Monetize Lab

Review: HostGator - Try it or try it not?

March 17, 2008 – 1:02 pm

HostGator is a hosting company created by Brent Oxley and is currently one of the most popular and trusted providers on the internet, being featured as one of the world’s 10 largest hosting companies. The company was founded in 2002 and currently provides services to over 700,000 domains for more than 90,000 customers. Despite his company size, Brent still takes personal involvement in customer satisfaction and will often handle concerns personally.

Their sites are hosted on top-of-the-line Dual Xeon servers in their data centers at Dallas. The data centers are well equipped and connects to 10 backbone providers. They offer 99.9% uptime Guarantee which is the industry standard. They support PHP4 & 5, SSH, Cron jobs, Python, Ruby On Rails etc. Also, all the packages include enough POP3 accounts(20 for Hatchling and unlimited for others).

HostGator is very popular among the new generation of bloggers that have taken to the web in the search of a reliable and affordable hosting solution to power their privately hosted blogs. The Hatchling plan is available for as little as $4.95 per month and was an instant success for anyone desiring to take the first steps into the world of professional blogging. If a more robust solution is needed, there are two more complete shared hosting plans priced $7.95 and $12.95 respectively.

The reseller plans start at an affordable $24.95/month for the Aluminum plan and comes with 24gb disk space accompanied by 250gb of available bandwidth. Other plans on offer include the Copper $34.95, Silver $49.95, Gold 474.95 and the Diamond $99.95 which boasts an amazing 100gb of disk space together with 700gb of bandwidth. All the reseller plans permit unlimited add-on domains, sub domains, POP3 accounts, FTP accounts and MySQL databases.

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They also offer some of the best dedicated hosting solutions available on the internet. All plans include server management software and an intuitive control panel completely free of charge. Customers opting for Linux can also choose from a list of Operating System which includes Red Hat Linux 9.0, RHEL3, RHEL4, CentOS, or FreeBSD. The basic plan starts at $174.00, followed by the Standard $219.00, Elite $279.00 and Pro $374.00.

You will also other services such as web design, merchant services, domain registration, SSL certificates (which at $75 each, are overpriced), and script installation. They outline all of their upgrades quite clearly in the Addons section of the Support Center, which is always nice.

The actual HostGator control panel is cPanel. There is absolutely nothing that I can tell that is different than any other standard installation of cPanel. It has the standard mail and database features. Everything worked fine and installation of the scripts I tried worked just fine.

Speed Test

It doesn’t matter if they have a great price, good support and fair addons if the speed is not great. Since I’m a HostGator reseller I thought you guys could think that I’m just trying to sell it so I decided to look for some one that had ran speed tests of HostGator and that is not involved in any of their reseller or referral program. I found this guy that has hosting accounts with 1&1, A Small Orange, Dreamhost and HostGator and decided to run some tests.

Web and FTP tests were conducted using 1 HTML page that contained 6 very large JPG images. Total combined file size: 19.1 MB. All tests were conducted 3 times with each host. What you’re seeing in the charts below are the averages of each of the 3 tests with each host.

FTP Upload

Since the first thing you do when you open a new hosting account is upload your files, we see no better place to start than with the results of my FTP upload speed test. This is how long it took to upload our files to the server:

FTP Download

For bloggers needs, this category isn’t particularly important. We usually upload a lot of files, but very rarely download any through an FTP client. But we already had the files uploaded, so we figured we might as well download them to test that speed as well.

Dreamhost was the clear winner in the FTP download category, allowing us to download our files in a mere 24.57 seconds. Host Gator was a close second, while the other two trailed far behind.

Web Download

For the Average Joe Web hosting customer, our Web download test represents the most important speed element. The chart below represents how long it to each host to load our 19.1 MB Web page.

Dreamhost and HostGator clocked nearly identical times of just under 19 seconds. 1&1 was roughly 26% slower than the leaders, while A Small Orange’s performance was very poor.

MySQL Query

If you plan to run any scripts that require MySQL database connections (such as forums or blogs) you should probably pay attention to this section.

Note: We were unable to test 1&1’s MySQL speed side-by-side with the others. We ran these tests using Navicat (GUI MySQL client). 1&1Hosting does not allow remote access to their databases. We could have tested through their Web interface, but that would not have been an apples-to-apples comparison, so We didn’t bother.

For this test, We ran a semi-complex query on a data table that contained 15 columns and 21,571 rows. The numbers on the chart represent the number of seconds it took each host to execute the query.

Once again, Dreamhost and HostGator were nearly identical, while A Small Orange was significantly slower.

MySQL Import

The results of my MySQL import test will probably only interest you if you find yourself constantly updating your database from an off-line source (like an Excel, Access or ASCII text file). Here are the results of the time test we ran to import the same data file mentioned above.

All 3 were fairly close, with HostGator getting the nod.

On January 2007, HostGatorlaunched a new widget that enables Web site and blog owners to have visitors rate how fast their Web sites are loading. “This simple tool gives our hosting customers valuable insight into their Web site’s performance,” says Brent Oxley, president and founder of Host Gator. “We are always looking for ways to add value to each and every hosting account we sell and this is just another example of how we do that. This tool also enables our hosting customers to evaluate the performance of Host Gator. We are absolutely confident in our track record and welcome the chance for our customers to put us to the test.”

Conclusion

HostGator offers good support, easy to contact, competitive pricing, plenty of features with cPanel, straight forward and good speed. In my opinion is a great fit for our blogging needs.