Hostgator Review : fine for little sites I’m sure, but I was really let down

By web hosting on Nov 5, 2004 in Reviews

Host unlimited blogs, websites for $4.95 only with this web host
or order a planet alpha dedicated server for less than $50 here

Hostgator is our recommended web hosting provider. Sign up with hostgator here

This is a hostgator review posted by spacefem on 02 November 2004

Greetings, all. My name is Spacefem and it’s been a few months since I vowed to write this review, but better late than never, yes?

About two months ago, I outgrew my host and started looking for a reseller account where I could put all my sites. After reading reviews, I went with the hostgator silver plan, which offered 100GB of bandwidth per month. Cool.

Like most of you, I was impressed with the online support and value of what was offered.

Unfortunately, my account was only up for two days when they suspended it. I had no idea why it was suspended. I was not contacted (my e-mail addresses were associated with my accounts, but they had my phone number, so I don’t understand what’s up). AIM support couldn’t help me, they just told me “e-mail sales@hostgator.com” over and over again. I couldn’t get anyone on the phone. I wasn’t given information, and the online support people couldn’t do anything. e-mail, in case you don’t know, is a really slow, frustrating way to get your problems solved.

In the end, it turned out that my sites were using more than their fair share of server resources. A friend helped me verify that my site was on a server with nearly 800 other clients. How hostgator can promise to offer a 100GB/mo plan is beyond me, because there’s no way to have that kind of data transfer without being a load on a server.

So I left. I didn’t get a refund for that month, it was just $50 gone. I could not downgrade without paying additional fees.

I did end up getting a dedicated server, but I still say the high-bandwidth reseller plans are misleading. When hostgator showed me the server logs, I had some PHP/MySQL files, some html files, some images taking up what they said was “too much server load”. But I guess that’s all debatable.

What really irked me off was the support. You think because there’s online support that you’ll never have downtime, but those people aren’t equipped to handle anything more than server status messages and pre-sales questions. If there’s a real problem, it’ll take at least a day to fix it.

If you’re making some little website for grandma millie to ship her cookie mixes, I’m sure you’ll love hostgator. They’ve got affordable plans and the servers seem to be… in existance. If you have a real website, go somewhere where you can get somebody on the phone for real. use http://www.whois.sc/ to see how many sites they’re pushing on each server, too.

Discuss this review in detail or sign up with hostgator webhosting

Related Posts :

This web hosting blog is proudly hosted with reliable Hostgator webhosting for only one cents through this hostgator coupon. If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to this web hosting RSS feed

Sorry, comments for this entry are closed at this time.

ThePlanet.com : Remote Reboot Migration Part 5
Hostgator Review : Over 3 months in