Is HostGator Still Tops?

Larry Tew

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Raleigh
I've read around the net that HostGator has experienced some hiccups since being bought a while back. Are they still everyone's top or near top pick for WP hosting?
 
I use hostgator and have had no troubles from them to speak of. Over the past 2.5 years my sites have been down maybe 3 or 4 times max. And it was never for more than a few minutes from what I could tell.

Their online support has been helpful when I have had problems. But their phone support is terrible from my experience, the connection on their end was horrible. It sounded like crappy viop from 10 years ago.


I have heard other people complain about servers being slow and having to get hostgator to switch them to a new server. But my sites dont have the traffic level that theirs do, so I have not seen any problems. And the ones that I have heard complain usually get it sorted out with a new server.


To me the 24/7 online support is huge. I work on my websites at night, so when I need help it is usually between 10pm-2am est.
 
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I've read around the net that HostGator has experienced some hiccups since being bought a while back. Are they still everyone's top or near top pick for WP hosting?

In two or three years I've maybe had two problems. I think they're tough to beat for the money and their tech support is great.
 
I've used Hostgator for over 10 years for my sites and over 50 client sites. They are solid. I've had very few problems and only experienced downtime a handful of times over those 10 years. You'll have some downtime with any host.

There are several great hosting companies out there.

WPEngine is a specialty service for Wordpress sites. It's expensive compared to other hosting but they tailor their service to make your your Wordpress site is fast and they also provide specific support for Wordpress. Not sure if it's worth the premium but you'd have to read the reviews. You can add the same features they give you to your cheaper hosting to make sure your site is fast.

What's your experience with them, Somarco? Worth the premium?
 
I had hostgator but the cs sucked for wp.
I went to Bluehost and they have been tops for me. (thats for shared hosting)

Can you elaborate? Bluehost is always mentioned along with HostGator. It seems that WPEngine is in a different league than these two - and priced accordingly.
 
WebE, I have been pleased with WPEngine. Migrated my sites to them last summer. No down time, responsive customer service.

Their "system" is different. They don't use cPanel so you have to know what you are doing (or have a son that does).

I had a lot of issues with Hostgator and Hostmonster and Dreamhost. Down time, slow load times and two of my sites got hacked.

Moving to WPE allowed me to eliminate almost half my plugins (which are a target for hackers). Dropping cache plugins and a few others which were no longer needed the load time on my pages increased considerably. WPE constantly monitors for intruders and will block most of them.

With HG the servers would go into overload and it was not unusual to get as many as half a dozen messages a day indicating my site was down. I used a web monitoring service at the time (believe it was recommended by HG) that would send out email when the site was down.

If you don't have an alert system you may never know if you site is down or not or if a page(s) aren't loading.

I had sites spread over 3 hosting services now all are consolidated in one place. The higher price is worth it to keep my sites running and the bad guys out.

If you go to their site and scroll down about half way you will see all the built in services they provide. I like them. Will never use a cheap service again, but I am a bit picky.

This is the service I used for monitoring.

WPE also monitors my sites to make sure I have the latest version of WP installed and upgrades for me if I fail to do it on a timely basis. They archive my sites on a daily basis. If my site crashes I can recreate the old site in a matter of minutes. This has been invaluable and wish I had it in the past.
 
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