Given that a one-second delay in website load time can affect your conversion rate, it’s essential that you use a host with servers that are closer to your target market. As such, in early 2012, HostGator was launched in India to provide plans designed for businesses and individuals in India.
While the international brand mostly caters to those in the United States due to the location of its servers, HostGator provides servers in India and also adds in the choice of U.S. servers. Its plans are optimized for India as well. Although the website is in English only, you can get support in some of India’s local languages.
Features and Ease of Use
HostGator offers web hosting, WordPress hosting, VPS, cloud hosting, and dedicated servers. The Linux shared/web hosting comes in four plans giving more options to customers in India unlike the three offered in the .com brand.
If you’re a small startup or a personal business, you could go with the Starter plan with five email accounts and 10GB storage space. For higher-level needs, the other three plans offer more. It also has Windows shared plans.
These are some of the features that shared hosting customers enjoy:
- 99.9% uptime
- One, three, or unlimited domains on one account
- Let’s Encrypt SSL
- 100GB or unmetered bandwidth, depending on plan
Customers that take a Linux plan are provided with cPanel while those on Windows are given the Plesk control panel. If you want to set up your website on them, you can design your pages using the SitePad Website Builder. It’s a drag-and-drop editor that you can install using Softaculous.
If you’d rather use a CMS or another web application, you can enable any of the 300+ applications through Softaculous as well. For programming, HostGator supports PHP, Apache, Curl, Python, Ruby on Rails, and ASP.NET.
It provides different ways to improve website performance in the hosting categories. For example, those on Linux can use the varnish cache to optimize website performance while those on Windows are provided with the Cloudflare CDN plugin to connect to the platform and scale up efficiency. It supports all that with availability from premium Intel Xeon processors with hyperthreading.
Pricing and Support
HostGator offers reasonable prices for the Linux and Windows shared hosting plans. To get the best deal, you’ll have to take a five-year plan. It might also interest you to know that it doesn’t provide a free domain registration – you’ll have to pay for that separately.
Although there’s no option to test the service without financial commitment, it will give you a complete refund within 45 days of your purchase if you’re not satisfied.
HostGator has a forum where you can ask questions and get a response from community members and support staff. You can search to find an answer to your issue if it’s something that has been addressed previously. There are also a few FAQs.
They also have a knowledge base with a few tutorials. If you prefer to have a private discussion with a support agent, you can contact them via phone, ticket, or live chat.
Given that the live chat isn’t active 24/7 and I sent a request during its off hours, I received my response via email a few hours later.
