HostGator Review 2024 – Is It Past Its Prime?

HostGator Must Be Doing Something Right. But Is It Right for You?

HostGator’s endless advertisement campaigns are definitely impressive, but marketers won’t give you an honest answer to the most important questions: Is this true quality hosting? Fast and reliable? And can it fit your specific needs?

I personally had a great experience with HostGator in the early 2010s, but things change. Some corporate meddling and “business optimizations” are all it takes for a great company to take a turn for the worse.

I decided to see for myself how the company fares today and signed up for the basic shared web hosting plan. Other than shared hosting, HostGator also provides managed WordPress, VPS solutions, and dedicated servers. Everything is available in English.

Long story short – you can do better. HostGator isn’t really cheap, support has been outsourced to who knows where, and the features aren’t good enough. 

A Little Something for Everyone

Of course, HostGator offers all the basic features. You probably won’t be surprised (or particularly excited) to know there’s support for SSL certificates, automatic backups, SpamAssassin to keep your email protected, website backup and restore, and so on.

One nice thing is that all the plans come with the free HostGator Website Builder, with more than 100 mobile-responsive designs and a media library.

Also, there are free website migrations and domain transfers thrown in to sweeten the deal.

Now, let’s take a closer look at some of HostGator’s advanced features.

Scalable Resources

The cPanel control panel offers one-click scalability. This means if you’re experiencing a peak or (hopefully not) a trough in your traffic levels, you can easily increase the capacity requirements with just a couple of clicks. Not only does this ensure your performance remains consistent — you only pay for the resources you need, when you need them.

Blazing Fast Servers

According to HostGator, thanks to “supercharged cloud architecture, low-density servers, CDN, and multiple caching layers”, your WordPress website should load up to 2.5 times faster. Faster than what, you ask? Well, they’re a bit unclear on that.

However, what is clear is that your content will be managed efficiently, with dynamic content requests processed quickly via cloud hosting services.

Developer-Friendly Features (Beginners, Skip This Bit)

HostGator is definitely a beginner-friendly host, but if you’re by no means a beginner, don’t let that stop you. It also comes with all the standard advanced-level features e.g. MySQL databases with phpMyAdmin access and FTP accounts, as well as some value-added extras.

There’s support for PHP 5 and 7, Ruby on Rails, Perl, and Python, and SSH access and Cron job scheduling for optimal system management.

Generous Resource Allocations

As well as scalable resources, all the plans come with comprehensive resource quotas. As a HostGator customer, you’ll get unmetered bandwidth, unlimited subdomains, FTP Accounts, email accounts, and a minimum of 100 GB disk storage.

Simply put, you’re not going to run out of space in any of HostGator’s packages.

HostGator Makes Hosting Easy

HostGator’s features are designed to make your life easier. From account creation to account cancellation, the processes are uber beginner-friendly. Take advantage of the one-click installers, the managed WordPress hosting, and the website building tool, which can all help you get set up without any coding experience or technical background.

Creating an Account

Creating an account with HostGator is ridiculously easy, although the pages are also surprisingly slow to load.

There are only a few steps on the online signup form and your dashboard is set up for you. It’s all done entirely from the browser and you don’t even need to confirm your account via email to finish the process.

Connecting a Domain and Installing WordPress

Largely due to cPanel, the process to connect a domain and install WordPress is easy as pie. It only took me a few minutes and I didn’t need any help from customer service.

However, if you’re a beginner or you just want to ask live chat for support while you’re doing it, be prepared to wait on hold for a long time.

Automatic Backups

The plans come with automatic weekly off-site backups. Okay, so it’s not the best backup policy I’ve ever seen (other hosts often include daily backup and restore). However, at checkout, you can upgrade to CodeGuard backup and restore for an additional monthly fee.

Application Hosting

HostGator plans are compatible with all the usual applications, such as WordPress, Joomla!, Magento, and Wiki. If that’s not enough for you, you can install more than 75 open-source scripts with the one-click installer.

It’s not the most premium one-click installer out there (some include 300 – 400 apps), but all the popular programs are included.

cPanel Access

If you’re a newbie, you’ll be pleased to see cPanel is the control panel. Sure, more advanced users may prefer a customized in-house panel, but for beginners (or people who want things to just work), cPanel is a reliable, easy-to-use, and well-recognized option.

It’s from here you’ll access your website statistics, setup your password protected directories and custom error pages.

Impressive Test Results

HostGator offers a solid, but fairly standard 99.9% uptime guarantee. While it’s not going to break any world records, it is good to see it’s backed by a full month’s credit in the event of excessive downtime.

Other third-party tests show uptime records well over 99.98%. However, anecdotal evidence from other customers often cites downtime and slow website load speeds as major issues with the service.

Never to take things on face value, I decided to run a Sucuri Page Load Test of my own. It’s important to know how fast your website is going to load, as we all know that Google recommends less than 2 seconds if you want your visitors to stick around.

As you’ll see from the screenshot, the overall performance is A+. You can’t ask for better than that. The website loaded in as little as 30 milliseconds for some locations, with the slowest locations at around 800 milliseconds. Whatever location you’re in, the page load speed is far below the 2-second rule.

Customer Service is Not HostGator’s Strong Suit

Up to this point, we have witnessed an exceedingly positive review. However, before you decide to proceed with any transactions, I kindly request a minute of your time to acquaint you with my experience concerning customer service. It is widely acknowledged that customer service stands as the most crucial feature of any business; nevertheless, with HostGator, it appears to be treated as an afterthought.

Customer service is 24/7/365 by live chat and telephone, plus there’s a series of video tutorials and a customer forum. However, it only takes a couple of minutes of searching online to find customers complaining about the level of service rather vocally on Google.

I’d love to tell you my experience was at odds with online customer sentiment, but unfortunately, they were spot on. I tested three methods of customer service. Read on to see how they fared.

Sales Live Chat

Before making a purchase, I hopped on live chat to ask a basic question. All I wanted to know was the location of the servers. I was left on hold for ten minutes waiting for an agent to pick up. When they did, they were helpful and polite, answering my question in full, but ten minutes does seem excessive.

Technical Support via Live Chat

When I was setting up WordPress, I wanted to install Cloudflare CDN. Unfortunately, the control panel didn’t make it clear whether or not this was an option.

First, in order to get technical support, you need to log in again (despite already being inside the control panel). Then, you are then at the mercy of the wait times. It was around noon on a weekday and I had to wait around twenty minutes for someone to pick up.

However, I still wasn’t out of the woods. The agent was not clear about what a CDN was, nor did they know if it was included. Again, I had to wait while they “looked into it”, which left me hanging around on live chat for another ten minutes or so.

Customer Forum

Following a letdown with live chat, I moved to the customer forum to check if it’s a more effective method to receive help. I posted a question at about 1:00 PM on a Monday, inquiring about customers’ experiences with uptime, in the pre-sales discussion.

A pop-up advised me the post would need to be approved by an admin before it was published. I waited for confirmation, but none came and my post was never approved, and as far as I’m aware, it was never published!

Pricing Breaks at 3-Year Commitment

HostGator displays its prices for three-year terms on the main product pages, so at first glance, the prices seem very cheap. However, if you’re looking for a month-to-month plan or any term less than one year, you’ll pay a much higher price.

There’s a generous 45-day money back guarantee, but you’ve got to watch out for the pricey (and optional) add-ons which are added to your cart by default.

When you’re ready to make a purchase, you can use any major credit card.

Cancellations & Refunds

Canceling your HostGator account is as easy as filling out an online contact form. The only issue is the multiple attempts to get you to speak to an agent. Depending on my mood, I’d say this is to get your feedback or to shamelessly convince you to stay. Either way, you can easily override it.

Click here to read about my experience in full.