Whether you want complete control over your entire hosting configuration or simply want to save money by securing a high-value and fairly comprehensive, shared hosting plan, HostGator may be the right provider for you. This is by far, one of the best-known companies out there. It is also among the cheapest. Following are several things that you should know about this provider when shopping around for a hosting service.
Even The Starter Plans Are Fairly Impressive
HostGator offers VPS hosting, reseller hosting, dedicated hosting and shared hosting plans. The Hatchling plan is the company’s most basic and low-thrills, shared hosting offer. Surprisingly, it comes with nearly everything that most small business owners and bloggers need to get started. Those who sign up for this service can enjoy unlimited bandwidth, unlimited disk space, a single domain and a shared SSL certificate. With a good promo code, the already low cost of this service will drop even lower. Best of all, subscribers will only experience a slight bump in prices after their first year of service has passed.
Guaranteed Uptime
Like most other hosting services, HostGator promises 99.9% uptime. This means that over the course of an entire year, subscribers will experience just 8 hours of downtime or less. For those who have tried other companies that have made this same promise, this provider appears to live up to its offer. In fact, most HostGator reviews assert that this company is both low in cost and reliable.
Excellent Customer Service
There are certainly other features that make HostGator a standout contender in the hosting industry. This can be seen in the fact that they offer continuous customer support. No matter what time of day or night problems occur, subscribers can count on reaching a live company representative if this level of support is required. This in turn helps to minimize the amount of downtime that is experienced by ensuring a swift resolution to problems.
Avoid Manual Transfers
It is not necessary to transfer your website manually when switching to HostGator. This is very helpful for those who already have existing sites and simply aren’t happy with their current hosting services. This company will transfer your entire site for you through a reliable process known as QuickInstall. Within a couple of hours of your initial sign-up, their tech team will have your site transferred over and ready to use. This saves site owners countless hours of frustration.
Powered By Clean Energy
If you are concerned about the environment and want to minimize your carbon footprint in every way possible, you will be happy to know that this company runs its data center on energy derived from natural and sustainable sources. This is not the case with other big-name hosting companies. HostGator uses energy from massive wind farms in Texas, as opposed to relying on large and outdated coal plants.
The Drawbacks
There are, however, a few drawbacks of using these services. Although this company has a number of accessible and very helpful tutorials, the dashboard and other features are often considered less intuitive than those of its competitors. Thus, it may take a bit of technical know-how in order to get optimal value from the available plans, particularly its shared hosting packages.
In spite of the massive amount of support that this company provides concerning its hosting packages, another drawback in working with this company is having a limited amount of support when it comes to prevention. There are backups that are performed on a regular basis and ample access to malware. Those who are operating WordPress sites, however, will have to maintain and run them on their own.