Hosting Review: Host Gator

One of the key decisions you’ll have to make when building your website is choosing a hosting company. A hosting company owns the (physical) servers where your website is located, allowin people on the Internet to access it. There are a wide range of hosting companies these days, with a varying features and costs.

One such company is Host Gator. The Dallas-based company was founded in 2002 (in founder Brent Oxley’s dorm room) and today offers shared, reseller and dedicated hosting services to over 150,000 customers. Currently, the only offer linux hosting, but their website promises they will be offering windows hosting soon.

For shared services, there are three different levels of hosting – hatchling ($ 4.95/month), baby ($ 7.95/month) and business ($ 12.95/month). They offer unlimited diskspace and bandwidth and pop3 accounts at all 3 levels, and unlimited domains at the baby and business levels. They support (unlimited) mySQL databases, Wordpress, Ruby on Rails, SSH, CGI, Perl and a host of other programs.

For those in need of more features and security, Host Gator provides dedicated servers as well, which come with up to 8GB Ram and 2 500GB hard drive and several programs pre-installed. If you ever wanted to build your own web hosting company, the Host Gator offers reseller accounts.

If you plan to put up and e-commerce site, then Host Gator has the tools you’ll need. They offer 4 different shopping cart programs (Agora, ZenCart, OsCommerce and Cubecart) and the Shared SSL will assure that all sensitive information (like credit card numbers) will be kept safe and secure. The cPanel allows you to have all of the tools at your fingertips, in an easy to navigate interface.

If you don’t know where to begin and don’t have a design for your site, Host Gator has you covered as well. You can use their Website Builder, where you can create and edit different aspects your your site or you can use one of their pre-made web templates.

Another interesting aspect is that Host Gator has recently gone green. They claim that 130% of their servers (shared and reseller) are powered by wind, through purchase of renewable energy credits. While their hosting capabilities are already quite substantial, caring for the environment certainly does give people an added incentive to use their services.

Host Gator does everything they say they do, has industry standard uptimes (99.9% and above) and lots of extra bells and whistles, which is not unusual for any web hosting company. What sets them apart, is the excellent customer service they provide. The company doesn’t spend a lot of time or money marketing their services, probably due to the fact they have a good reputation and word-of-mouth marketing. Customer service is available 24/7 via email, telephone or live chat. Apparently, if you have a problem with their customer service, Brent Oxley will personally see to your problem. If you’re unsatisfied at all with any of their services, they have a 45-day money back guarantee.