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HostGator is good, but they'll upsell you when you call for support
June 05, 2018

HostGator is good, but they'll upsell you when you call for support

Dan Gospe | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 3 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with HostGator

We use HostGator to host our website, and to provide automated backups of the website. We get our SSL certificate through them, and also have their SiteLock add-on for providing an additional piece of security. To manage the site, we use their cPanel interface. Until about a year ago, we also had them hosting our email addresses but we migrated off of that plan, and retained only the website services.
  • A simple backup is included at no cost
  • Haven't experienced any downtime for 2 years
  • Uses cPanel, which is familiar and easy to work with
  • Support could be better, it takes a long time to connect with somebody
  • You need to pay extra for a backup you can rely on
  • SiteLock is sold separately, but did not help when we were hacked
  • Site seems to slow down from time to time
  • The basic plan we were sold was not enough for us, so we had to re-work our budget
  • Having a website with our own domain has increased sales and visibility
When we were looking at hosting companies, it boiled down to both HostGator & GoDaddy. We chose HostGator because the sales team spoke to us more directly, whereas GoDaddy felt like they were reading a script.

I did not compare speeds of websites between the two hosting companies, but it's something I wish I had done. However, speed isn't really that much of a deciding factor for us so it likely wouldn't have swayed us.
HostGator is cheap and will host your website and the users of your email. However, we did run into some issues over the years.

They sold us SiteLock, which is supposed to be an extra layer of security. We had it for a while, when our site was hacked. When I called HostGator they said that the SiteLock plan we had wasn't the right one to protect you, so they tried to upsell me on more SiteLock. This was very frustrating, as our site was down due to hacking and we were seen as a sales opportunity instead of clients who needed help.

It turned out during this time that the basic backup that was included with HostGator was not going to work to get us back up. The problem is that it backs up once per week, and overwrites whatever was there before. So, it had backed up after the hack. After that we decided to get their premium backup plan.

HostGator is good if you only need the most basic of services, unless you are willing to pay for the add-ons, and you might not even be aware of the add-ons until there's a problem.