My Honest HostGator review, My Chosen Hosting Since 2009

If you’re planning on building an online business, sooner or later you’re going to need good web hosting. Unless you’re planning to use an all-in-one solution like Shopify, you’re going to need a place to host your website. So today’s post is my HostGator review, the hosting company I’ve used since 2009

Because web hosting is such a profitable business model, in researching for my HostGator review post, I found that there are tons of web hosting providers in the marketplace.

I’ve also found that unfortunately, many of them are unreliable and provide very poor service.

I suggest that you avoid ‘lifetime hosting’ at all cost. For starters, you’ll never know whose lifetime they’re talking about. Yours? The web hosting company owner’s?

No one really knows… however, this is not one area where you want to pay the least and cut corners.

Spending all kinds of money to get your website built only to have your hosting company disappear overnight and you’re back to square one would suck!

With a poor web hosting service, your site may crash often or be slow to load. It may get hacked due to low security or like I mentioned in my HostGator review above…it might even disappear overnight along with the web hosting provider.

In researching for my HostGator review post, I’ve come across countless horror stories when it comes to web hosting services.

So, you’ll want to go with an established brand that thousands of other marketers are using and swear by. One of the best web hosting companies around in my opinion is HostGator. I mean if they weren’t…would I still be using them after all this time?

So without further ado, let’s delve into my HostGator review and look at the pros and cons of this awesome hosting company…

Listen, If you’re still in the domain name registration phase of building an online business, please read my honest review of Namecheap before you take that step and register your domain name.

The Pros Of Using HostGator As Your Web Hosting Company

• They’re very reliable

In researching for my HostGator review post I found that it claims to have a 99.99% uptime – which basically means their servers hardly ever go down. This is pretty crucial in my books, especially if you’re running an e-commerce store or maybe an affiliate type review site.

Let’s say for example, you’ve found a pretty hot selling item on Alibaba and you build an entire ecommerce site around that product and are making hundreds of sales a day…now imagine your website goes down! You could potentially be losing sales every minute your sites down. HostGator’s 99.99% uptime guarantee should give you some peace of mind that this will rarely happen.

• Hostgator is very easy to use

You’re not going to run into any problems using Hostgator’s interface to manage your websites. It’s super intuitive and everything is neat and well laid out. I pay for the reseller package which gives me access to not only the websites Cpanel but I also have access to their WHM (web host manager) which allows me to resell their hosting services under my own brand. I never used it to resell hosting services…Instead I used it as a way to create unlimited affiliate websites and kept everything separate for when I ever sold one.

• Hostgator offers dedicated servers

Some web hosting services don’t provide dedicated hosting. So they can’t grow with you when your business gets bigger and you need better hosting. Hostgator is perfect for small to medium sized businesses and you’ll get dedicated hosting with them.

• Hostgator Offers Managed WordPress Hosting

You’ll easily be able to hit the ground running with WordPress already installed on your hosting account. Create an amazing website using WordPress makes the highly technical process of installing WordPress as your CMS very smooth and easy for just about anyone to do. I mean…who amongst us can’t push a button right?

• Hostgator Offers Free migration

If you’re with another web hosting company and reluctant to move because your sites are all there? Take it from me…who has real life experience transferring domains to a new hosting company as I’ve “been there and done that”!

When I first started building affiliate type websites way back in 2008, I had first began with another web hosting company. I chose them based on some over-hyped up review by some internet marketer who I’m sure just chose that company for their affiliate commissions.

Anyway long story short I wasn’t impressed with that company’s support and took the leap of faith to move all my sites, (I think I had over 100 domains at the time) over to Hostgator.
I had just contacted Hostgator’s support and they migrates my sites for me. I didn’t have to do a thing.

• Hostgator Offers Excellent support

I didn’t really have to do any research for my Hostgator review post when it came to their support as I have real life experience

I have personally used both Hostgator’s Web’s support which is available 24/7 as well as their phone support in the past.

I believe I wrote about the time one of my affiliate review sites got hacked and was showing a video of what I can only describe as an Al-Qaeda recruitment video. I freaked out and contacted phone support as soon as I noticed. While they had me on the line, they worked to restore a previously clean backup and had my site back up and running within no time.

I have also used Hostgator’s chat support in the past as well… Multiple times actually! When I say multiple times…I mean ever time…you see, every time I buy a new domain and set up my hosting using my WHM, I contact their support through their live chat and have them install the SSL certificates on my website.

I’ve found that their support staff are always polite, knowledgeable and very prompt with their help. I can honestly say that writing about their support in my Hostgator review post was super easy as I have never had a bad experience with their support!

• Hostgator Offers Automated Backups

On Hostgator’s site they claim that they automatically backup your website/s daily. Like in my Al-Qaeda example above, even though it’s usually a very rare event that your site gets hacked or you lose your data, etc. Rest assured you’ll always be able to restore your site with the backups stored on Hostgator’s servers just like I was able to get support to do for me.

• Hostgator Offers Added Security

Hostgator proudly uses SiteLock Website Security to scan your website and offers top notch protection against those unscrupulous hacker folks. Hostgator plans offer automated malware removal, brand reputation protection and offers a defensive wall against malicious attacks.

Losing your precious search engine ranking by getting blacklisted just plain sucks so having a website security program like SiteLock to help prevent potential ranking loss is a big plus in my books.

If you’re planning on installing and using WordPress as your CMS, I’m happy to add to my Hostgator review post that SiteLock‘s firewall and vulnerability scans help prevent hacks and automated attacks. Their malware protection service helps protect your WordPress website

• Hostgator Offers Free SSL certs

With Google blatantly pointing out security issues when a site doesn’t have an SSL certificate installed on your website, it’s crucial that your sites have secure socket layer technology enabled. Since it’s free with Hostgator, you’re not have to pay for it…and like I mentioned above, their live chat support staff will even install it for you.

• Hostgator Offers Unlimited email addresses

If you have virtual assistants and/or staff who may need their own email addresses, you can create unlimited email addresses with HostGator. In my opinion using a custom domain name email address definitely makes you look much more professional over using a free gmail address. it’s also awesome when it comes to your branding as well.

• Hostgator Offers A Money back guarantee

Whichever HostGator hosting plan you decide is right for you…rest assured you have a whole 45 days to kick the tires and take it out for a test spin. If you’re not satisfied, you can always ask for a refund. This is highly unlikely because once you see how good they are, like me, you’ll probably stick with them for years. I mean think about it…would I really be writing a HostGator review post if their service was horrible? While I’d like to think I’m a pretty easy going guy, there’s no way I’d stay with a horrible company when there are so many others out there

The Cons of HostGator

While I’m sure you know that nothing in life is perfect, and it wouldn’t be much of an honest HostGator review if I didn’t list what I believe to be the cons as well as the pros right?

While conducting my research for my HostGator review post, I came across a few customer who have claimed that their experience with HostGator’s customer support was at times slow or even spotty.

I can tell you that this wasn’t the case for me during any of my support requests, perhaps I get preferential treatment because I pay for the reseller package?

Another common problem I came across while researching for my HostGator review post is some people have said that there is an additional fee associated with restoring a backup.

Once again, I can attest through my own personal experience that I wasn’t charged anything additional to eliminate the Al-Qaeda recruitment video and re-install the backup of my affiliate website. Once again though…I am wondering if it’s because of my current reseller hosting package.

So Based On My HostGator review…Will You Use HostGator To Host You Website?

If you’re a blogger, course creator or an online affiliate marketer who might be just starting out and needs reliable webhosting, I’m hoping that after reading my HostGator review post that you’ll come to the same decision I came to all those years ago…that HostGator is perfect for you. It’s affordable and has all the features a good web host should have.

Did I miss anything in my HostGator review post? Whether you believe its a pro or a con, or maybe you’ve got a question that I didn’t answer in my HostGator review post…please feel free to leave a comment below or simply send me your question using my contact me page