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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.