While HostGator can be good for some things, the fact is that their server ARE overcrowded. You can do a simple WHOIS lookup and see over 200 accounts on a single server sometimes. Their tech support may be 24/7, but how well do they speak English? Why can't you get a hold of the Sales Team within 12 hours?

These were all problems that I had to deal with before starting work with the company I work for now.

HG is great for someone starting a small website with limited visitors. They are cheap and pretty reliable. However, if you need personalized support from a big company like HG....forget it!

I actually have to disagree with you completely. HostGator are by far one of the best hosting companies around at the moment. I have a reseller account with them for my personal site and servers with IGX host for my customers (best to keep them separate). It doesn't make any difference how many accounts are on a server if you don't know the full story. 100 of those accounts may be static websites that rarely get any visitors. GoDaddy is who you should be moaning about as I have heard rumors that they host accounts in the thousands.

As far as support goes we all known that HostGator are one of the top hosts for this. Their live chat is amazing and I haven't had to wait longer than 5 minutes to actually start speaking to someone. Their staff are knowledge and always very friendly. If they can't help you they will create a support ticket for you which does take longer but it's only a rare occasion when their chat support can't help.

Have you actually used HostGator before? If not I don't see how you can comment based on a WHOIS search...

Jack

I have been working with hostgator for more than a year.. I have shared account with them.. Even it is a shared account, the customer service is perfect.. Always have an answer.. perfect answers which solves my problems..

Back some 4-5 years ago they were indeed outsourcing level 1 support to India. But they have been all US based for a number of years now.

Last I read about it, they put about 300 accounts per server which leveled off towards 250-200 in time due to customers canceling/upgrading. You'll find that other hosts in the market they compete in put a lot more (though the server hardware may be different too in some cases).

They are using clusters, with separate servers for database servers, email etc. so the number of websites per server may end up being less than initially apparent. That being said, their shared hosting is slow, so they probably are packing a bit too many accounts on them.

Very True and it is fine to disagree with me, I actually enjoy when people do. I like making people think about things more deeply.

@Dan-Most website hosting companies really overdo it on the placement of clients on a server. From my years of experience, I would NEVER place more than 50 sites on a shared hosting server. To me, I dont want to deal with the hassle and headache of complaints from those who notice that slight delay in loading time. While we have some pretty powerful servers, we dont keep that many sites per server and we've had no issues. When the old owner owned our company...haha, different story

Setting an arbitrary number of sites on a server makes no business sense at all.
Server load depends on the type of sites and the volume of the sites, not on the number of sites.

Agreed, and we do NOT set a number except a MAXIMUM limit (50). We will not go over that, no matter how small the sites are.

However, we may have a shared hosting server capped at 6 people (in fact we do right now!). The load would go above acceptable and we dont want to do that!

Isn't each add-on domain a "site"?

At an under $10/month price, I would not expect the host to place only a couple of accounts per server. A fair deal means the customer gets good value, and the host gets to make a profit. Anything else can only end up costing the customer more, at a later date.

Technically it is. I should've rephrased to no more than 50 accounts per server.

It really makes my life easier:

1) I can EASILY track any exploits down and allow only so many IP's into cPanel (VERY SECURE!)

2) Should the server go down for some reason, I only have to explain to 50 accounts, not 500. I feel much better knowing that less people are negatively effected.

Our company's goal is not a lot of profit, but to provide the customer with a fair value and reliability. Since the new owner in 2006, that has been the only goal.

I used to host with Hostgator once upon a time, never had any issues and never got suspended for over usage.

I had an 246GB site with them. The only thing is there inode restriction. It dose limit the amount of files allowed on any one account. But if you read the TOS before buying then you can have a good hosting experience with them.

Awesome to hear a good experience! So many of the ones I hear from new clients are bad experiences!

Honestly they advertise one price at the homepage but the price is different at the checkout page. I personally dont like companies that lie to me just to get me to the checkout page.

Do you have an example of a price that changed at checkout?

I use hostgator for one of my websites. I'd like them to let you use more than 1 domain on the account but otherwise they are pretty good.

HostGator isn't a bad site. It's reliable. I've used them in the past and thought their service was great.