Webhosting & Hosting Reviews

After the negative hostgator review that I have posted few days ago. I found another hostgator review but this time it seems very honest to me. Cisco was the user who reviewed hostgator as initial impression. Very well done and very straight forward:

I recently switched over to HostGator after a horrific experience with HostNine. I ended up leaving HostNine after a period of downtime followed by one of their employees making strange demands of me in exchange for downtime credit. That incident and their snotty staff, overloaded servers, and inadequate WHM replacement resulted in me looking for a new host. After reading some positive reviews of HostGator on WHT I decided to give them a try.

Setup - 10/10
HostGator set up my account instantly, just as HostNine had done. One of HostGator’s staff members called me up and asked me if I needed help migrating my accounts. They went ahead and moved my accounts/files/databases and WHMCS installation over for me. I had been dreading moving WHMCS over because I thought it would be a real pain to set up the new HostGator license but it turned out to be a non-issue. When I originally signed up with HostNine no one bothered to contacted me about migrating my accounts and I had to do it manually.

HostGator couldn’t have handled setup any better so they get full points.

Services - 10/10
One of the differences I have noticed is that my site now loads much faster than on the HostNine server. I suspect that this might be because HostNine allows resellers to oversell which leads to way too many accounts being crammed onto each server. I haven’t had any downtime or temporary slowness with HostGator, so they get full points here.

Value - 10/10
Great price and a free WHMCS license. Not much more for me to ask for.

Support - 10/10
All of the staff members I’ve dealt with so far were polite and helpful. They took care of each issue quickly and called me up when they had questions. I guess they could always be a little faster, but they always replied to me in minutes so there’s not much room for improvement there.

Another difference I noticed between HostGator and HostNine is that HostGator usually tried to take care of the issue before they replied to me. With HostNine the first reply was always something like “What’s your domain?” or “Which account is this?” even if I had included that information in my ticket. I suspect that HostNine support people get paid per reply or something. Or maybe they just get a kick out of not helping people.

Business Practices - 10/10
My previous hosts should try harder to emulate HostGator’s business practices. HostNine seems to treat their customers like a bunch of drug addicts who will put up with anything as long as they get their next fix — as long as they keep paying, HostNine doesn’t really give a hoot. I think that because HostNine has a lot of new customers coming in because of their ad campaign and low prices, they don’t really care if their old customers leave.

With HostGator, I was called a few minutes after opening my account. All of the staff members are polite and helpful. No complaints here, which is surprising because it is one of the main areas where other hosts seem to fall short.

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I think that I might have made a mistake earlier by going with a host that has only been around for a year or so. It looks like HostNine has given in to the temptation to overload their servers in exchange for a higher profit margin on each server.

So far HostGator has had all the features my previous hosts had but none of their problems. I don’t enjoy giving a host a 10/10, but I feel that I have no choice. In a month or so I plan on writing a more in depth review, so we’ll see if they screw up in any way before then.

Final score: 10/10

Hostgator.com