Good price, but mediocre everything else.

[posmatic]

After about 2 years of evaluation, I'm about ready to voice my opinions on Hostgator and its services.

We are currently on the Reseller Plan. And we are starting to get more and more e-commerce development projects. We moved our e-comm development to Magento recently and are currently hosting 3 of our clients on Hostgator servers.

In the beginning we were somewhat satisfied. The main reasons being that 1) we didn't work with Magento back then 2) we had a separate dedicated server hosted in-house.

As of late, there has been a lot of down times. Although some of them I can totally understand. Such as applying security fixes on the servers. But at the same time, these down times should have been notified via email to AT LEAST the reseller customers. The response I got after informing the cs rep at Hostgator was that I should have checked the forums.

After 2 years, I just created my account and this is my very first post. So that pretty much states that I've never checked the forums. I just don't have the time to. Although all clients should be notified directly, reseller customers are a bit more important I believe. Reason being is that we have other clients under us.

When down times happen, our clients are yelling at us - and in turn ruins our credibility. At the least, if we gave them a notice - it wouldn't be as bad.

Now, the biggest letdown for us has been the POOR PERFORMANCE of Magento on Hostgator's servers. With Magento becoming ever more popular, I would have figured Hostgator would have optimized their servers by now.

Although I understand that there can be other things to be considered, as such optimizations can have side-effects in terms of security, server load and etc - I believe Hostgator could have found a solution that's beneficial for all.

Due to Magento being such a resource hog, there are plenty of optimizations that can(need) be done. But the problem is that most of them aren't possible unless you're on a dedicated server. Lately there are more and more shared servers that provide these performance upgrades. For such a popular hosting company, Hostgator should have been ahead of the times and made the appropriate optimizations earlier.

We have waited and waited. And now, our patience has depleted. We are currently getting ready to move all our clients over to another hosting provider. It really is a shame this couldn't work out. But 2 years has been pretty frustrating and now we're ready to move on.


FYI

If anyone is looking to host Magento on Hostgator's shared servers, look elsewhere. The few I hear that are Magento-friendly are: Aspiration Hosting and SimpleHelix.

[GatorDHanna]

Thanks for your review and your comments.

Regarding downtime and notification of scheduled downtime, we’ve been working hard on improving how we notify our customers of expected downtime for the last year or so now. We’ve gotten a lot better with providing updates via email, updates via cPanel for shared accounts, and more. We have additional plans to increase the number of ways in which we notify our customers of expected downtimes and that is a pain point we’re very aware of and working very hard to fix.

Regarding poor performance of Magento, do you have any ticket IDs I could have an administrator check into? Magento is very popular among our customers and I’d like to have someone check into what’s happening and help you out.

[posmatic]

Well. I've brought the performance issues up a few times via online chat. Didn't get any ticket ID though.

[GatorDHanna]

Do you have any of those chat IDs? I can pull them up and have someone check into the problems for you.

If you don't have them, would you mind emailing us a brief history of what's been going on and what you've noticed? After you have a ticket ID (it'll be emailed to you immediately after you email us), send me that ticket ID and I'll investigate.

[posmatic]

Well I have a couple of ID from searching through my emails.
IKL-3404411
DAI-3517558
FIP-4933915
CAY-12425149

Not sure how much they'll help.

[GatorDHanna]

I've forwarded those ticket IDs to one of our senior system administrators. He should be in touch shortly.

[GatorFord]

@posmatic :

I've reviewed your tickets in question and while I do apologize that we don't perform MySQL query caching or opcode caching like some Magento specific hosts are. Unfortunately on our shared and reseller servers we can't do PHP opcode caching because we run SuPHP and it needs to be in a DSO environment to do so.

Magento is quite slow especially when a large number of products (or even a few) are added just because of how chatty it's MySQL queries are. This isn't really something that is in our control, and the only hosts that are Magento specific don't actually fix the problem, they merely workaround it by using MySQL query caching or php Opcode caching. Just google "Magento Slow" and you'll notice how many people out here actually have this problem.

I'm very very sorry that this is a dealbreaker for you. We're going to be offering VPS very soon and I'll speak with our Deputy CTO about possibly creating a Magento optimized template for those of you wanting to run it and maybe down the line and that way it would be also more effective in terms of price point and you wouldn't have to go all the way to a dedicated. If you haven't already gotten settled with your new host you could give us a shot and see if you like it when that time comes.

The other thing I can do is talk to our owner about the possibility of having just a few Magento specific servers that are optimized for clients that want to do nothing but Magento. I can't guarantee that this will fly since we have so many ongoing projects between the new billing system, VPS, etc, but it's a thought.