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HostGator Review: Web Hosting Review |
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| An excellent, though pricey choice for beginners; includes green hosting; 20% discount with code: SPRING | |
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[Editor's note: HostGator is offering 20% off your initial order with the coupon code SPRING. This discount applies to domain registration, web hosting, and any set-up fees]
HostGator is a nice, high-quality web host with a great online site-builder. It's only marred by somewhat high hosting costs and an annual $15.00-per-year domain registration fee. Registration with the Hatchling Plan will cost you $6.95 per month for one year. The monthly cost goes down to $4.95 if you choose a three-year plan. You will have to pay an additional $10.00 annually for domain privacy, something that we highly recommend for individuals. Whichever you choose, you get 'unlimited' storage and bandwidth. It's also worth noting that they're offering a 20% discount at the time of this writing. HostGator calls itself a green host, meaning it achieves carbon-emission reductions through efficient servers and the purchase of wind-energy. If shrinking your carbon footprint is important to you, this may help to justify the extra cost. One of the few complaints we have about HostGator was how long it took for our domain to be online after we bought it (a process known as propagation). At 5 hours, it was considerably slower than with other hosts, though there could be many reasons for this (any web host will tell you it may take up to 24 hours for a site to appear, although it usually takes less than one). Since registration only happens once when you initially sign up, this shouldn't be a big problem. A number of different sitebuilding apps are included with HostGator, but we had fun using the Parallels Plesk sitebuilder. There's a large variety of templates to chose from. While many appear a bit generic, there's a good amount of easy customization you can do to add some originality. The design process is very fluid, and it's a true WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor. There's support for virtually any kind of page you might make: basic text pages, galleries, blogs, and one of the easiest shopping cart creators we've come across. You can even add a nice, animated flash intro with just a few clicks. Users looking to build a multi-faceted site online, should give this one strong consideration. HostGator has shown to be a great performer in our spec tests. Its average response time for our 88KB test page was only .363 seconds, the fastest time for any host we monitor with this test, considerably faster than the .518 second average. It doesn't have a perfect uptime record, but at 99.96% it's certainly fine (just over an hour over the course of four months, and above the 99.88% group average). Its average download of our 77MB test file was just over a minute. This is actually a little slower than when we first tested it, but should be more than adequate for all but the heaviest media sites. HostGator offers a rare 45-day money-back guarantee. After that, it's prorated. The $15 domain registration fee is, as usual, not refundable. Support is provided by chat, email and telephone. A telephone call was answered in 9 minutes, a somewhat long wait. But the help was cheerful and gave us an accurate answer. A chat, using the integrated support function, was picked up in less than a minute, and provided us with an answer. Our only real complaint about HostGator is the cost, but you get what you pay for. Those who don't mind paying a little extra, will definitely get their money's worth out HostGator's green hosting, stellar site builder, and excellent data transfer speeds. |
| Cheapest Plan: | $3.95/mo 3 years (after 20% discount) |
| 1 Year Plan: | $66.72/yr; $5.56/mo (after 20% discount) |
| $ Back Guarantee: | 45-day full refund, prorated after; Domain name not refundable |
| Domain: | $15/yr |
| Support: | Email, Chat, Phone |
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