutes to complete the online form, after which your account details need to be verified with a telephone call. Once that was done, I had a welcome letter from HostGator in my email inbox within an hour. The verification process does take a little extra time, so don’t expect to be off and running with your new website the moment you’ve paid your bill.
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Billing
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HostGator accepts all major credit cards and PayPal. I had no issues during my two year stay with HostGator, but the month after cancelling my account I was unexpectedly billed for services. I was able to clear this up with an email, but the process was somewhat slow. It was nearly 36 hours after first writing HostGator that I received a reply to my question, and a full five days before the situation had been corrected.
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Pricing
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HostGator has three shared web hosting plans, each offering unlimited space and bandwidth. The smallest plan, called Hatchling, allows for one domain and unlimited services for $7.16/month or $3.96/month if making a three year commitment. HostGator’s prices are good, but not great. There are several other well known unlimited hosts with at least slightly cheaper plans.
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Reliability
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The hosting server which I used experienced no downtime whatsoever due to hardware failure.
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Help & Support
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HostGator answers support questions via email, forum, live chat and telephone. In short, HostGator excels in this department. No matter how I contacted support over the years, I always received a timely, well-thought-out answer. Superb!
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Uptime
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My premium uptime monitor indicated that HostGator maintained a 99.99% uptime over a two year period.
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Guarantee
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99.9% uptime guarantee.
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45 day money back guarantee.
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Terms of Service
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The Terms of Service for HostGator are online. Highlights include:
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No IRC scripts or bots allowed.
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File dumps, mirror scripts and spamming not permitted.
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Websites using high levels of server resources may be suspended.
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Bottom Line
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Advantages
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Network is extremely reliable.
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SSH access available on all hosting accounts.
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Excellent support team!
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Environmentally friendly hosting.
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Free website builder.
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cPanel control panel.
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Disadvantages
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Slightly more expensive than other unlimited hosts.
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Expect 10-20 minute wait times for support by phone or live chat.
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Billing office slow to respond to issues and complaints.
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Heavily trafficked websites or those that use resource intensive scripts will be required to upgrade to VPS or dedicated server.
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