Are you after a genuine HostGator review from someone who is actually a paying customer?
Then this is the review for you.
As I have been a HostGator customer for 8 years, you’ll get my in-depth and long term overview of this web host.
I’ll also share with you such things as the speeds, uptime, customer support, plus the pros and cons of HostGator.
Even better is that this review is made for those in the UK. Let’s begin!
HostGator Review UK [currenttear] (8 Years Of Experience)
Quick Overview: My HostGator Experience
After using HostGator for 8 years and hosting dozens of websites with them. I can easily say they are one of the best providers that I have ever used.
Since signing up with them in 2011, they are still providing me with great web hosting at an affordable price and are still doing so for new website makers. Hence why I am still using them to this day.
What I also really like about HostGator is:
- Awesome pricing (£2.16/mo for beginner plan)
- 1-click CMS installs
- Very beginner-friendly
- Unlimited storage & bandwidth
- Free SSL certificate
- Good customer service
- Unlimited MySQL databases
- 99.98% average uptime
- Cloudflare integration
- Good speeds
- Unlimited email
If I was to zoom out and look at my overall experience with HostGator during the 8 years, it would be nothing short of fantastic. Highly recommended.
Brief History Of HostGator
Founded in 2002 out of Florida by then student Brent Oxley, HostGator grew to a massive 200,000 customers within just 4 years.
In 2009, HostGator outgrew its original facilities and moved to a much larger 20,000 square metre hosting facility which it is still using.
What started out with just 1 university student, HostGator now employees over 1,000 staff members and has 1.5 million hosted websites and counting.
HostGator’s Plans, Pricing & Features
When it comes to cheap shared hosting plans, HostGator was the first provider to really offer up this service and is still at the leading edge of shared web hosting.
While HostGator is most widely known for their shared/ budget plans, they also offer up a nice selection of other products such as:
- Cloud web hosting
- VPS hosting
- Dedicated web hosting
- Managed WordPress hosting
For simplicity, I will only be covering HostGator’s shared web hosting plan as this is the one that I have used personally. Plus it’s also their most popular product by a long shot!
Above are HostGator’s shared hosting plans (I’m on the Baby Plan). Unfortunately, HostGator doesn’t charge in GBP, so I couldn’t find official pricing in GBP.
However, I did do some currency conversions so you can see what each shared plan will cost for those in the UK.
- Hatchling Plan: (£2.16/mo for 3 years)
- Baby Plan: (£3.11/mo for 3 years)
- Business Plan: (£4.68/mo for 3 years)
While these are some weird sounding plan names (for the first 2 anyway), they all offer up some great value.
Personally, I started with the “Hatchling Plan” which allowed me to host 1 website and gave me unmetered bandwidth and unmetered storage which was more than I’d ever need.
But after 2 years, I upgraded to the “Baby Plan” which allowed to me host an unlimited amount of website domains. Yup. An unlimited amount.
With all of these plans, HostGator also provides free SSL certificates, instant backups, 1-click WordPress install, 24/7/365 support and a 99.90% uptime guarantee. Not to mention a 45 money-back guarantee!
So if you are just getting started with creating 1 website, the Hatching Plan is a great pick. For creating the next website empire, the Baby Plan can’t be missed.
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Easy To Use For Beginners
In all honesty, when I first started out with HostGator, their user experience and cPanel were old school and clunky, to say the least.
Fortunately, they have completely revamped their cPanel and platform which is a big breath of fresh air for existing users (see the screenshot of my dashboard).
It is also now a much easier and better to use experience for those just making their first website.
HostGator has made it so simple in fact that it’s almost impossible to screw anything up.
1-Click CMS Installs
Along with having a really simple user interface, HostGator also provides 1-click installs for CMS (Content Management Systems) for WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Magento, Wiki and also PHP.
Having this functionality is an absolute must-have for any good web host as it allows new users to get a website online in under 5 minutes.
As for the website setup process for HostGator, it’s incredibly simple. For my latest website, I connected my .co.uk domain and installed a fresh version of WordPress.
All up, this process took me only a few minutes and I had a brand new WordPress website online! For more WordPress host, you can see this guide here on WordPress web hosts. You can also see my post on the best website builders for beginners!
Average UK HostGator Speeds
The next thing that I considered in my HostGator review was load times and the speed of websites hosted on HostGator’s servers.
I’ve touched on this in other articles, but having fast speeds for your website in this day and age is essential. There’s simply no compromise.
This is mainly due to the fact that slow loading websites can literally lose you traffic, leads and income. So how does HostGators stack up in the speed department?
Well, to be frank, their speeds are good, but not great. Especially for UK based websites.
From my testing, the fastest load time I got for a ping in London was 636ms, which was on a blank WordPress website.
While these aren’t the fastest speed in the industry, they’re still pretty darn good for a shared web hosting provider!
Side Note: HostGator does also provide free integration with Cloudflare CDN which essentially makes copies of your websites all around the world.
This results in less latency and almost instant load times. So if the speeds aren’t up to scratch, this is a good option to boost speeds.
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Average UK HostGator Uptime
Another thing I tested in my HostGator review was uptime which is the amount of time a website is successfully online. As a good rule of thumb, an uptime of at least 99.90% is a target to aim for.
So how has HostGator stacked up over the past 8 years in which I have been using them?
In short, HostGator’s uptime has been nothing short of fantastic. During this time, I have never had a major outage on any of my websites which has allowed me to get consistent traffic day in and day out.
When looking over a long term period, HostGators average uptime is hovering around the 99.98% mark which is a very reputable number.
- 2019 March average uptime: 99.98%
- 2019 February average uptime: 99.99%
- 2019 January average uptime: 100%
- 2018 December average uptime: 100%
- 2018 November average uptime: 99.98%
- 2018 October average uptime: 100%
- 2018 September average uptime: 99.95%
- 2018 August average uptime: 100%
While HostGator does provide an uptime guarantee of at least 99.90%, their real-world results are far above this amount.
Unlimited, Unlimited & More Unlimited
When it comes to storage and bandwidth using HostGator’s shared plans, there really are no limits. Well, kind of…
Even though hosting companies state that they offer “unmetered” or “unlimited”, this is only within reason. If it was truly unlimited, I could see Google and FaceBook jumping ship very quick!
Ok, so HostGator states “unmetered”, but what does this actually get for a user?
Well, from my own experience, I currently have 5 websites on my shared hosting plan that get an average total of 7,300 visitors per day. Or 220,000 visits per month.
While I’m not trying to brag, this is a substantial amount of traffic for a shared web hosting plan. Especially one that is only £2.16/mo.
While that’s a lot of bandwidth (the flow of data over the internet), what about the storage capacity? Currently, I have over 30GB in website files which has been slowly growing over the 8 years of using HostGator.
And guess what, I still haven’t hit any limits or glass ceilings. Also, an average website with a CMS included is roughly 1-2GB. So yeah, there are quite a lot of files.
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HostGator’s Customer Support (My Experiences)
Let me take you back to late 2018.
On a whim, I decided to share one of my blog posts on Reddit before I went to bed. To my surprise, when I woke up, my website had crushed. Huh?
After investigating in my Google Analytics, I saw that this blog post received 84,000 visits within 5 hours, which resulted in my website crashing. I could also see that people were still trying to visit my website as the post was still going “viral”.
What I did next was to call HostGator to try and get my website back online so I could benefit from this surge of traffic.
Once I validated my account and a short amount of waiting (around 2 minutes), I was connected to one of HostGator’s team members.
After explaining my story, the team member was very empathetic to my situation and gave me extra bandwidth to get through this spike in traffic.
He also explained to me that my website, unfortunately, had to be stalled as I was taking server resources from other users on the server. Sorry guys!
Overall I had a positive experience with HostGator’s customer service and had the issue resolved in under 10 minutes.
Free SSL Certificate (But No Free Domain 😔)
Another advantage I have found with using HostGator is that they include free SSL certificates with all of their domains hosted on their platform.
While many hosting companies (and even domain registrars) are still charging £20/yr for SSL certificates. HostGator provides this for free which is a huge thumbs up.
Unfortunately, HostGator doesn’t provide a free domain which is a bit of a bummer, but considering the value users get from their service, it’s something I can live with.
As for HostGator’s domains, they cost £10/year with the renewal cost being the same which is quite reasonable.
Side Note: If this is your first time hearing about an “SSL Certificate”, it essentially means that there is an encrypted connection between the server and the web users computer.
If you want to see if a website has an SSL certificate, simply look for the padlock icon in front of the domain which signifies SSL. You can also check by looking for the https:// as opposed to the non-SSL http://.
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Security & Backups With HostGator
When it comes to hosting website files online, having uncomprising security and redundancies is a must. Without these, users’ websites are at risk of getting hacked and viruses making their way into servers.
This can result in lost revenue and web traffic which can be disastrous.
Fortunately, HostGator provides great security on all of their web hosting plans which prevent thousands of DDoS attacks every day. Not to mention malware and viruses.
While these are baked in features, HostGator also does provide SiteLock and SpamAssassin which are add-ons (at a price) they give users extra peace of mind.
Along with having great security procedures, HostGator also provides daily backups at no extra costs! But as I am very security conscious, I always add secondary backups just in case.
To see other companies that provide backups, check out my guide on the best web hosting UK picks where I covers several web hosting comapnies in more detail.
Free Website & cPanel Migrations
Another thing I considered in this HostGator UK review was the option of free website and cPanel migration services.
One thing to note with this feature is that it’s only available to those who are transferring an existing website from another web host. This service is also only available within the first 30 days of signing up for the service.
If users are to take it up, a HostGator team member will do all the hard work for you. Easy peasy!
This is hands down a great service as many other providers charge in excess of £100 for this privilege.
45 Day Money Back Guarantee
If for some reason you’re not happy with HostGator, you’ll then be happy to know that they offer up a 45-day money-back guarantee.
So if for some reason a user is not happy with the service, they can leave within the 45 grace period if they feel like the service is no up to scratch.
While I’ve never had to take this up, it does offer some peace of mind for those who are not yet certain.
Downsides Of Using HostGator
As I’ve touched on in other articles on this website, there is no such thing as a perfect web host.
Even if a web host excels is many areas, which is good for a majority of people, there are always certain aspects that affect a select few. So in saying that, here are some of the pros that I have found when it comes to using HostGator.
1. Pushy up-sells: When going through the HostGator checkout process, HostGator which actually include extras into the purchase.
While a user can easily deselect these, for those in a rush, they might end up paying for a service they don’t need. Even though these tricks apply to almost every web hosting company, it would be a breath of fresh air to not see them.
2. No domain name included: As I touched on briefly above, HostGator, unfortunately, doesn’t provide a free domain name. While this isn’t a huge “stay away”, it can be a roadblock for those on a tight budget.
On the topic of domains, HostGator also doesn’t provide native support for .co.uk or .uk domains which is a shame. However, a co.uk domain can easily be picked for a cheap from a good UK domain registrar.
3. Poor customer support in evenings: Ok this one is a bit weird, but I have noticed that if I call HostGator customer support during evening or early morning hours, the support has been less than my expectations.
While this is a strange observation, it is something to be aware if you need support at late hours of the night.
Final Thoughts
Over the past 8 years, I have been extremely impressed with my HostGator shared web hosting plan and believe it is a great starting point for those in the UK.
While HostGator doesn’t have European servers, a user can easily integrate a CDN that can propagate copies of a website to dozens of server locations in Europe and the UK.
Overall, HostGator has allowed me to build several successful online businesses that get hundreds of thousands of visitors per month. They are an ideal provider for those starting a blog, small business website, e-commerce store and heaps more. Highly recommended!