Content Notice!

This post is really old, and no longer reflect my skill level, views or opinions, it is made available here for archival purposes (it was originally on my old WordPress blog).

Keep that in mind when you read the contents within.

The No Bullshit HostGator Review

Introductory Ramble of Nonsense

Before I start reviewing HostGator, I should probably explain what my level of experience is with managing websites, what i use my websites for and how lazy of a person I really am. I don't like fucking around in the command line if i don't have to, I feel like that in this day and age, it should not be something that a consumer(Me) should have to deal with regularly. Therefore I MUST have CPanel or an equivalent when I look for shared web hosting, if I look for a VPS like the ones Digital Ocean sell for $5 per month, I don't mind having to deal with the command line that much since I can install cpanel or an alternative myself (take a look at Ajenti). Some of you might know that I am an "Hobby internet marketer" and own a few affiliate based sites and stores and some random shit(like this and this),  therefore I've usually just put all of these on my hostgator account, there are about 40 sites hosted on it right now.

The No-Bullshit HostGator Review

Hostgator Review

Price

Hostgator's price is pretty great in my opinion and i'll give you a break down on how it works as it might be confusing if you ain't got any knowledge in how companies upsell their shit. What they do is they give you a larger discount if you purchase hosting annually(Pay for a whole year at once), the plan I am using right now is called Baby, and I purchased this plan purely because I NEEDED the ability to host a fuck-ton of domains on one account, this is very convenient for me and people that say this is a bad idea are probably circlejerkers on WebHostingTalk.com (No link, because fuck them all). hostgator-review-price Anyways, back to the pricing. As you can see in the screenshot on the right, you get Unlimited(Within reason... obviously) domain hosting(Multiple domains on one account, very handy) for $ 7.96 per month, if you choose to pay monthly. That in itself is a pretty good price, and If you got the cash and want to invest in 3 years worth of hosting you get it for $6.36 per month, that will save you $57.6 if you pay for the 3 years straight out the gate instead of paying monthly for 3 years. *Head explodes cuz math* What I dislike about Hostgator in terms of pricing is their domain prices, it's about $15 for a .COM when you can get it for about $11 on NameCheap(Best domain registrar In my opinion), But you have the option to use a domain that you already own, so it shouldnt be a big deal if you know how to assign your nameservers(Read Tutorial Here). If you don't have a domain yet, and want to find a cool one, you can try this Domain Name Generator I coded.

Speed

I live in Norway, although my target audience lives mostly in the US, UK and India for some reason... I get pretty decent pings and page loads from Norway. Here is me Pinging my website 15 times from Norway with 1024 bytes of data , the average ping is 231 ms. hostgator-ping   Here is a screenshot of a report from Pingdom Tools, where I checked the load speed of IPShark.net(Another small site I host on Hostgator) hostgator-website-load-speed   And here is the same test for my blog, which is a WordPress blog with 13 plugins and the Origin theme. hostgator-helgesverrecom-speed That is not that bad considering I've got around 40 websites in my account, Keep in mind that all of the websites that I host on my HostGator account is static low traffic sites(except my blog). But take it with a pinch of salt, this is going to be different for everyone, if you need your website to load fast as fuck, get hosting that is meant for 1 single website and optimized for speed, I look at Hostgator of more of a "Put all your shit in here because its decent and cheap"-kind of site.

Support

To be honest, I've only needed to contact their support about 2 times for the last 3 years, One of the issues involved was this one and the other one was just a question about some of their policies that I was unsure about. and any time I have a question I usually go to their live chat and ask, and i get a response back within 2 minutes, I once called their phone support just to see how long it would take me to get hold of a real human being, and it took a good 10 minutes before I arrived to a guy named Mike who spoke great English, and was not an outsourced Indian drone(red flags at NSA right there).

Control Panel

hostgator-cpanel-advertsiement HostGator uses CPanel, which is the industry standard control panel for web hosting, the ease of use of this admin panel is one of the best and feature rich that is on the market today. What I would like to see though, would be to have the option to install CPanel plugins by myself, although i understand that it would become a clusterfuck for the support team if every user on a shared server would install a different plugin on their account. HostGator also puts advertisements to various random shit(Most of them are affiliate links) in their control panel, this can get a bit annoying, but you can minimize them so you don't have to deal with them all the time.

HostGator Discount Code (this is the part where i get money for you signing up)

So if you were not totally put of by my honest review, you might want to reward me by clicking on this affiliate link, and in the process saving yourself some money, It's a win win for the both of us really. Use the code: HELGESVERRE to get 25% Off on your Hosting Plan! Click Here to Visit HostGator's Website

Update 1 Nov, 2013

I will be moving my main website to another hosting provider soon-ish so my blog will be a bit faster.

Update 22 May, 2014

I have moved to MDDHosting, and will do a review of it once I've used it for a substantial amount of time.

Update 23 June, 2014

I've written a review of my new web host, click here to read my review on MDDHosting.