HostGator has become one of the better known web hosts in the industry by being themselves. Though nothing they do is completely spectacular or unbelievable, they do what they should do. That is, HostGator actually answers their phones, replies to their emails, responds to live chat requests, doesn’t rip you off, and provides quality hosting. It’s actually quite sad that most hosts can’t seem to get these things right, but it’s great for HostGator as they’ve banked on it and it’s translated into success.
At first glance, HostGator is not too impressive. They have a fairly generic web site, a logo with a fairly lame slogan - “we eat up the competition” (the alligator in the logo is eating the “H”) (sorry HostGator), ordinary copy on their text, an apparent lack of updates on their site, a pretty standard ModernBill setup, cPanel, and basically everything an average web host has.
However, that’s the beauty of HostGator. They don’t have too many bells and whistles, marketing ploys, or anything of the sort. What you see is what you get and it’s that simple. HostGator’s terms of service is pretty standard, as is their order process. Marketing isn’t shoved down your throat at every page and billing is simple. The order process takes about 5 minutes and HostGator accepts both credit cards and PayPal (which is always nice), as well as debit cards.
HostGator offers some other services such as web design, merchant services, domain registration, SSL certificates (which at $75 each, are overpriced), and script installation. They outline all of their upgrades quite clearly in the Addons section of the Support Center, which is always nice.
The actual HostGator control panel is cPanel. There is absolutely nothing that I can tell that is different than any other standard installation of cPanel. It has the standard mail and database features. Speed was good. Everything worked fine and installation of the scripts I tried worked just fine.
Pros
Good support, easy to contact, competitive pricing, plenty of features with
cPanel, straight forward
Cons
Not too many free addons or extra features, no Web 2.0 technology support
Bottomline
HostGator is a solid hosting company that provides excellent support and competitive pricing without too many frills or marketing ploys.
Hi, I've been a webmaster for many years and have experience with many of the top web hosting providers out there. I have thoroughly reviewed and rated the
Hostgator has been great for me. Their support is excellent and very fast. I agree with another post here, the only downfall would be lack of ffmpeg support. It’s probably in their best interest not to support it because of it’s high CUP overhead. All in all, they have been a solid hosting company for me.
Hostgator is great, The haven’t had any real problems. When I have questions support answers them quickly and to the point.
Recently I have been wanting to run a small video site but cant because they dont allow ffmpeg on their shared hosting plans, This is the ONLY thing I have against them at this point. Uptime has been great, space and bandwidth for the price is great.
You really cannot go wrong with this webhost.
Host Gator is by far the best “standard” shared hosting company we’ve seen and is who we refer all of our clients to when they’re searching for such a host. And for the price, you just cannot beat it.
While we have had a few minor issues over the years, their customer service is great and is quick to respond and make everything right. Which is more than we can say for many hosts (and we have seen quite a few).
(Their reseller accounts are pretty decent as well if you need more resources and aren’t quite to the VPS or dedicated server level of need.)