Best HostGator Web Hosting Plan

When it comes to fighting global warming, here’s what most people will do: cut down air conditioner usage, reduce plastic bags usages, use a bicycle, use recycled papers, and split your garbage into seperate recycle bins.

What about web hosting?

I bet majority of us have not thought about getting a ‘green’ host when it comes to web hosting. In fact, little had been told – most of us do not link global warming with web hosting at all.

However, do you know about 3~4% of the electricity used in this world is consumed by date centers? The IT sector has a huge climate impact.

If you’re one of the four and a half million registered users of Second Life, consider this: the average Second Life avatar consumes 1,752 kWh of electricity per year, or about two thirds that of an actual person (globally averaged). One server alone has roughly the same climate impact as a 15mpg SUV!

Seeing our planet needs a hand desperately, Hostgator has gone green by working out series of program (with the help of Integrated Ecosystem Market Services) to reduce their IT emissions.

What had Hostgator achieved?

As the impact of this program, Hostgator is now using renewable energy (wind power) to cool and power their servers.They had purchased RECs (translate it to wind power capacity) for 130% of the elctricity used to maintain both their shared and reseller servers.

What does this mean to you?

Switching to Hostgator, or picking up Hostgator as your web host means that you care about your environment. By switching from another web host (that’s not using recycle power), you simply reduce your personal carbon footprint greatly.

Want more readings?

Wish to know how Hostgator did it? Check out their latest blogpost about the whole go-green program: What’s lean, mean, and now green.

What are your consideration point when you’re shopping for the right web hosting services? Was that monthly price of the hosting package? Or it’s the hosting features? Or server storage capacity? Or…?

To pick up a good web hosting service, web server uptime is something you MUST look into. For any hosting companies to listed as “Good” in my list, regardless of the price and features, they must be able to provide reliable server uptime.

This is very important so that your website is always available in the internet. I mean, what’s the point of having 5,000 GB, 10000GB, or even unlimited GB of bandwidth transfer when your website is not accessible online?

The availability of you website is important so that it can be reach anytime.

It will be irritating if your website often experience interruption, slow loading time and so on. When your web server is down or loading slow, the user’s surfing experience will turned terribly bad, and your website’ll loose all the credibility.

To have your website running smooth, you must have a high uptime and a high traffic support so that you’re the people who access your internet gets to your website very quickly. In the industry today, the standard uptime for a good hosting company would be 99.5%.

A check on Hostgator server uptime

Now in case you wonder, here’s how Hostgator server performed for the past one month – tested at Uptime Auditor, on 15 minutes frequency.

Things seems pretty stable with Hostgator server and there’s no downtime faced for the whole August. As I already mentioned earlier, Hostgator is one of the very little web host companies that fully maintain their own datacenter. This enables folks in Hostgator to take extra care on the servers, which then lead to better server performance.

Why all the hassles setting up a full website, blog software nowadays can do almost every thing you need in a basic website.

Why WordPress for your blog?

To start blogging at Hostgator, you first need to setup your blogging software. For our case, I’ll take WordPress for example.

WordPress is a blog publishing system written in PHP. All data is stored in a MySQL database. It’s an excellent open-source and free blogging software that should soon or later take over all its competitors.

As Hostgator already has Fantastico embedded in the control panel system, we won’t need to install WordPress manually. All you need is to have the idea on the naming of your blog as well as where to install it.

Installing WordPress at Hostgator

Click “Fantastico” at the front page of your cPanel. Fantastico is a wonderful tools that enable you to install series of web applications in just a few clicks. phpBB, Joomla, and WordPress is some of the famous one listed in Fantastico library.

When you’re in, select WordPress – you’ll get a screen (on your right) showing a short description on WordPress, disk space required for installation, all WordPress installation on your account, and a link named “new installation”.

As you might be aware, Hostgator’s currently serving WordPress version 2.6 where the latest version is 2.6.1 (just released mid August).

To install, click on the “New Installation”.

Put in the necessary details – blog names, admin username, password, blog location… etc. Leave blank at the folder column in case you wish to have your blog installed at your root folder (meaning, you want the homepage of your blog to appear at the first page of your website). Click “Install WordPress” when you’re ready, the process will be done within seconds, and… you are DONE! Yup, with the help of Fantastico, it’s just that simple.

If you wish to have your installation details to be kept in email, you can input an email (same or different from what you just registered) and the system will automatically send you the details.

More about WordPress, visit here.