Hostgator is probably one of the most famous hosting company in the world providing cheap hosting packages to its users since October 2002. Most of new website designers, programmers and webmasters tend to pick Hostgator as one of the most talked about web hosting companies. Thanks to their hosting packages that start at $2.75* per month (if you purchase 3 year plan) and easy to setup accounts, Hostgator acquired for the past 16 years more than 400.000 customers hosting 9 million (as of 2013) domains.

Running a website has never been easier than today. I remember the times when you had to know how to setup your server for better compression, serving images, scripts or videos. You had to know everything in order to properly maintain your website and get the most for your buck. Nowadays, you have huge hosting companies like Hostgator. Of course, that has its own drawbacks – less you know, more you depend on your hosting company. While everything works fine – it is all great but once something happens you are in the hands of your support (or the lack of it). Anyway, no matter how slow the support is, it is easier to bother them than waste your time figuring out how to fix the problem (believe me).

What is Hostgator?

Established in October 2002 by Brent Oxley, Hostgator became one of the biggest web hosting companies in the world. Thanks to their good and quick support, cheap hosting plans and reseller program, Hostgator grow fast from from “Baby Croc” to “King Croc” (reference to their hosting packages back in 2002). In September 2004, Hostgator focused their effort to acquiring more resellers offering “Reseller Package” for just $25. That was pretty good move and thanks to that Hostgator grew even faster. Good old times when you could sell cheap hosting packages to your clients and pay off your hosting bill quickly, earn few bucks and host all your websites for free. Anyway, by the end of 2006, they had more than 200.000 domains hosted on their servers. In 2012, Hostgator was sold to Endurance International Group (EIG) for USD $225 million for many reasons. One of the reasons was that Brent Oxley wanted to travel the world before starting a family, but the more obvious one was the fact that Hostgator had problems creating stubille billing. As a matter of fact, Endurance International Group acquired many reputable hosting companies in the past 20 years, some of them are: Bluehost (their sister companies are HostMonster, FastDomain and iPage), FatCow, BigRock, Dollar2Host, JustHost, PureHost, NetFirms, etc. Therefore, if you want to give your money to other huge company then EIG make sure to do your research first. In 2013, Hostgator was hosting more than 9 million domains across 400.000 user accounts.

Should I use Hostgator Hosting Services?

Short answer is YES! Hostgator provides great service, especially for those users that host small company or personal websites. We live in 2018 and EVERY professional and company should have their own website. Creating personal brand was never more important than today in order to get better job and for company to acquire new clients. Building and maintaining website has never been easier. Low maintenance cost are biggest factor for those two categories so Hostgator is one of the best solutions for this. Their Shared and Cloud hosting packages can handle up to 10.000* unique visitors per day (biggest packages, not the small ones) and that is more than enough for small business or personal needs. If your website receives more traffic, then you should consider more serious hosting packages, VPS, Dedicated hosting or even different hosting providers. In any case, for 99% of user and companies, hosting plans that Hostgator offers on their website are more than enough.

Be aware of the * signs!

Just like the most hosting companies, Hostgator offers dirty cheap packages – but just in case that you purchase 3 year subscription and pay in advance. That * symbol represents just that – 3 year package at the price of $2.75 to $9.95 a month. In case that you want to pay on monthly basis, realistic costs are $10.95 (+tax) to $19.95 (+tax). When you compare prices with and without * symbol, you will notice significant difference. Moreover, I have compared here cheapest shared hosting price (Hatchling Package)  with most expensive cloud hosting (Cloud Business) price.

Hostgator Packages

At the moment, Hostgator offers few different hosting packages:

• Shared Hosting
• Website Builder 
• Cloud Hosting 
• WordPress Hosting 
• Reseller 
• VPS Hosting 
• Dedicated Server Hosting

Also, you can purchase domain name for your website through Hostgator that we recommend you to skip entirely. Get your domain name through any domain name register like GoDaddy or NameCheap. Never buy domain name through hosting company – NEVER!

Hostgator Hosting Package Features

Hostgator provides many features across their hosting packages that are in overall similar to all serious web hosting companies. Even packages on Hostgator are pretty similar and choosing the right one can be a little bit difficult especially if you are not sure what you need. If you want to host just one personal or small business website, then even smallest packages can be good and provide good value. On the other hand, if you are learning and tend to host multiple websites then going for the middle packages with more (or unlimited) domains would be better. Good thing about hosting your website(s) on Hostgator servers is even if you are not tech savvy, Hostgator can help you with transferring your website to bigger hosting plans. Especially since this is done “in house” they will not (I believe) charge you arm and leg to move you to bigger plan. Since I want to help you choosing best hosting package for your needs I would suggest reading my conclusions under every plan. Also, we will provide more in depth comparison on our website in the near future. For now, information provided here will be more than enough to help you select proper hosting for your website.

Shared Hosting Plans and Features

Main difference between Hatchling, Baby and Business Shared hosting is Dedicated IP for your website and Free Positive SSL. Only thing that you actually need here is SSL certificate. It is not essential but considering that Google takes this into account as well as ranking signal, then having SSL is a plus for sure. Remember that you get SSL certificate just for one website even though you can host unlimited number of them. Apart from this, there is nothing worth mentioning as significant difference between those three hosting packages. They all offer FTP access, Hatchling plan is just for one website (domain) while others are unlimited, all hosting features are enabled for all plans, email hosting, control panel features, stats and error logs, etc. In overall, with Hatchling Plan you can host just 1 website while with Baby and Business you can unlimited number of websites (good for testing purposes). Business plan offers free SSL which is great for the price. When on a subject of price, those that you see are for 3 year plan. Real monthly prices are:

• Hatchling Plan – $10.95 (+tax)
• Baby Plan – $11.95 (+tax)
• Business Plan – $16.95 (+tax)

Website Builder Hosting Plans and Features

There is no major difference between those three packages in terms of features. With “Premium Plan” you get priority support (basically nothing special) and with eCommerce Plan you can setup shop and sell your stuff online. To be honest, I don’t get this one when talking about eCommerce considering what Hostgator has to say “All of HostGator's hosting plans are perfect e-commerce solutions.” Source Only difference between those packages are price and SSL certificate for eCommerce Plan. Worth the price difference? Yes considering the price of SSL certificate. If you can acquire it cheap, then no. Real prices are following:

• Starter Plan – $11.35 (+ tax)  billed monthly
• Premium Plan – $125.79 (+tax) billed yearly + you get free domain name
• eCommerce Plan – $209.56 (+tax) billed for 2 years + free domain name

In any case, I would just skip this package. Apart from different checkout page this plan does not offer any significant difference from Shared or Cloud Hosting plans.

Cloud Hosting Plans

In my personal opinion, Cloud Hosting plans offered by Hostgator are best hosting that you can get here. They offer all features and there is, free SSL certificate plus, they are scalable! Remember, you get free SSL certificate for 1 domain, not for 2, not for unlimited number of websites – just for 1 main domain that you register (or choose). What I mean by that? If you, for example purchase “Hatchling Cloud” in order to get more resources all you need is to go to Hostgator Panel, change your package from it to Baby cloud with 4 CPU cores or Business Cloud with 6 and pay the price difference. Since your website is in the “cloud” there is nothing else you need to do. Also, when you compare those packages you will also notice that real difference between those three hosting plans are amount of RAM memory that you can use, number of domains you can host and CPU cores. My recommendation is to start with “Baby Cloud” and more to “Business Cloud” once you need more resources. Real monthly prices are following:

• Hatchling Cloud – $12.95 (+tax)
• Baby Cloud – $13.95 (+tax)
• Business Cloud –  $19.95 (+tax)

If you want to host just your own website as portfolio or small company website and you want to keep your expenses as low as possible, I would suggest “Hatchling Cloud” over “Hatchling Plan”. For $2 you will get SSL certificate and that is a plus both for Google and your potential customers.

WordPress Cloud Hosting Plans

Now we are at the point where we need to use our calculator to determine if WordPress packages are worth the price. On a plus side, you will get Free SSL certificate for your website. They also offer migration of your existing blog to their servers for free (number of websites migrated depends on a plan) so that is also a plus. I have not tested this but it sure sounds good especially if you are not tech savvy. If you, on the other hand just want to start your blogging adventure, Starter Plan is just enough. Hitting 100K visits per month is far away for you. But when you take out your calculator, that is just over 3000 visits a day. In any case, pretty good but take into consideration that those numbers will go down as you add more addons and plugins to your WordPress. I can bet that they will cut this traffic in half if you add many plugins. So, using this logic, with Business Plan you can expect it to handle more than 16.000 unique visits to your (3) blog(s) daily. With few plugins here and there, that should be fine for 10.000. Considering this amount of traffic, price is fair. If you receive more visits than this you should consider more serious hosting than this anyway. One thing that is not obvious here is CDN. Yes, for those packages Hostgator provides CDN which is really great. Considering that CDN is not free (if you want to use something proper) than there is value here. Real monthly price:

• Starter Plan – $14.95 (+tax)
• Standard Plan – $20.95 (+tax)
• Business Plan – $27.95 (+tax)

Now when we look at those prices it doesn’t look that good. If we take into consideration that Cloudflare offers free CDN for for website (3 pages rule) then this doesn’t look that great. When you compare Business Cloud that is $19.95 with Business Plan here that is $27.95 – I would choose Cloud one.

Reseller Hosting

We are at the point where you need to know what you want and what you need. I believe that you already know what “Reseller” plans offer. From time to time I build websites for customers and I was thinking about this in the past. Yes, having Cloud hosting plan or something similar where you can host unlimited number of websites is fine and you can provide FTP access to your customers but having Reseller plan looks (and it is) more suitable for business. In any case, if you are considering to get into this and think about Reseller Hosting, best advice would be to go for smaller one and grow from there but I would advise you differently. If you think about Reseller Hosting then it would be best to go for biggest and save with discount code. Lets compare prices (monthly):

• Aluminum Plan – $29.95 (+tax)
• Copper Plan – $41.95 (+tax)
• Silver Plan – $59.95 (+tax)

For a year if you pay monthly, if would look like this:

• Aluminum Plan – $29.95 (+tax) x 12 = $359.4
• Copper Plan – $41.95 (+tax) x 12 = $503.4
• Silver Plan – $59.95 (+tax) x 12 = $719.4

If you choose one year plan right from start, you will pay this much (coupon code provided by Hostgator):

• Aluminum Plan – $299.42 (16.69% off)
• Copper Plan – $359.38 (28.61% off)
• Silver Plan – $359.41 (50.04% off)

My honest advice and suggestion if you think about purchasing Reseller Plan is to save money and purchase AT LEAST it for a year. If you really want to save (and earn) money with this, you should go for 3 year option.

Why? Take a look at this:

Price total:

At this point you should spend some time looking for better coupon codes than provided by Hostgator. Even though current one provided by Hostgator themselves is 58.38% off, you should try to find better discount. For Business Cloud, I remember getting 71% off so there is always chance that you can find one in 60-70% range.

Hostgator VPS Hosting Plans

VPS hosting plans provided by Hostgator are very interesting and provide great flexibility for their users. If you are thinking about getting one, then you already know that you get what you pay for. VPS plans are for sure for more tech savvy people that know what they want and need. With full root access, you can have full control over your hosting. Basic plans will not provide much better response time or better performance compared to other hosting plans mentioned before but offer more flexibility and control. Bigger plans, more RAM and CPU cores should provide better response and faster loading of your websites as well. Now, lets see how much this will cost (monthly) without cPanel (+$10 for cPanel):

• Snappy 2000 – $79.95 (+tax)
• Snappy 4000 – $119.95 (+tax)
• Snappy 8000 – $149.95 (+tax)

For full 3 years with discount offered by Hostgator:

• Snappy 2000 – $718.11 (+tax) 75% off
• Snappy 4000 – $1,078.25 (+tax) 75% off
• Snappy 8000 – $1,438.08(+tax) 73% off

I don’t think that you will find coupon codes anywhere that will offer more than 75% or 73% that are already provided by Hostgator. Real question here is whether it is better to go for Dedicated Plan or stay with VPS for this price. This is whole new subject that we will discuss in article dedicated to this question.

Dedicated Server Hosting

Hostgator pinnacle, top of the line ultimate power and control packages! Lets see what they offer to their customers and at what price! First question that I would ask you is why? Have you heard of RackSpace, IBM Cloud, AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud? I remember how much trouble you can have with dedicated server and once cloud was introduced first thing that came to my mind was “My God, no more resets and OS installation”. I won’t argue here, if you are tech savvy person than dedicated server has its benefits like: performance, lower cost, less complexity, better per-dollar performance. In any case, I have never used Hostgator Dedicated Servers so I can’t give my insights on this. Since I never had major issues with their other services (and I’m using them for 10+ years) I believe that they are fine. Anyway, here are their real monthly prices with cPanel:

• Value Server – $189.00 (+tax)
• Power Server – $249.00 (+tax)
• Enterprise Server – $289.00 (+tax)

Hostgator Packages Speed and Uptime

In the past, Hostgator had its problems with uptime and speed of their servers across the board. Most reviews that are found today saying that they are slow, not reliable, etc came from that period of time – https://wpsecuritylock.com/eig-major-outage/2013 and 2014 to be exact. When compared to competition, Hostgator offers great as advertised 99.99% uptime, fast servers with response time that depends mostly on your plan and location. People often forget that servers are machines, computers that update from time to time, that break from time to time and so on. It happens, it is true and when that happens it is not pleasant feeling especially if you receive significant traffic. Contacting support often helps. I must say that every time when I had to contact them, I was lucky to resolve my issue with someone. Sometimes that was right away, sometimes after speaking with level 2 or level 3 support but issues were resolved always.

How much is “Unlimited”?

Hostgator and many other companies advertise their service as “Unlimited”. In a real world, this is not really “as much as you can”. Just imagine running YouTube on $5 hosting plan. Real world is a bit different and how much is “unlimited” depends on many factors and it varies from hosting package to hosting package. If you are lucky to host your website on a shared or cloud server with 100 other people that don’t use server resources at all, you will get more for your money. On the other hand, if you are unlucky and you host your website on heavily used server – your response time and loading speed may suffer a bit. Of course, Hostgator is capping websites that use much resources and do their best to keep everything in balance. Hostgator allows a maximum of 25% CPU usage limit and you are not allowed to cross this limit for more than 90 seconds for WordPress plans and Shared plans while Reseller plans have same 25% cap but per cPanel. Cloud plans have scalable capping as they are built more to handle traffic bursts. With Cloud plans, you can use 50% of your power without capping. You can use 100% for 300 seconds and after that it will be throttled down by 25% every 300 seconds. With VPS servers, you can use 100% of your CPU power but since it is just a portion of whole server it is recommended to upgrade to dedicated plans if you always use 100% of it. Of course, with dedicated server plans it is all up to you. You are allowed to use 100% of it all the time.

Ordering Process and Setup Time

Ordering your hosting package with Hostgator is easy and quick. If you already purchased your domain name, all you need to do is to add it on checkout page together with your credit card info and you will get access to your cPanel instantly. Of course, once you add DNS information to domain, your website will be online.

Pros Using Hostgator

Every person using Hostgator services have love/hate relationship with them and that is expected. You will find many negative reviews about Hostgator mainly because tons of people use their services. Often, when people get enough they move to another hosting provider and then get back to Hostgator. Of course, this is not always the case but in overall – Hostgator provides great service at low price. Also, Hostgator may really say that they have great uptime. Advertised 99.9% uptime is industry standard and anything less than that is not really tolerated. Also, great way to advertise this and keep to the word is offering compensation for lower uptime. Hosting your website with huge company as a result has 24/7 support. Yes, waiting time depends on many factors but you will be in front of your screen anyway. It is not a huge difference if you wait 2 or 30 minutes – just pop up your support chat and watch YouTube if you don’t have anything smarter to do. Even though they advertise “Unlimited everything” you can get capped in terms of traffic, bandwidth, CPU, MySQL connections, etc. In any case, if you really need more resources than provided, then you receive enough traffic to really consider bigger package. If you receive 10K visits a day, then you should monetize those visits somehow and use hard earned money to pay for server as well.

Cons Using Hostgator

There is no perfect hosting company and Hostgator is not perfect. Using cheap, shared hosting solution has its disadvantages for sure. You will be sharing your server with many people and most often it will be more people than it is advertised or expected. In order to be able to provide low cost service, all hosting companies will put as many accounts on server as they can. As a result, they will run them on their limit – preferably at 99% all the time. Expect that your loading time will suffer.

In any case, you get what you pay for and if you pay $155 for 3 year Business Cloud hosting plan like me, then you should be able to live with bit slower loading and support waiting time.

How to Get the Most of Hostgator?

To really get the most out of your Hostgator hosting plan is to get expensive one for as long time as you can possibly can. Personally, I always purchase 3 year plans using best discount codes that I have find online at that time. When I know that my hosting will end in 3-4 months, I start looking for discounts. With best ones, you can get 60-70% off the price. Even Hostgator themselves offers discounts like this.

How to Get Hostgator Coupon Code?

Easiest way to do do this is to go directly to their checkout page and see what they offer right from the box. If that is 70% off, then don’t even bother looking for bigger discount. Now, if you have 30-40% discount, then you should move your mouse cursor like you want to close the page. Their popup will go up and you will get better offer. If this don’t happen, try it few times or try using incognito mode.

I have tried this right this moment and I received first offer for 40% discount, then for 44% discount and lastly 71% discount code for 3 year plan. Of course, if this trick with going back and forth, refreshing the page doesn't help, you should Google for discount codes. In any case, try to find 50-60%+ discount code. They are not always available but that is main reason why you want to start looking for them few months in advance.

Also, check Hostgator Discount Codes page! Maybe you find some gems there as well.

What Hostgator Hosting Package Should I choose?

This is probably most common question that people ask, especially if it is the first time that they purchase web hosting. People will tell you that you should get cheapest one first and then go for more expensive once your website starts to get more traffic. It is WRONG! Go for most expensive one right from the start!

Why? Because, once your websites starts growing, you should focus on your website. I can bet that you don't know how to transfer website from one server to another, from one package to different one. Even if Hostgator do this automatically, there is a chance that something will go wrong. In most cases, exactly this happens. So, get biggest package (when talking about Shared and Cloud hosting) as someone new in all this hosting business.

Also, I never understood “Website Builder” and “WordPress Hosting” packages. Why would you buy it when with Cloud Hosting or even Web Hosting package you have all that. Nowadays, you have tons of WordPress templates that will allow you to create website. You can use plugins like “Elementor” and create website that you want.

As Hostgator say by themselves “If you’re trying to build a large-scale site, or simply want more control over the look and feature set of your site, then WordPress is going to be a great choice.” So right from the start you should skip Website Builder package.

Now, if you want to host a blog on Hostgator servers then you can choose between “WordPress Hosting”, “Shared” or “Cloud” hosting. To be honest, I don’t see the point here but let's say that WordPress hosting servers are preconfigured to host WordPress and that is more predictable for Hostgator to service those servers. I would say that it's all marketing gibberish. As long as MySQL and PHP, you don’t need anything special.

Real choice up to this point is whether to choose Shared Web Hosting or Cloud Hosting. Here is what Hostgator has to say about this:

It is much more simple now: Cloud Hosting it is for people getting started with their websites. Why? Because you will get more for your money. You have open hands to host not just WordPress sites but try and test other scripts. What if you want to try Joomla or something else?

Of course, if you are more experienced, then you will go for VPS or Dedicated server. In this case, you already know what you need and what you are doing so my tip here can only be regarding finding best coupon codes and discounts. Choosing between VPS and Dedicated server (especially on Hostgator) is really discutibile so we will continue it in our article VPS or Dedicated Hostgator Package

Hostgator Security

Hostgator has strong firewalls to counter all online threats, DDoS attacks, viruses and other nasty things that dwell online. They take their security seriously so there is no need to worry about this. All instructions are provided, you will create your own PIN code and they will ask for it when you contact them.