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.

I was reading quite some good words left at Hostgator forum and think it’s appropriate to quote some of them here.

Hostgator User Reviews

HostGator: You Had Me At ‘Hello!” – kevo777 @ 03-03-2009

After coming from such a bad experience at GoDaddy I had to post and share how really great HostGator has been just in the few days I’ve been a member.

I so very much appreciate the minimalist design with HostGator’s web presence, including the home page and cPanel. Anyone who has a domain or host account with GoDaddy knows how busy their site is! It’s a mess IMHO.

Maybe I’m just imagining it but I really think my site with HostGator is snappier. True, the account is only 3 days old and it wasn’t a site transfer; just a clean fresh WordPress install. But even when my site was fresh with GoDaddy there seem to be some lag. Perhaps they install more accounts per server on their shared hosting then HostGator does? At any rate, thank you HostGator!! WOOHOO!!!

Ref link: http://forums.hostgator.com/hostgator-you-had-me-hello-t46399.html

Completely awesome – logbert @ 14-03-2009

I used to host with GoDaddy and hated it. So awful. So I switched last year to HostGator. Even if you guys didn’t offer way more features and better support, you’re still like 9,000 times better because your administrative interface isn’t a confusing mess.

Anyway, I’ve been hosting here for about a year now and am really happy with it. I’ve seen virtually no downtime, support has been great, and as dumb as it seems, I’m most happy because I don’t have to pay extra to see totally normal things like raw Apache access and error logs and accessing a database remotely.

Thanks for the great service.

Ref link: http://forums.hostgator.com/completely-awesome-t46959.html

Very happy! – seaspiritnw @ 14-03-2009

I have been with HG for just one month but I have to say I am very pleased so far. There were a few questions and a couple of problems I had and chat support was great… they walked me through what I needed to do. My being new at using Joomla and not knowing what was wrong..they found one of the problems was actually with Joomla, and found a link to what I needed at Joomla to fix that issue. If not for them I would probably still be pulling my hair out..lol..

In my opinion they went beyond what I expected to help me out, and were patient with my crazy questions and very nice. My first regular payment just came out and it was so nice to see it went smoothly and was exactly what they said I would be billed…just as the first month was really only 1 penny!

Thank you HG for making my first paid hosting a nice experience!

Ref link: http://forums.hostgator.com/very-happy-t46941.html

Favorite Hostgator customer feedbacks

Of all the reviews I read at Hostgator’s forum, this forum post comes with the best detail and it’s especially helpful for those who wish to switch their current web host.

Host Gator Saved My Business! – marko1 @ 14-03-2009

A giant Thumbs Up to Host Gator…

About three weeks ago, I learned my existing host was being bought out by a larger company with a terrible reputation that planned to migrate all sites to their ‘advanced’ platform.

The old host was excellent – good service, good up-time, competitive prices, personal support and so on. The reviews on this new host are probably the worst on the web. My decision was easy that I had to find somewhere else to host my sites or I could find myself out of business very quickly. I had read stories online about this company loosing entire vps’, providing empty backups and having downtime measured in weeks.

I had almost 100 sites under a reseller plan with the previous host and searched the web to find either a new reseller plan, vps or dedicated server. I decided that the Windows Elite Dedicated Server from Host Gator was the way to go. It took less than 48 hours for Host Gator to prepare the server and I have spent the last two weeks, night and day transferring my web sites and preparing the server.

Even though I transferred my sites, I have not told that new company yet. I am watching as they attempt to migrate my sites and can see the errors and problems I would have to deal with if I stayed there. They even go as far as changing your code to work on their new platform – totally unacceptable!

I am extremely pleased with how smooth this migration went to Host Gator and will be purchasing a Linux Reseller plan this week for several of my Linux sites and as my business grows I can see another Windows Dedicated server in my future. I did encounter one problem on my new server which was answered within 20 minutes from a Host Gator tech through the ticket system.

Keep up the good work!

Ref link: http://forums.hostgator.com/host-gator-saved-my-business-t46935.html

In case you are still wondering about Hostgator hosting service, my only advice is ‘JUST DO IT!’ Hostgator provide 45 days money-back trial period. You can get full refund if you’re unhappy with them during this period.

Hostgator offers unlimited hosting capacity. But what does ‘unlimited’ means? Does ‘unlimited’ means that you can now store unlimited files in your Hostgator account?

The answer is NO.

Surprised? As a smart consumer, you should know that all unlimited hosting offers are actually limited. While storage capacity and bandwidth offered are unlimited, hosting companies often set limits in CPU processing power or number of files. Yes, it’s true that hosting companies are able to offer as much as hosting power their users want under normal circumstances; unlimited hosting offer in reality, however, is more like a marketing gimmick that’s used to attract shopper’s eyeballs. You might want to read further on the truth about unlimited hosting offer here but what we’ll discuss in this post is the file storage limitation in Hostgator account.

Inodes limitation in Hostgator

Yes, Hostgator limits number of files you can store in their hosting account. Or more accurately, Hostgator sets limits in inodes.

What’s inodes?

Inodes the data structure on a traditional Unix-style file system such as UFS. An inode stores basic information about a regular file, directory, or other file system object. In brief, inode is the count of files created or uploaded to a server. At the time of writing, the inodes quota in my Hostgator account is 250,000 – this means that I can only upload or create, by maximum, 250,000 files in my unlimited hosting account.

I feel cheated! They said they are offering unlimited hosting!

Don’t be. Folks at Hostgator had never hide anything about these fact about inodes quota and the inode usages are showed clearly in every account’s cPanel front page. Hostgator, in fact, is the very few hosting companies that is such transparent towards their shoppers.

Bluehost and Hostmonster mentioned about account suspension for overused CPU quota (but not inodes!) and Lunarpages talked about inodes count on their wikipage but nothing specific are mentioned. Not to say that these other hosting companies are bad, but at least you can see that unlimited hosting packages by others are not ‘unlimited’ after all.

So if inodes limitation is not cheating then what does inodes has to do with me?

Basically nothing – unless you plan to run your site on a buggy database scripts or use your Hostgator account for spamming purpose. 250,000 inodes indeed, is a huge number and it’s pretty hard to fill up the quota. I runs 5 websites on my Hostgator account and yet I used less than 3% of the inodes quota given.

3%!

So please, don’t misunderstand that I’m writing this blog post to complain Hostgator. Instead, I’m trying to make you stay informed with what you’re buying. Hostgator, is still, very much recommended and I introduce them to my friends and families every time I was asked.

One thing I like so much about Hostgator is their server stability. Hostgator hosting is so reliable that I hardly find anything to complain everytime I check on my account’s server status. Go check for yourself and try out Hostgator hosting for free for 30 days. I am not saying this because of my business relationship with the company. Yes, Hostgator pays me when my readers signup via my affiliate link but I take pride in promoting them. In fact, I recommend Hostgator when was asked by friends and families!

For your inforamtion, here’s a quick view on Hostgator’s recent server status. Everything seems fine and I’m especially happy with its server load level.

Hostgator is hiring.

But they are having hard time getting the right candidates (sggh, what’s bad economy?). So in case you are qualified Linux or Windows system administrator and unemployed, you know where to submit your resume.

Good luck!