Hostgator Review by brian22 – One year and counting

It’s been one year since I signed up with HG to start hosting websites, and, while my experiences haven’t been 100% positive, HG has been overwhelmingly good to me.
Admittedly, I don’t have support issues that deal with unusual scripts in unsupported languages, or huge, server-choking forums with thousands of visitors a day, and I’ve noticed that these “power users” seem to make up a majority of the support problems posted here.
My sites are pretty simple, kinda small, and even hand-coded for the most part (yeah, I’m a pretty small operation).
I’ve had a few issues crop up, but once I sent them to support, they tend to be resolved pretty quickly (a little follow-through from the folks at support would be nice – the “it’s fixed now” e-mail is nice, but a little condescending sounding, actually. I’m not asking for a tutorial on how to fix it, just an idea of what went wrong…)
My take: my sites have been up EVERY TIME I’VE CHECKED in the past year, the price is right, the support folks effective but a little terse at times, and forums like this have answered questions for me, provided scripts to use, or just given good advice. All in all, HG gets a 9.5 out of 10 from me.

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Hostgator Review by chinpdx – Service + Reliability

I know many people have some issues here. I have not posted since I got started in September, 2004. What I would like to point out is that often some issues with HostGator can be avoided by using a dash of common sense and taking a moment to think.

Some of my initial problems were partly my fault. I misunderstood what I needed to do and it was not explained to me as clearly as it could have been. But we did manage to eventually work it out.

I came here from gisol.com and I just checked to see if they still exist and to my amazement they do. That was the WORST experience I have ever had with a Web host. In the end I was down MORE than I was up!

Regarding HostGator, I now have my main domain and 11 sub domains and myriad email accounts. My sites have never been down that I am aware of – and, yes I check them daily. Three are for my son and trust me, when we were with gisol, I never heard the end of it from him.

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Hosting in the Heart of Texas

Brent Oxley was a college freshman when he dropped out of school three years ago to devote himself full time to HostGator (hostgator.com), the Web hosting business he started in his dorm room. Last year his Boca Raton, Florida-based company, which focuses on the global reseller market, grew by 370 percent.

“The Internet is our generation’s gold rush,” he says. “It is one of the few frontiers left where anyone can make it big with the right mindset and a ton of hard work. Web hosting is a worldwide market that can be run from anywhere as long as the servers are located in a data center with a good network and great uptime.”

When searching for a data center in which to colocate his business Oxley sought a profitable company that would be around for decades. He chose Dallas-based The Planet (theplanet.com), not only for its solid reputation, network and professionalism, but also for its location in Texas, a state that takes its Web hosting seriously.

“Texas is home to many of the largest and most known data centers,” says Oxley. “When it comes to network costs and stability, Texas seems to be the premier location.”

He’s right about Texas. The Lone Star State is a hosting hotspot, a status due in part to an entrepreneurial spirit reinforced geographically by a central location on the Internet backbone, and by pro-business drivers such as lower real estate costs, favorable tax rates and a skilled technical labor force.

At The Planet, where HostGator’s servers reside, chief operating officer Lance Crosby, Esq., says his company owes much of its success to the state in which it operates.

“Our fast growth has been directly attributed to the competitive advantages we possess here in the Texas area,” says Crosby, “in terms of data center space, bandwidth, latency, technical talent and overall lower cost of doing business.”

Located in the central United States, Texas has the advantage of reduced latency to each coast. The average ping time is roughly 20 milliseconds to the San Jose, California and Ashburn, Virginia, areas, commonly referred to as the east and west Metropolitan Area Exchanges.

“Our core infrastructure,” says Crosby, “resides within Equinix in Dallas where we connect to 14 different carriers with over 25 gigabits per second of connectivity.”

In the United States, there are several points of peering where the vast majority of bandwidth providers converge to exchange packets. Dallas is one of those key exchange points where numerous providers operate significant hubs and exchange points, allowing for increased performance over other areas.

“With numerous companies hosting extremely large server farms, Texas has a distinct advantage over other states. Companies like The Planet, Rackspace, EV1, EDS, ACS, IBM and more have significant data center footprints in the Texas area, lending to increased bandwidth volume and reduced cost per megabits per second,” Crosby says.

Crosby, who holds advanced degrees in finance and management and who is an attorney active in the State Bar of Texas, says real estate costs in Texas are considerably lower than in comparable metropolitan areas nationwide. The Planet, which has been in business since 1994, currently leases three data center facilities at rates that amount to roughly 50 percent of the prevailing rates in San Jose, Ashburn and New York areas.

“Real estate pricing in Texas continues to remain lower than the national average, although distressed data center opportunities are beginning to subside,” says Crosby, “The Planet will remain competitive in our overall pricing as we further expand in the Texas area and capitalize on the lower market rates.”

As a pro-business state, Texas follows closely behind Delaware in terms of focusing on business needs. Low property taxes, no state income tax and no sales tax on out-of-state Internet services all are beneficial to delivering services over the Web, he says.As for a technical labor pool, Dallas is known for its abundance.

“In the dot-com rise, the market gave rise to large companies like Nortel, Texas Instruments, Allegiance Telecom, Verio, Data Return, Sprint, Exodus, Epic Realm and more, bringing a substantial technical talent pool to North Texas,” says Crosby. “In the down market, a ton of talent hit the streets in Dallas, allowing The Planet to hire the best of the best. In recent years, the talent pool has stabilized, allowing salaries to rise, with competition among job applicants. The Planet feels confident the technical talent available in the North Texas area will continue to be stable and allow for continued growth well into the future.”

The Planet, which delivers enterprise level hosting services to the SMB market, has seen explosive growth, with demand exceeding 1,500 new dedicated servers in each of the past 12 months.

“We have also seen rising demand in the server-on-demand market as enterprise customers reach out to fulfill excess computing needs,” says Crosby. “We believe the entry level and mid-market dedicated server market will continue to grow rapidly as the SMB market shifts to outsource technology. Our ultimate goal is to be the new utility to the Web, a turnkey bundled affordable hosting solution for the SMB marketplace.”

Twenty-one miles to the west of The Planet is the Bedford, Texas headquarters of C I Host (cihost.com), a managed Web hosting and colocation solutions provider founded in 1995. Texas offers fertile ground for businesses to grow, says C I Host CEO Christopher Faulkner.

“Dallas-Fort Worth is one of the world’s primary breeding grounds of ideas and innovations in technology,” says Faulkner, who almost sounds like a salesman for the state. “Texas is the second largest producer of electronic components and Richardson’s Telecom Corridor is the nation’s highest concentration of telecommunications firms, with more than 350 located within a two-square-mile area.

“Austin is home to Sematech, one of the nation’s premier research consortiums. Houston’s Advanced Research Center, which focuses on scientific research and applied technology development, benefits more than 150 companies annually. San Antonio’s Southwest Research Institute is the country’s third largest independent, non-profit, applied research and development institute.”

In general, the Texas economy is one of the healthiest in the nation. A key to economic growth has been Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, home of American Airlines, the nation’s largest carrier. The Fort Worth Alliance Airport was the first industrial facility of its kind specifically built to meet the needs of purely business cargo.

A growing population, nearing 23 million, helps stabilize the state’s economy. Texas ranked fourth in job creation last year with 9,400 new jobs in the professional, scientific and technical fields.

The state also has the third highest growth rate in small business, a market expected to explode in the next few years.

“We’re definitely a major regional hub for telecommunications infrastructure,” says Faulkner. “Verizon recently began rolling out its fiber optics initiative deploying 440,000 feet of cabling in suburban Dallas. They said they were going where the competition is, and they’ve found the right spot.”

Austin is recognized as the most “wired” city in the nation, and Texas is home to several fiber cable developers, distributors and suppliers. Texas Instruments, headquartered in Dallas, is the world leader in digital signal processing and analog technologies, the semiconductor engines of the Internet age.

Texas is more affordable than New York or Los Angeles. Living expenses are lower and there is no corporate sales tax. The average cost of real estate in the North Texas area is $12 per square foot, far less than the costs in the big three cities of New York, Chicago and Los Angeles.

Trained technical talent is being turned out by the state’s nationally recognized tech schools, such as DeVry University, Texas Tech, Westwood, Texas A&M, ITT Technical Institute, Universal Technical Institute and the Texas State Technical College network, notes Faulker, who sits on the board at DeVry University.

Faulkner also credits the pro-business climate in Texas with fostering the growth in technology businesses.

Texas recently instituted major reforms in workers’ compensation that lower the employers’ costs substantially. The state ranks as one of the lowest in business taxes as a percentage of total state tax revenue.

And Faulker says his own company’s research shows the small to medium-sized business market in general is poised for growth.

In January, C I Host polled 20,859 SMB clients across the United States. Twenty-three percent say they expect to increase their labor forces and 53 percent plan to increase their overall IT spending. Sixty-six percent of respondents plan to increase capital expenditures in 2005, while 53 percent expect to spend more on Internet marketing specifically. Sixty-one percent plan to rebuild or revamp their Web sites in the coming year. Overall, the majority of businesses expect the US economy to improve. Sixty-eight percent of respondents predict 2005 will be a good year to expand their businesses, and 4 percent expect gross revenues to increase.

The optimism is encouraging to Faulker, who already has data centers in Los Angeles and Chicago and plans to open another facility in London.

Despite Dallas-Fort Worth’s stats as the state’s technology nexus, Texas’s Web hosting isn’t confined to its borders.

San Antonio, 280 miles to the south, is home to the headquarters of Rackspace Managed Hosting (rackspace.com), one of the fastest-growing managed hosting companies in the nation.

“Rackspace Managed Hosting was founded in San Antonio in 1998,” says Annalie Drusch, the company’s director of corporate communications. “Texas, particularly San Antonio, has been an excellent location in which to start and grow a hosting company and it provides us with great advantage in terms of costs, talent pool and operational efficiency. All of these advantages contributed to Rackspace’s ability to achieve profitability in 2001 and have spurred our growth rate of 50 percent a year to more than $100 million in 2004.”

In addition to its central location and fast access to the entire US, she says, Texas is the crossroads to all the Central and South American markets.

Rackspace has five data centers with two in San Antonio, one in Dallas and one each in Herndon, Virginia and London.”While we have state-of-the-art facilities in other parts of the country and the world,” says Drusch, “Texas provides a cost benefit not only in terms of facilities, but also in operational costs. Any company running large data centers knows that power consumption is a major expense, and Texas offers an abundance of inexpensive electricity.”

There is no shortage of technical and service-oriented talent in San Antonio due to the presence of multiple military bases and many nearby universities and colleges. And Rackspace dips deeply into that pool, employing 515 people across all its data centers.

“We also recruit heavily from nearby Austin and Dallas,” says Drusch. “Texas has afforded Rackspace a true recruiting advantage, which has enabled us to add more than 100 employees in the last 12 months.”

Houston, 190 miles to the east of San Antonio, is the home of VeriCenter (vericenter.com), a leading enterprise managed IT services provider. In addition to enterprise hosting, VeriCenter provides colocation, disaster recovery and centrally delivered managed services. The company posted revenues of $38.3 million with positive EBITDA in 2004.

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Hostgator Review by Klouda – Concern about email reliability

For the most part I am very pleased with HG, but I keep getting told by people that emails they send me are bounced back due to errors. I have clients (I’m a reseller) and they get the same result. We are very concerned about this. When contacting Support I get the response (try now). Well the issue is intermittent and seems to happen every week or two (a few emails do not get through). This is an issue if email is business critical.

I would like to see a redundant email system in place to increase the reliability. I am investigating other options, including moving all email to another provider who guarantees 99.994% email uptime.

If it was not for this issue I am really happy. I left my old provider for email issues (they kept getting blacklisted).

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Hostgator Review by babylonking – I am very satisfied

I am very satisfied with Hostgator, Never had any major problems with the service and very little downtime that I am aware of, I recently did some extensive research on all the best hosting providers and found your site to be the most accurate and informative out of all the top Google & Yahoo search results and review sites.

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Hostgator Review by OffbeatZero – Best experience yet!

I have been with hostgator since December when my previous host kicked the bucket.

I was in a rush that day as the site went down suddenly and… there was no chance for recovering any data, and instead of going off an old backup I decided to start from scratch… but unfortunately finding a good host isnt necessarily easy.

Hostgator from the start was wonderful – when I originally registered for shared hosting the setup was quick, with no quirks. Any time I had a problem or noticed a problem all I had to do was contact the live online support and I got a sufficient update as to what was going on.

As my site grew, Brent called me up one day and informed me that it was growing out of normal bounds – and therefore some objects needed to be addressed (so as to not suspend me). This surprised me as – I’ve never expected to actually be called. Not only that, but it gave me 100% without a doubt, no reason to ever leave this host so long as it lives! We resolved the issue quickly after our initial chat on the phone and a few emails back and forth, and everything was peachy.

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Hostgator Review by ricardoc – ASP Hosting

I’m very, very glad with HostGator with my reseller hosting account and have one of the best support team.

But… HostGator doesn’t have Windows hosting and some of my clients need that.
Someone can referred a hosting provider with MSN/Chat support (like HostGator). I need multiple domain/sites (in a reseller account or not)

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