Hostgator Review

Hostgator was founded in 2002, and is one of the ten largest hosting companies in the world.  Their data center is located in Houston, TX.  They currently serve more than 200,000 customers.  And they offer excellent redundancy and security.

This is a very reliable webhost with great response times.  And they rarely experience any downtime (99% uptime guarantee).  They offer a simple cpanel interface, and Fantastico Deluxe for easily installing Wordpress.  You’ll find all the bells and whistles you might eventually need, including script interfaces for Perl, CGI, Ruby on Rails, and Front Page.

This web hosting provider seems to be the most commonly used, and all the extra service providers out there will interface with Hostgator easily.  Don’t worry about that right now.  But later on, you may wish to automate some of your marketing tasks through third parties.

Customer service record is great.  Simple monthly billing, with no long term contract.  Plus a 45 day money back guarantee, just in case you’re not satisfied.  If you’re coming from another hosting provider, they will transfer your site to Hostgator for you at no extra charge.  They even give you a free credit for Google Adwords advertising.

Feedback from customers has generally been very good, and this is the Number 1 choice that I recommend, despite the fact that they do not give you a free domain name.  You can get one at www.namecheap.com for about $10. Go with Hostgator. You won’t regret it.

For Just One or Two Websites

If you’d like to start out small, go for the Hostgator Baby Plan.  It’s slightly more flexible than their one-website Hatchling plan (their cheapest, at $5 per month).  And sooner or later, you’re bound to have more than one website.

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The Official Business Plan

The Hostgator Business Plan is similar to all their other plans — but they throw in a couple of freebies that could be useful.  So you might consider this option, as long as you’re only putting up one main business site (subdomains under your main domain are still okay).

The first freebie is an SSL certificate for your business.  The other is a free, national (U.S.), toll free number.  While that sounds like a great perk, the toll free number actually just comes from an internet based forwarding service.  And only the first 100 minutes per month are completely free.  That’s not a lot of calls!

If you’re debating between this plan and the Reseller Plan (below), I would choose the latter.  With Reseller, you can have separate CPanels and separate tracking statistics on every one of your websites.  That can be invaluable!  And there are other ways to easily get a toll free number and SSL certificate.

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For All the Websites You Might Create

If you plan to be a serious online marketer with many websites, then your best choice will be the Hostgator Reseller package for $24.95 per month.  You get 24 gigabytes of storage space, and it’s easy to upgrade to a bigger hosting package down the road.

You can have a separate cpanel for every one of your domains.  You can even sell hosting space from your account to others, and let your customer manage his own cpanel.  Hostgator even provides a free guidebook which explains how to start selling hosting space.

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