Web Hosting – HostGator Review

HostGator was founded in early 2002 in Boca Raton, Florida by Brent Oxley. It was started in his dorm room in college. Brent dropped out of college to pursue HostGator full time, and now its gone from a few dozen customers to over 150,000! Brent is now the president and chief executive officer of HostGator. This site is proudly hosted by HostGator!

HostGator was ranked by Inc. Magazine in 2008 to be the 21st fastest growing private company in America, second fastest growing private company in the “Business service” sector and the fastest growing private company in the state of Texas.

Hosting Plans

Unlike BlueHost and HostMonster which offer only 1 plan for everyone, HostGator is offering a full range of web hosting services with a lot of different plans. However, we are only interested in the Baby plan (Cute Baby Gator?) that comes with unlimited disk space, unlimited bandwidth and the ability to host unlimited websites.
There is a cheaper plan known as Hatchling but it is not recommended because it only allows you to host 1 website. The more expensive Business Plan includes extra features such as dedicated IP address, private SSL certificate, anonymous FTP connection and a toll-free number. Dedicated IP address and private SSL certificate are required if you plan to register for your own online merchant account to process credit card payments (You don’t need it if you are accepting PayPal payments). The toll-free is self-explanatory. The anonymous FTP connection is a useless feature that I don’t think you will need it.

Expensive Pricing?

The pricing for HostGator seems to be in the high side at $9.95/month, comparing to the standard $7.95 and even below $5 nowadays. But please take note that the biggest difference between HostGator and other web hosts is that they have no setup fees and no contracts!
If you want to sign up for a baby plan, you are not locked into 3 years at $5 a month. All other web hosts usually wants you to pay 1 year, 2 years or even 5 years upfront or they will charge you a high setup fee that is not refundable! With HostGator, you can just pay month to month without any setup fees. There is no contract bond.

As what Brent said, “We believe you shouldn’t hold a customer hostage on a hosting plan. If they don’t like our hosting they can leave anytime. And we tend to keep our customers for the long run. You can check our forums at forums.hostgator.com anytime for unfiltered customer reviews, the good and bad.”
What this means is if they want to make money, they have to make sure they provide the best service to their customers everyday single day because the customers can leave anytime!

They also have a longer 45 day money back guarantee instead of a standard 30 day money back guarantee with no questions asked. And they promise to process your refund in just 1 working day! For them, customer is the boss.

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To your success,
Pedro