Host Gator Reviews

here's my experience:

I have had Hostgator for a web host since 2006... I moved my biggest site to them when it was in its early stages, getting a couple thousand visitors per day. I progressed up through their packages at my site traffic grew, eventually getting onto their most powerful server package. Unfortunately even it wasn't enough. Earlier this year they switched me to a new plan with less bandwidth than I needed. So of course the following month I exceeded bandwidth, to the tune of $2200 worth! When they had signed me up for the new plan, I didn't pay enough attention to the bandwidth limitations. however, I feel it should have been explained more clearly to me.

So they shut down my site and locked me out until I agreed to pay $1300. However, by that point I was unhappy with the support - couldn't talk about it on the phone and had to rely on email. So I moved the site over to one of my servers at LiquidWeb, which was a VERY smart move. Their service is MUCH better and you can talk to the techs on the phone until the problem is resolved.

Anyway, I'm not saying HG is bad. I still have a ded server with them. But if you have a big site, there are much better options out there.

I had posted the review a week back but for some reason everything went bazook with WHT. I lost all my posts but am making an attempt to write the review again of my exp with HG.

Well, I had been with these guys for close to 14 months. I never knew there was bright world beyond HG for dedicated server untill I came to WHT. I had taken a xeon 2.4 with 2 gb ram for $219 everything was fine untill the server started giving me problems off late. It was supposed to be a managed server but these guys had just no clue whatso ever on any kinda problem. The took like close to 12 hours just to figure out the problem which was an issue with fan.

Imagine they were putting the blame game on me till they figured out it was a problem with the hardware(fan). When I went to claim refund for meeting the SLA, they told me that it was my fault and the onus was on me to ensure the server is up and running. WTF? How do you expect me find and why do you think I took managed service if the onus was on me to make sure the server is up and running.

That wasn't the end of my horror story. I don't remember the number of times I had to suffer with restarting the Apache / Mysql and downtime and when I did goto them, they said my RAM usage is too much. Hmmm when I further digged out and I felt cheated when I found out that they gave me a cheap DDR-200 MHZ RAM which is way outdated technology. I was like WTF? All those problems were because of that Cheap DDR-200 MHZ RAM for which they were charging me a bomb.

Imagine they gave me a trash Hardware and charging me a bomb for that crap and they kept blaming me for it.

I scrapped my Xeon 2.8 to Q9550 for a bit more but it was worth it.

My advice in cause you wanna still goto HG, Enquire everything about their Hardware, SLA as.

Hi all,

I am a customer of Hostgator since the end of July 2004, having my 1st reseller account (2Gb disc space, 50Gb BWT) and I think the time has come to post a short review of this hosting company.

The registration process for my account was quite simple and easy and the speed of setting up my account was very speedy (about 20 mins!).

I hosted about 15 websites of our customers and up to now I have not received even one complaint about their sites/emails. Their uptime was excellent (almost 100%) although I did noticed some rare speed problems (about 7-8 times within 3 months).

We had no problem using WHM/Cpanel and the Messenger/Email support was very fast and helpful, although I guess that specifically Messenger staff sometimes acts like intermediate to the tech staff for almost all major questions (I guess that's normal).

I have also called 3-4 times (mainly to ask some presales/upgrade questions) and the telephone was answered very promptly, with no waiting time. I remember one time calling very late at night (due to time difference it was morning here) and still their suport was there and effective.

The only suggestion that I would like to make is to be a little more helpful when speaking on the phone. This does not mean in any way that they were not polite but the feeling that I am receiving when I call them is a little negative - with very short answers and not much explanations until you ask for them - or not as much friendly as I would like to be (maybe that's my opinion as I am not a native English speaker).

Anyway, I just signed up for my 2nd reseller account and the experience was very positive for one more time! They offered the 1st month for free as I asked and they set it up within 10 mins. And when I sent an email to the sales department (after 5 mins that I signed up for the 2nd account), asking for a free upgrade of my 1st account, they replied within 3 mins that the upgrade to 5Gb was already done! Pretty amazing I think...

Overall I must admit that Hostgator has proved to be the best hosting experience I've had for the last 4 years that I host my sites. They can certainly work a little more on the support experience the customer receives, but this does not mean you will have any unanswered questions or delays. It's nice to sleep calmly at nights and not be afraid whether your sites will be online and a technical team will seriously take care of them if needed. Hostgator is there for me...

If you are thinking of a reseller hosting provider - not the cheaper one but certainly cost effective and of high quality - then Hostgator should be included in your short list for sure.

Best regards,
John

I got started with Hostgator back in early 2005 and I must admit they gave the best hosting experience so far. I had been (and still currecntly using some of them) with Bluehost, Hostmonster, WebHostingPad, Lunarpages, Exabytes, Gate, Network Eleven, PowWeb, FatCow, StartLogic, HostPapa...(gosh that's a long list).

Bluehost and Lunarpages used to be as good but not now anymore.

I have a couple of servers of my own but STILL recommend hostgator to clients that expect high bandwidth and storage. And, the reason is humorously not because of bandwidth and storage...it's because of support. Hostgator has 24-hour, 7 day support...and by chat (my personal favorite). So, I have a couple of reseller accounts at hostgator in addition to my own servers (hosted elsewhere) for those few clients that suck up disk space and huge usage. "Normal" clients get hosted on my own servers. It's a good mix.

I have been with hostgator for three years now and can tell you I am very satisfied with them. I also tried Ipower, Bluehost, IX and others. But i stick with HG because they are really the best.

Is it good for several small sites?

You bet. I have about 10 sites: joomla based, wordpress blogs and some static HTML pages.

I never had problems. When I needed support they were there for me. They helped me to set MX settings when I transfered my email to Google Hosted Mail in just a few minutes.

So you can rest assure your sites will be doing ok with them.

Good luck with your site.

I own a dedicated server with HostGator, with a bandwidth allowance of 1500GB monthly transfer.

In March, I went over this allowance by 1577.9GB - I was unaware of this until yesterday when I received this e-mail:

Quote:
We received a report from our data center on all of our dedicated server's bandwidth usage and your server xx.xx.xx.xx used 2577.9GB in March when your limit is 1500GB.
Your account has been invoiced 50 cents per gig ($538.95) for these overages, please login to billing to make a payment.

In my experience with other datacenters, when approaching my bandwidth limit - they send me an e-mail to warn me.

HostGator sat there silently until I went over the limit and the amount was due.

I had no idea I went over this limit until I received an invoice for $538 USD - if I had of received notification before I went over my limit, I could have suspended a site etc to avoid going over my limit and paying such a hefty invoice.

Just another rant about HostGator, a very popular and unethical webhost.

The only problem I have with them is that they don't allow the 777 file permissions, I've needed this to run quite a few scripts, which I'm not able to run. Other than that, they've been fantastic. I've had them for a year now, and my site hasn't been offline once. (no lie.)

Hostgator is good if you have small sites that do not use much resources. I had one of my sites shut down with no warning because it god a surge of traffic from a promotion I was doing. If you have a lot of traffic use a VPS of dedicted server.

I had 2 dedicated accounts with them (about $500 a month) and they still treated me the same way. I was so peed of. I would move but its more just more work on my half. I was getting 500 Internal Server randomly after they upgraded a server to an elite account. I lost hundreds of dollars and thousands of customers. I got 50 different answers and finally i told them that if they didn't know what to do to get someone else to fix it else i was moving host. That must be the only thing they care about because after that i've had no such errors.

I defense of hostgator lunarpage is the same way. Someone needs to create a help desk software that manages request better. The system is FLAWED. But when you are hosting millions of web pages... its kinda hard to keep up with users.