HostGator Review
Review about HostGator
HostGator is a popular web hosting provider. The company has been offering hosting services since 2002 when it was founded by Brent Oxley. As HostGator themselves say, they started the company from a dorm room at the Florida Atlantic University. Since then, HostGator has grown to a massive company with more than 7,000 managed servers. Currently HostGator hosts over four million domains and make approximately 1% of the world’s Internet traffic.
Summary of Test Results:
Test Period | Speed | Security | Support | Bonus Points | Rank |
Jan-Mar 2013 | 585 Hits and 100% Availability | Chroot Isolation | 35min Basic and 10hours Advanced Support Response | Joomla Auto-updater | #2 |
Server Speed and Security
HostGator doesn’t actually own their servers. They rent them from SoftLayer, previously ThePlanet. SoftLayer has four different data centers based in Washington DC, Houston, Dallas and Seattle. HostGator servers are located on those data centers taking advantage of all the experience and professionalism SoftLayer has to offer.
Technical Assistance
HostGator provides few different types of support. For Pre-Sales questions we recommend you to use the Live Chat support. They have friendly sales representatives able to answer your technical and billing questions. In addition they provide phone support for technical emergency calls, billing and abuse issues. Last but not least, HostGator has a really convenient ticketing system that provides the user with quick help for day-to-day website issues.
Joomla Hosting Features
HostGator provide you with a cPanel tool to manage your hosting account with Fantastico integrated in it. This means that you will be able to install Joomla with a single mouse click.
For small to medium-sized websites HostGator servers handle Joomla very good. All Joomla requirements are fulfilled on HostGator’s servers which guarantees smooth work of the application.
Aside the free Joomla installation and properly configured servers, HostGator have a support team trained to quickly troubleshoot Joomla sites.
I’ve tried HG for a couple of months.
Unfortunately they lack some needed basic features as free daily backup and a good spam filter. They offer you for free a rather basic and clumsy Apache SpamKiller that is impossible to manage properly without spending hours a day.
Their tech support is OK, but far from excellent. Moore often than not they will send you a link to a KnowledgeBase article and you’ll deal with the issue yourself.
Finally, the fact that without informing customers they performed a huge maintenance on their services in the middle of a working day was the last straw which made me cancel the service. When I contacted tech support they just told me that was 4 am at their end, thus the fact that we are based in the East Coast in the USA didn’t seem to count at all for them and the site was down for the most part of the day.
I wouldn’t say they are bad, but would not be my first choice if you are running a business site.
We switched to SIteGround, and although we have been with them for a couple of days, so far I am extremely pleased with their service, tech-support and overall service offering. Among other things, we needed a good quality spam filter which they include for free with any service (SpamExperts), free daily backups and countless features which we have not yet fully explored.
Hostgator definitely do not offer Joomla support. They used to. They were great when I first signed up with them, but now they will not offer any help at all and charge for any site restore/ additional support above and beyond simply copying and pasting a link to their standard support pages. I did pay for a backup restore after a migration went wrong, but they overwrote the backup and I lost the site!
the email is blacklisted from their serves to Aol, yahoo and a few others. No help at all and AOL will not whitelist. It’s a long standing issue and now I can’t reach half of my subscribers. RUN!
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A major disappointment. Been using them since 2008, now I am getting as far away as I can.
Fantastico was long ago abandoned by Hostgator — only an old Joomla 1.5 install. They developed an iinhouse install script, but not quickly update to new CMS versions and the 2.5 version install is broken — incomplete.
They up the hosting packages 25% after the 1st year. in effect changing you a penalty for staying with them. They figure it will be too much trouble for you to move.
Had my whole account shut down — over 22 domains — because HostGator said there was copyrightd material. The domain (addon domain) they cited was only a holding page with an index file. If there was copyright material there it had to have been hacked. I hadn’t done anything with that domain holding page for 2 years. No response to me, no restoration, nothing. They took my account money, shut it down and turned silent.
BAD BAD company. But they are so large — they claim hosting 7 million domains — that they buy add space and reviews everywhere. AVOID HOST GATOR like the plague .
My company was looking for a reliable, cheap web hosting company that offers reselling host options. Their server is fast and reliable, easy to setup and live help tech team is incredible. Very helpful and knowledgeable of the product their selling which makes it an absolute pleasure to have and make our company grow.
We presently use a hosting site that is really impersonal and does not provide direct answers to client questions. With this host, though i purchased their AntiSpam option, my email account has been compromised and they send “read how to correct this” but when you go to the link, there is so much clutter and not the specific answer that I am looking for.
So, the first thing that I need to know is how friendly is your customer service to help clients with specific directions to answer their problems?
My problem is that my email account with my present host has been compromised and I see little assistance in direct aid to me to cure the problem.
Thank you,
Erwin Williams, Founder
ForesicCareers.com