Hostgator All You Need to Create
a Professional Best Looking WebSite
Every business needs a website, that
means you need Web hosting. It doesn't matter if it's a full-blown e-commerce
setup or if it's a simple page with little more than contact information.
HostGator - Shared balances attractive prices and features, while offering
plenty of tools to more advanced Webmasters. HostGator has quality shared and
virtual private server (VPS) Web hosting packages, but its dedicated server
plans are what make the company stand out from the Web hosting pack. Shared.
Web Hosting Packages. HostGator offers month-to-month shared Web hosting plans,
but it pushes really hard for you to sign up for longer terms, starting at six
months. Even though the standard monthly and six-month plans start at $8.95 per
month, there are discounts available for those looking to sign up for a long
haul. Many customer were like that, during the signup process, HostGator
defaults to a three-year term. It's one thing to encourage users to not go
month-to-month, but pushing them into three years right from the start is a bit
much.
HostGator have the plans are called
Hatchling, Baby, and Business, and, unless you dig into the details of what
each plan offers, it's difficult to tell how they're different. The Hatchling
plan (starting at $8.95 per month) offers unlimited disk space, bandwidth
databases, and email addresses, plus support for one domain and third-party
applications such as content management systems and e-commerce platforms. You
need to upgrade to Baby or Business to get unlimited domains. The Baby and
Business plans (starting at $9.95 per month, and $14.95 per month,
respectively) add highly specialized options, such as having a free toll-free
phone number or dedicated SSL certificates.
Virtual Private Server Packages. HostGator offers Linux-based VPS
hosting starting at $19.95 per month. If you need more power, expect
high-traffic volumes, or have specific compliance requirements that prevent you
from using shared servers (but you don't want to pay dedicated server prices),
these are good options to consider. The most basic VPS plan, Snappy 500, starts
with 512MB RAM, 25GB disk space, and 500GB of monthly data transfers. The most
advanced, Snappy 8000, offers 8GB of RAM, 240GB of disk space, and 3TB of
monthly data transfers. The Web host's plans are much more flexible and may
offer more RAM and storage than other competitor.
Dedicated Server Packages. HostGator's dedicated server packages
start at $139 per month, and offers an excellent set of features for its price.
HostGator users can customize their servers with up to 1TB of storage, 16GB of
RAM, and an impressive 25GB of monthly data transfers that bests the offerings
from many other Web hosts. That said, HostGator beats and best than their
competitor when it comes to operating system options. The company's dedicated
servers come in Linux and Windows flavors, which isn't as commonplace as you
might think; Linux tends to dominate the field. In fact, HostGator offered both
operating systems. Balance and price gives HostGator the dedicated hosting best
Choice.
Setting Up a HostGator Hosted Site. It's a good thing HostGator sends a
getting-started email chockfull of links because the interface is a little
tricky to get used to. HostGator has a Billing Login link at the top of its
site that leads to the customer portal, where all the payment information,
details about the plan, and options to purchase add-ons are listed. This page has tabs across the top for account
and domain management. The Hosting tab is where you see the actual control
panel with site building tools, applications, and website statistics, to name a
few. The introductory email also has a direct link for the control panel, but
it looks different from what you would get through the Hosting tab, making the
experience more interesting.
Differences in control panel aside,
you have several options for building a website. You can use the included
site-builder, which happens to be Weebly, Weeby's drag-and-drop functionality
let you quickly build an attractive page complete with slideshows, contact
forms, social media links, and more. You can also install WordPress or other
CMS platforms such as Drupal, b2evolutions, Joomla, Mambo, and Tiki, to name a
few. A File Manager tool lets you manually upload files to the server to create
the website that way. The tool is better than a basic FTP client because you
can edit the files directly or use a built-in HTML editor. We like the various
ways that we were able to get superfuntechgator.com up and running.
Setting Up WordPress on HostGator. WordPress is easy to set up on
HostGator, though. The customer portal has an option called Quick Links that
opens a dedicated interface for installing third-party applications. There's
also a handy shortcut called Get Started With WordPress Today which leads to
the Quick Links interface. You can set the path the blog should be installed,
entered the username for the WordPress administrator account, and clicked on
the install button. As easy as that, the site up and running. HostGator also
automatically installed the WP-Super-Cache plugin to help improve blog
performance.
The process of setting up WordPress
was easy because the database was already set up. The Quick Links interface may
look a little intimidating, but it really is point-and-click-and-go. There was
also a link to the Mojo Marketplace under WordPress services with premium
add-ons and services for our WordPress blog. HostGator lacks a blog import
button, but WordPress makes the import process easy enough.
Flexible Email Management. What's the point of a Web presence if
the visitor to your site can't contact you? HostGator provides an unlimited
number of email accounts right from the start. Setting up an email account is a
breeze. You click on Email Accounts within the Customer Portal to open the form
to create email accounts. You create accounts one at a time, which is
unfortunate; Network Solutions lets you make several at once. I did like the
fact that HostGator let me set mailbox quotas. There's also a built-in password
strength meter, which is important.
Security Is Available. HostGator doesn't offer any email
security protections, which is disappointing. The Hatchling plan gives you
access to Shared SSL to protect your e-commerce store, but to get a dedicated
SSL site, you need to upgrade to the Business plan.
During account creation, we were
prompted to create a PIN for my billing account. We were restricted to only
numbers, and it had to be between 4 and 8 digits long. While we're not wild
about the restriction on the maximum length, we would have preferred a higher
minimum. Four-digit PINs are easy to crack brute-force.
Helpful Customer Service. HostGator offers both 24/7 telephone
support and an online Web chat. You can dialed into the telephone tech support
at any time. Since HostGator doesn't
provide WordPress hosting, you can asked how you were supposed to import your
WordPress.com blog into your HostGator site. From my experience you will
received detailed instructions and was able to get them emailed to you. I was
quite satisfied at that time and I think you would too.
You can tested HostGator's online Web
chat, and this is the one Iwas not very
impressed. After typing our question into a form and starting the chat, we were
shown our estimated wait time: 30 minutes. After about 36 minutes (I forgot the
day but at morning), it finally updated to show 29 minutes. Four minutes later,
the timer changed to show 13 minutes. While the estimated wait time is at best
guesswork, I was not sure whether the chat window was still active or if it had
crashed and timed out. The other time around, on a Wednesday morning, the wait
was much more tolerable, with a 15-minute estimate turning into 7 minutes of
actual wait time. We were able to get easy-to-understand instructions on I was
asking for. From my experience HostGator has a very deep knowledgebase and it
contains answers to practically every possible question someone would have,
from managing DNS records to setting up a website.
Dedicated to Hosting. HostGator is a good Web host that
makes setting up a site or WordPress blog a breeze. It doesn't have one-click
installs or imports, but the Quick Link interface is straightforward and much
more robust than most of the options out there. But from other friedns
experience there were just enough misses, such as no email security, weird wait
times on Web chat, and a slightly confusing customer portal interface that
keeps other webhosting company as slightly better deals. That said, I like
HostGator's generous dedicated hosting offerings enough and enjoy to used
HostGator as my pavorite webhosting. If
you like having a lot of options at your disposal, HostGator is a Web host
worth considering. In terms of money-back guarantees, HostGator does better
than most of its competitors, offering a 45-day guarantee
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