HostGator Review

I've had a plan on moving a couple of my sites to hostgator, because they are incredibly dependable and they make your life simple.  The reason: their passion is to deliver uptime, and support.

I bought one of the cheaper plans, and it didn't mean that I was left out of having certain things under my own control.

For instance, one of my other Hosters who will be out of my life in under 3 months, won't mention the name, does not allow me to do anything with the .htaccess file in my own directory.  I dislike this immensely. There are so many different things that you can do with this file, and that you need to do, at times.

For instance, if you so happen to go on a "learning binge", googling for all of these different things you want to know how to do, such as using .htaccess for redirecting, or enabling php, ... you can count on HostGator to allow this stuff to be done, without a headache.

Here's an example of their over the top support:

It was a Sunday afternoon.  I had installed a PHP-based program on my Hostgator-based server, but I couldn't figure out why two of the directories this installation program had created, somehow were not allowing me to change to Read/Write permissions.

Only about 30-45 minutes later, I got a support email back from Hostgator, not only notifying me that they had changed the permissions, but explained to me why they were not the correct permissions (this condition was something I had personally done that was not very TechWise)

HostGator simply delivers.

The only drawback, in my mind, is that they're dragging their feet on getting PHP 5 installed on their servers.

However, this could be seen as a good thing, because they are adamant about not creating problems for customers who might suddenly run into a PHP5-related incompatibility with cpanel and other php-based tools.

I applaud their decision. When it comes to the down-side of a hoster, this is their only downside. The rest is definitely way up.