Best HostGator Web Hosting Plan

Hostgator hosting comes along with Fantastico, where you can instantly install a script without any programming knowledge in just a few clicks. At this time of writing, Hostgator support more than 50 popular scripts. Thanks to Fantastico, these web applications can be installed, updated, and maintained easily on Hostgator.

Sidenote: What is Fantastico?

Fantastico is an automatic script installer which automates the installation and maintenance of common web scripts such as forums, blogs, CMS scripts, and web gallery. Fantastico helps a lot (especially for the non-technical person) as it eliminates the tons tedious jobs involved in web scripts uploading, installation, and basic setups. The installer also helps with server configurations. For example, files/folders permission will be configured automitcally and necessary server configuration files such as .htaccess will be modified accordingly.

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.

No joke, Hosgator business hosting plans now come with a toll free number with no additional cost at all! If you check on Hostgator’s latest shared hosting plan, you’ll notice slight changes had been made for the Business Plan. Now with $12.95/mo, Hostgator is offering unlimited hosting services along with a toll free business number.

Hostgator upgraded their Business Hosting Plan

According to official news released, the toll free service is connected via VoIP with the support of Houston-based VOIP Company, VOIPo. It doesn’t cost anything for Hostgator Business Plan users for the number. Further more, the free number comes with 100 minutes of free usage per calendar month. That’s $4.9/mo call time credit for a $12.95 hosting plans.

What I think about this?

In my opinion, this is amazing. As mentioned by Hostgator marketing directior, Chad Bean’s:

“It’s no mystery that having a toll-free number on your website can drastically improve conversion rates and further establish trust with your site’s visitors. By providing toll-free numbers for free, we’re adding another service to our growing roster of free add-ons and helping to give our web hosting customers the competitive edge in the increasingly competitive hosting market,” says Chad Bean, HostGator Marketing Director.

A toll free number offer is extremely attractive as it’s very valuable for business owners.

This latest deal definitely keep Hosgator one step ahead their competitors. They are, in fact, setting a new industry standard with this offer and I’m sure it will cause certain level of panic to other web hosting providers. Will other companies like Bluehost and Lunarpages follow this trend? I can’t be sure.

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.