Leaving HostGator after a 1+ year of service

[Kris Siegel]

I have decided to leave HostGator and move to a VPS.

In HostGator's credit, I had very little downtime over the past year and my e-mail has been working relatively well. To be honest I only have two bad things to say about HostGator, 1 which required me to find a new host:

1. For some unknown reason we would get periods where we would get quite a bit of spam. After asking HostGator about the issue on a few occasions, each time was due to them working on updating the Spam Assassin configuration and causing it to not work for a few days. Not sure what happened but this is what support from the on-line chat told me.

2. No Windows shared hosting or VPS. I needed to move to an ASP.Net platform and after asking Chat and sending e-mails multiple times to HostGator, the only response I received was from a Support tech on the forums promising me he would check and get back to me. He never did. For well over a year HostGator has said their Windows Shared hosting was "coming soon".

While I expect to go to a dedicated server within the next 1-2 years, I didn't need that now. It's very unfortunate that HostGator will leave its users in the dark after a service is seemingly over a year late. It would be nice to have at least an idea when it could come out.

Other than those two issues I've never had another problem with HostGator. I didn't exactly host any complex sites yet (that's what the VPS is for ) but I'd recommend them for any regular, non-complex website (nothing beyond basic forums). Anything beyond that and you're better off getting a dedicated server or VPS solution.

One last, minor thing I'd like to mention is that I couldn't find the cancellation page on HostGator's website so I asked an on-line chat rep who told me it was at hostgator.com/cancel. This is not true as I learned by being greeted a 404. I found out how to cancel through Google which is at https://secure.hostgator.com/cancel (btw, HostGator, you don't need to use a separate subdomain for SSL. It just looks... odd).

[GatorBrent]

Hi Kris,


It was great having you the last year!

Spam is a very ticky problem which is why we always recommend using boxtrapper over SpamAssasin. Spammers are always changing the way they spam and many of them even use spamassasin to test that their emails won't get picked up.

I use the boxtrapper that we include with every account and I'll see at most 2 spam emails a month. If I disable it I receive 100's of spam emails a day.


I wish you the best of luck with your new host, and if anything should happen we would love to have you back.

We plan to offer VPS in the future so perhaps we'll be able to cater to you once again.

[Kris Siegel]

When HostGator offers Windows VPS I'll definitely think about coming back.