My 6.5year review of HG

[Grumpy]

I've been with hostgator since 2004, and boy, it sure has been a long ride. But I'm (sort of) no longer a HG customer.

Back in 2002~2004, it was a time where free hosting was the only thing that I sought. But so much downtime and horrible support spent countless hours of my life. Once the needs of more reliable hosting became a necessity, I've tried a number of paid hosting. But soon came to realize that they were not much different when it came to horrible services. However, my nomad days finally came to an end after reading a review on webhostingtalk.com (or at least I think it was WHT) that HG was awesome. And so I was convinced and so my 6 years came to be.

For 6 years, it was always shared hosting for me. I've had upgrades and downgrades but I do have few complaints. But throughout my 6 years, my most disappointing time was when I realized that there's a fee for downgrading (is that still even there?). It seemed odd to me and even though I actually (at least) skimmed through ToS, I did not see that. Such a message was hidden deep and I got a surprise bill. Also, when canceling and resigning up doesn't cost me anything in addition, (and I might even get a bonus for sign up) I ended up paying an extra for a downgrade.

I was also quite annoyed when the server switched from php4 to php5 and HG's "automatic script updater" which was supposed to make my php4 scripts be php5 friendly. Guess what? It failed. And it ended up taking my site down for a good number of days (as I was away to deal with the situation).

The lesser complaints are the occasional downtimes and server with a slow response. But perhaps that's not a complaint but a compliment. Because the rate of downtime or a slow response is still far below par in comparison to other hosting. And that's what kept me here for 6 years. And for the most part, I think it is a lot better now than 6 years ago as well.

What made me leave? My site grew. My account had too much usage of inodes (disk space roughly), and backups were no longer done on my site. So I was under a lot of risk. I also required around few hundred gigs to a terabyte of bandwidth (in total, including outside of what I had on HG at the time) and I needed something that can take all that together. A perfect solution was a VPS. But HG's vps are not exactly the cheapest. It may be good in sense that it's not over sold, HG may have superior support, HG may have world renowned datacenter but it's pricey in comparison to some and in comparison to my budget. So, I left.

I was probably an ideal customer. Over so many years, I've probably only made 10 tickets or so. So, it's not me who's taking up your 100 live support staff. The biggest billing problem I ever had was when my credit card expired and I tried to change it with a new one but typed my CVV number in a wrong box.

But, it is not the time to say good bye to HG. Because while my account may no longer be with HG, my clients' are. I've always recommended HG to about almost everyone that asked me since I know that HG's support is awesome and that is more important than anything else in my opinion because their business needs to be running even when I'm not here.

So, thumbs up for HG for all these years of service and I'll still be around.

[GatorDougB]

Grumpy,

6.5 years definitely is a long time and it's greatly appreciated from everyone here at hostgator, for being such a loyal and dedicated client like yourself. I understand some of the hiccups that happened during the time you spent with us and they are things we are improving day by day. Striving to become the best webhost definitely is no easy task but we do our best to ensure top notch customer service and technical support.

We'll always be here for you and if you would like to make a return drop me a PM so we can work something out.

Thank you for your review and recommending our services, couldn't ask for much more!