I’m a total geek and love to build and maintain websites. I do contract work for clients as well as run many websites for personal fun as well as business. I’ve used all kinds of setups for my web hosting, including maintaining my own machines at home, colocation, and managed hosting services. Thus, I consider myself to be something of an expert when it comes to web hosting.
So, as a seasoned web professional I want to give my personal kudos to a company named HostGator for year after year of outstanding service as a web hosting provider. After being a customer with them for the past 3 years, I continue to be impressed with their tireless customer service, great web hosting packages, reasonable prices, and great uptime and reliability.
I must say that I’ve used many hosting companies including EasyCGI, StartLogic, UltraHosts, and iPower, and my number one complaint has always been poor customer service. When a server goes down, or you have a configuration problem, the only thing that matters is being able to get in touch with a knowledgeable and friendly staff member who can solve your problem. Oh, and it also helps if they can speak decent English! Not always the case.
In a typical exchange I have over text chat with a support rep at HostGator, they can usually identify the cause of the problem I’m having or answer my question within minutes. With many other providers I’ve been put through the run around where my question is looped to "specialists" who are required to answer my question, usually forcing me to wait a day or more. This can be extremely frustrating if you’re in the middle of a time sensitive project, and have to twiddle your thumbs for a day or more to get a simple issue fixed. I believe that HostGator as a company culture really gets this frustration point of its customers and really organizes itself to ease this into a non-issue. Their reps really seem to empathize with what you’re going through, and they generally seem very technically knowledgeable themselves, giving you the sense that they understand what you’re dealing with.
I’ve been a loyal customer of HostGator for both their low-cost shared hosting as well as their higher end dedicated hosting services for years, and I plan to continue using them. I wanted to send them a thank you note for the years of great customer service and recommend them to you - you won’t be disappointed with their old-fashioned good service. If you haven’t tried them out already, I recommend checking them out - in fact, they have a limited 20% off sale going on now, go to their offer page and use coupon code "BEACH."
