The best Web Hosting of 2020
(WordPress and Overall)

A Quick Background

HostGator provides shared, VPS, reseller, and dedicated hosting. The company operates out of Houston, though they also have a presence in Austin and India. That’s not where it started though.

The company was founded in 2002 in Boca Raton, Florida, by a Florida Atlantic University student named Brent Oxley. The company grew quickly so that by 2006, they had over 200,000 registered domains.

In 2007, HostGator moved to Houston, Texas, into a new building. In 2008, the company was ranked by Inc Magazine number 21 on their list of fastest growing companies in the United States, and number 1 in the local area.

During the same year, HostGator went green but also started to claim they could provide unlimited hosting. Oxley stated they could back up their offer, and claimed that, at the time, this decision led to a 30% increase in sales.

In 2010, HostGator expanded to Austin, while in 2011, they opened up a branch in India, with an office and data center in Nashik, Maharashtra. In 2012, Oxley sold HostGator to Endurance International Group for $225 million.

Average Uptime

As with all the other web hosting providers, we tested HostGator’s average uptime using a single site, but also multiple sites using their different plans.

For more information on the plans HostGator offers, please check below for all the relevant details.

We also ran our tests for approximately three months, to get a more accurate view of the situation. Anything less than that, and the conclusions we’d reach would be skewed.

Thus, as you can see in the graph, for one site measured over a month, HostGator achieved an uptime of 99.92%. This is quite acceptable, though, as in most cases, it doesn’t match the promises made in their marketing. Our site experienced 13 outages with a total downtime of 31 minutes.

Now, if you look at SiteGround again, which is ranked first in our list, you’ll see that their uptime was 99.97%, and they only had 4 outages with 12 minutes of downtime.

In second place we have WP Engine with an uptime of 99.98% with 2 outages and 9 minutes of downtime. Our third is Inmotion with uptime of 99.88% and a total downtime of 45 minutes.

You might be wondering why Inmotion came in third despite a poorer performance in terms of uptime than HostGator. Well, you’ll see in just a moment why we felt Inmotion deserved third place over HostGator.

The average response time was 524ms, with a maximum response time of 831ms. If we’re classifying HostGator based solely on these response times – for a single visitor – they’d come in second. Only WP Engine achieved better results with an average of 439ms and a max response time of 707ms.

Comparatively, SiteGround’s average was 671ms and their max was 858ms, while Inmotion offered a more sluggish average response time of 808ms and a max of 1.28s.

Next, let’s look at HostGator’s results over multiple websites hosted on their different plans. Thus, for the whole quarter, HostGator’s average uptime was 99.62%, with 80 outages.

Most of the outages lasted only a few minutes except for one that was almost 2 hours long. Then there were days when our sites experienced multiple outages on the same day.

Unfortunately, these results are very weak and an outage that lasts up to 2 hours can have a major impact on any website. It makes them look unprofessional and can damage their reputation with their audience.

We won’t even go into the monetary losses, which can be significant even for a few minutes’ downtime let alone hours of it.

And things don’t look much better even on a slightly shorter timeframe. When we looked at the results of a single month for our sites, the uptime was still only 99.67% with 25 outages.

Things only start looking up when we look at just one week, but the duration is just too short to matter. One good week doesn’t make up for 3 weak months.

Speed Test Results

When we conducted our load impact test on HostGator’s servers, we weren’t impressed with the results.

As before, we sent 100 concurrent visitors, gradually increasing the number from 1 until we got to 100. The number of visits is represented by the blue line in our chart.

The green line represents response times, and, as you can see, HostGator didn’t perform that well. The response time was steady until we got to approximately 50 to 60 visitors and then things started going haywire.

HostGator’s servers spiked continuously, slowing down with every additional visitor. Once we got to 100 visitors, the server seemed to just give up and it took 2 minutes for our page to load.

In the digital age, a 2-minute load-time is ridiculous. Users expect pages to load quickly and many find even a few seconds to be too long. No one is going to wait around for 2 minutes.

Thus, our conclusion is that HostGator’s servers do not have the capacity to handle a large number of concurrent requests or visitors.

If we look at the other hosting companies, we’ll see a massive difference.

For example, SiteGround was largely steady. They had a few spikes, but funnily enough, those were at the beginning, when we had only sent a few concurrent visitors.

But things calmed down soon enough and then response times held steady all the way to 100 visits with an average load time of 515ms.

WP Engine’s servers were stable and gave us an extraordinary average response time of 280ms, whether there was one visitor or 100. That is seriously impressive.

Inmotion’s results were a little choppier but their average response time was 380ms, which is definitely more than acceptable.

Despite the slightly weaker performance than the previous two companies, Inmotion’s servers still never had us waiting for 2 minutes for a page to load.

Customer Support Review

When testing HostGator’s customer support department, we evaluated them based on their response speed, knowledge, and their ability to solve our problem.

We used their live chat system and though it only took us one minute to contact them, this result wasn’t consistent.

We discovered the wait time varies based on the time of the day and the day of the week. At times, it took quite a while to get through to their support.

However, on normal days, the wait was less than a minute.

Unfortunately, while their customer support team is very friendly and willing to help, their knowledge and problem solving skills are only average.

When we compare with SiteGround’s customer support, HostGator comes out looking very poorly indeed.

SiteGround’s response time was consistent at less than a minute every time. They were also very knowledgeable and able to solve a complex problem like a full site transfer easily and quickly. Plus, they also made sure to keep us informed throughout the process.

WP Engine also did very well in terms of customer support. Once again, it only took a minute to get in touch with them, every time.

Their live chat interface is also beautiful and extremely easy to use. And their customer support team is not just friendly, but

Prices, Plans and Features

The Conclusion

While HostGator didn’t perform amazingly well, they are still a great web hosting option for anyone who is just starting out with a small scale website. It’s an excellent starter option, especially since they have some outstanding budget plans, making it affordable for anyone to get a site up and running.

However, once your site starts growing and your traffic volume increases, you should probably consider switching to a different provider as you might start experiencing a number of problems.

So, it’s probably a good idea for you to regularly check how your website is performing, especially during times when you see significant spikes in traffic. The last thing you need is to gain a poor reputation for having a slow site.

But, until you get to that point, HostGator will be more than sufficient for your needs.