Hostgator Review
HostGator is an immersive web-hosting source for all the hosts in the book. They begin with a basic web-hosting platform, but move into WordPress hosting, VPS hosting and Dedicated hosting. Their customer service support team has won awards for their access and effectiveness, with round-the-clock outreach and contact options. They let potential customers preview their demos and see for themselves which bundle will work for them. Plus, their sub-plan options and variety will win customers over that want customizable packages and plenty of additional features.
They use Weebly QuickInstall for all their customers. This way, customers can create a page and start hosting quickly—even if they’re moving from another host to HostGator.
HostGator has plenty of assets that set them apart from the competition. First, they’re prone to discount offers. They currently offer on their site anywhere from 20-40% discounts on different plans and that number only grows over time. They keep their prices low compared to other companies, their plans easy to understand and their discounts high. They communicate well with each customer and make very clear which bundles come with which offers.
Not that there’s a shortage of plans to choose from. HostGator offers four main plans and sub-plans within those, so that all customers can refine their package and get only the services they absolutely need. Then, there are the managing benefits. Customers can choose how much of their host HostGator manages personally. Whether they want a semi-hosted, fully managed or self-managed site, they can reach out to the support team and find the option that works for them.
In fact, some options may be hard to navigate. There are so many immersive choices that users might need to do a bit of climbing around the website to see them all. Or, they can shortcut the process by reaching out to the customer support team.
The web-hosting platform consists of three packages with very explicit price points. They run specific to different services and hosting varieties. The packages come in: the standard web hosting service, the “optimized WP” service, the “VPS hosting” package and the “Dedicated hosting” package.
The standard web-hosting package comes with a well-formatted control panel that allows the customer easy control and customization of their page. They can install scripts with one click and modify over 4,500 completely free website template designs. All of these website designs run with an uptime guarantee of 99.9%. They offer 24/7 technical support but, if you don’t like their services, you can be sure of a 45-day money back guarantee. Upon subscribing, you also receive a $100 Google AdWords offer and $100 Yahoo!/Bing credit offer. At the time of writing, HostGator offers a 20% discount on this deal.
Their optimized WP package comes 2.5x faster than competitors with managed hosting, prime scalability and even better uptime. Their control panel is as functioning as their standard, plus added security and, of course, WordPress priority.
Their VPS comes with different software options for all their customers, with the same award-winning tech support and top-of-the-line hardware. These include 32-core AMD Opteron 6376 processors, 128 GB RAM and 3.6 TB RAID 10 storage.
Last, the Dedicated hosting platform comes with Intel Xeon quad cores, Uplink ranging from 100 Mbps to 1 Gbps, up to 16 GB RAM and 1000 GB RAID 1 drives. Their bandwidth goes up to 25 TB and their dedicated IPs go up to 5.
Each plan has about three to four sub-plan prices. The web hosting platforms are divided into the “Hatchling,” “Baby” and “Business” plans. The Hatchling runs for up to three years at $3.96/month, the Baby for three years at $6.36/month and the Business for three years at $10.36/month.
The WordPress (WP) hosting plans are called Blog, Business and Pro, and range from two years maximum at $12.95/month to two years maximum at $89.95/month.
With a control panel, the VPS hosting starts at $57.95/month, for the first month, then recurs at $89.95/month afterwards. Without the control panel, the semi-managed VPS package starts at $47.97/month, for the first month, and recurs at $79.95/month.
The four Dedicated server packages are called Basic, Standard, Elite and Pro. These range from $105-225/month, for the first month, and $174-374/month recurring. These prices don’t change based on the control panel.
HostGator won awards with their customer support for a reason. Their support team offers two pages: the customer panel and the support panel. The support service is its own domain. The “Support Portal” offers a whole page of listings and advice, contact options, resources and other topics for all users, both potential and current.
Their Quick Links bar contains all the links to their outreach options. Users can contact support, by phone or web phone, live-chat, produce a ticket for service and manage billing. The support ticket link follows, along with a few other feature menus. There’s the add-on menu, where you can customize your account. Then, they have forums and knowledge bases with all the articles and sites a user could need to find answers and seek help on their own. They stand out from their competition with video tutorials. Their multiple cPanels all come with tutorials, as well as most of their software, their different processes like billing and webmail, and other app and feature tutorials like Sitebuilder and WordPress. To the left, users can find the topic links, including policies, guides, cPanel, Webhost, specialized help and others. Their resources include account add-ons, billing, their HostGator blog, forums and videos. Last, but not least, you can reach out to HostGator on various social media platforms to get a more comprehensive idea of their brand.
HostGator is a great starting—and hopefully ending—place for any webhost need you acquire. They have all the platforms, variations of those platforms and flexible pricing. All of their host packages are easy to use and mange, or partly-manage, thanks to their understanding and customer-conscious support team. Any business of any size can purchase a web host platform with HostGator and walk away completely satisfied with their features, services and output.
