My Initial Experience As A New Hostgator Customer
After years of refusing to go back to Hostgator, I relented and decided to take the plunge. It was the lesser of the available evils, so to speak. And to put icing on the experiential cake, my return to Hostgator was met with some bumps in the road.
I went through the paypal payment and got the button to go to the Customer Portal. It took some time to load and then it gave the 500 Internal Server Error. I received the payapl receipt but no email from hostgator about my account. I finally decided to check my spam box, and behold the new account info email was there!
The good news is that I was able to get on live chat, and they helped me through the bumps. I was able to get into the Customer Portal by requesting a password reset (Forgot Password).
I was able to get into the cpanel account just fine from the email I received from them.
I learned that the jailed shell is pretty useless. There is no SSL on the account, so sftp is out. Instead, I have to use FTP port 21, using the cpanel username and password they provided. Of course, change the password as soon as you can.
Why Sign Up For Hostgator: A Personal Review
Back in the day (about 8 years ago), my first shared hosting provider was hostgator. They’ve been around for a while and they were one of the most popular website hosting companies around. I like using their service, and their monthly pricing was very reasonable.
I was sending lots of paid traffic through their hosting platform, and it was working well… until there was a mix-up with their billing. You see, I was paying via paypal (which I am also doing this second time around – slow learner), and paypal was not transmitting the transaction seamlessly to their billing platform. Long story short, they turned of my domains that I was sending paid traffic to. Actually, they had redirected my domains to their parked pages, where they were received revenue from my paid traffic. It may have been a couple of days before things were finally resolved, but I was not very happy as a result.
Other than that inconvenience, everything else about their service was fine. But it left me with a bad taste in my mouth, and I vowed to never use them again.
After hostgator shared hosting
After that experience, I moved my sites to a dedicated platform (both with and without managed services), VPS hosting, and other shared hosting companies.
I decided recently to move my WordPress websites to WPEngine, as they came highly recommended by an industry leader in Internet Marketing. They also said they are moving their themes from using custom themes to using Studiopress themes built on the Genesis Framework. I had been a long-time user and fan of Studiopress, so I paid close attention to their hosting recommendation.
I also did my own research into WPEngine and found a lot of great reviews on their support, security, reliability, and fast page loads. I am so glad I made the switch from Liquidweb VPS hosting to WPEngine.
Why get Hostgator shared hosting again
There are a couple of things that WPEngine does not offer. For one, they do not offer any email, so I had to find another solution for email hosting. This meant I needed another hosting provider. Second, they only host wordpress sites, and there are some script-based sites I need for click tracking and analytics.
As I did my research on what’s popular for shared hosts, I kept running into one or more of these limitations with service providers:
- Limit on monthly traffic count
- Not unlimited emails
- Low storage limits
- No shell access
- No cpanel
- No backups
- Limit on the number of domains
- Limited mysql databases
- No monthly billing!
I’m guessing that shared hosting prices results in low profit margins for web hosting companies. So, they try and make up for that by requiring a long term commitment. However, it’s a huge commitment on the customer’s end, as well.
Because of this, I will not go higher than monthly billing on my hosting services. This is true even for WPEngine. I’m still trying them out. Until I am ready to make annual commitments, its much better for me to be agile with my domain hosting.
I would like to stress that I am very much enjoying my WPEngine experience. They have wonderful support. Each member I speak with is professional, knowledgeable, and very fast in solving my issues.
No other website server hosting company comes close to the support that WPengine.com tech support provides.