Go With HostGator? Yeah, In A ‘Snap’

As with most choices to be made in this complex day and age, there’s often far too many of anything to pick through, whether you’re deciding on what toothpaste to buy or which Internet hosting company to go with for your company’s website.

With dozens of web hosting services to cull among, going with only one can feel a bit overwhelming. Just make sure you don’t allow yourself to be lulled into opting for one host over another just because they’re cheap or even free. Often people who side with the least expensive hosts end up leaving eventually out of frustration due to abysmal support.

One name that seems to be on everyone’s short-list in terms of customer support, monthly cost, speed, and overall reliability is HostGator. With a slew of awards to their credit in 2011 (Best Small Business Hosting, Best Free Website Transfer Service, FindMyHost Editor’s Choice Award, etc.), HostGator’s on an industry tear, raising the bar every year, and swallowing up the competition in the process.

With over 4500 free separate website templates available to pick from, HostGator offers a 45-day money back guarantee policy, a $50 Google Adwords credit, and unlimited access to their celebrated 24/7/365 award-winning customer technical support through tickets/email, chat, phone, and online forums. And just to sweeten the deal a touch, HostGator is offering a 25% off sign-up coupon as well.

Broken down into three individual plans/packages, the Hatchling plan is their least expensive at a scant $4.95 per month good for a single domain, and unlimited disk space and bandwidth. One category up from Hatchling is Baby. Baby gives its customers an unlimited number of domains, disk space and bandwidth, all for only $7.95. Add another five bucks onto this amount and you’ve entered the ‘Swamp.’ In addition to what you get with the Baby plan, with Swamp you also get a free dedicated SSL and IP plus full usage of their toll-free customer support hotline.

Another huge plus in going with HostGator is that the company has recently turned ‘green,’ by powering and cooling their server using wind-generated power. This is very different from a lot of other green hosts who only offset the electricity used to power their servers. For every watt of electricity that a server uses, 1-2 watts of electricity are typically required to cool it. What that means is that HostGator is investing in about twice as much renewable energy, on a per server basis, as those green hosts only using renewable energy to power their servers.

In barely a decade since its inception, HostGator has swelled to over 7 million individual domains in over 200 countries worldwide. Recognized by companies large and small (many of whom are Fortune 500 companies by the way) as one of the most reputable shared, reseller, and dedicated web hosting platforms available, HostGator provides two of the biggest pluses for anyone out there searching for a web hosting provider: reliability and customer support.