Yeah, Hostgator sucks. That’s true according to all the haters who contribute their input here: Search Google: Hostgator Sucks.

But if that’s how you judge the quality of a hosting company then Hostgator, apparently, doesn’t suck at all. Results on Google searc for Hostgator Rocks outnumbered the search results by more than 10 times and there are hundreds of thousands of Hostgator lovers leave positive comment on the company.

So does Hostgator suck?

Well, it depends. There are tons of reasons why a hosting company gets complaints. Not every bit of the reasons are valid and sometimes, people are complaining just because they are expecting too much from a good thing.

More of the time, I think people on the Internet just like complaining. They think they will get extra by putting up hate words and rants. Hostgator, as one of the fastest growing hosting companies in United States operate hundreds of thousands websites online. With that much of clients being served, I think it’s fair to say that the hosting company can’t please everyone to the max.

Should I go with Hostgator hosting?

For those who’re worried by the negative comments, note that Hostgator offer a long trial period where you can test Hostgator service risk free. The best hosting review you can get is by reviewing the hosting company yourself. If you are unhappy with any part of their service, simply resign from the subscription and you’ll get your full refund back.

Isn’t better?

And after all, not everyone thinks Hostgator sucks. As mentioned earlier there are more fans than haters for Hostgator. Take me for example, I had been operating websites for years and I’m happy with their services all the time.

Hostgator sucks? Never in my dictionary.

Just a quick note that Hostgator had released a new theme for the control panel. The latest theme design feels much better and the new ‘domain search/transfer’ feature on top of the page is very handy.

Quick view on Hostgator’s cPanel Theme

It’s always a good thing to see your hosting company is improving. Hostgator never fail to impress me with their determination to provide better and faster supports to their clients. If you ever submit a ticket to Hostgator recently you’ll notice there are quite some changes with Hostgator’s ticket system.

Hostgator’s new ticketing system

First, the control interface of customer support is different now. The designs look cleaner and it’s more user-friendly. More over, you’ll notice a friendly message from Brent (founder of Hostgator) regarding on the upgrades. This change will inject better automation and increase efficiency of the customer support team.

What’s more behind this is that the upgrading of ticket system is just a part of Hostgator’s latest project named ‘Gator’, where the system will evolve into an integrated billing, affiliate, chat, and ticket system. According to Brent, Hostgator’s old system needs upgrade desperately. The system, lack of modern IT automation, is using ModernBill for billing, Kayako for tickets, LivePerson for chat, and a hacked up version of ultimate for affiliates.

The new system on the other hand will improve a lot in term of customer-support interaction (such as customers can rate all HostGator responses), spam detecting, as well as employees management at Hostgator’s end. According to Brent, when everything has been completed it will result in millions a year in savings and at least a 30% increase to staff productivity.

It’s no wonder that the folks at Hostgator seems excited with this change and saying that ‘Freedom is coming’. Hopefully the price will not increase when the productivity leveled up.

I think I still owe you guys a detail introduction on Hostgator. I was reluctant to write about this because it’s boring covering all the history stuffs of a company and I thought consumers would be more interested in what they can get.

However I was wrong. In fact what I learned is that some shoppers are interested in knowing the company’s details before they order their hosting package. So for friends who asked me to cover more on Hostgator’s company details, here’s the information.

Hostgator Homepage

Who’s the boss behind Hostgator?

Brent Oxley is the founder and current CEO of Hostgator.

When Hostgator started off their business?

Hostgator started off their business back in year 2000. Hostgator’s current success is quite an amazing story as the company is actually an one-man-operation company based in Brent’s (the founder) university dorm room at Florida Atlantic University.

What is the size of Hostgator at current time?

Hostgator grew fast, very fast. They were first started with just 3 servers and are now running on over 5,000 servers. The company’s HQ recently moved into a new 20,000 square foot office building in Houston, Texas and has added more than 150 employees.

The success of the company is recognized when they were named one of the fastest growing private companies in United States (ranked 21st for nation and ranked 2nd in Texas) by Inc. Magazine.

How Hostgator achieved such level of success?

I’m not a professional business analyst thus have no accurate answer for the question. But in case you want my opinions, here’s it.

Features wised, Hostgator hosting solutions are very comprehensive. Generally, no matter what is your purpose of getting web hosting, they have the right solution for you. At the time of writing, Hostgator offer hosting services in three major categories: Shared Hosting, Dedicated Hosting, and Reseller Hosting packages. Each of these hosting package offers powerful features which include good storage and bandwidth as well as other supporting features.

Listed above are the tangibles features that can be compared and reviewed. However, from the user’s point of view, I think “treating the customers right” is what brought Hostgator to today’s success.

Hostgator are, by now, the best hosting companies in my list (yes, it outranked Bluehost by now) - the kind of attention I’m getting in term of customer supports and needs is abnormally high. Hostgator had been improving their users experience in the past and they are now still doing the same thing (in fact they recently just invested in cPanel upgrading and customer tickets system). Sure the price of Hostgator is a little higher than the rest - but the service quality is worth every penny of it.

Hostgator’s Web Hosting Features

I would like to pull in Hostgator’s hosting features as the end of the article. Readers who get interested in Hostgator are recommend to click here and place your orders. (Yup, that’s my affiliate link and please - that’s the only way I earn the income to support my writing and hosting fees for this blog. Why not do me a favor since it’s not costing you any extra.)

You can check my previous post for Hostgator’s shared hosting plan; while here are the dedicated and reseller hosting plans for Hostgator.

Hostgator Dedicated Hosting Plan

Dedicated hosting is a kind of hosting service where you rent the whole server as your own. You can run multiple websites on a dedicated hosting but you’ll be the only client using that particular computer.

More details on Hostgator’s dedicated hosting.

Hostgator Reseller Hosting Plan

Clients who take up reseller hosting account can, well, resell their hosting capacity. You would be amazed how easy and cheap it is to become your very own web hosting company. Hostgator offer you all the tools and support needed to have you up and running in just a few minutes time. All of our reseller hosting plans allow you to create unlimited web sites under your own packages, prices, and brand.

More details on Hostgator’s reseller hosting.

Hostgator seperate its hosting plan to major three: HatchlingGator Hosting, BabyGator Hosting, and Busines Hosting. Hosting plans are divided based on its disk space and bandwidth allocation as well as some other addon hosting features.

In a quick glance, here’s the overview of Hostgator hosting plans.

* Hostgator upgraded its hosting plan in late October.

Server uptime is always the most important issue for web hosting shoppers. When you host a website, you do not want any of your website visitors bump into a blank page due to web host outage. This explains why most hosting review websites focus a lot on tracking hosting server uptime.

One of the hosting review that did a good work on checking Hostgator uptime is HostgatorReview.org. Quoting from the website, we can see that Hostgator is recording a respectable hosting uptime for August.

Refer figure below for Hostgator hosting uptime - you’ll be surprise how well the hosting perform.

Hostgator Hosting Uptime

As you can see from the chart, Hostgator recorded a 99.94% of hosting uptime for month August. This is a very good results and folks at Hostgator should be very proud of it!

In case you’re wondering about Hostgator server reliability, you can be assured that the hosting service by Hostgator is well above average and it’s recommended by most hosting review website.

Some voice from other Hostgator’s user perhaps? Thanks Phil for the guest articles - I hope you can benefit from this Hostgator review.

Guest Articles:Hostgator Hosting Review

In the circle of web hosting companies, Hostgator has emerged as one of the most popular company around. They achieve this because they deliver what they promise. It is as simple as that. Their customers are pleased with their service because they pick up the phone and solve their problems every time. Not only do they answer phone, they also reply email enquiries, respond to live chat as well. No wonder they get such high rating from their customers. When you have happy customers, it is hard to say no to success.

However, if you just glance through HostGator, you would not feel that this provider is something that you would be interested in. Their generic website is dull with a slogan which is also dull. It says ‘We eat up the competition’. It uses a cpanel and standard set up which is an average for web host companies.

This simplicity is the key to their success. They seem to be transparent and let you know everything about them. So, you won’t feel like there is a marketing ploy or any undisclosed terms about them. What you see is what you get. Their terms of service with HosGator are as simple as their order process. You can order your website with ease and it only takes up around 5 minutes. Their billing details are displayed so you can track it in every page of your order. Finally, you can pay via credit card, paypal or even debit card. All this features makes HostGator such a user friendly provider among its competition. Below is a review on the feature and performance on HostGator.

Hostgator’s Features Review

HostGator uses the Linux system. This means that they can only provide Linux hosting. Nevertheless, it is heard that they are planning to improve their service by adding windows system hosting in their services. They provide all their features in all their packages and this is what consumers need to build a serious website. For consumers who may need additional domains, their Baby and Swamp package allows unlimited domain add-ons. This gives you the ability to have multiple sites. HostGator uses cpanel, the best controlled panel available in the market. Furthermore, you will also get Fantastico script installer which let you open most of the open source scripts with just a few clicks. They also support PHP4 and PHP5, SSH, Cron jobs, Python, Ruby on Rails and so on. The packages also include sufficient POP3 accounts.

Hostgator’s Performance Review

All the websites hosted by Hostgator is placed in their Dual Xeon servers. These servers are located in their data center located in Dallas. The data center connects to 10 backbone providers providing 99.9% uptime with a standard industry guarantee. A test done on a website hosted by HostGator using a third party uptime monitor shows result that HostGator provides 99.98% uptime. This test was done from February2008 till the end of April. For more than 3 months, HostGator was able to provide unchallenged performance by other host companies. This is the proof that Hostgator has to say that they are the best in the field.

Article by Phil Anderson - experienced web writer.

For those who’re looking for web hosting, take advantage of Hostgator’s recent Halloween special promotion: Customers get 20% offer for every hosting account purchased.

At the time of writing, HostGator claims that they are world’s top 10 largest web hosting companies with more than 1,300,000 hosted domains. Also, the hosting company recently ranked 21st in Inc. Magazine Top 5000 fastest growth company.

I’m not surprise to see them launching out new promotion at this ‘heated’ moment. After all, isn’t now the best timing to trumpet their victory and win more market segment in hosting business?

While researching for this blog recently I’ve found some funny facts about Hostgator.

Now you might already knew Hostgator’s based in Houston, Texas; and they have just won themselves #21 spot in Inc. Magazines Top 5,000; what you might not know is the figures about the company’s past three years growth.

Hostgator Company Profile

Check this out, Hostgator company profile according to Inc. Magazine:

The company actually grew nearly 5,300%, started out of a college dorm room with literally no budget to a company with 155 employees, in just three years! The numbers are really remarkable and I have my highest respect to their founder Brent Oxley.

Funny rules in Hostgator

Also, what you might not know is that HostGator has a full-time chef who cooks meals for the employees on all shifts (wow!). But only if they meet their call quotas. If employees don’t meet their call quotas, they are taken off the list for the day.

No wonder the supporting staffs are so helpful!

“Overselling” is always a big issues for website owners and hosting companies.

Overselling in web hosting industry simple means a hosting provider is selling more resources to it’s customers than it actually has. Stretching the resources beyond the limits represents better profit margin for the hosting company (thus allow users to host with a lower cost) but in the same time, a great risk for customer.

When planned carefully, overselling allows web hosting companies to operate more efficiently, where this in fact can be benefiting for the customers - lower hosting costs, better hosting features, more free promotional vouchers, etc.

However, overselling can be the pain in the butt when irresponsible hosting companies play it bad. Heavy downtime, extremely slow server response time, lost of data - these are all the terrible consequences of overselling.

There’s a good place that I used to learn a lot about web hosting overselling - No OverSelling Hosts (www.noshosts.com). At www.noshosts.com, you can learn everything about overselling, from how to catch an oversold web hosts to shop for no-oversell-certified hosting companies.