With plethora of shared hosting services available to pick from for hosting your next website, it can a hard task to finally settle with one. Even after hours of reading hosting reviews and comparing pricing and plans, you could be left dumbstruck as to which hosting to go with. If you are a small or medium sized business or blogger who is looking for a reliable hosting for a decent price, hostgator could be your ideal choice. I have been very happy with their service. Here are the 10 reasons that make Hostgator’s shared hosting plans the perfect hosting solution for you.
Hostgator’s excellent support
If a hosting company doesn’t have a good support system and manpower in place, it cannot be much relied upon. Hostgator has been quite phenomenal in terms of providing 24×7 support. Normally on weekdays, the maximum I have to wait to get on line with one of their live chat staff is around 5 minutes while on weekends it could be around 10-15. They will ask for your credentials and will try to solve your issue then and there for you.
Technically Sound Tech support
This could come under the first point but I wanted to make it a different one. On one occasion, I needed to automatically create a subdomain for each URL on one of my other sites. I installed a wordpress plugin for that and it wasn’t working and thinking it was a server related issue, I got on a live chat with hostgator tech support. He went out of his way and not only provided me an alternative and a more reliable solution without using a plugin but also pointed me to a stack overflow thread that showed how to do it. Very commendable.
Supports Ruby on Rails out of the box
While this may not be quite a necessity for many bloggers who just need a hosting to get their WordPress blog started, it may come in handy for startups who want to build with Ruby on Rails, which is one of the most popular web frameworks out there today. You can find Ruby Gems and Ruby on Rails options under their software and services settings and get started with your Ruby on Rails based online application.
One thing that Hostgator excels at is uptime. I am amazed at how much reliable Hostgator is in terms of the uptime it promises and lives up to. I use a web monitoring service called montastic.com which sends me an email whenever my site is down and then another email when the site is back up again. In a year, I may get around 10 emails from montastic saying the site is down and then another 10 saying its back up again. And the downtime is never more than 10-20 minutes. That’s about 15 minutes of down time every month and as a shared hosting user I am perfectly fine with that.
You may say 15 minutes is enough to a lose a potential customer who may land on my site during the downtime. But hey, if you compare it with other hosting companies in the same price range, it is actually miles better than the ridiculous down times that customers of other low price range hosting companies have to face.
Doesn’t lock you out of using certain WordPress plugins
Some hosting companies do not allow you to use certain memory hogging plugins like All in one SEO, broken link checker etc. While these plugins are great, they do use up a lot of memory. Some shared hosting providers like dreamhost prohibit the use of All in One SEO from what I have read other bloggers say. However, Hostgator doesn’t force you to stop using such plugins. It sure does recommend not using memory hogging plugins but you will always have an option to use them whenever you want.
As a sidenote, if you are looking for an alternative to all in one seo plugin, WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast would be a good choice for you.
Hosgator’s great site response times
If you check on pingdom, you will see that sites hosted on Hostgator have a very quick response time. For example for this site http://techattitude.com, the load time is just 2.41s at the time of writing this post.
Instant backup service on cPanel
Hostgator offers a good deal of backup services right on the cPanel. It has a cloud backup solution option and also allows you to save the a backup of the files using their backup wizard. Plus if you meet their criteria, Hostgator automatically backs up your data for you on a regular basis so that you won’t have to worry about losing any of your valuable data.
Hostgator’s Great security
Hostgator’s servers are pretty secure when compared to some other hosts. When I was working for one of my clients who was using Bluehost for hosting his websites, I witnessed his site got hit by malwares on more than one occasion. With hostgator, this doesn’t quite happen, at least it hasn’t happened with many people I know who have been using hostgator.
Besides that, Hostgator’s Sitelock feature available on their cPanel allows you to protect your site from the hackers.
Plenty of website builder options
Even if you are a complete noob when it comes to creating websites and blogs, hostgator can be your companion. It has a great suite of tools that allow you to install wordpress or other CMS like magento on your site with ease. Its Quickinstall tool allows you to install all different kinds of CMSs ranging from WordPress, Magento, joomla, glFusion, Modx, Mambo, Nucleus and more. It also has website builders such as Weebly mobisitebuilder which allow you to interactively build your site and start adding content right away.
It offers over 4500 free website templates, 8000 free images and flash intros and more. What more could you ask for?
Bing and Google Adwords credit
If you are a new user who wants to start out with a new hosting, you can benefit by signing up with hostgator as you will receive free Bing and Google Adwords credit as well.
Bonus points
Hostgator loves the nature
Hostgator servers are powered by wind. The millions of sites that are hosted on hostgator are powered by wind energy that comes from Texas wind power.
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