99.9 percent Good

[srider]

I signed up for my Hostgator Reseller account about 4 weeks ago. I'm about to close the account, but not because of problems with Hostgator.

I've had websites online since 1996, and have often changed web hosting companies, in some cases when an awful big hosting company bought a great local one. I once had a web hosting account that got started when I drove to the datacenter and picked up a floppy disk with a TCP/IP stack I could add to my Winders version 3.1 PC. I'm old, but I'm not dead yet. (He says he's not dead yet.)

I began my account here as a way of testing the waters, with a view toward moving my 45 domains from another web hosting provider. My account with the other provider is for exactly the same amount of hard drive space and the same monthly bandwidth allocation, but the Hostgator offering was $15 a month lower in price. Both accounts feature cPanel and WHM, and I would never go back to the dreadful Plesk manager that was foisted on me years ago.

Many of my websites are built up around a PHP script named Carp (geckotribe.com) that can take an RSS newsfeed and parse it into HTML for use in a webpage. That script ran perfectly here, but I discovered one subtle little difference between the Hostgator user account configuration and the one at my other web host. On the other host I was able to configure and run Carp on just one of my domains, then use PHP to include the output Carp created from pages on any other domain inside my reseller account. Hostgator did not allow this read access to other domains inside my Hostgator account. This is probably a superior setting on Hostgator in terms of security, but for my unique case it was an inconvenience.

In terms of Tech Support, Hostgator is clearly vastly superior to my other web hosting account. I think Hostgator probably has the best Tech Support that I've seen in any web hosting firm. My other provider originally had a support forum like this one, but one day it was simply gone, as was any mention of it ever having existed. Sort of Soviet style...
(we have always been at war with Eurasia)

The main concern I had that originally caused me to start looking around for a new hosting provider was that every morning I would discover that a web browser I left always connected to one of my news sites would have failed to refresh a page during the night, indicating some sort of outage had occurred. One of the first things I did with my new Hostgator account was to setup a mirror of that site. I then left a tabbed web browser running all night with windows connected to both Hostgator and the other site. Boy, was I surprised when my sessions to both sites had failed overnight! On further investigation I found that I was getting a high rate of packet loss on my cable Internet connection when the outside temperature dropped. The problem was neither with Hostgator nor with my other hosting provider.

The last significant issue that differentiates Hostgator from my other account is the issue of what is called Overselling. Now keep in mind that my use of a reseller account is atypical, I have no customers at all except for my son and daughter to whom I gave free accounts. But I do have 45 domain names registered in my name, and I'm always buying more. Some of my sites occupy less than 5 megabytes of disk space and will never get 500mbits of traffic in a month (that's half a gigabyte for the math challenged), so I like the fact that my other provider lets me assign disk space and bandwidth to my domains in such a way that the total allowed by the sum of my configurations is greater than my reseller accounts total drive space and bandwidth allocation.

By comparison, Hostgator does not allow overselling. If you create a WHM package that assigns 1GB of disk space, you can create exactly five of those with a 5GB reseller account. The advantage of the Hostgator approach is that everyone is treated fairly, and the stated bandwidth and disk space are actually available. Overselling depends on the assumption that many accounts never use their allocated disk space or bandwidth.

During the time I have been a customer here there has been one brief outage that was long enough for me to become aware of it and troubleshoot to the point that I knew it was a problem here. That was because of an attack by the Santy worm, not Hostgators fault, and I also had an outage at my other account on the same day for the same reason.

There went my idea of having multiple providers to avoid simultaneous outages. DOH! But at least I was able to view this forum and understand what was happening. At my other account I got an email that said "We had to reboot the server unexpectedly", and that was all.

I've had a positive experience here. I'll be closing my account simply because the other provider allows me to do what might be described as cross-site scripting, and because they allow overselling. Apart from those two considerations, Hostgator is superior.

My best wishes to all.

Steve Rider
http://MyStupidPresident.com/