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Review: Hostgator.com

Web hosting companies are springing up everywhere- the low cost of disk space and the declining cost of bandwidth are making it a viable business option for many people that are willing to put in the time it takes to build up an established client base. Hostgator.com is not a new hosting company, but it definitely is not as established as other hosts (many of which have been around for ten years or more).

Initial Impression
Our initial impression of Hostgator was a positive one: the main page was professional, well laid out, and lacked any obvious signs of bad business (such as missing contact information or poor grammar and spelling). Some research yielded a bit of information about the company, including some reviews from what were largely satisfied customers.

Knowing that no business will have a 100% satisfaction rate (there's always someone who's going to complain about something) we decided to purchase their most basic hosting account (the hatchling) for the purpose of this evaluation.

Value Factor
Hostgator offers competitive pricing that matches current market rates. While you certainly won't be blown away by the low cost, you will definitely find value in the low monthly rates (under $10 a month). It should be mentioned that, like most hosting companies, you must pay for a years worth of hosting up front. After that there is no monthly fee, and it does work out to their quoted monthly rates.

The price for what you receive is absolutely stellar. The sub-$10 a month crowd usually means that you are sacrificing domains, space, e-mail accounts, or other valuable features. Not so with Hostgator. Hostgator allots you 50,000 megabytes of space and 20 e-mail accounts. As well, Hostgator is completely PHP capable and can handle just about every type of server side scripting you want.

Considering the price, that is very impressive.

Reliability and Performance
Reliability is probably the most important aspect of your hosting. If your website is down 10% of the time that could mean lost traffic and, as a result, lost sales. Hostgator boasts a 99.9% uptime guarantee (they can't guarantee 100% uptime, but no host does) and our research (and personal experience) agrees with their claims.

During our evaluation we never experienced one downtime, slowness, or unavailability. Traffic from three different geographic locations (Canada, the USA, and England) were all able to access our website quickly and without any loss of information. Sounds standard, I know, but you would be surprised how many times someone from Europe won't be able to access a website simply because the host is having problems with international traffic or is banned from European ISP's.

Conclusion
We recommend Hostgator. The value, features, and performance are all there and create one reliable and trustworthy host. We will definitely be using them in the future.