Shared Hosting

Hostgator Hosting

Here is my first review of shared hosting company HostGator. Hostgator is USA based company headquatered in Houston, Texas, top web hosting provider. Offers shared, reseller, vps and dedicated servers. There is room to grow in case your site grows in popularity. There three shared plans: hatchling, baby and business. The difference between the three is on hatchling you can host only one domain, and on business and baby you can host unlimited domains. Plus on business plan you  get free toll-free number, ssl certificate and dedicated IP address. All other features are the same: unlimited space, bandwidth, cpanel control panel, PHP, MySQL databases, FTP, Fantastico one click installer, 45 day money-back guarantee and lots of others. The best plan for you would be the baby plan if you want a personal website, or business for company.

HostGator Support

Hostgator offers ticket (e-mail), phone, live chat and community support. Support have been excellent. In my 2 years time, I have had 2-3 problems so far, and all tickets have been answered within 30 minutes. Operators have been nice and knew what they were doing.

HostGator Uptime

On my test site rsmkd.com, the uptime have been great always > 99.9% as guaranteed. Here is a live link of the monitor report.

Overall Rating

Hostgator have been excellent host. My test site have showed good response time and uptime. There are lots of features available, you get what you pay for. My rating is 10/10.

HostGator Coupon

If you want to test hostgator use this coupon “freemonth” and you will get the first month for $0.01 for the baby hosting plan.

The most popular shared hosting providers are listed below. All offer many features on single hosting account, including control panel to easily manage your web hosting account, including add new domains, setup databases, ftp accounts, php, mysql and lots of other features.

1. HostGator – Hostgator is top web hosting provider based in Texas, USA with more than 2,500,000 domains hosted on their servers. Offers three shared hosting plans: hatchling, baby and business. The most popular plan is baby with unlimited disc space, bandwidth, unlimited domains on single account, cPanel and other. With Hostgator there is room to grow, they offer also vps hosting, reseller and dedicated servers.

2. Bluehost – Bluehost hosts more than 1000000 domains. It is founded in 1996, and based in Utah, USA. Offers one shared hosting plan with plenty of features including php, mysql, php, mysql support, unlimited hosting. Best for personal websites/blogs.

3. Hostmonster – Hostmonster is also USA company with more than 600000 domains hosted. Single plan is offered with lots of features.

4. IxWebhosting – Ixwebhosting offers three shared hosting plans: expert plan, business and unlimited pro. Also offers VPS hosting.

5. Webhostingpad – US based company offers only one shared hosting plan.

6. Justhost – Only one shared plan

7. Lunarpages – Offers starter, basic and business hosting.

8. Dreamhost – Only one shared web hosting plan offered.

I have accounts with most of the hosts and all of them are great hosting providers. All offer cPanel control panel, except Ixwebhosting – hsphere and dreamhost their own control panel.

Shared hosting is the most popular web hosting service. It is also the cheapest because many users share the same server resources (CPU, disc space, bandwidth and others). For automaticing and managing hosting tasks a control panel like cPanel, Hsphere, Plesk, DirectAdmin may be used. Control Panels are very simple to use and are specifically designed to help the average user who does not have any tecnical knowledge whatsoever to manage its hosting account. Depending on the enabled features by the hosting company with control panel you can manage database (create new, add users, permissions etc), setup FTP accounts (with quotas), add new domains, upload/edit files via File Manager, or install applications (wordpress, joomla and others) with one-click installer, and other features. Nowadays web hosting providers offer many features on one shared hosting account. PHP (dynamic web language), MySQL (relational database system), unlimited space, bandwidth and unlimited sites on single account, Ruby On Rails, Perl, free site builders etc for e very cheap price of few dollars monthly. The most popular shared hosting platform is the LAMP stack (Linux – Operating System the best for web servers, Apache HTTPD (the most popular HTTP web server), PHP  and MySQL). There are thousands of shared hosting providers in the world, most are in USA, an in my next post I will post the most reliable and popular ones.

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