Review of Hostgator
Pros and Cons of the Hosting Service for Joomla Ninjas and Internet Gangsters
This is my honest review of the website hosting service that I’ve been using for nearly a decade.
I’ve been a web designer, developer, and Internet entrepreneur doing business online for over 10 years. Here are a few of my digital properties and websites I’ve created…
I’ve spent literally thousands of hours working with about 30 different hosting companies on hundreds of different websites, I want to give a sincere recommendation of the one which I think has the best hosting service at the best price, which is HostGator. But there are some downsides to HostGator I’ll discuss honestly here…
This review is a little longer because I want to thoroughly address all the factors of choosing a hosting company that really can make or break the success of your website, blog, startup, consultancy, smartphone app, or online brand.
I recently learned that a client of mine, whose startup I’ve consulted since its inception 3 years ago, got offered $25 Million for approximately half of the company. They run on HostGator servers, so I’ll talk a little about how that happens.
You’re hosting company really is your partner in your online business…
- The load times of your websites depend upon the hosting.
- The functionality of your website depends upon the hosting environment.
- When emergencies and crashes happen the quality of the hosting support, their competence, and commitment to fixing your problems really matter.
Your hosting is not the place to skimp or just pick the option cheapest available.
American customer service
They have the best customer of any company I’ve ever dealt with.
You call your cable company, your ISP, or your cellphone company and you wait on hold 10–20 minutes and you can just tell that you are dealing with an underpaid, under-trained, and under-motivated employee that just wants to get off your call as soon as possible. Or worse you get someone who doesn’t speak English well, has an accent that’s hard to understand, or obviously comes from a culture that just doesn’t understand customer service.
I’ve never had these kinds of experiences with HostGator. All their employees are based out of a US customer service office in Texas and they seem really committed to fixing whatever issue you call in with.
My pet peeve with customer service employees is when they say, “I understand” every other sentence to try to calm you down or pace/lead you when they obviously don’t understand your problem or its ramifications. They don’t do that at HostGator.
I want to give a special thanks and a shout-out to a couple of HostGator employees that have really impressed me: Herb, Jason, Jessica, and a bunch of others! You guys rock!
Troubleshooting
HostGator employees go above and beyond with troubleshooting issues with websites. Most of the HostGator employees I’ve talked with are also HostGator customers who have their own websites.
I’m not a hobbyist, I’m a power user and some of my websites are very sophisticated. I’ve had complicated problems with my websites and I’ve got quotes from 3rd party consultants who were going to charge me $200, $300, $400 to fix those problems. Before I spent that money, I thought…
Why don’t I just call my HostGator, see if they have any good ideas…
And they fixed the problem completely! Sometimes on the first call, or sometimes they would need to submit a ticket and it would be fixed a couple of hours or days later. They’ve saved me an incredible amount of time and money in troubleshooting inevitable issues on the sites.
HostGator employees do some common sense things that I wish other companies I have to deal with would do…
- If they don’t know how to resolve a particular issue they will ask people in their department that do.
- They Google search solutions to problems — sometimes fixing problems is this simple.
- Before they make a change to an important file they will back it up.
They will call you back! How many times have you taken your valuable time to explain a complicated problem to tech support and then got disconnected and you had to start all over, spend another 20–30 minutes, calling back in, waiting on hold, and explaining the problem to another tech support operator. It’s such common sense to just call your customers back if you get disconnected, I don’t know why more companies don’t do it.
Email support
Anyone who uses email knows that inevitably your email will go down and HostGator is really good about email support. Personally, I’ve found the most reliable email client to be Gmail. Checkout this lifehacking article about how to send professional corporate-branded emails from a Gmail account.
Backups
HostGator has some kind of time machine technology where if you need to revert your website to its condition a week or two ago you can! This has been a lifesaver for me a couple of times when I was experimenting with some weird Open Source extension that royally screwed up my website and I just had to go back a week or two to repair the damage.
Flexibility of payment terms
I think HostGator has a lot of customers that are small businesspeople and they understand that, as an Entrepreneur, you are always waiting on an invoice to get paid by a client or an affiliate check to arrive. If you need an extra week or two (or three!) to pay your hosting bill just call in and ask them. In my experience, they are very accommodating and it’s saved my businesses a couple of times!
Search Engine Optimization
Organic traffic has been the foundation of my online businesses for the past 6 years. HostGator has really excelled in this respect:
- My website Limitless Mindset gets 8000–12000 unique visitors monthly from highly competitive search phrases for various brain power supplements
- I was ranked #1 for Denver marketing firm for several years which was a super competitive search phrase.
- Tarantulas and Zanzibar — The owner of these two pool halls came to us to increase their local SEO ranking. Both bars are now ranked on the 1st page for billiards and pool hall locally on Google, Bing, and Yahoo.
Pricing
I have a package that costs about $50/monthly and it’s the best $50 I spend every month. However, HostGator’s packages start at about $11/monthly although I think that’s only for a single website or domain. If you want to have multiple domains or websites you need at least the Baby plan which is about $12/monthly — the yearly pricing discount is pretty sweet, about $50 for a year. This includes:
- Unlimited disk space, bandwidth, and email.
- Free site transfers.
- An intuitive web builder to create your website — although I think Joomla or WordPress are better.
- 99.9% uptime guarantee.
- Free SSL certificate — important for security!
- 45-day money-back guarantee.
- And the excellent customer service I mentioned above.
Honestly, I don’t know how long HostGator will be able to keep their prices this low, probably not forever. Although you can lock in your pricing for up to 3 years.
Free consultation
If you purchase a package with HostGator of 12 months or more through the links here or with the coupon code jroseland, I will include a free 30-minute consulting call with me. We can discuss…
- Web design and Joomla development.
- Search engine optimization.
- Email marketing strategy.
- Content marketing and ad copy.
- On-page optimization and funnel creation.
- Text message marketing strategy Empowering your business with cryptocurrency.
- Using Nootropics and “Biohacking” to enhance your productivity.
We can talk about whatever you want!
I wish I could do more than 30 minutes but I’m busy running my own businesses, serving clients, and the free consulting calls are really just something I do to meet interesting new people. I’m not sure how much longer I can do these calls as they do a take chunk of time out of my work week.
For the free consultation, you need to use the coupon code jroseland so please write that down.
Case Study
One of my clients got an offer of $25 million for half of his company which I’ve consulted extensively for in the past 3 years. It was a start-up in the vacation rentals industry, basically a competitor to Airbnb. The client built a proprietary aggregator software that scraped websites like Craigslist for property listings. It did a little better job than any other software scrappers on the market; it was a little faster in migrating properties, a little more accurate with the information collected, and a little more automated in the way it would notify people that their property was being advertised, and getting them to engage with the platform. A couple of other things my client did smart…
- Instead of buying Superbowl ads for his website, doing a massive SEO campaign, or gambling on a viral marketing campaign he created a software API that would allow the vacation rentals to be syndicated to other websites and strategic partners. So instead of generating the traffic himself, which is expensive and time-consuming, he just put his API to work where the traffic already was.
- There was a ton of development work that needed to be done and my client, did something really smart there, he did research where in the world the cost of living was lowest, yet the Internet access was fastest and most reliable. He identified where he could hire the most competent developers at the very lowest cost, it ended being somewhere in India.
- This is not “4-hour workweek” style Entrepreneurship; my client really worked his ass off for years and kind of went through a Howard Hughes type phrase where he basically boarded himself up in a little room in Costa Rica, which he only left to go surfing, and just worked hard for a long time.
- The success of this business was built on scrapping massive amounts of data. Right now there are a lot of websites like Reddit and Tumblr where users are curating massive amounts of information and content about everything under the sun. I believe that the Entrepreneurs that figure out a way to scrape this data and do something useful with it will be the next generation of Internet multimillionaires. I hope you are among them!
What are people saying about HostGator?
They have a 3.3-star average rating on TrustPilot, which might seem average but I used TrustPilot to look up every company I might deal with and over 3 stars is actually pretty good — especially considering that they have over a thousand reviews.
There are some idiosyncrasies of HostGator and, yes, negatives I’ll mention…
Photocopies
When you open a new account with them they ask you to send them a photocopy of the credit card that you used to purchase the package. I realize this is a little weird but it’s just something that HostGator does to add another layer of security to your account, if someone calls in claiming to be you they will just ask them to verify details that they have from the scans of your credit card.
Support with content management systems
HostGator has an official policy of not providing tech support for content management systems or 3rd-party Open Source software. This is totally understandable because let’s say you install some weird plugin developed by some guy in Eastern Europe with incomplete or poorly translated documentation, and it breaks your site. The HostGator employee did not design this software and they don’t know how to fix it.
However, my experience has been that tech support employees do their damndest to help me fix problems with the CMS and the Open Source Extensions. A lot of HostGator tech support employees have their own personal WordPress or Joomla website and they are familiar with the popular extensions of these systems.
I would encourage the HostGator management to do away with this policy because the majority of the employees don’t really follow it.
Wait times
When you call in the wait times are as low as 1 minute, as high as 15 minutes. Although they have told me that they are taking steps to decrease that wait time.
Requests for recency
Hostgator asks you to keep all the scripts on your websites up to date, which I also understand since out-of-date scripts make websites vulnerable to hackers. However for power Joomla users like me, my websites run 30–40 different Open Source scripts, it really is not plausible to keep them all up to date at the same time. Updating scripts that often not only takes a lot of time but can also actually break your websites. I now update my websites once a month on the first of the month.
What would be more convenient would be if they would send a notification if a specific script is problematic.
Server and PHP upgrades
About once or twice a year HostGator will perform upgrades to servers or upgrade versions of the software that are running on these servers (PHP, MySQL, etc) and this often causes problems with the websites themselves or downtime.
The Bottom Line
After dealing with dozens of different hosting companies over the past 10 years, I can tell you all hosting companies make mistakes big and small inevitably, it’s just part of doing business online, but HostGator is the most committed to fixing these when they happen.
I put my real name on this recommendation because I stand behind it. But I have little loyalty to HostGator — in the future if the quality of their service drops I will notify my clients and will be the first to jump ship. I will update this review, but since I’ve been with them, they’ve been the best, so if you take your business seriously like me, I recommend HostGator. Again, they do have a 45 Day Money Back Guarantee if you are at all disappointed or if the hosting doesn’t fit your requirements. Purchase at least a year of hosting with my coupon code jroseland (save 60%)…
And we can talk, I look forward to a continued conversation with you!
