I’ve been wanting to get some webhosting for a long time. I wanted to set up a blog, and perhaps a forum or photo gallery. Who knows, even a content-management system like Joomla might be in order.
I looked around for a decent hosting provider with good reviews. There are a few good website hosting review sites out there that I found useful in making my decision:
Eventually after reading some comments and seeing how satisfied folks wer, as well as considering the space/bandwidth per dollar ratio (I am not rich, after all), I settled on Hostgator.
The “Baby Croc” shared hosting account matched what I wanted. A lot of space, a lot of bandwidth, for not a lot of money. I even found a 20%-off coupon code (”spring”) online, making the deal even better.
Overall, my experience has been pretty good. I’d give Hostgator an 8 out of 10. They had my shared account set up about half an hour after I ordered it. At the time, my DNS name hadn’t propagated yet, so I logged into the web-based control panel (cPanel) using the server’s IP address.
Good things:
- Hostgator has fast server setup
- The tech support is reasonably fast. I needed to submit 2 help tickets and had an answer within 1-2 hours of submitting a ticket. Just make sure that after you submit your ticket, don’t go in and modify it since that will restart it a the bottom of the queue.
- They allow SSH access (but you need to submit a ticket to request it)
Not-so-good things:
- I’m not a huge fan of cPanel, but it’s ok and gets the job done, (I guess).
- SSH only works half of the time.
The account comes with the ability to have “unlimited” addon domains hosted from your account, which is nice. The only annoying thing is the file structure that cPanel enforces. All of my files are located in /home/username/public_html, however the addon domain files are located in /home/username/public_html/addondomain/;. Very strange. It really makes it hard to keep things separated.
Another thing that kinda worried me was the stipulation in the Terms of Service that you have less than 50,000 files. At first glance, that doesn’t seem like a lot, but a medium-sized Gallery installation might take up 20,000 files (including all PHP pages, pictures, and auto-generated thumbnails.) Some techs in the forums essentially stated that wasn’t a hard-and-fast rule, but there as a guideline to be able to terminate users who abuse their diskspace by creating and removing thousands of temporary files, thereby corrupting the shared disk.
Overall, the price of the account more than makes up for the shortcomings related to the hosting structure and silly cPanel. I’m a happy Hostgator customer.
