Background

Business Name: HostGator.com LLC

Year of foundation: 2002

Location: Houston, Texas, United States

BBB Accreditation: No

Market Size: > 1.3 million websites (#3 HRank list)

Growth Status: (by websites quantity): Decreasing

In 2002, Brent Oxley, a Florida Atlantic University student, lived in a dormitory. At that time, he did not know yet that the idea of setting up his own business that crossed his mind would result in one of the most successful projects in the history of the hosting industry so far. It was then that he decided to establish his own company, which he humorously called HostGator.

Its first headquarters was located in Boca Raton, in the state where he was studying. The company took off very fast: by 2006, with only 19 team members to handle all aspects of their business, it had grown to a major player offering a wide range of hosting options and providing support via phone, live chat, instant messages, and other means – for a mid-00 company, that was quite an achievement. In 2007, they left the original office, which had become too small by that time, and moved into a new 25,000 sq ft building in Houston, Texas. In 2008, only 6 years after it was set up, HostGator was ranked #21 in the list of the fastest growing American companies and got BBB accredited (A+).

Another milestone in its history is its acquisition by EIG in 2012. Oxley remained the owner of the facilities where the company HQ is located. When commenting on the deal, he explained that he wanted to travel before becoming a father, and that he hoped EIG would fix the billing issues and other problems HostGator had.

The change in management did not slow down HostGator’s growth. Today, it hosts about 1,300,000 websites and is generally considered one of the key players.

Offers and Pricing

Hostgator.com has 3 shared hosting plans on offer.

All of them can be purchased for 1, 2 and 6 months, also for 1, 2 and 3 years.

The most beneficial option is a 36-month subscription for $2.75/mo (Hatchling plan). Its monthly option costs $10.95. Here is quite a bargain, right?

They also offer:

• Shared / Reseller / VPS / Dedicated web hosting,
• Domain registration,
• Website builder (their own product),
• also, they assist with website management in other ways.

The company have long been working with WordPress and even launched their own offering. Their most profitable service, following the customers’ opinion, is cloud plans. It’s safe, fast and has a fair price tag.

The first and cheapest plan in shared hosting line is tenderly called “Hatchling Plan” (isn’t it cute? :)) is not that cheap, if you look at the renewal price – $10.95/mo. However, a 3-year subscription is way more beneficial – only $2.75/mo. Yet, it’s hard to tell whether such a long-term commitment is a good idea or not…

Support

Instant Technical Live Support: Yes

The main advantage of the service is the high quality of customer support and user-friendly interface. At least this is what we have gathered from the general impression on the Internet.

All in all, the company offers a variation of support options and a live chat is among them. And this gives them a huge advantage. So, if they are prompt to help, maybe a 3-year plan is worth a try right at once.

They also offer tech support via live chat.

HostGator Summary Analysis by HRank

HostGator’s overall HRank rating was not very high in 2018 – 5.2 with its position on the 2018 list – only the 93d; in 2019 – 6.7 HRank and 83 position in 2019 listing.

Our data charts reveal HostGator’s uptime performance since June 2018. In 2018 and 2019 uptime was on average 99.9%. There were several cases of downtime (98.455%) in the course of the monitoring, but they were really few. Still, these cases contributed negatively to the overall rating of the provider.

Response time from the domains showed no good values – 1,300ms to 1,000ms on average [from June 2018 to December 2019]. It is not the fastest indicator (many providers in our list showed better results), however, it definitely demonstrated the tendency for improvement. 

The number of Shared IPs and domains that hosted them decreased, it means that BlueHost loses its market positions.

After 2 years of monitoring, we can say, that HostGator is not on our recommendation list.