Web hosting industry is a competitive industry. Especially during bad time like now, hosting companies are slashing their price to win customers and to stay alive in business. But is cheap the best? Should we evaluate a web host just by its price tag? As a user, we must be cautious of the cheap hosting because it might be one of those that only care about getting you money. Some companies will try all sorts of marketing tricks to sell you their service. There are many disadvantages with low-cost web hosting services as most of them will fail to deliver proper service.

Cheap hosting = poor support?

The issue with cheap hosting is that it only provides the minimal service (well what do you expect? It is a budget service!) Yes without doubt such hosting companies will provide support that’s good enough for you to put up and run a website. However, it lacks the most important part which is the support. Some companies do prepare support but it is very limited and to be frank, it feels like you have no one backing you up at all. Even though some companies put up 24/7 support in their advertisement but this never really becomes a reality once you start using their service. So, it is very important for you to be able to find a company that provides some sort of support. You can know this by testing their support with emails to see if they reply or not.

Service Level Agreement

Another common pitfalls with cheap hosting is the Service Level Agreement.

It’s important to read the SLA throughly before signing up any web host as it is a legal agreement that ensure the hosting company’s level of service. A responsible web host always offer clearly written SLA to states their service transparently and to guarantees the service quality. But this not the case for most cheap hosting services. In fact, some budget hosting companies do not even provide this agreement. In case you come across one, stay away form them and look for the next one.

Reseller hosting

Cheap hosting also has another drawback with the intrusion of middleman. Sometimes, when you are in the process or getting a new hosting, you are not really dealing with the company but with a middleman. These middlemen are known as reseller hosting. They are people who are agent that sell hosting packages to make profit. The problem with reseller is that you must also find a good one in order to benefit from you cheap hosting.

So, to make a conclusion, there is actually no big problem with cheap hosting. It is a choice that we can. Although cheap, we still have to pay for it and the most important part is t get a good working web hosting to provide the service that we need. Of course, we cannot get fantastic service but at least we can get sufficient service to run a smooth website.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Quick view on Hostgator’s cPanel Theme

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

* Hostgator upgraded its hosting plan in late October.

Much, much more higher.

From Google Insights, it seems that Hostgator related searches (such as Hostgator hosting, Hostgator coupons, and Hostgator reviews) are mainly coming from Asia countries like Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines, Indonesia, and India. Singapore – a small nation with 4.5 millions population, topped the table for Hostgator’s regional interest for year 2008. (Google Insights data shown here)

Why is Hostgator much wanted in Singapore, and other Asia countries?

I was searching around Asia based forums and articles but couldn’t draw any solid conclusion on the question. However, I do come up with a few explanations based on my searches, Hostgator’s much interested in Asia countries might because of:

1. Load time factor vs website targeted audience

One, websites hosted in United States load faster for United States users.

Two, while globalization’s already reshuffling world’s economic standings; United States remain as the biggest spenders for online shopping.  Affiliate network (like CJ.com and ShareASale.com), Google Adsense, AdBrite – major e-commerce networks are based in United States.

Combining the factors above, it’s reasonable to believe that Asians who wish to start their home based business would focus on U.S. market and hosting with a U.S. based web host.

2. Hosting cost

Check this out, a Baby-Gator hosting package at Hostgator cost $7.95/mo for 600GB/6,000GB disk storage/bandwidth, unlimited addon domains; a standard hosting plan at Singapore based PozNet cost $9.5/mo (S$160/yr) for 350MB/35GB disk storage/bandwidth.

That’s right, you gotta pay extra for less features for Singapore hosting. The pricing is more or less the same with other Singapore based hosting, for example: Vodien cost $17/mo (S$24/mo) for 10GB/unlimited disk storage space/bandwidth; CyberSite cost $10.5/mo (S$15/mo) for 200MB/unlimited disk storage/bandwidth, HostSG cost $8.5 (S$12/mo) for 2GB/20GB disk storage/bandwidth.

So should you go with Hostgator if you’re from Singapore, or Malaysia, or Indonesia?

It’s obvious that hosting with Hostgator save you more money. Unless your website’s targeted audience are mainly local (for better loadtime); else I don’t see why you should limit your hosting choice within the local region.

$7.95/mo for 600GB/6,000GB disk storage/bandwidth, reliable web hosting server with long uptime, strong customer supports – I don’t see why you shouldn’t go with Hostgator – regardless which part of the globe you’re staying at.

Well the answer is “not much different” according to Google Insights. A quick check on these three hosting companies for the past four years draw a conclusion that all three of these web hosts are interested by searchers more or less the same recently.

It’s obvious that iPower was leading in the beginning of year 2004 (as they were one of the pioneer); Hostgator and Hostmonster grew exponentially quick and hence, the search trend shown in the graphic below.

Where will Hostgator be in the next 2 years?

Summing up with Hostgator’s recent move in Going Green (using renewable energy to power their servers); I’m expecting the hosting company to continue its strong grow trend and leave the other two behind in one or two year time.

Since Hostgator started its business, it able to offered services for high traffic sites, in which this thing was considered mission impossible at that time, but Hostgator could perform it nicely. Three years ago, it was still a small scale web host which only has hundreds of clients. At the time of writing, Hostgator’s customer base exceed thousands and named as one of the fastest growing companies in United States.

Below are some of the attributes which attract customers to choose Hostgator:-

Customer/Aftersales support

A reliable and promising supports and after sales service which not many web hosts can give. Hostgator provides professional solutions to tackle all type of problems in order to let customers do their business without any obstacle. Customer service is always being the first thing they look into before getting any business from customers. They provide a free guidance to their customers. Most of fundamental services are provided to customer free.

Web hosting servers

The simplest way to justify whether a web host is strong or not can be differentiated by numbers of servers. Meaning, the stronger web hosts will have bigger numbers of servers. For Hostgator, it has about 800 servers up to today.

Customer satisfaction

According to reviews and surveys obtained from forums and articles, Hostgator wins a lot of good comments and appraisals from customers not only on packages provided, but also on services given.

Market leader

Hostgator always looking forward to be the market leader in web host business. This spirit has drive to them work hard to provide more satisfying services to customers.

Reseller Service

Hostgator helps customer to get more savings through reseller service which allow hosting of 12 domains.

Zero Downtime

After years of improvements, downtime almost achieves 100% no downtime service.

Free of Charge Account Moving Service

Hostgator provide a free of charge service to customer for moving 20 accounts.

Effective Business modules

Hostgator help customers to overcome problems of setting up business modules. Until now, a lot of business modules were being set up by Hostgator and all of them are proved to working perfectly.

As a conclusion, Hostgator is your good choice for web hosting company. Since established until today, tons of good comments have clearly proved that Hostgator is a well known, prominent and reliable web host. Plenty of strengths like large web space, strong supports and zero downtime are again convincing you that Hostgator is your ultimate choice.

Minor negative comments like only answers provided during live chat and problems accessing to email. However, such negative comments are just contributed to a very small ratio as in compare with junks of strengths which Hostgator offering.

Lastly, your choice is around the corner – Hostgator. Be a smart buyer and choose the best for you. Hostgator definitely is the one for you.