Top HostGator Alternatives

Good: Green hosting with no contract, fast servers, 99.9% uptime, affordable, free upgrades and transfers, transparent about unlimited features, one-click installations, 24x7 customer support, 45-day money back, free toll number on some plans, prorated cancellation refunds

Thing to Improve: Reports of canceling accounts without prior notice, Overselling servers.

Overall: A flexible and decent hosting service for those who cannot compromise with reliability, stability, and performance and still need the required features

Introduction

HostGator is one of the hosting services known for their giant growth in the Web industry. Started with only a handful servers; today, it is a world-famous giant that is remarkable for its least expensive sharing plans. The company has diverse shared hosting plans for fulfilling the varying needs of its customers.

It seems that HostGator’s base of success is formed by their well known customer support service. With its exceptional technical support and delivery combined with prominent service and money back guarantee, there is seriously nothing to doubt on its genuineness and reliability.

The company was recently acquired by EIG (Endurance International Group) which also own many other leading web hosting companies.

Shared Hosting Plans

Hostgator offers three shared hosting packages: Hatchling, Baby and Business. Each stepping up in terms of features and support provision. Both Hatchling and Baby packages offer unlimited hosting features, except for Hatchling that falls apart by offering only one domain. The Business package comes with more goodies such as private SSL, toll free business number, and free dedicated IP.

You can consider Hatchling plan if you do not want to host multiple domains but starting with online business and need an affordable option. It is suitable for WordPress and small sites. Business plan is fine if you need business hosting features. It is better to start with a lower level plan because upgrading is completely free at HostGator, which is truly commendable keeping the beginners in mind.

Features

HostGator started offering green hosting service to all its customers. The company is certified as eco-friendly, as its servers are  powered by wind energy to offset emissions. For this purpose, it buys licensed and climate-friendly Renewable Energy Credits to run as well as cool down its shared servers.

Another worth mentioning aspect is its transparency about the restrictions of its unlimited hosting features. It clearly explains that its unlimited features are actually limited!

You obtain all basic features of a shared hosting plan such as unlimited disk space and bandwidth, and shared SSL certificate. Baby and Business plans come with unlimited domains and sub-domains. However, all plans come with cPanel, must-have applications such as content management systems and shopping carts, free site builder and templates, several open-source scripts installed at one click, $100 Google Adwords offer, and unlimited email accounts as well as MYSQL databases.

The shared plans come with Joomla, WordPress, osCommerce, stats packages, forums, blogs, social networking tools, picture gallery software, and one-click installs. The integrated SiteBuilder makes it efficient to build simple and complex sites without knowing about coding.

Control Panel

All Linux shared hosting plans offers cPanel as standard user interface for managing the sites from behind the scenes. It allows accessing all features, such as Google Apps DNS settings, one-click installations and backup, webmail, Fantastico and Simple Script installer, and web file manager.

The custom panel is updated regularly to offer the latest version of scripts and notify you about the outdated Web scripts through an e-mail. This is useful for managing many sites under different hosting accounts.

Uptime

Hostgator offers certainly 99.99% guarantee. Constant monitoring by on-site personnel, fire detection, and power back-ups keep their servers safe and secure. The company also offers an RSS feed for getting the service status updates. Shared servers are backed up weekly.

HostGator Extras

For advanced customers, access to Ruby on Rails, PHP, and Perl libraries is encouraging for custom management of sites. The service also includes support for streaming audio/video, FrontPage, span detection, IP denial, diverse logs, password-protected directories, and affiliate program.

Conclusion

Based on the judging factors namely price, features, reputation, performance, customer support, and chance to grow, HostGator tops except for customer support that is, at times, lazy.