Overall positive experience, servers excellent.

[digitaltoast]

Well, I've been here over a week, and I have to say what a refreshing experience it's been. I jumped ship from site5 as I was seeing sometimes hours of downtime each day, and even their own stats put most of their servers below 97% uptime. And site5 upport was either rude or useless or lied about server outages.

So, here I am, one week on. It was a bit tricky to start with due to some confusion (see below) which resulted in over 20 tickets, BUT now we're up and running, it's fantastic. What matters is speed and uptime, and I'll let the stats speak for themselves - these are page parse time logs for a variety of database heavy pages, from the same time of day:

Site5 (on a good day - 30 second page times weren't unusual!)
10/04/2008 13:11:36 - (2.333s)
10/04/2008 13:12:38 - (1.779s)
10/04/2008 13:15:08 - (1.909s)
10/04/2008 13:15:15 - (1.667s)
10/04/2008 13:15:28 - (4.081s)
10/04/2008 13:16:05 - (1.834s)

Hostgator:
13/05/2008 13:14:37 (0.196s)
13/05/2008 13:14:42 (0.194s)
13/05/2008 13:14:47 (0.184s)
13/05/2008 13:14:51 (0.327s)
13/05/2008 13:14:57 (0.186s)
13/05/2008 13:15:02 (0.187s)

That is many times quicker - makes such a difference to back-end operations too.

Of course, nothing is totally perfect, and I would like to make the following two observations as just that, rather than criticism.

When I first spoke to sales on the phone, I made it clear that I was NOT a reseller, but I ran two sites which needed SSL, and two personal sites which didn't. They said that the ONLY package was the Aluminium reseller, even though I wouldn't even use a 10th of the space/bandwidth.

I think if I had been made aware earlier about the far more suitable "special reseller for people who aren't resellers but need > 1 IP", that would have saved a lot of time at both our ends.

Secondly, when I first signed up, Paypal did some weird thing (or it might be hostgator!) where it sent it as an echeque, which was going to take 7 days...and not from my credit card on file. I called up Hostgator and explained I could forward the paypal reference number etc, and even though you have a 45 day trial period, and even though the paypal payment would be there in 7 days, they would not start the account without a duplicate payment via credit card! Paypal wouldn't cancel either. This has meant great confusion, and refunds to do at Hostgator's end, not to mention 4 support tickets! I think in this case, it would have been easier for HG to either have taken but not processed a credit card for security, or to have waited for the paypal payment. I suggested both options but they were turned down.

As far as support replies go, they take a little longer than I expected, however, unlike at site5, when the reply comes, it's usually actually been read, and not just a standard "everything looks fine here - how can we help you?" response from certain other hosts. Phone support are always excellent.

The only ticket I marked down was when, having learnt to pre-empt all the questions that would be coming back at me, I added to an urgent ticket:
"I understand that this ticket will involve charges of $10 and $24 and I agree to the charge of $34".
I woke up in the morning to find the response "We can do this, do you agree to the charge of $34?". So that got a bad mark, but out of >20 tickets, that's pretty good!

Bottom line is I'd recommend hostgator.

[digitaltoast]

Thought I'd update my experience, one year on. Overall, it's been good.
There was an incident with a referral not being paid, but the top man himself phoned me and sorted it out - excellent!

The servers have been rock solid and reliable. There are still a couple of bugs in cpanel which I've given up on reporting. Either that, or they seem to get fixed, then break again in the next cpanel update. Not a big problem and doesn't affect my hosting really.

Unfortunately it seems support times are getting longer. When they answer, it's still good. May I make a suggestion? If you are going to cut someone's website off, without warning, because just one script is overloading the DB, and that person replies immediately having corrected the problem, it might be a nice idea if they didn't have to wait 7 hours to get back in the line to be dealt with.

With my old host, what they did was let you tick a box saying it was dealt with and then they automatically put you back online. If it happened a second time, it was a normal support ticket (this was the ONLY thing they had better than HG!).

I've renewed for a second year just now - slightly alarmed that there was no reminder (what would have happened if I didn't remember and renew? Would I have been cut off?).

So, overall, still 5* rating, but please work on bringing support back the the times it was a year ago.

[GatorDHanna]

Wow, exactly a year later. Thanks for the update!

In response to your feedback, we have been working to improve our support times. We've been hiring a lot of people and improving our internal processes to ensure that time sensitive tickets like the one you referred to are dealt with as quickly as possible.

If you ever run into an issue that you feel is time sensitive, feel free to contact us via live chat or the telephone and make us aware of it. We'll do whatever we can to help you out.

Our billing system does send renewal notices. I'll PM you some information so that we can ensure we have the right email address on file for you.

Thanks for continuing to be a HostGator customer and for your review!