Packed with features, Hostgator hosting has just about everything you want from a web host.
Hostgator hosting is a great web hosting service that is easy to use and offers a variety of useful plans for consumers and small businesses. It’s our top pick for shared web hosting and novice webmasters in general.
Per month, starts at $10.95
$2.64 per month + HostGator free domain registration
$6.95 per month Save 62%
$2.64 por mes WordPress
$3.58 per cloud month
HostGator Hosting Review: What are the Pros
A variety of feature-packed hosting plans
Excellent shared hosting offer
Good for novice webmasters
Useful site building software
Good customer service
excellent uptime
HostGator Hosting Review: What are the Cons
No Windows based VPS hosting
hostgator vps cpanel
Every business needs a website, whether it’s a fully functional eCommerce setup or a simple blog to post daily updates.
HostGator is feature-packed and a top choice, with quality cloud, reseller, cpanel virtual private server (VPS), and dedicated server packages, but it’s the company’s shared plans that really stand out from the very web hosting package. busy.
In fact, HostGator’s shared packages are so robust that the service earns our Editors’ Choice rating in that hosting subcategory.
Shared hosting, if you’re not familiar with the category, is a type of web hosting that sees multiple sites living on a single server. In this setup, the sites share server resources (hence the name), so a large spike in traffic on Site A can, unfortunately, affect Site B’s performance in a negative way.
Shared hosting is a good option if you are looking for cheap hosting; If you want more server resources dedicated to your site, you should go for VPS or dedicated hosting routes.
HostGator offers month-to-month shared web hosting plans, but pushes hard for you to sign up for longer terms, starting at six months. I don’t like that during the subscription process HostGator defaults to a three year period. It’s one thing to encourage users to skip month-to-month service, but pushing them to three years from the start is a bit much.
Starting Prices hostgator
That said, HostGator offers Linux or Windows-based shared hosting packages that give small and medium-sized businesses room to grow. The Hatchling plan (starting at $10.95 per month) offers unlimited disk space, monthly transfers of data, databases, and email addresses, plus support for single-domain and third-party applications such as content management systems and e-commerce platforms.
The Baby plan (starting at $11.95 per month) builds on the hatchling offer by adding unlimited domains. The top-tier business plan (starting at $16.95 per month) includes highly specialized options, such as a toll-free number for your business and a private SSL (secure socket layer) certificate.
Hosgator VPS Web Hosting cpanel
Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting is for people who want more server power than shared hosting offers. VPS hosting also sees multiple sites living on one server, although much less in number than what you’ll find on a shared hosting server. You’ll pay more for a VPS server, but you’ll get more server power in return.
HostGator hosting offers Linux based VPS hosting starting at $19.95 per month. If you need more power, expect high volumes of traffic, or have specific compliance requirements that prevent you from using shared servers (but don’t want to pay dedicated server prices), these are good options to consider.
The most basic VPS plan, Snappy 2000, offers 2 GB of RAM, 120 GB of disk space and 1.5 TB of monthly data transfers starting at $79.95 per month (or as low as $19.95 per month with a three-year commitment). The mid-tier Snappy 4000 package, starting at $119.95 per month (or as cheap as $29.95 per month with a three-year plan), features 4GB of RAM, 165GB of storage, and 2TB of monthly data transfers.
The most advanced plan, Snappy 8000, offers 8 GB of RAM, 240 GB of disk space, and 3 TB of monthly data starting at $149.95 per month or $39.95 per month if you sign up for 36 months. The plans are much more flexible than what Network Solutions offers, but not as well rounded as Hostwinds, our editors’ choice for VPS hosting.
Hostwinds ($3.29/Month at HostWinds) has well-rounded, wallet-friendly VPS deals starting at $16.99 per month for 1GB of RAM, 30GB of disk space, 1TB of monthly data transfers, and unlimited email.
Plans scale up to $574 per month for 96GB of RAM, 750GB of disk space, 9TB of monthly data transfers, and unlimited email. Hostwinds VPS plans also have a Windows OS option, which is something HostGator does not offer.
HostGator Dedicated Hosting User Profiles
Dedicated web hosting
Dedicated hosting is a powerful form of web hosting that sees your existing site on a server by itself. As a result, this expensive hosting is also the most powerful. If you expect a lot of traffic, it is what should feed your website.
HostGator’s dedicated server packages start at $119 per month, and they offer a good set of features. HostGator users can customize their servers with up to 1TB of SSD storage, 32GB of RAM, and unlimited monthly data transfers, which beats the bandwidth offerings of many other dedicated server packages.
HostGator’s dedicated servers come in Linux and Windows flavors, which is not as common as you might think; Linux tends to dominate the field. In fact, HostGator is one of the few web hosts we’ve tested that performed well and offers both operating systems. Even DreamHost, one of our favorite hosting services, lacks Windows-based dedicated servers.
That said, Hostgator is not the editors’ choice for dedicated hosting. That title is for AccuWeb.
AccuWeb has an impressive set of features. Their dedicated hosting packages (starting at $105 per month) can be outfitted with up to 2TB of storage, a whopping 512GB of RAM, and 50TB of monthly data transfers. The servers come in flavors of Linux or Windows, too.
Still, HostGator’s dedicated hosting deals are nothing to sneeze at. Hit them up if you need dedicated hosting with high-capacity SSD storage.
HostGator, like the many other web hosts PCMag has reviewed over the years, also offers cloud hosting. With cloud hosting, the resources your site needs to run are shared across multiple servers. The benefits? You can scale resources in real time, since the site is not limited by the physical constraints of the server.
HostGator’s cloud hosting service, unlike DreamHost, the co-publisher’s pick for the category, is only available through the Linux platform; if you want the Windows operating system, you have to look elsewhere. Still, HostGator has attractive cloud hosting plans that are worth your consideration.
Hosgator hosting plans cloud hosting, cloud hosting
The $12.95 per month Hatchling Cloud plan comes with 2 GB of RAM, two CPU cores, one domain, and unlimited data and storage. From there, the $13.95 per month baby cloud plan adds unlimited domains, and increases the cores to four and the RAM to 4GB. At the top of the deals is the $19.95 per month Business Cloud, which features six CPU cores, 6GB of RAM, and a dedicated IP address.
1&1 Ionos, the other co-publisher option for cloud hosting, is designed for enterprise-grade companies. You’ll find 16-core CPUs, servers with 48GB of RAM, and other high-end specs. You can also heavily customize your package.
WordPress Webhosting with Hostgator
HostGator allows you to install the WordPress content management system (CMS) on any of its servers, but the web host also offers three levels of managed WordPress web hosting: Starter, Standard, and Business.
Starter (starting at $14.95 per month) offers 25,000 visits per month, the ability to host just one WordPress site, 50GB of storage, and unlimited email. Standard (starting at $20.95) bumps things up to two WordPress sites, 200,000 monthly visits, and 150 GB of disk space. Business (starting at $27.95 per month) gives you three WordPress sites, 300,000 monthly visits, and unlimited storage.
All plans come with page caching and an optimized WordPress hosting environment.
A2, our Editors’ Choice for WordPress Hosting, leads HostGator and the competition by offering three great tiers of WordPress hosting, Lite, Swift, Turbo, that feature unlimited storage and monthly data transfers across the board. Your pre-purchased environment comes with many WordPress-friendly features, including live malware protection and select plugins that are designed to enhance your experience.
WordPress is easy to set up on HostGator even if you’re not going the Managed-WordPress route. The customer portal has an option called Quick Links which opens a dedicated interface for installing third-party applications.
There’s also a handy shortcut called Get Started With WordPress Today that leads to the Quick Links interface. Fixed the path to my blog installation, entered the WordPress admin account username and clicked the install button. Easy as that, my site was up and running.
HostGator also automatically installed the WP-Super-Cache WordPress plugin to help improve blog performance.
In testing, the setup process for my WordPress site was easy, because the database was already there. There was also a link to the Mojo Marketplace under WordPress services, with premium plugins and services for my blog. HostGator lacks a blog import button, but WordPress makes the import process easy enough.
Setting up a hosted site from HostGator hosting
It’s nice that HostGator sends an introductory email with links to all the resources you’ll need to create a website, because the interface takes a bit of getting used to. HostGator has a billing login link at the top of their site that leads to the customer portal, where all your payment information, details about your plan, and options to purchase add-ons appear.
This page has tabs at the top for account and domain management. The Hosting tab is where you see the actual dashboard with site building tools, apps, website stats, and much more. The introductory email also has a direct link to the control panel, but it looks different than what you’d get through the Hosting tab, making the experience a bit confusing at first.
HostGator has several options for creating a website, including HostGator’s own website builder.
The drag and drop functionality allows me to quickly create an attractive page with slideshows, contact forms, social media links, and more in no time. You can also install WordPress or other CMS platforms like Drupal, b2evolutions, Joomla, Mambo and Tiki to name a few.
A File Manager tool allows you to manually upload files to the server to create the website that way. The tool is better than a basic FTP client as you can edit the files directly or use a built-in HTML editor.
HostGator blesses you with a free domain name if you sign up for at least 12 months of cloud, shared, or WordPress hosting – dedicated and VPS hosting do not qualify. That’s not an unusual feature in the web hosting space, but it’s a nice touch. However, there are two caveats.
The free period lasts for one year and the desired domain must end with the extensions .com, .org or .net. If you already own a domain name that ends in one of the above extensions, HostGator will transfer it to a server for free.
Hostgator Apps
If you’re looking to get into the web hosting business, but don’t want to deal with infrastructure issues, check out HostGator’s reseller hosting packages.
The plans, starting at $19.95 per month, feature unlimited email across the board. Shared, dedicated, and VPS packages are of the Linux and Windows variety, but HostGator doesn’t provide them with unlimited storage and monthly data transfers at each tier like reseller publishers’ choice hostwinds does with its offerings.
On the plus side, HostGator allows you to apply your own branding to the servers you rent, and also provides 24/7 technical support.
Ecommerce Tools at Hand Hostgator
As mentioned, HostGator offers the Mojo Marketplace, which has email marketing tools like DaDa Mail (starting at $34.95 per year), software that allows you to send email newsletters to a list of subscribers. Quick Links also has eCommerce packages including Magento, phpCOIN, SugarCRM, and ZenCart.
I have installed Magento which provides a drag and drop interface to create an attractive online store. There are tons of layout options, which can be a bit overwhelming.
Excellent uptime results Hostgator hosting
Website uptime is one of the most important aspects of a hosting service. If your site is down, customers or clients will not be able to find you or access your products or services.
I used a website monitoring tool to track the uptime of our test site hosted on HostGator over a 14-day period. Every 15 minutes, the tool pings my website and sends me an email if it can’t contact the site for at least 1 minute.
Test data reveals that HostGator is remarkably stable; in fact, it didn’t go down once in the two-week testing period. You shouldn’t have to worry about your HostGator site being down for long periods of time.
Quality Customer Service Hostgator
Like HostMonster, HostGator offers 24/7 phone support and online web chat – I’ve tried both methods of help.
I called phone support on a weekday afternoon to ask how I could import my WordPress.com blog into my HostGator site. I received detailed instructions via email and was quite satisfied.
With HostGator’s online web chat, after typing my question into a form and starting the chat, I was shown my estimated wait time of two minutes. Less than a minute later, a customer service representative showed up and provided easy-to-understand instructions on how to import the blog.
HostGator also has a very deep knowledge base that contains answers to just about every possible question you might have, ranging from basic to very advanced. Overall, HostGator provides excellent customer support.
HostGator does better than most of its competitors here, offering a 45-day guarantee, but Dreamhost, our top pick for power users, is even more generous, with an impressive 97-day guarantee.
Dedicated Hostgator Hosting
HostGator is a great web host that has power and flexibility across multiple hosting categories. HostGator’s generous hosting offerings are enough to earn it the PCMag Editors’ Choice designation in the shared web hosting subcategory, and it’s also an overall top pick for web hosting, along with business-friendly DreamHost, Hostwinds, and liquidweb. HostGator is specifically superior when it comes to web hosting for beginners.
