Host Gator is a webhosting company that provides three types of hosting; shared, reseller and dedicated. With shared web hosting disk space on one server is shared between many web sites, belonging to different people. In the case of reseller web hosting, the customer, known as the reseller, is allowed by the web hosting company to use his allotted disk space and bandwidth to host web sites belonging to third parties. Dedicated web hosting is where a large web site is given a dedicated web server for its exclusive use.
With shared web hosting, Host Gator, at the moment offers only Linux hosting, with three plans in this category. As of now they do not offer any form of Windows hosting, but promise that that will be available soon. The three shared web hosting plans they offer are Hatchling, for beginning users, Baby for intermediate users with greater space and bandwidth needs, and Swamp for advanced users.
The Hatchling plan costs $4.95 per month, and for that you get 350 GB of disk space and a bandwidth of 3000 GB per month. You are restricted to one domain with this plan. The Baby Plan comes at $7.95 per month, and it gives you 600 GB disk space, 6000 GB bandwidth, while the Swamp plan, at $12.95 per month gives you 1000 GB disk space and unlimited bandwidth. The last two plans give you the ability to host an unlimited number of domains. This is what you see on the surface, but if you dig deeper, you will come across hidden costs. These rates, it turns out are only valid if you pay for 3 years or 36 months at a time. If you wish to pay on a monthly basis for the Hatchling plan, for instance, your cost per month will come to $8.95 or almost $9. The same holds good for the Baby and the Swamp plans which, on a monthly basis will cost you $9.95 and $14.95 respectively. 2 year and one year schemes are also available which fall in between the extremes.
All plans offer typical features such as MySql databases, CGI, PHP, Python, Perl, and Ruby on Rails, SSI, SSH etc. ASP support is only available on the Swamp plan. All plans give you unlimited POP3 email accounts, webmail, SMTP, IMAP support, mailing lists, auto responder and so on. Unlimited FTP accounts are provided, although, anonymous FTP is only available with the Swamp plan. SSL and Shopping cart facilities are also provided so that your site is e-commerce ready.
With all plans they give you 24×7 support, 99.9% uptime and 45 day money-back guarantees. Setting up is instantaneous and free, and there is a site builder which you can use to construct your sites. There are also a large number of free website templates available. For controlling your web site, you have cPanel which is the most popular control panel at the moment.
If you already have a website hosted by some other company, switching to Host Gator is easy as they offer free Domain, file, MySql and script transfer.
In all this is a web hosting company which offers pretty good hosting services, although there is nothing special about it.
Price: 9
Reliability: 10
Tech Support: 10
User Experience: 10
Overall: 10
