2020 Hostgator Review: My Honest Verdict

Hostgator is a US based web hosting service that is headquartered in Houston and Austin, Texas. The service is operated by Endurance International Group (EIG), the same company that owns Bluehost, HostMonster, and iPage.

Founded in 2002, Hostgator now boasts over 8 million hosted domains and offices in multiple countries across the world.

However, while the provider has enjoyed tremendous growth in recent years, they have also had to deal with some crippling incidents, including multiple service outages in 2013.

But that was 7 years ago. Since then, Hostgator has improved and now promises a reliable service with great speeds and advanced security.

I conducted a thorough test run of Hostgator to see how the service performs in 2020. I checked its speed, uptime, security, WordPress, backups, and much more.

Is it any good? Keep reading to find out!

Pros

• 99.99% uptime guarantee

• Unmetered bandwidth

• Free migration

• Flexible billing periods

• 45-day money-back guarantee

• Good support

Cons

• No free domain

• Average load times

Hostgator Features & Benefits

Reliable Uptime – 99.9%

When it comes to websites, keeping them functional 24 hours a day is the essential thing. Downtimes can damage your brand reputation and bring both monetary and productivity losses. As such, you want to choose a web hosting provider that offers stable and reliable service all year round.

Hostgator offers a 99.9% uptime guarantee and promises 1-month free credit should the service fall short. This inspires confidence, especially given that not all web hosting companies provide uptime guarantees.

As usual, we put Hostgator under testing to see how it holds up. True to the claims, the service was reliable and consistent. There wasn’t a single pronounced downtime during our 6-month testing period.

Hostgator comes with an inbuilt uptime monitoring that allows you to track your server status easily.

Hostgator Uptime in 2019

• July – 100%

• August – 100%

• September – 100%

• October – 100%

• November – 100%

• December – 100%

Load Times – How Fast Is Hostgator?

Page loading time is an important aspect of your website’s user experience. No one likes a slow website – not you and definitely not your site’s visitors. In fact, if your website takes longer than three seconds to load, you could be losing nearly half of your visitors.

While Hostgator had no uptime issues during the testing period, we found some of their servers to be a bit slow when put under load. Other than that, the response and load times were impressive.

Here is a snapshot of the loads during the second half of 2019.

• July – 1178ms

• August – 1039ms

• September – 1195ms

• October – 1164ms

• November – 992ms

• December – 1003ms

Robust Site Security

Cybercrimes are on a rapid rise, and to protect your site, you should start by making sure your web host is safe and secure. Hostgator performs incredibly in this regard. Its security features are excellent and on par with the best in the industry.

The hosting service comes with free SSL encryption on all their plans. With the service, you also get SFTP (SSH FTP) and FTPS (FTP over SSL or TLS) on all servers except on ‘Optimize WordPress’ plans.

In addition, Hostgator protects against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, which can overwhelm your site and prevent visitors from accessing and interacting with your website.

Hostgator data centers are highly secure facilities with restricted access, and their servers are equipped with a robust firewall. The provider offers the HG Firewall plugin for managing firewall settings from WHM, but this is only available to users who are administering VPS or Dedicated servers.

To prevent data loss due to vulnerability, HostGator provides automated weekly backups for Shared, Reseller, and VPS accounts. You can also create manual backups via cPanel of 10 GB or 150,000 inodes or less.

Like most hosting providers, Hostgator does offer a SiteLock security add-on. However, you will need to part with an extra $1.94 per month to enjoy the service.

If you are willing to cough up a few extra dollars, you can also get SiteLock security add-on starting at $1.94 per month. SiteLock is a cloud-based security tool that scans for malware and vulnerabilities and blocks automated bot attacks. But there is a catch. To remove any detected malware, you will need to upgrade to SiteLock’s Fix Plan, which starts at $6.97 per month.

You can further eliminate vulnerabilities by making sure that all CMS installations and other add-ons are kept up-to-date.

Control Panel Features

Hostgator offers the latest cPanel and Plesk control panels. If you are a Shared Web Hosting user, you can easily use cPanel to monitor the amount of bandwidth, and disk space used, create email addresses, MySQL databases, and subdomains instantly.

The service also allows you to monitor stats in real-time using AWStats. Other features include Error Logs, Referrer Logs, and Webalizer, which displays in-depth traffic statistics for your site.

Free Site & cPanel Migrations

Hostgator offers free WordPress/cPanel website transfer. However, you can only access the free site migration within the first 30-days of signup. If you are outside of the 30-day window, the provider may charge you a fee.

Hostgator’s site migration includes both content migrations for new accounts and inter-server transfer between HostGator servers. The process is simple, and all you need to do is fill out a transfer form.

More Freebies

Besides free website transfer, Hostgator offers lots of other freebies. These include:

• Unlimited bandwidth

• Unlimited storage

• A website builder

• Website templates

• Unlimited MySQL databases

New accounts are also given $100 worth of Bing Ads credit on registration as well as $100 Google AdWords credit upon spending $25 in ad buys.

Ease of Use

Hostgator makes it quite easy to set up and manage your website. Their control panels are well designed and navigable and allow you to control everything from a central location.

Hostgator uses cPanel in Shared Web Hosting, Reseller, VPS, and Linux Dedicated accounts. Plesk, on the other hand, is used in VPN and Windows Dedicated accounts.

While we feel Hostgator design is a little bit dated, we were impressed by its user-friendliness. And thanks to its one-click installs, you don’t need to be a tech guru to get your website up and running.

Installing a CMS on your site is quite easy and can be done on a few clicks of a button. All these tools and services make Hostgator an ideal choice for beginners and seasoned users alike.

Good Customer Support

When getting a web hosting service, you want to ensure the provider can handle any issues that may arise quickly and reliably.

I was thoroughly impressed by Hostgator’s customer service. The company offers 24/7 support via phone, email, and live chat. Their support team was friendly and knowledgeable and all my queries were resolved quickly.

As often is the case, the live chat option was the fastest, but I was also pleased with the effectiveness of their toll-free phone support.

In addition to the above support options, Hostgator also offers a Knowledge Base section where you can find tutorials and other useful information.

Hostgator Pricing, Plans, and Payment Methods

Hostgator offers an all-around service. Supported hosting types include Shared, VPS, Dedicated, Cloud, and Managed WordPress.

• Shared Web Hosting: This is the cheapest and most common hosting type. Users share the same server, with each individual being allocated a set amount of resources (disk space, memory). Shared Web Hosting offers beginner-friendly features and is ideal for starter websites. Prices start at $2.75 per month.

• Cloud Hosting: Shared hosting, but on steroids. Unlike shared hosting, cloud hosting spreads the resources required to maintain your website over multiple servers. This makes it much faster and more secure. Prices start at $4.95 per month.

• Managed WordPress Hosting: 2.5 times faster than Shared Web Hosting, Hostgator’s Managed WordPress Hosting is the ideal option for hosting WordPress sites. It offers convenient simplicity, advanced security, and support for up to 3 websites depending on your plan. Starts at $5.95 per month.

• VPS (Virtual Private Server) Hosting: Ideal for small businesses, VPS hosting uses a virtualized dedicated server. It is fully scalable and offers greater access to server resources and increased customizability. Starts at $29.95 per month.

• Dedicated Hosting: As the name suggests, each user is allocated a personal physical server. Dedicated hosting offers unmatched power and control and is ideal for large businesses with over 500,000 visitors per month. Starts at $118.99 per month.

Shared Hosting Plans