HostGator Review

What's up With HostGator? People Love/Hate it. Why?

Brad Smith  —  · Read user reviews

HostGator Shared review

HostGator might be one of the biggest, oldest web hosting companies in the industry, but they’re still making improvements, posting an average uptime of 99.98% over the past 24 months.

Their basic shared hosting plans come with unlimited storage, bandwidth, free domain (for the first year), and a free SSL certificate. They also have great customer service, who connected through a live chat instantly and answered each question within a few seconds each.

Unfortunately, HostGator’s average page loading times let them down (1191ms average). Many extra services, like backups and security, will be tacked on as additional fees. Plus, the renewal rates rise aggressively after your first term expires.

Here’s a complete look at our hands-on test, using third-party data from Pingdom to shed light on their performance.

General Info & Hosting Overview

SPEED: 1,191ms (February 2018 to January 2020 average)
UPTIME: 99.98% (February 2018 to January 2020 average)
SUPPORT: 24/7 Live Chat
APPS: Over 75 apps supported
FEATURES: Unmetered bandwidth and storage,  single email account, free domain 1st year
HOSTING PLANS: Shared, Cloud, WordPress, VPS, and Dedicated Servers
SITE TRANSFER: Single Free Site Transfer
PRICING: Starting at $2.75/mo (renews at $6.95/mo)

Pros of Using HostGator Shared

HostGator’s uptime performance used to be an issue in years past. But not anymore, based on our 24 months’ worth of tracking.

On top of that, their customer service was fast and friendly. They’ll help move your site over to their service for free. And beginners will like a lot of the simple, intuitive options directed their way.

Here’s a quick summary:

1. Strong and Stable Uptime of 99.98%

HostGator has posted a 99.98% uptime over the last 24 months. They’ve been consistent with 99.98-100% uptime for several months.

That’s not even the best part, though. They’re consistent for a reason: their uptime guarantee says that if they drop below 99.90%, you can receive one month of credit on your account.

Obviously, any planned maintenance or impossible-to-predict hacks aren’t factored into this guarantee. You will, however, have to reach out and ask for the credit by submitting a support ticket to their billing department within 30 days.

We’ve started to see a few other hosts pop up with uptime guarantees recently, and it means all customers win as a result. Competitors coming out and doing this helps raise the bar for the entire industry. It forces everyone else in the market to either match their guarantee and raise the standard level of service or risk falling behind.

Last 12-month average uptime:

  • January 2020 average uptime: 99.97%
  • December 2019 average uptime: 99.89%
  • November 2019 average uptime: 100%
  • October 2019 average uptime: 100%
  • September 2019 average uptime: 100%
  • August 2019 average uptime: 99.99%
  • July 2019 average uptime: 100%
  • June 2019 average uptime: 99.99%
  • May 2019 average uptime: 99.95%
  • April 2019 average uptime: 99.98%
  • March 2019 average uptime: 99.99%
  • February 2019 average uptime: 100%
HostGator Shared last 24-month statistics
HostGator average uptime | See stats

2. Good Support

HostGator provides a knowledge base, phone, email, and live chat support. The last option is the fastest, connecting us to a service rep within about 15 seconds.

We tried peppering them with questions, jumping around from topic to topic, and they never hesitated once. Their staff seems knowledgeable, well-trained, and friendly. It was a good experience all-round.

Hostgator Shared Customer Support Live Chat Experience

3. 45-Day Money-Back Guarantee

HostGator is so confident in their service that they extend the industry-average 30-day refund policy an extra two weeks or so to 45 days.

That means you can use them for over a full month and still get your purchase price back if any issues pop up.

This 45-day money-back guarantee applies to all shared, reseller, and VPS hosting packages.

The only catch is that this does not apply to HostGator’s dedicated servers, administrative fees, install fees for custom software. After combing through 30+ Terms of Service documents by now, we’ve found that these caveats are fairly common in the hosting industry.

So, for example, if your plan included a free domain name, they’ll deduct the standard fee of $15.00 for the domain from the refund amount.

There are a few other points to make. HostGator’s Terms give them up to 90 days to actually issue a refund. No refunds will be given on check, money order, Western Union payments, or bank wire transfers, either.

Refunds are only available for new plans or accounts. So if you previously signed up for one, and are canceling a renewal or second attempt, you won’t get anything in return.

And last but not least, foreign currency refunds are processed based on the U.S. Dollar exchange rates.

4. Site Security Features Available

HostGator’s shared hosting plans are fairly bare-bones. You’re getting enough for one site, but not a whole lot of extras on top of it.

Fortunately, they do offer a few extra security features like the ability to add SiteLock monitoring to your site. This service will run daily, looking out for any potential site breaches or hacks and let you know instantly when they find it.

They also offer Spam Assassin on their email plans to help prevent spam from hitting your inbox in the first place.

The only downside is that SiteLock will cost you a little extra. We’ll expand on this below in the Cons, but the sticker price is $1.67/mo, billed annually at $19.99.

5. Free Site & cPanel Migrations

If this isn’t your first site, and you’re trying to move an existing one over, HostGator’s got your back.

You’ll have 30 days after sign-up to get in touch and have them help move any site files, databases, scripts, and even a domain name over for you.

This includes a full cPanel transfer. So if you happened to have multiple site installs (like subdomains for one large site), you’re covered.

All of HostGator’s shared hosting plans come with a single site (or cPanel) migration included. Different plans, like resellers, for instance, will get access to more (up to 30).

A single free site migration isn’t a lot compared to some hosts. But it’s still better than others, like Bluehost, that will charge $150 for moving up to five sites at a time. Click here to read our detailed comparison between Bluehost and HostGator

6. Very User-Friendly for Beginners

HostGator is tailor-made for beginner bloggers or webmasters.

Their site is full of tutorials, walkthroughs, and more to help you navigate the murky world of DNS and data centers.

hostgator support
They also have extra features for beginners who are looking to set up a site without the hassle of hiring other people to design, build, and manage everything.

Their website builder, Gator by HostGator, is one of the better ones we’ve reviewed. It comes with free hosting and a domain name, so you just need to purchase a single account for all of the necessities.

The customizable templates are all pretty modern, to begin with, and you can easily customize how they look by dragging and dropping each feature. You’ll also get site analytics and a free SSL certificate to help safeguard your visitors’ personal data (like their physical location).

Gator by HostGator even comes with an eCommerce plan, so you can set up a fully-functioning online store with inventory and more, all without worrying about payment gateways, plugins, or any other messy technology. It just works.

Cons of Using HostGator Shared

HostGator’s consistently strong uptime was, frankly, surprising (in a good way). We’re also fans of their uptime guarantee.

Beyond that, their beginner-friendly approach and helpful customer service mean that there’s a lot to like about their service.

Unfortunately, we also ran into a few issues along the way while testing them out. Here are the biggest problems we found:

1. Slow Page Speed (Over 1 Second to Load)

HostGator’s servers had no issues keeping our site up and live for the last year and a half.

The problem is that these same servers were consistently slow, too. Their average page loading time over the last 24 months has only been a 1191ms average.

That’s over a second to load relatively simple, text-based content pages. So just imagine what would happen if you fill these pages up with thousands of words and dozens of high-resolution images. Yeah, not good.

Slow page loading times have been shown to impact your visitor’s experience directly. And that has a trickle-down effect to hitting your bottom line, too.

There are a few things you can do to speed up your site without switching hosts. But if your host is consistently slow, it means you’ll constantly be fighting a losing battle.

Last 12-month average load times:

HostGator Shared last 12-month detailed statistics
HostGator average speed 2019-2020 | See stats

2. Lots of Extra Fees for ‘True’ Backups, Gmail, and Malware

HostGator’s shared hosting plans are cheap, with introductory pricing starting at only $2.75/month (for 36 months).

Their cheapest plan (“Hatchling”) comes with a single domain name, one-click installations of popular apps like WordPress, Joomla, and more, unmetered bandwidth, unlimited storage, and a free SSL certificate. Basically, all of the core features you need for a complete website.

HostGator shared additional services

However, that’s about all they provide in their default plans. All of the ‘extra’ stuff, like site backups, Gmail access, SiteLock monitoring, and SEO tools will all cost you extra when it’s time to checkout.

It’s disappointing because many of these features are worded carefully on the site, like “available,” to make you think they’re included. Browse the other top hosts we’ve reviewed and you’ll see that many of them, in fact, do throw these into their basic pricing.

It’s only when you get to the very end of the process, when you go to enter your billing information, that you’ll realize all of these extra features will cost you, well, extra.

Gmail is the standard $5/month or $60/year per user, which is their normal pricing. But then SiteLock will cost you $19.99/year, CodeGuard (to backup your sites) will cost you $23.95/year, and they don’t even keep many previous versions of your site on file in case you run into any problems.

So while the initial plan seems inexpensive at first, it starts to become pretty pricey when all is said and done.

3. Industry-Standard Pricing ‘Tricks’

In addition to extra fees, HostGator pulls two pricing tricks that are pretty standard in the industry.

The first is advertising a low rate like $2.75/month, only for you to realize that it requires you prepaying for a full three years to actually get it. Otherwise, you’re looking at $10.95/month for an actual single month’s worth of service.
HostGator Shared Price Breaks for Long Term Plans

That’s just the beginning, though. Because on top of this, HostGator’s renewal pricing jumps dramatically after your initial plan expires.

So let’s say you go ahead and lock-in that low rate for three years. You’ll be getting a pretty good deal, no doubt.

The trouble starts when it’s time to renew your plan in three years. At that point, your monthly rate for the same plan jumps to $6.95/month (or $250.20 total) — more than double what you just paid for the same exact service.

Essentially, they’re preying on the fact that after a few years, the likelihood of you wanting to switch services is pretty low. So you’re locked in for a while (like a cable company or gym membership).

Lots of other hosts we’ve reviewed pull this same stunt. However, that doesn’t mean we have to like it.

HostGator Pricing, Hosting Plans & Quick Facts

Shared Hosting: HostGator has three shared hosting plan option to choose from:

Hatchling Plan Baby Plan Business Plan
Pricing $2.75/month
Renews at $6.95/mo		 $3.95/month
Renews at $9.95/mo		 $5.95/month
Renews at $14.95/mo
Websites 1 Unlimited Unlimited
Bandwidth Unmetered Unmetered Unmetered
Storage Unmetered Unmetered Unmetered
Email Accounts Unlimited Unlimited Unlimited
Other Features – •Unlimited Addon Domains • Dedicated IP
• Free Positive SSL Upgrade
• Free SEO Tools

Quick Facts

  • Ease of Signup: Easy signup process.
  • Payment Methods: Credit Card, PayPal.
  • Money-Back: 45-day money-back guarantee.
  • Hidden Fees and Clauses: Introductory pricing is only available for long-term plan purchases. Renewal rates will also more than double. Extra services, like backups and malware monitoring, are all extra fees, too.
  • Upsells: Lots of upsells.
  • Account Activation: It can take up to 24 – 48 hours to activate your account.
  • Control Panel and Dashboard Experience: cPanel.
  • Installation of Apps and CMSs (WordPress, Joomla, etc.): They make it easy to install popular apps and CMSs in a few steps using QuickInstall.

Do We Recommend HostGator Shared?

Not really.

But not for the reason you’re probably thinking.

HostGator’s shared hosting does offer a lot of benefits. The uptime has really improved over the past year or so. The customer service was good. And the plethora of beginner-friendly options makes it user-friendly.

However, a combination of the slow speeds and extra pricing hikes make it too expensive to be considered a decent value.

The reason we wouldn’t recommend it, though, is because they have a better option in the store that does actually deliver a good value.

HostGator’s WordPress Cloud hosting is a little more expensive initially on paper, but the performance is also substantially better.

So we’d recommend taking a look at that one, first, because you’ll probably end up paying the same at the end of the day when you throw in these extra fees and price increases.

Visit www.HostGator.com

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184 user reviews for HostGator

Nicole

1 — 

Can't do a simple WP Migration

I have had a work order in place for over 14 days (and counting) for HG to migrate a simple, small WP site from GoDaddy. I am on the phone with HG support literally every 1 to 2 days; the phone rep confirms that they have all the info to do the migration; they confirm that the logins that I provided are working, BUT they fail to move the site. I could paste-in pages of documentation about all the hassle I have gotten, but I'll spare you here - it is representative of the typical inane things that go on, with bad service and either insincere or powerless support representatives. Granted they are all wonderful to speak with and promise they are going to give your case special attention, but in the end (another 48 hours later), there are no results; and also, no emails back to me, the website admin. (Yes they have all my contact info and promise to include me in all communications BUT they don't. My client does not monitor his emails from them and has authorized me to get all the communications directly, but HG fails to follow-through. My client chose to switch to HG because he thought he'd save a lot of money on email services. He handled the email migration with HG directly and went through hell for 10 days, before his email was actually restored and working. The hours he had to spend with them on the phone, and the hours that I've had to put into this with HG support, have cost him thousands of dollars.

Tanja

4 — 

Easy going

I've been a hostgator I client for a year and I decided to extend the cooperation for another three years. So far I didn't have any technical problems.

Catherine M

2 — 

.NET Support Missing in Action

I took out a .NET windows hosting account with Hostgator but we have found that our application is running very slow. When we discovered it was slow, we contacted tech support for .NET, and found out that customer service for .NET was even slower. Plus, additional code was placed by the technician that ended up costing us hours of extra work to find and resolve the code error. There was no windows hosting support I could contact directly. They seem to be isolated in a backroom somewhere. I have to leave a message with regular support and they relayed it over to the Windows support team. It takes forever to get back to us on a request, because we can't talk to anyone directly. Meanwhile, business is lost.

We have been a reseller with Hostgator since 2008 (on the Linux Hosting side) - and never imagined this would happen if I hosted our application on Hostgators .NET servers. I was always able to talk to someone directly to get to a solution. Not with .NET Hosting - it's been so difficult.

I'd like to provide a more positive review since I have dealt with the company for many years, but I truly believe having no direct support for this side of the business is a step backward (in my opinion).

Ian

5 — 

Happy with the service

Transfer from the previous host was fast and simple. No issues found. All my sites are up and working and have better load times than before.

Response received from Erinn, HostGator (Responded November, 2020):

Hi Ian,

We're so glad to hear things are going well for you. Welcome to the HostGator family!

Erinn
Customer Advocate at HostGator

Carlos

1 — 

After 4 years, I am considering leaving

Last month I had an attack, and got sitelock to fix the issue per a recommendation by the hostgator rep. Then this month I am getting database error connection issues on a site protected by sitelock and considered clean based on their info.

I called to find out what is going on and they stated that i am using a lot of resources... which doesn't make sense since my traffic is below 500 a day and I only have up to 7 wordpress plugins. Nothing major to cause an issue. They told me it was my wordfence and yoast plugin...

I deleted both plugins per their request which shouldn't have been causing issues, but did it anyways.

Then it happened again, and they came up with a new thing saying i have to optimize my php or or mysql and since i had no idea how to do that, i asked for help.

The lady rep at the hostgator guided me through, but I told her I did not feel comfortable and did not want my site to get damaged by this. She stated it wouldn't and that it is an easy thing to do. She did it and it corrupted my postmeta folder...

Now my site is broken. I had to pay 25 for a backup and it has been 72 hours already, nothing. I told them that after this was fixed that I was planning to get their vps and codeguard, but then the issue happened again to another one of my sites...

The database error came up again, but this site is even smaller and with barely 10 people traffic a day. I am calling now, and got a rep who didn't do anything and did not want to transfer me to a manager. He still, I MEAN STILL has me on hold. No response, and doesn't want me to do the survey.

I am chatting with someone in the chat box now as this is beginning to push me away from the hostgator. The sad part is I have a back up for everything dated a month ago, but I wanted a more recent backup after a few updates. I wanted to trust my host provider and believe they would fix this issue properly. Now I am wondering if this is a scam to get me to buy a bigger package, making it seem like all my sites are using a lot of resources when they are not. It's disgusting and I am utterly disappointed. I used to recommend people to this host, and I regret it now.

Response received from Erinn, HostGator (Responded October, 2020):

Hi Carlos,

We'd love to help get this resolved for you once and for all. Could you please send us an email at [email protected] and provide the primary email address on your account and the best phone number to reach you? If you reach out, as requested, we'll make this right for you. Thank you.

Erinn
Customer Advocate at HostGator

Donna K

4 — 

Breath of Fresh Air

I had a nightmare with another hosting service where I couldn't get things working correctly since early August and it is now almost October. They only had email support which was the first annoying problem. Anyway, I eventually moved to Hostgator and cannot tell you how great it was to have the chat support on two occasions in two days, get the site up and running. I didn't have to do ANYTHING except pay. I find their prices comparable and their support stellar. I realize I just began with Hostgator but as a web developer/builder since the 90's there are much worse places to be for your web needs. Kudos and thanks y'all!

Response received from Erinn, HostGator (Responded Sep, 2020):

Hi Donna,

We're so pleased to hear that you've had an awesome experience thus far. Thanks for the great review and welcome to the HostGator family!

Erinn
Customer Advocate at HostGator

Ted

1 — 

Slower than slow

Moved my small wordpress blog to Host Gator after seeing one of their promos and while the admin tools are pretty awesome, the actual results... Let's just say I left months into a multiple year plan. That's a multi-year plan I won't get money back on (but that part is on me, I should have bailed day two with that 45 day policy... my bad).

Why? Well that's simple: it was slow. Like >20 seconds to render, can't even get google page speed to run and even start the load process. Again, I'm talking about your typical small, niche blog. No crazy designs, no amazing addons, nothing but basic posts and maybe a few images.

Of course, I reached out for help with this. After a half dozen messages about optimization and then magical DNS changes, I disabled or removed just about everything from my site to test their suggestions and while things did go from slower than dirt, they only made it slow as dirt.

I've got months of already paid for time left but when clicking admin pages takes forever and a day, you know something is wrong and it just wasn't worth sticking around for even if it cost me a few bucks for the lesson.

Response received from Erinn, HostGator (Responded Sep, 2020):

Hi Ted,

Thanks for taking the time to share your experience. We'd like to take a look at your account and see if we can determine what happened. If you could please reach out to us at [email protected] and provide the primary email address on your account we'd appreciate it.

We do completely understand why you left and we don't blame you. In an effort to do better we want to learn more and look forward to your response.

Thank you.

Erinn
Customer Advocate at HostGator

Oleg

1 — 

Shared hosting is very slow

They are getting worse and worse. My website on their shared hosting used to work fine but about 6 months ago I started noticing that sometimes it works much slower - it took about 5 sec and more to load the page. Now it's slow almost every time - it works fine only for a short period of time
I talked to tech support but they always blame my website optimization. When I asked them, how can you explain that it worked fast 1 hour ago and now it's 10 times slower? They claimed that they don't see any slowness on their end. A few weeks ago, the server a few times failed completely and returned code 500. But tech support pretends that they don't know about it. I ended up moving to another hosting provider where my "not optimized" site works perfectly fine with the cheapest plan. Unfortunately, Hostgator doesn't want to refund money for the rest of the year but I'd better lose money than I would deal with them anymore..

Response received from Erinn, HostGator (Responded Sep, 2020):

Hi Oleg,

We're terribly disappointed that you chose to leave HostGator, but we understand you had to do what you felt best for you.

We understand your frustration with not getting a refund, but when you signed up for service you agreed to our Terms of Service:https://www.hostgator.com/tosand that includes our refund policy.

We wish you well.

Thank you.

Erinn
Customer Advocate at HostGator

Paddy T

1 — 

Truly terrible

Even as a customer of over 10 years, when I really needed them, they have been terrible. The server that has been hosting my website seems to have crashed and although I use their live chat or their phone lines almost every day - it's been nearly 3 weeks now - they still just provide platitudes and never email me with news of what's happening even though they keep promising they will do.
Are Hostgator in financial difficulties? Are Hostgator going bust?I've been logging all of the live chats and just feel helpless. Hostgator have proven themselves truly dreadful

Response received from Erinn, HostGator (Responded July, 2020):

Hi Paddy,

We assure you that HostGator is here to stay. It's not okay that our support teams haven't met your expectations. We've opened an escalated case and an Escalations Manager will be in touch with you shortly to ensure that everything is sorted out. Our apologies for the delay, there is no excuse. Thank you for your ongoing patience.

Erinn
Customer Advocate at HostGator

Jaime G

1 — 

6 days for a restoration and still waiting...

As detailed in the article, with this host you end up paying more than you think in a first moment (pricing isn't clearly explained).

Support is always available and they treat you well. However, many times they cannot solve the problems. For example, they told me my Codeguard subscription was turned off but it kept on and therefore I needed to pay extra.

Last PHP version is never available (at least in the plan I have). I also had many issues regarding domain emails going into spam and lost many days trying to solve this. Last but not least, it's been more than 6 days since I requested a restoration (for 25 USD extra...?), they told me it will be done in a maximum of 72 hours and I'm still waiting and losing time every morning to ask for the same thing...

I'm changing of host as soon as my restoration is done, bye bye friends

Response received from Erinn, HostGator (Responded June, 2020):

Hi Jaime,

Ouch! Our apologies for the delay in getting your site restored. We'll be in touch with you soon to discuss your concerns and make things right for you. Thank you for sharing your experience with us.

Rich

1 — 

Useless support and poor servers

So for me the Hostgator server has a 60-100 second wait once or twice per day. All other times the speed is ok, nothing special, maybe 2 seconds for the entire site (and I'm an IT pro who has optimised). After extensively logging all the times my site was unavailable, Hostgator replied to me that their servers were up, just not responding quickly. The SLA is for servers being up, so the fact that my own experience of Hostgator is no better than 90% availability (which is AWFUL), I had no remit whatsoever to complain as the server was working. Their response is I should upgrade to a dedicated package.

The support is pretty useless, took me about 15 conversations for them to understand my issues and stop asking me to optimise my site (which is the difference between a 2 and 3 second load, vs waiting 50 or 80 seconds for the server to respond). That is despite me having the evidence pre-prepared and easy to understand.

So my overall experience is that I would not spend any more money with them if they paid me to, and I deeply regret reading articles which said how reliable they are - because the version of reliable is not the same as the user experience version of being able to actually access a hosted site.

Response received from Erinn, HostGator (Responded June, 2020):

Hi Rich,

Thanks for taking the time to share your experience with us. We'd love to do a deep dive and see if there's anything we can do to resolve the issue for you. We respectfully request that you send us an email to [email protected] and provide the primary email address on your account and the best phone number to reach you and we'll see what we can do to make your remaining time at HostGator better. Thank you.

Dave B

2 — 

I’m out of here!

Excellent customer service. Usually. It needs to be given the amount of times I have to contact them. Not so good at present with them pretending not to understand my issue with any of my or any other Hostgator sites not showing on a certain device I purchased when absolutely any non Hostgator site works fine on this device. Shame really. Prices are fine too. Dashboard is back to front, the free SSL has to be unnecessarily asked for, website forwarding fails, file transfer issues, failure to fulfill an arranged telephone call.....
I’m just working out the best way both practically and financially to get away.

Response received from Erinn, HostGator (Responded June, 2020):

Hi Dave,

It's so disappointing to hear about the experience that you've had. Thank you for taking the time to share it. We've created an escalated case and an Escalations Manager will be in touch with you soon to see what we can do to make things right. We don't want to lose you over this. Thank you.

Erinn
Customer Advocate at HostGator

Susan

1 — 

No support

After 14 yrs as a client I am leaving HG. In the past week, I have spent 9 hours trying to get support, been disconnected 8 times and still my site is not working; pages are blank except for the home page. Wordpress PHP is not compatible and basic config files are missing. They promise to help and it's just a stall to see if I contact them again. So disappointed!

Response received from Erinn, HostGator (Responded June, 2020):

Hi Susan,

Oh no! That is simply not acceptable and not what we expect from our support teams. If you would, please, contact us at [email protected] and provide the primary email address on your account and the best phone number to reach you and we'll make things right. We truly value our long term clients and do not wish to lose you over a known LiveChat issue. Thank you so much in advance.

Erinn
Customer Advocate at HostGator

Gerard

2 — 

Very Slow and Super Expensive to keep

I've been a hostgator client for almost 4 years with a couple of website domains on a shared CPanel platform. Websites are Wordpress based information pages. No store features or even customer logins.

First, it is SLOW and gets a C-rating or worse by 3rd party speed analyzers, such as pingdom.com. Wait times are in excess of 1,200ms and just a main page can take 7-20 seconds to load, or just sit there.

As the article says, a subscription renewal is exponentially more expensive for existing customers, while new customers get good pricing. In other words, HOSTGATOR PUNISHES CUSTOMER LOYALTY and after my subscription expires I will again be forced to migrate to a different hosting service to avoid paying through my nose.

Finally, one has to keep a constant eye on billing through billing history, promises by Hostgator about included features, and beware of false promises and unwanted subscriptions. For example, 3 months after purchasing a shared service, charges started appearing on my bill for an add-on service (called 'Contact Services') that I didn't even sign up for or use. Going back through all the emails and spam I received from Hostgator, I found the emails about the addon claimed it was a FREE service that was INCLUDED with my package. However, when I contacted them after seeing the new charge I learnt that this service had a 3 month FREE SUBSCRIPTION after which it charges a monthly fee, which was a surprise to me, especially since I never even used the addon nor did I sign up for it.

TIP:
I'm personally very careful about free trials and try to avoid them. In the unlikely event that I ever sign up for one, I tend to look for automatic paid renewals in the fine print and I set myself electronic reminders to cancel before the end of the trial. But overall I avoid them except for very rare instances.

Response received from Erinn, HostGator (Responded June, 2020):

Hi Gerard,

Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts with us. We are very upfront when customers sign up that when you take advantage of our introductory pricing that it is in fact introductory and that you'll be expected to pay full price at renewal. Our full prices are extremely competitive with other hosting providers of our size. We would love to talk to you about the possibility of a discount on your renewal, as we truly do value ALL of our customers and don't want to lose you as a customer. We will also be happy to discuss a refund for your unused add-on.

As for site speed, we would love to take a look at your site and see what optimizations we can recommend to improve your sites performance.

Please contact us at [email protected] and provide the primary email address on your account and the best phone number to reach you and we'll do our best for you. Thank you.

Erinn
Customer Advocate at HostGator

David

2 — 

Going down, down hill...Moving on

I've been with HostGator for a few years, and while their tech support is knowledgeable & courteous, our site's performance has been upended. As a caveat, I'm the company CEO, not the IT/web person, but it seems we have grown beyond the shared server capabilities simply by upgrading our web site to provide more information. We don't do e-commerce of any kind, but provide consulting services. We recently went for a major site upgrade, switched to a different Wordpress theme, and new information. Our site consequently broke...not once, but twice with two different WP themes. And we've had to rebuild it twice at a cost to our clients who rely on the information we provide them, especially during this Covid-19 time. Our site isn't that complicated, but turns out shared hosting doesn't have sufficient PHP memory for us. It wasn't until I personally reached out to tech support a 5th time about this problem that a tech person (in India or wherever) said that the problem was the PHP memory... We couldn't update our site using Elementor, but come find out through various forums that the problem is we need at least 512M, or even 1024, and we're limited to 260M. Why after 4 calls, no one in tech support (until the last tech person) could tell me this, is beyond me. Anyway, in contacting forums, numerous people asked why I was using HostGator in the first place as my WP host. I've now wondered why myself now.

Response received from Erinn, HostGator (Responded May, 2020):

Hi David,

It's extremely disappointing to hear that our support teams didn't figure out the issue on the first go round. We expect more from our support teams. We would like to talk to you about your concerns and see what we can do to make things right for you. Please, if you would, reach out to us via email at [email protected] and provide the primary email on your account and the best phone number to reach you and we'll do our best. Thanks for taking the time to share your experience. Our apologies that we failed you.

Erinn
Customer Advocate at HostGator

Tim B

1 — 

HostGator used to be the best, now they are the worst

I had been with Hostgator for quite a number of years. Back in the day, their support and service was outstanding.

Something changed, and now I wouldn't recommend them to my worst enemy. I had missed a couple of payments and in the old days you got suspended and got to catch up the payments to bring the sites back up - which is more than fair.

NOW, for whatever reasons, the same happened and good Ole Hostgator Completely Wiped out my Hosting Account. My Sites and Client Sites have simply been deleted without any notification. No reminders, Zilch.

To me that clearly shows they have total disrespect for their clients, long or short term. It doesn't matter.

I would highly recommend that you stay very clear of this company.

I had to help rescue a friend from Hostgator, who could not ( or simply didn't know how to ) update PHP above 7.1. After a long battle with them, they managed to get it up to PHP v7.2.4 which beggars belief.

Yet, another reason to stay away from Hostgator.

They need to take a very hard long look at themselves.

Response received from Erinn, HostGator (Responded May, 2020):

Hi Tim & All,

We generally give a 10 day grace period on invoices before suspending service. We then send out 3-4 past due reminders and data is kept on our servers for 45 days post suspension. We took a look into your account and it was cancelled in December 2019, but you never contacted us until April 28, 2020. We're disappointed that you didn't contact us sooner so that we could accept payment and restore your sites.

All of our policies about payments, cancellations and data are publicly available to you and all customer here: https://www.hostgator.com/tos and you agreed to the Terms of Service when you signed up with HostGator.

We would like to call your attention to two specific items.

Section 12 point D:
Late Payment.
All invoices must be paid within ten (10) days of the invoice due date. Any invoice that is outstanding for more than ten (10) days may result in the suspension or termination of Services. Access to the account will not be restored until payment has been received. If you fail to pay the fees as specified herein, HostGator may suspend or terminate your account and pursue the collection costs incurred by HostGator, including without limitation, any arbitration and legal fees, and reasonable attorneys' fees. HostGator will not activate new orders or activate new packages for customers who have an outstanding balance on their account.

Section 14, point H:
Termination
HostGator may terminate your access to the Services, in whole or in part, without notice in the event that: (i) you fail to pay any fees due; (ii) you violate this Agreement; (iii) your conduct may harm HostGator or others or cause HostGator or others to incur liability, as determined by HostGator in our sole discretion; or (iv) as otherwise specified in this Agreement. In such event, HostGator shall not refund to you any fees paid in advance of such termination, and you shall be obligated to pay all fees and charges accrued prior to the effectiveness of such termination. Additionally, HostGator may charge you for all fees due for the Services for the remaining portion of the then current term.

UPON TERMINATION OF THE SERVICES FOR ANY REASON, USER CONTENT, USER WEBSITES, AND OTHER DATA WILL BE DELETED.

All of this to say, that we feel we give ample notice of past due bills and we retain data for more than a month to allow customers to catch up on payments and we feel this is more than fair.

We're very disappointed that you had this experience, but we stand behind our policies. We appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts and wish you well in your future endeavors.

Erinn
Customer Advocate at HostGator

William

1 — 

Bad Software, Worse Support

I used HostGator a couple years ago, and it was a fantastic experience. Shortly after my purchase I had someone call me offering help. It was great. I used them for a few months, and then the project I was working on didn't come to fruition so I closed the website.

Now, April 2020, I have a new project, and decided to be loyal, and return to the company that was once great to me. Within 40 minutes I realized that the site I made in their Website Builder wasn't publishing properly, so I contacted their support. The support agent I had took about 5 minutes between each message. It took 20 minutes alone to get me verified, despite the fact I had to log in to use the live chat. After about an hour of being in the chat, while they couldn't figure out what was going on, I decided I'd just cancel, and go somewhere else. I told them that I wanted to cancel, and then suddenly my site is working again, and everything is fine.

I decided I'd keep trying their service, because I do have the 45 days. I decided to use their 1 click install to get MediaWiki on the website. Go through the 2 steps to get it installed, and it gives me an error when I try to access it. I contact support again. This time saying I want to cancel, and tell them what's going on. They offer to be on chat and walk me through the steps of installing it with me, but it's literally steps like type the directory you want to make, and what's your username. I tell them I just want a refund, and they start the process. About 10 minutes later a thing on my screen pops up saying that I've been disconnected because the chat was inactive. I reconnect again, wait out the 5 minute waiting period for the 3rd time in one day, and get someone that can help me. After about 20 minutes in that chat, I get my refund. The refund itself will be 5-7 business days.

Response received from Erinn, HostGator (Responded May, 2020):

Hi William,

We're disappointed to hear that you weren't satisfied with your experiences with our site and our support teams. We would love to have been able to make things work for you, but you decided to go ahead and cancel, so we can't do that. We wish you well with your new provider. We're still here if you change your mind. Thanks.

Erinn
Customer Advocate at HostGator

Dan

2 — 

Time to Move On

Been a client of Hostgator since 2011 on a shared hosting plan. Everything was fine for our purposes until last fall (2019). Email server issues with MSN accounts rejecting emails from Hostgator's email servers (thus getting bounce-back email messages because Hostgator's multiple email server IP's have been flagged for a number of spam reasons by other Hostgator clients). Hostgator advised in the end to upsell to an email plan, which isn't financially viable for running a number of nonprofits on the shared hosting account that uses a handful of emails at low volume activity. Tech support for the most part is good (after a string of emails some resolve if the phone tech is unable to resolve), polite and knowledgeable techs, etc. etc.. Pricing has naturally increased over the near decade of service. As well I see other changes coming, and other changes not happening (i.e. not using the preferred version of PHP for Wordpress) which I'm not too keen on. It was a good run while it lasted. Been through this before with another hosting service. Time to move on.

We asked HostGator for a response:

Hi Dan,

Oh no! We really don't want to see you go. We'd love to discuss this with you and see what we can do to keep you as a client. Please drop us an email to [email protected] and provide the primary email address on your account and the best phone number to reach you and we'll see what we can do.

Please know that we have been working away at updating all our servers to the latest version of PHP, it's been a bit slow going because we don't want to break peoples website who have plugins that aren't compatible.

We look forward to hearing from you.

Erinn
Customer Advocate at HostGator

Carrie

1 — 

Don't use Hostgator if you have a real business.

I hate leaving bad reviews, but this is too important not to share. We are a small company and we don't do any marketing email, only billing and answering questions for customers. Our emails on Hostgator constantly get flagged as unwanted spam, phishing, etc. They say we have to upgrade to get on a "clean" server, which seems wrong.

Since this was the 5th time calling about the emails getting flagged as spam or phishing, I was ready to do that, but customer service dropped the call (not us, it went to the survey- so it was her hanging up) So, I called right back and after sitting on hold for 20 minutes, no one picked up, then in the chat help, it said 15 minutes for help and it was over an hour. By the time someone answered, I'd gone back to work and missed the message. Been with them 3 months now and we still don't have functional email.

Also, beware of the 45 day cancellation policy. It sounds great, if you are transferring a domain, you can't transfer it again for 60 days, so you're stuck with them.

So, long story short, if you actually do business on your website and need to be able to send/receive email from customers then the hostgator is not the place for you. I'm not sure where we'll move to, but we'll be eating the investment and moving our hosting this week.

Response received from Erinn, HostGator (Responded April, 2020):

Hi Carrie,

This is not the experience we expect our customers to have and we would like to make this right for you. Please email us at reputation[at]endurance.com and provide your primary email address and the best phone number to reach you and we'll get you taken care of. Thank you.

Erinn
Customer Advocate at HostGator

Mark T

1 — 

Terrible experience

Been on a shared server since September 2019, due to testing encountered an over-usage CPU problem and had a site blocked. Attempting to have it back live without success for one week. Customer service keeps promising and promising but never delivers. Ended up changing hosting providers since we were losing business day after day.... Never again !!

Response received from Erinn, HostGator (Responded June, 2020):

Hi Mark,

We're disappointed that you chose to leave but understand you need to do what's right for you. We do take the integrity of our servers very seriously, so we will take down sites that are over utilizing resources on shared servers. Thank you.

Roycelynne R

4 — 

Service works for me

The server and support service so far satisfactory. I am able to contact the support desk at a reasonable time and have provided very good support.

Response received from Erinn, HostGator (Responded June, 2020):

Hi Roycelynne,

Thank you so much for the great review! We're so happy that you're happy. Thanks for being the best part of the HostGator Family.

Greg J

5 — 

Honestly

Working on my first website, really pleased with Hostgator thus far. I've used their support which was perfect! i'm seeing evidence they've got the bases covered and have all the features i'll ever need, easy to access. Yea, yea the price doubles after the initial period or whatever.. don't think i'll hold it against them.. it's not like my website will have many other outgoings to cover.

Dr J

5 — 

Very good

In an age where "hosting-is-hosting" and it's "good" everywhere you go, hosting companies are 'getting ahead' of the competition on price and customer support and Hostgator toes the line. They make GoDaddy look like amateurs. And Hostgator is CONSIDERABLY less expensive. Hostgator is the best hosting value available at this writing. And that comes from a power user with 12 hosting accounts spread out over 5 different companies. (It's better for SEO to have your domains on different servers and IP's)

They're generous with their iNodes, and the space. They have nimble servers. When they tell you that they can give you a product or service, for example, Widget "A" there are no apologies later when they can't.

I get that at a lot of hosts. Sales overpromising. Not at Hostgator. Their customer support has let me down ONCE in 3 years. Brian Christian. I was thinking "wtf?" is he NEW? Never found out. Besides that one time, I've had everything fixed in one try and I'm not talking about restarting the server or troubleshooting Wordpress. I'm talking about doping out .htaccess rewrites and handling CSR SSL installations, proper glue on a private nameserver and deactivation of WP Plugins even through a catastrophic failure and 500 Internal Server Error that prevents any client-side fix. These guys are GREAT. So there you have it. You can find cheaper. But you better know what you're doing and be practically self-service, because you're not getting any backup when you try to bootstrap your .wordpress backup restore via FTP or figure out where your excess iNodes are hiding. Hostgator's got your back.
- Doc Johnson

Bill

4 — 

Everything Works

I use the server to host my clients. It makes life easy, gives me access to tech support when clients try to do something on their own and break it all, and has been a pleasant experience. This is the third server package I have purchased since 2005. I keep coming back and they keep letting me. It works.

Richard

1 — 

Not really happy with Hostgator

I have had, over time, anything up to 20-30 websites with Hostgator shared. At the moment it is down to about 6. Speed is their biggest problem overall. The load times can be atrocious. But my biggest issue lately / right now is that all my sites, email accounts and cpanel have gone down for 15-20 mins, then suddenly come back online. I have had their tech support look at this but they can never find out what the problem was. They always suggest to call when the problem is happening but by the time they answer the chat the sites are all backed up and everything is working

I'm looking at moving to another host and probably going with VPS.

Response received from Erinn, HostGator (Responded April, 2020):

Hi Richard,

This is not the experience that we want our customers to have. If you would,please reach out to us at reputation[at]endurance.com and provide the primary email on your account and the best phone number to reach you and we'll do our best to resolve things for you. Thank you so much.

Erinn
Customer Advocate at HostGator

James

1 — 

Impossible to work with

I paid for their extra SEO plan which consistently crashed every time I tried to open it or the basic SEO plan. Service tickets were open for 2 months while they kept sending messages that they were working on it. After 2 months I gave up and changed companies. All you are paying for with this company is canned apology remarks about why they can't make their own products work.

BTW, they refused to refund any amount for the website for their expensive premium SEO that never worked for a single minute.

Response received from Erinn, HostGator (Responded April, 2020):

Hi James,

What a terrible experience! That is not how we expect things to work for our customers. We know that you've moved on, but we'd like to see what we can do about refunding the SEO product that you purchased. Please watch your email for a notice from us about a refund. Thank you.

Erinn
Customer Advocate at HostGator

Mike S

5 — 

Tried many, stick with it

I host several sites for different kind of sites and customers, tried many hosting suppliers big and small and Hostgator still reliable, good support, good rates and good performance, I have been using them for more than 8 Years

Stephen G

1 — 

Dedicated Server Down

I have been with the hostgator for many years and although their customer service is good my dedicated server goes down at least once or twice a month. I have about 40 wordpress sites on the server and a lot of unhappy clients. They always give me the same excuse that is was caused by an attack on the server from an unknown IP address. I don't believe this is the cause.

Response received from Erinn, HostGator (Responded April, 2020):

Hi Stephen,

We'd like to investigate this issue for you and see what we can offer to get this resolved once and for all. Please email us at reputation[@]endurance.com and provide the primary email on your account and the best phone number to reach you and we'll do our best to make this right. Thank you.

Erinn
Customer Advocate at HostGator

Athar K

1 — 

Not just slow, pathetic servers

As per the article, its very very true that they are very slow (like a speed of a tortoise). Instead I would say they have the slowest servers. Not only this, there servers are not even capable of taking any of the load. For instance, if you have just 4 products, and you try to edit them at one time.. 3 of them will be presented with a so call beautiful logo of hostgator saying sorry we can't take this shit load. And only 1 product will be updated successfully after 5 minutes of loading (as I mentioned, pathetic server speed). See attached screenshot. I have wasted all the money as they now say we cant refund you because I have just crossed 40 days time as I was just busy in development of the website. Very smart strategy of looting people. I am now hosted with another hosting provider who are providing far better speed then this shit!

Response received from Erinn, HostGator (Responded April, 2020):

Hello Athar,

We're sad to hear that you didn't have a great experience with us. We'd like to make things right for you, but see that you've already left us. We wish you well in your future endeavors. Thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts.

Erinn
Customer Advocate at HostGator

Kingsley O

5 — 

I find Hostgator reliable

I am surprised, even to the point of shock to read these bad reviews on Hostgator. I used to with a Nigerian hosting company and the issue was its frequent downturns. My friend strongly recommended that I move to Hostgator as HG has been serving him well for a couple of years now. I migrated. First, I was impressed that they helped me migrate for free and I was more than impressed by their 45-day money back guarantee. In the early days, I contacted their support nearly everyday and I found them courteous, patient, and helpful. I once contacted them just to retrieve my login details. But reading this set of reviews made me wonder. Perhaps I am only seeing the good side of them. Perhaps I run a small outfit and am bound to run into trouble when I escalate my portfolio. I earnestly hope not, but that doubt is there; like a small foreboding attached to my growth. No organization is perfect and I hope this is just the 3% dissatisfied group that is writing this. My rating is actually 4.5 but since there are no half stars here, the full thing. And it is based on my individual experience alone. Would change when they change. I hope not.

JEK

1 — 

all you'll get is polite customer service that can't do anything

Couldn't point my Host Gator domain to my website to save my life. cpanel is completely nonexistent on my account. Thought it was a good service after seeing recommendations so went with the 3-year hosting plan. BIG MISTAKE. After realizing how un-user friendly HostGator is, tried to cancel, but because I chose a plan over a year, they "offered" (i.e. automatically signed me up) the "free" domain registration, which then becomes a non-refundable $17.99 fee if you cancel in less than a year (they hide this detail when you sign up). If I had gone with one of the shorter monthly plans, this apparently wouldn't have happened. But, when you sign up for a 1+ year plan, they don't give you the option to opt-out of the "free" domain registration. Also, paid $24 for WHOIS privacy protection, but if you want it refunded you have to request a new refund transaction to have this done. Found another domain host that offers this protection for free, but can't transfer to this service until the 60 day ICANN grace period, but would have to request a refund within Hostgator 45-day money back "guarantee". So, my email, etc. linked to my domain would be spam fodder for 15 days if I want a privacy protection refund within their time limit. Customer service could only politely tell me how much I got tricked into paying for their nonrefundable services. Their online chat is a slow nightmare. It takes at least several minutes to get a response to each of your replies, where you can easily waste upwards of 2 hours waiting.
Don't be fooled by their low prices. You'll pay for it in the end. Run far, far away.

Johnny

1 — 

No refunds with hostgator

refuse to refund my money after purchasing a VPS account for around $1100 dollars. Only offers partial refunds and adds in fake charges without a clear indication why.

Don't use hostgator they have condescending live chat who always tells the customer is wrong when all I requested was a full refund. Live chat who refuse to do due diligence and check for accounting errors but refuse to even bother. Just horrendous customer service.

Their servers are slow meaning they still use HDD instead of SSD like other web hosting providers. Their servers are slow and it results in slow loading websites (even with websites that have no content) and it's a way to upsell you to buy expensive packages. Too many tricks and lying destroyed the customer relationship trust. Go with a different hosting provider anything is better than hostgator.

Jaime G

1 — 

More than one year of nightmare with emails going into customers spam

Don't know much about hosting services... Hostgator is the 2nd one I've used. For more than a year I've been having issues with auto-reply emails from my site going into customers spam folders. I have lost hundreds of hours chatting with support trying to solve the problem. Not only they have never been able to solve the problem, but they make it worse frequently as when they try to solve that I end up not being able to receive emails on my Gsuite/Gmail account. I'm trying to search for a different server, but I'm afraid it may give the same problems? Thanks,

Jeff

1 — 

Hostgator charges are forever

Whenever you see the top ten Website Host's, be advised at least eight of them are always owned by the same company. Including Hostgator. This means you will always run into the same issues where it concerns billing. I have used two of those companies. Most recently Hostgator. Neither would stop billing. After Live Chat plus calling and speaking to a live person on numerous occasions and having guarantees they would stop Billing, including with Emails showing the date and conversation transcripts, a year after shutting one of my websites down Hostgator continued Billing, forcing me to block them off my Credit Card permanently and filing a claim to get my money back through my Credit Card company. So keep in mind once they get your Credit Card info, you are going to have a heck of a time getting them to stop Billing you if you decide to close down your website.

Their lower tier Tech Support is completely incompetent. They know nothing at all about the product and escalating to higher tier seemed to take days and the problems were never corrected. Constant database problems made it not worth the time or money.

Shared hosting, their lower tier, is useless unless you use outdated software versions. For example VB5 uses an SQL version higher than what is available on Hostgator shared Hosting tier, almost every company not affiliated with Hostgators parent company already offers the updated SQL Version on their lowest tier, not this company, this company requires you buy into higher tiers. So if you want to run a basic Forum, you will have to use outdated software full of security holes unless you agree to upgrade to a higher, more expensive tier. If you don't want to, and decide to switch Host's, then you are stuck in the Billing they refuse to stop. They also lie about their upgrades claiming its coming. I heard the lies from Tech Support for close to two years.

* Nonstop Billing even after numerous requests to stop Billing
* Weekly Downtime often exceeds Uptime.
* Incompetent Tech Support.
* Outdated SQL.
* Extremely slow.
* Upload and download capped more significantly than other non related Host's.
* Migration might as well be nonexistent its so slow.
* Failure to have updated SQL requires software use with security holes because some of the lower software Vers are no longer supported after the company moves on.

The extremely low priced shared tier serves one purpose, to sucker customers in and force you to buy into a higher tier. That is their solution for everything. And when you say no and change service, they won't stop charging you no matter how many times you tell them to stop, and this wasn't just Hostgator, it included one of Hostgator's sister companies (Host's).

This also adds up to a poor user experience for the end user of your website or forum. Loss of funds when you decide to change Host's and Includes making the end user vulnerable through outdated software.

My recommendation is to avoid this company and any of the sister companies under their parent company. The low cost shared tier is a complete sham.

Sam k

1 — 

Crap Service

One of my friends was a customer of Hostgator in the past, had many issues with them and told me to stay away from them. I decided to give them a try, and purchase their best reseller hosting account. Only two days, I have had to call them about 20 times about issues that can only be fixed by contacting Hostgator support. The support reps, hardly know what their doing, I kept getting passed around from one rep to another.

The WHMCS license they provided had issues, giving me a invalid license key error TWICE!

The second time the web advisor had to contact WHMCS that would take a day, and they put in a request for someone else’s domain, which I had no idea who’s it was when on the phone it was confirmed several times that it was for my domain.

I now went to Inmotion Hosting, and their customer service is great, cpanel works much smoother, and it’s much easier to use the Softaculous installer then Hostgator’s own QuickInstall.

Stephanie J

1 — 

Was Great until a Year Ago

Never had a problem until this year. I pay for services and renewals and they never get done. I have to contact support and they apologize and assure me that everything would be taken care of. It takes an average of 3 support chats to finally get the issue fixed. For my domain renewal I even contacted support early to make sure it would renew so my site wouldn't go down. I was assured I was fine and not to worry. My domain expired and my site went down. Currently I am going through this same scenario with my SSL certificate. I have begged the Chat Support Tech to give me a phone number to call the main office to review my account. Unfortunately, he just forwarded my case to billing/admin support. This will be the second time being referred to them due to the "seriousness" of the issue.

Brutus

1 — 

Beware HostGator SEO & Web Design Service

I've been with HostGator for a couple years now for hosting my website. The service has been consistent and even when I needed Tech Support, they were efficient, fast and courteous. That gets five stars. The one star is for the over promise under deliver pitch for SEO and web design services, lack of candor and forthrightness in explaining process, giving evidence that work being charged for is actually being done, total unresponsiveness of supervisors to contact me "at all" to discuss questions and issues. The biggest of which is embedding their proprietary SEO technology on my website without telling me what those were upfront, and that at the end of six month agreement, all the SEO technology would require a monthly fee to sustain or all technology would be removed and all SEO benefits removed. This also was not explained or even touched upon up front. The whole affair is now three months in and I have not heard from the project coordinator in weeks. Caveat Emptor Folks. Don't be taken by this unprofessional department at HostGator.

D C

3 — 

4 years experience, average

Overall an average experience. Hostgator pushed WordPress for a while but I hated it, too complicated for website use. For cost, do not get enough pages. As fees go up, need to look for another host. Other than that, website works although website maintenance too seems clunky. Tech Support usually good but takes a while to reach someone after 5 PM and on weekends.

Bonnie

3 — 

Passive-aggressive billing

The hostingfacts review talks about Industry-Standard Pricing ‘Tricks’ but I was so annoyed with their renewal tactics that I will look for another hosting service before my next renewal.

Six weeks before my renewal date, they emailed that they would automatically renew for a year. Twenty-four days before that renewal date, they emailed that invoices are generated 6 days prior to renewal date. Two weeks before my renewal date, they charged my credit card. When I called immediately to tell them I wanted to make a change and also stop the renewal of an addon, they told me it was too late even though it was still at least a week before my renewal date.

Otherwise, the service seems reliable enough. Early on, there was a period of difficulty with emails bouncing which resolved after a few weeks without any indication of the reason.

Christian

4 — 

Happy customer

Much, much better since changing from our old hosting partner. Only one mysterious issue of loading problems, eventually went away. Support team is very friendly and helpful.

Lisa M

5 — 

So far so good

I have been using HostGator since 2011. I haven't had any problems with my website. To my knowledge (I've had someone overseeing it for me) my site has only gone down one time in 8 years. I'd say that's pretty good. I've used their customer service and have been satisfied. Overall I have been very happy with HostGator

Francis P

5 — 

Can't Complain

I've been with Hostgator for about 2 1/2 years, I think. I'm surprised to see the many critical reviews, but perhaps my use of web space doesn't get me into issues with providers. I transferred several domains and their files to Hostgator and was running with no particular trouble that I remember. This included a Wordpress site, which made the transfer and was running right away. I'm not aware of any significant downtime over the last couple of years, but my sites are very low on access. Mainly, as I'm retired, I do several sites as a public service, a few for family needs, and some for myself. None would produce any heat on a server. I don't recall any issues over the past few years, so I have had almost no contact with Hostgator support. I load the files, configure the domains, and away we go. Nothing is too sophisticated or complicated. Since I can't recall any particular problem or issue, I can't do anything except give them 5 stars. I'm probably up for renewal in the new year, and I hope for no issues there.

Gabrielle

4 — 

It works

Often slow but working most of the time. We mainly use the site for back office jobs. Since the visible part is an entry for other websites, and a blog more set for google than for our customers, we don't complain as long as the databases work.

Greg

5 — 

I love HostGator

HostGator has been nothing but great. I have a dedicated Windows server and I write my own pages. Everything has worked great from day one. When I've needed help, tech support is local (USA), knowledgeable and professional. Any issues I've had, which mostly stem from SSL expirations, have been solved within hours. They've also been helpful managing my server as I am not confident in my skills when it comes to that. I don't know what all these negative reviews entail but they need to be balanced with a report of a good experience. This is one. If you take responsibility for your own work, HostGator is the place to be.

Deena

3 — 

terrible chat service

I am investigating domain hosts in order to transfer my site. I was very unimpressed with HG's chat. They outsource it to the same service that A Small Orange uses, and the reps don't speak great English. It took forever for the rep to answer each question, and I kept begging him to look at the top of the chat to see what my question was, so I wouldn't need to rewrite it. Unless I made a mistake, you also can't get a copy of the chat, so if you don't write down everything that was said (or do a screenshot), you will not have a record of the info.

JonF

1 — 

They take your site down and leave you down

Last night they took my site down because it supposedly had too much CPU usage, I had 31 visits, 124MB of bandwidth used. It's been 24 hours and they still haven't gotten my site restored, they haven't even whitelisted my IP addresses so I can do anything about it.

Not only this, their hosting is incredibly slow, average page load times around 5-8 seconds PER PAGE.

So here I am, I bought new hosting, luckily I had a backup from a few days ago I could restore, I'll be taking everything off of Hostgator and will never return.

Stefan

2 — 

Ok until something goes wrong

So we have been hosting our website with them for over a year and everything was ok. A few downtime issues but not major. Then they disabled our website with very little information. After hours of trying to contact them we gleaned we had been hacked via a plugin and told us to update it. At this stage we can't access the site to change anything. After 24 hours of our website being offline they admit we weren't hacked and that our backup service was loading the CPU too much. The same backup service we had been using for the whole time we had been with Hostgator. We ended up migrating to another host and had it up and running before Hostgator got around to responding in any serious manor. Don't use them if your website is important!

Lida

1 — 

Very bad experience

I've been with hostgator for over 2 years now and I found their support not helpful at all. I got malware and they provide no solution except redirecting me to another company to pay them more. They advertise a very very cheap plan but after being with them for 2 years and having so many downtimes they charging me over $500 to renew my hosting. I'm not happy with this host at all and I don't recommend it to anyone.

Scott

1 — 

offered one thing, given another

I purchased domain and website builder through them so I could have a small web presence but was also promised 1 free email which is really what I wanted it for so I could have an email linkedin to my site. Got my site live today and told now they charge for email. Asked for a full refund because the email is what I wanted it linked to my site. Promised one thing then try to charge me more when they backed out of original offer

Samuel

2 — 

Long wait time customer support

1. They sold out to a company in November 2018 and since then you will have to wait indefinitely to be connected to live chat support. Their chat room doesn't notify you with a sound when receiving new messages. So be prepared to be on that very page (waiting for several minutes) because if you go to a new tab and they keep writing you, they will quit the chat and leave. (yes, you are welcome), happened to me!

2. Many unqualified agents in chat rooms: they have no idea what you clearly ask for. They will give you totally different answers or shamefully create a ticket so that a higher admin will attend to you via email --you gonna have to waaaaaiit for that. I have over 20 domains with them and I won't recommend them. Try bluehost.

Gill

1 — 

Terrible support - not fit for purpose for resellers

There is no option in the UK to contact them for support except the terrible chat system which you will wait up to an hour to connect with a person who has less technical knowledge than my cat. They will reply very slowly and use annoying phrases like asking how you are instead of getting on with the job - which they can't do in the end. In the end you get through to the ticket system, but after they replied incorrectly to my issue (not solving it) they closed the ticket and I had to go back to the stupid chat system. As a business owner, this is not an acceptable service for resellers. Disappointing would be an understatement. I will be moving as soon as possible.

Essence V

1 — 

Essence Valencia

Lost hours of my time contacting support due to constant downtime issues. They always refused having any downtime and instead reworded it each time we have a scheduled maintenance. Maintenances no customers were ever aware of. Lost $100's of dollars in sales. Their technical support lacks knowledge and experience. I have 20+ years in customer support and tech support so I know what I am talking about. Stay away from them.

I now changed to SiteGround.

Karen

1 — 

Worst Experience Ever

This has been the worst experience ever. We have been waiting TWO WEEKS for migration. Not one person can tell us what is going on. They just say that they are backed up. They have no way besides email to contact migration and no one ever responds. Don't use this company unless you want no site and no answers!!!

Ron

1 — 

No Customer Service

Hostgator has zero customer service. You call in via voice or text and are given a different story as to why your website is down. Each time they say the previous person didn't know what they were talking about. We had a VPS and they took it down during the busy Christmas holidays. 1st call they said they took it down during middle of the workday for maintenance. Called back again got a different story. Finally hours later learned one site had been hacked so they took the entire server down and never notified us. This cost us a great deal of business. If they would have been upfront as to the issue we could have gotten back online much sooner.

This is just one example of how they deal with issues. Their servers are slow. They don't respond to support tickets. Hostgator takes your money but doesn't deliver.

Zee

1 — 

Dubious practices

Like in the article, it renewed, price jumped from $140 to $250. As I wasn't online during this time (sailing long term) I was hit at the bank account. So I cancelled when I got back to the land of the internet. They placed the cancellation date three years from date of cancellation. Basically the refused to refund as per their policy of cancellation. Its entirely their discretion. So my domain name email comes in for renewal. It says I will be billed in late April. Its early April and I tried to cancel it. Their policy is to charge 30 days before the due date. That's not written on the email however. The have a cancellation page that forces you to go via a support person. For your protection. Funny, I can sign up for anything without a support person, they won't refund money if I do, and this is all after signing onto their site. No verification to sign up, they require verification and a live chat to support to cancel. They are protecting their wallets by shady practices. Do not recommend at all.

olive

1 — 

HG Lost Me Jobs

I'm a reseller & took advantage of free migration. One site I manage, a salon, was LOST in the migration. The site went down over the Christmas season so they took a big hit which meant a big hit for me. I only accidentally found the cpanel they mistakingly set up outside of my package (linked from an email confirmation). Tech couldn't find it, then couldn't figure out how it happened nor fix. Now issues with super slow page loads and tech only points me to tutorials for speeding up sites. I've done everything I can do at my end. I don't mind doing the work, it's my job to look after clients but it seems HG turns that job into a headache. I dread contacting support because the calls often end with links to "how to figure it out yourself" and they also want to up sell. I'm shopping around now for faster server, better support, affordable (gotta make a living)

Casper V

1 — 

Cheap, but Bad.

The hosting is ridiculously cheap. With that comes tech support that often has no clue and don't know what they're doing. Case in point; I needed to add a dedicated IP to one of our customers' accounts. I asked tech support whether doing this would cause any downtime for us. They said no. Several days later they email us to say the IP has been added. Lo and behold the site was down. And this customer's DNS person was not available to adjust the DNS right away, either. Utterly amateurish bunch over at HostGator.

John S

5 — 

Great service with great support for a great price

My title pretty much says it all. HostGator has been extremely professional handling anything I've thrown at them. I have many different domains with them and like to self-teach myself about all the back-end stuff by just messing around there and seeing what happens. So I'm probably not their favorite client but nonetheless, every time I've managed to mess something up they have managed to fix it. The service is good, price is good and support is great!

Jay

1 — 

Shared hosting IP always blacklisted by ISPs.

Hostgator shared hosting is worse. I purchased shared hosting and after few days I saw that shared hosting IP is blacklisted. All my site went down. In shared hosting thousand of user host their sites and if one user do some spam activity all other users site willl go down hosted on that Shared IP. Very bad service. I am on support call more than 50 minute no one picks up. I would not recommend hostgator to anyone. Very horrible service and disgusting.

Max R

1 — 

A company with no Brain activity

One of the dumbest teams in the IT industry. We have been their customer for 10 years. How unfortunate for us. Certain complication preventing us from moving but soon the day is coming!

Let me just give a list of stupidy and destruction that Hostgator did to us.

1. When you need them the most during Christmas time they are understaffed with low paid employees who are not trained.

2. One of the slowest portals in the history of hosting companies. They upgraded real slow to slow. Hostgator does not know how to build products that help people. At the present day, the portal makes it impossible to navigate.

3. Do not use this company for any windows type hosting. They dont have IT staff to run the operations.

4. Hostgator turns on accounts that we do not use and charge us. They did refund it after we noticed. How many people they stole money from that did not notice. Would love to hear from its customer to see if it is possible to take Hostgator to court for years of abuse.

5. There was not one time that as a customer we could get a hold of any managers. Imagine a company having lots of problems where they shield themselves. That's Hostgator for you!

6. After refunding for fake account charges a year later they turned it back on and disconnected our site a week before Christmas. Imagine that you pay them and they turn it off on the busiest time of the year.

7. If you have any respect for your own business my best advice do not use Hostgator. They will ruin you! We have been running our other sites on Digital Ocean. For 3 years there was not one time that we had to use tech support. Smart people produce results. The uneducated team produces chaos!

G

1 — 

They sell your contact information.

The second you register your domain with them, you will get bombarded with calls from foreigners trying to develop your website. No matter how many times you tell them no, they persist. Switching numbers, switching the names of their company, trying anything and they dont take no for an answer. Highly annoying and highly unprofessional from hostmonster.

David H

1 — 

Website hacked and HostGator unable to assist

Our website has been hacked. We needed a backup to restore it or the ability to access it for editing. We called in numerous occasions and they kept saying that we were not the owner of record even though our credit card keeps getting charged for $10.95 a month. Call after call. Pleading with them to assist with reset. We had to cancel the auto charge, dispute last months charge - but our website that serves over 1,000 seniors, disabled and families of low income has been done for about a month with no help from HostGator.

Raymond W

1 — 

Run as fast you can

If you have not decided yet then DO NOT consider Hostgator, it will be worst decision you will ever make. I don't even know where to start, but after you sign up and past the 45 days then hell will break lose. In my case I was promised by the sales guy a 'professional looking Desktop and Mobile version' of my website. I have to admit that my desktop version looks really good, but we are now 3 months, 20 phone calls, 15 emails from customer support, 13 payment reminders and threats of suspending my account, etc... further and still no mobile version that you want to look at. I finally got to the bottom and with the software they used to built my Website (Website Builder) you can not get a decent looking tablet version, but my sales person (MIA since) 'forgot' to mention this during his sales pitch. I stopped payment and this is helping a little bit, but I don't think that they even care about that........ this organization is so unstructured, disorganized, no management, probably so overwhelmed with all the complaints that they also do not know where to start. Run while you can and do not look back........

Raymond W

5 — 

Good & Informational

I have read your post and quite informative. It is a good platform to host your business website. Any startup business can get benefit by hosting their business website on this platform as they have superb run time 99.9%. I have recently hosted my business website and I found it as an ultimate source for web hosting.

Christopher R

1 — 

A nightmare to cancel.

Second-year hosting invoice was more than twice as much as the first-year one, so I decided to cancel. One invoice was issued to renew hosting, and a second for the domain name. The domain name is impossible to cancel. After the invoice is generated, 45 days out from the renew date, turning off auto-renew won't delete the invoice. You have to contact customer service. But customer service says they cannot cancel the invoice--the billing department has to cancel it. But the billing department can't cancel the invoice in advance of the renewal date. They can only cancel the invoice when the domain name renews--after, presumably, they've charged your credit card. Their LiveChat representatives are perfectly nice but the company's policies suck.

In terms of actual hosting, I never experienced any problems.

Sean

1 — 

Traffic

I saw a traffic spike on my website after it was linked to by a regional newspaper. Not an enormous amount of traffic but some. At the point where we were getting 20 hits a minute, they shut down the site for CPU use.

Contact with support can be summed up as - you are not entitled to CPU use "paying for bandwidth and storage does not entitle you to processor time past a limit which we can arbitrarily set." We won't help you when traffic spikes as a matter of policy.

Also hostgator have taken the ticket management service offline so you can't look to see what if anything they are doing to resolve your issue.

Summary of todays dealings with hostgator "Thanks for the cash don't come looking to us for service we're not in that business."

Brittany

1 — 

Worst hosting ever - unprotected servers, terrible customer service.

This is the worst hosting service out there. My sites were all hacked while on their servers, slow speeds, endless instances where they suspend my account for "over usage" with no way to fix the issues they say are happening without paying for extra services. I believe their company is fraudulent and is compromising accounts at the sake of selling site lock and other services. It's a nightmare. I will do everything I can to get the word out about these crooks.

steve m

5 — 

I love hostgator

I have not had any problems with hostgator and have been with them since around 2010.

they have an easy website builder, good knowledge base for learning how to do something. live chat is fast and usually fix what I need done. I only have a simple business website but it is just fine for my needs. You can pay monthly or annually for cheaper. So not sure why so many bad reviews. I would not hesitate to go with them if you are new and looking for a host.

Marco

1 — 

From good to... worst

I have had years of experience with Hostgator with both a big VPS service and a smaller shared hosting service. After the acquisition by EIG Group, service quality and customer support got really bad, and I moved the VPS service to another provider. I have used the shared account for a few things and was going to cancel it this year.

I got charged five days prior to renewal (it's their policy, even if they don't send you a reminder of the automatic payment by email) and through the chat I asked for a refund because I had decided not to renew the service and it was not expired yet. The chat operator confirmed that the refund would be issued and that the account would have been available for accessing and saving data until the actual renewal date.

Today (1 day before the actual renewal date) I discovered that the account has been canceled without waiting for the natural expiration so I can't access or save the data.

Not a huge deal in my case - I already moved away most data - but the final proof that they are to be avoided at all costs.

Hope this can save you some headaches.

Devin

1 — 

Review about Hostgator

Do not use Hostgator for web hosting. If your website ever has an issue, the support takes forever because you wait in a large queue to get help. They cost my business a lot of money on multiple occasions. They are a very large hosting company, and if you have any issues with your website, you will be placed into a huge queue and the issues will not be resolved for a few days at best depending on the issue. When you call support, you talk to lower level support that isn't able to handle your technical issues. Lower level support just takes information and then inputs it into a ticket queue until the admin support can finally get around to handling the issue. First in first out in their queue.

On a few different occasions, Hostgator had issues installing my SSL certificate. Normally, this wouldn't be a huge deal, but my website is how I make a living and my website was down for a few days. When an SSL certificate is down, like many know, an internet browser tells someone trying to access the website that the website is not safe/secure. This is what happened to my website and I kept getting several emails about this from customers and I ultimately lost customers and a good amount of money. Not good at all for business.

Then, I switched hosting to WPX Hosting, and they are amazing!!! I could not believe the amazing quality of WPX Hosting support. They respond within 30 seconds on the live chat every time and they fix any issues immediately. WPX Hosting is also extremely fast compared to Hostgator if you own a Wordpress website. At WPX, I was able to install an SSL within a few minutes. Now I realize that Hostgator was just telling me SSL certificates take a few days to activate because the Hostgator admins didn't have time to get to my ticket in the queue.

In addition, I paid about $1,100 up front for three years of VPS hosting with Hostgator. When I cancelled about 1/2 of the way through, of course Hostgator has a no refund policy. It is not fair to the consumer, even though I agreed when I signed up. Learning experience on my part.

Either way, Hostgator is decent in some areas, but I would say Hostgator is the worst web hosting for any website based on my experience.

I normally do not write reviews online, and I know people are probably thinking that only upset people write reviews, but I would recommend choosing another hosting company besides Hostgator. Hostgator is fine until you have an issue with your website, and if it is important that you do not have downtime on your website, I would definitely not recommend Hostgator.

Sorry Hostgator for the negative comments because I know a lot of people at your company work hard. I am very disappointed with the disconnected support system at Hostgator, and unfortunately it cost me and my business a lot of money.

Matt

1 — 

Good technology, mediocre support since years

A day in the life of a HostGator customer...

I need an SSL certificate, buy a third party one. I get the CSR and RSA from my reseller account.

Like so many times before, I submit the 3rd party certificate install request, especially mentioning that all files – certificate, bundle, RSA are in the home directory, just the way they like it.

Then I am waiting for the ticket confirmation. Checking spam filter – nothing. Usually, it comes after a few minutes. I look for the support tickets and cannot find them, also not the old tickets which often contain valuable information. After 90 minutes I go on the chat. The friendly tech support lady confirms that a ticket was created 90 minutes ago and that the confirmation email has not been sent out. She does not know why it hasn’t been sent and how to access neither the ticket nor the old tickets.

She offers to install the certificate and I give her the same credentials that are in the ticket, also mention that the new certificate, bundle, and RSA key are in the home directory.

After 10-15 minutes she asks me to verify that the certificate works.

I check and notice that she did not install the provided certificate, but a free Let’s Encrypt certificate.

Upon my objection and a bit back and forth, she finally forwards my request to the next support level. She actually tried to talk me into a free certificate although I had provided a paid one!

Another tech support agent contacts me about four hours later to install the certificate.

Scenarios like this have happened several times to me over the last years. Support at HostGator has been questionable for years. Considering they raised the price on my reseller account 20%, I wonder why such a big company is unable to provide better service.

A working ticket system is a MUST.

Ngawhare

2 — 

Do not use Hostgator

Hostgator support desk will typically in my experience not reply to emails for over 15 hours if at all. My websites were down for two days and their notification was an email which went to my junk folder. Despite cleaning up the websites and notifying them many times over a 15 hour period nobody answered (this has happened in the past too). Their live chat is reasonably responsive and helpful but can't do anything to help with situations like this so you are left with nobody to talk to and all email and websites down.

Goran N

3 — 

Where to start...

I am with Hostgator now for 2 years and I had so many errors with them on their part that it is unbelievable. In the moment of writing this my site is down as their system did not renew SSL certificate automatically. Support is polite but I am having troubles explaining issues to them and I really wonder do they have any knowledge to provide support. Also, bare in mind that if you want to install additional SSL certificates for multiple domains you have to pay for them as they have removed SSL/TLS option from cpanel. I use cloud hosting there and I really wonder sometimes is there any real difference when compared to shared plans.

and if someone from Hostgator read this here is chat ID: 00001aDJB79112AR

Man, you were so good. What happened to you Hostgator?

Jo

4 — 

No problems until recently

I've used hostgator since 2011 and never had any serious issues with them - until recently the last time I contacted support was in 2010. But with the new GDPR laws I have been trying to find out what I can do about their collection of my site visitors IP addresses. Support was polite, but didn't seem very knowledgeable about it, and eventually told me that IP addresses are not considered personal data by GDPR (despite everyone else in the internet world saying they are). I'm going to try support one more time, but if I can't get anywhere I may be looking for a new host.

Aydin E

4 — 

Im starting to like hostgator

I don't normally write "good" reviews and i think everyone is the same, thats why researching for things is a nightmare cause you only going to get the Bad raps. Honestly, if you are just making a website and want it to work, you can’t go wrong with HostGator. Stop doing you head in with reviews, its mostly mad people who have had a bad day. i have never waited more then 2-3 mins for support and always get long ass emails from support at hostgator.

My website works well and speed is not bad. By the way, I contact them from Australia, so i'm assuming people are working around the clock.

Stephen

2 — 

Lots of words very little action

Hostgator has been consistent in delivering the bare minimum. If that's all you need, then they would be a perfect company to work with.

Pros: The up-time is great. Lots of options. Cheap

Cons: Poor customer support. This needs explanation. They answer, they promise, they confuse tickets, they don't usually deliver what they say they would, however, they are polite.

I just moved over to a dedicated server and it's been a week without any movement despite the fact that they've told me on each occasion that I call that I am a priority....a priority yet 7 day and nothing.

James

2 — 

Not the fastest support

I am very surprised reading this review and can only assume I am one of the few that has had a bad experience although I doubt it as when you Google HostGator reviews you can see thousands of other unhappy customers.

I suspect this website earns a decent commision from HostGator through referrals. I also suspect they only approve the good reviews... we will see.

I signed up after reading this review. I decided on the Cloud package which would have suited my needs. After paying my money and receiving my welcome emails I thought everything was smooth and quick. I then received an email asking me for proof of my identity. I sent over a scanned copy of my passport thinking that the verification process would be quick. This is where I was sadly wrong. After waiting for over 8 hours I contacted the live support that they claim here is great. The live support were unable to help me, they said the verification team are only able to access that information and only they could approve my account. They had no problem taking my money and passport photo though. After waiting for over 24 hours and not being able to crack on with my new website I decided to go elsewhere. I asked Live Support for a refund and for them to close my account and they told me it will take 7-10 days to process and that I need to respond once again to the open ticket that originally requested my ID, the very same one that is still unanswered! This company is awful, read up on other review websites that are in no way affiliated with HostGator for some real and genuine user reviews.

Everton W

1 — 

If you need support, go some where else

Been trying to get a couple of email account up and running with these guys for several weeks now. I constantly have to repeat things because their tech support has no idea what they are doing. One tech will tell you one thing and the next will tell you just the opposite. I am so glad i did not go for the long term option with hostgator. I am currently looking for new host.

Developer

1 — 

Stay away, downtime ruins your reputation

I got a reseller package from Hostgator on sale. It was not noticeable at the beginning but once some websites started getting more traffic it turned out that it's really unstable. Either WHM or global database would go down taking all websites with it and there's nothing you can do except waiting until it comes back up.

I tried contacting support and it's useless. Using super slow chatbots that give you responses from KB that do noth

I'm migrating out right now and warn you to stay away from this garbage.

Yash J

2 — 

Terrible Providers

A very cheap and malicious company. The customer support might be free, but it's below par. Their services are terrible. For their baby plan they only provide 100,000 for 20GB! That is a rip off. They use these malicious scams with intent to make sure your $12 a month looks like you should be only paying $2 since you can't reach the 20 GB a month because the 100,000 inodes will fill up quicker than you can even reach 3 GB of storage.

Use digital ocean! They are a much better company and provide much better services

Sonu

1 — 

Don't fall for their fake Unmetered Disk space offer!

Hostgator initially promises unmetered disk space (1 TB) on all their cloud hosting packages and once you start using it for your email and you reach around 75 GB, you will receive an email saying that you have exceeded our usage policy and unmetered disk space is used for website files only and you will be forced to remove your emails from their server.

Never trust these guys on their fake promises.

Hostgator - very bad hosting.

There are other who are out there who offer real value for money.

Allan

3 — 

Try to cancel, but they don't co-operate

Required to verify myself to reset my access so I could cancel my hosting as the domain was de-registered in December 2017. Got no response from support via email so I had to go online to chat and make it clear that I need to reset my credentials to get access to cancel hosting before next yearly charge was taken from my credit card. Finally got the procedure and sent the required info to them. I then sent them multiple request for updates for the cancellation of hosting, but still no response from support. It seems they wanted to drag out the time so they could bill me for another year of hosting a non-existent domain. Finally I get a response from them with new login credentials and guess what? They don't work, so once again they are not working with me to try and cancel the hosting, they just don't care. Responded back to tell them the credentials don't work, and once again they just ignore the response to the ticket. Checked my credit card statement and gee guess what, they billed my card before sending me the wrong login details. How convenient that they do not want to respond when someone want to cancel their service before billing happens. It works well in their favor, and the longer the muck the customer around the more they can take from their credit card.

I have kept all correspondence and it shows that I made it clear I wanted to cancel before next billing, and have even advised them that they are not to take another payment as I am trying to cancel the hosting, but they still took it. So I have now made a formal complaint to my bank requesting a refund of the charges as they are clearly defrauding customers to try and get as much money as they can be acting ignorant and ignoring requests. How stupid are these people when you tell them you want to cancel and you want to do it before next billing, and then magically they seem to become unresponsive, send incorrect information, drag it out as long as possible, all in an effort to charge me another year of hosting for a domain that no longer exists.

Be warned, they are very dishonest given their actions, and they do not respond to support issues for weeks/months which is totally unacceptable and doesn't make sense as to why they would do this unless they want to rip people off.

It's rather sad as I have given them nothing but top scores and high praise for their hosting over the past few years, but get ripped off in the end for all my efforts.

My opinion is to find another hosting company that has good reviews when it comes to how they treat customers.

Kim

1 — 

WORST SERVICE - HIDDEN CHARGES

I have had multiple hostgator accounts over the years and now I have finally reached the last attempt in dealing with this company. The constant sign-ups for unsolicited items is too much.

They have a horrible support system, they have actually removed support tickets from their site, making you sit on chat for support to only be passed off to the next possibly less informed agent.

DO NOT BUY HOSTGATOR - GO TO A BIG COMPANY like AWS if you want real quality.

Michael

1 — 

getting nowhere

my old hosting was about to be up for renewal, so I thought I would shop around. I could get 3 years at hostgator for the price of 1 year at my old host. so I made the switch. its been two weeks since starting the process and I currently do not have my website. when I originally contacted them to ask questions, I told them I am very unknowledgeable on how all this hosting and transferring works and repeatedly asked if I switch to them if my website will be fully switched and transferred so I wouldnt have to redo the whole thing. yes was the answer multiple times. now its...well theres waiting for this and waiting for that... and fill out this form and do this blah blah blah. so my "website" finally came up today (only on my phone, not on my desktop) but it wasn't all of my information and hard work. it was basically a blank page. so after 20 minutes of waiting for a chat person they tell me to fill out a form. I don't know "the answers" I am supposed to put in the form spaces and apparently neither do they. total waste of time. not to mention, you ask them a question and it takes 5-7 minutes to reply each time. I eventually ended the chat because it.. once again... got me nowhere!! I'm not sure whoever they have for their chat support really know what they are doing. so here I am...no website STILL. saving the amount of $$ is not worth all this hassle.

jamie

1 — 

Gateway timeout & dire support

Signed up with these in July 2017 and it has been a nightmare. We use it to host test websites for clients in development and the 502 - Bad Gateway error is now almost a permenant thing. I gave up about 10 days ago and asked support to close my account but support is so bad they have not even responded yet. I have no idea where the 99% uptime stats are coming from as we have had less than 50%.

Jennifer H

1 — 

Good hosting turned bad

My first site in 2013 was on the babyplan by hostgator. My dad recommended them as he had been with them for years before that. I loved their customer service and platform. So when my mom wanted me to build her a website I used hostgator in 2015. It was wonderful and customer service was great. Then in January 2018 I built by boyfriend's website and we had some real problems that still haven't been worked out. It started with being double billed for multiple accounts when there was only one. That was worked out and I tried to contact them about site speeds but they couldn't help, it was like they weren't even listening. The final straw was when I wanted to add an additional site to my mom's account and the website place holder was this weird search site and even when I redirected and downloaded Word Press it was still there. I called them about it and they didn't know what I was talking about and wouldn't help me. So I went to SiteGround and the experience has been wonderful. My site isn't up yet but the place holder is really cute...it says that a really great website is about to be born. I really love siteground so far and I am so sorry that Hostgator has become such a bad hosting site.

Dave

2 — 

Customer Support

The customer service guys are not knowledgeable and I used to contact them 5-6 times to get a reasonable customer support guy to fix an issue. I am running a web company and during the renewals I am moving the hosting to new providers. They were good few years back and now awful. Customer support people raising my BP, especially while talking to ladies.

Heather

2 — 

Terrible wait times every time you call

I have had Hostgator for several years. I am currently on hold for over SEVENTEEN MINUTES at 9pm. That is typical; every time I call I know I will face a loooooong wait time. I wait so long it makes me wonder if there’s even anyone there. I recently opened an account with another hosting company and they also have 24/7 support and answer the phone as it rings without any hold time. I hate calling Hostgator.

Fritz

1 — 

Very Negative support chat experience

I have had HostGator as host for my company website and other websites for years. Mostly it has been a positive experience.

However, I just looked at my billing for December and found HostGator charged me for Domain Privacy. They don’t tell me for which of my 4 domains in the bill, and NONE of my domains has Domain Privacy enabled. It’s only a $12.95 error, but I chatted them up to clear up the problem.

I gave the person the invoice number. From that should should be able to see everything…

The support person asked me several, “Which domain has Domain Privacy enabled?”

I kept saying NONE. I DO NOT HAVE DOMAIN PRIVACY. WHY AM I CHARGED?

They kept saying they were looking into it…

I had to explain the issue 3 times.

I asked them which domain does that invoice ## pertain to?

After nearly an hour in the support chat window, the support person had to write up a ticket to get billing people to look into it. Why didn’t they do that to start with?!?

So, HostGator wasted my time and probably more than $12.95 for 1 hour of that support person plus more money for the next person that looks at the ticket… DUMB DUMB DUMB

When I have time, I’ll look into other hosting options.

Ismail

1 — 

Worst hosting company

Hostgator are the worst hosting company you could ever imagine. no response from customer service and i was advised to send an email [email protected] but there is no response from anyone either. This is week number 4 and my services are still down, my whole company business depends on the hosting plan. They have canceled my purchase due to account verification and refunded my payment, then i went to hell an back trying to reconnect it. Got charged gain on the 27th Dec 2017 and was promised 24h to 48h for reconnection but nothing happened until this minute. Customer service says they have no idea why my dedicated server package has not been active until now! (Who is supposed to know?) My paid domains have been deleted and I have no control over them, some got released back to the public! Useless service and if I get to rate them I will give them zero stars. Wonder what the reply on my comment will be other than “We are sorry for your bad experience, please send an email to feedback and we will look into this issue”. Well, I have done that 4 times already! I made an international call and I was kept on hold for 53 minutes and then the guy answered and told me it is out of his control, he has no explanation why this is happening and tht he can cancel my account for me if I wanted! . No responsibility, not professionalism and they had a huge negative impact on my company. Stay away from this Hostgator.

Yucai

1 — 

Just the worst, can't be worse

I hosted with hostgator. Now I regret my decision 100%. SQL server been having issues in the past 2 days. Now, the ftp server is down too. How are they 99.9% up time? That is simply a LIE! Their customer support is also THE WORST I have ever experienced. I contact them via live chat. I was told there was no error, I told the support member to check the error log, and he literally just refused. Just refused… I don’t even know where to begin… Hostgator will be gone, it won’t be long!

Katt

2 — 

Terrible live chat cust. serv.

I used their live chat twice to resolve an issue. Both times the customer service reps took a while to respond when I asked questions and left me waiting. The first rep could not even type a proper English sentence. It was full of run on sentences and misspelled words. Hostgator needs to check on who they are hiring and insure that they have the basic communication skills.

Mark O

2 — 

HostCrooks*

I have been a customer at HostGator for 3 years, both in domain and hosting. I had a .com domain for 2 years, and it expired/lost it, and made a .net domain (with HostGator, again) and transferred my site to that. Within a week of transferring files e.t.c. the site was up and running smoothly. I run my site passively as it doesn’t require maintenance and I am busy in school to keep it updated, but it serves as a platform for prospect graduate students to enhance their standardized test taking abilities. After 6 months I check up on my website, only to be greeted with a big fat red “This domain is suspended” and a paragraph under it about failure to verify the email address. For 6 months, I was paying hosting and domain for NOTHING, for HostGator to publish that page as if I violated a terms and conditions or the law. I had never received an email from HostGator. I spent an hour with online support as they tried to figure out the email situation and finally I received an actual email. The resolution was that, finally receiving an email and being told to wait another 2 days for the site to go back live. I paid for an annual hosting and domain, only to utilize half of it while HostGator shut down my site because I did not verify my email. The same email I had used prior with my .com domain and hosting for 2 years. As soon as my plan ends, I will be migrating to a hosting company that are not thieves, regardless if the price is extra. Avoid this company.

Mike N

1 — 

Poor Support

Same ticket: 10 hours for a response, then 8 hours till the next one. 2 hours after that (total of 20 hours in to the issue) I called and spoke to a live person. After an hour and a half on the phone with them, I was told sorry, but there’s nothing they can do about it.

What is ‘it’? The type of ssl that I purchased requires both an organization, and an organizational unit. Thier csr generating form has a field for the unit, but it doesn’t incorporate it in the csr generated. But they’ll be more than happy to sell me their overpriced ssl, which would work.

Stephen L

1 — 

Support defensive and out-of-their-depth

I was perfectly satisfied with Dreamhost except for one thing: the very low quality of email services. Hostgator has been fine and especially email — fast and dependable. The most frustrating aspects of Hostgator are (1) the technical shallowness of their Tech Support, (2) therefore, the defensiveness of their Tech Staff … to the point where they cannot cooperate in problem-solving, and (3) the undependability of their support tools. On Dreamhost I saw maybe 2,000 visitors each week. When I migrated to Hostgator, the hit rate reduced to nearly nil. Huh?! Just not plausible! So, I asked a dozen friend to visit my site simultaneously while I did an “Update Now” on their stats-reporting software. It registered *no one*. I then looked at their raw data and saw 100 records piling up. I alerted the Hostgator tech that they had a bug. Her response: “We can’t help it if your site is unpopular(!)” So buried in defensivness that can’t be bothered with a solid bug report. TIme to move on. But to which host service?

R. R

1 — 

Slow and woeful support

Hostgator used to be OK 5-10 years ago but in 2017 they are well behind. Woeful support, slow servers and Hostgator policies if anything goes wrong are woeful. Once they issue an invoice, they call it your balance even if it is wrong or not what you want.

Save yourself the heartache. Don’t sign up to Hostgator.

Alejandro

1 — 

I regret chosing Hostgator

Hostgator tries to double or triple charge me early for the ssl certificate and other charges. Maybe there is problem with the billing department set up or something, but since I brought it up to them year after year I suspect that they are actually trying to bank this way. It is extremely anying having to solve the same overcharge issues early, especially after my website’s certificate expires and I mis business. All in all, they really suck!

Eben A

2 — 

Horrible customer care

My client’s usage exceeded the hostgator limit according them, even though it is unlimited shared hosting. They blocked and suspended the account, and client could not use POP/IMAP to retrieve emails as requested by Hostgator to free up space. We requested for 48horus to allow the client to retrieve all emails via outlook, but no one has ever bothered to respond to the tickets. Support tickets have gone answered for 12days now. I have engaged live chat support several times and they all claim to forward my requests to senior admins, who alone have the right to unlock the account for backup of emails. After 10 days of no response, we had to get a new hosting for the client, so they can use their emails. It is a shame how they claim to care about customers, but take it from me, it is a lie.

Tanner

1 — 

Terrible service and sell your info

This is my first experience with HostGator, while some have had a great experience this has not been the case for me. None of the techs have ever been able to explain why I will always have “builder” in front of my domain name despite the migration having been completed now for over two weeks. How dumb will that look on a business card? I am well within my 45 day money back guarantee window and when I ask for this using online chat its crickets.

Overall a very sad organization but that is what happens when you are bought by a larger organization which also owns several other hosting companies such as sitey, bluehost and ipage I believe.

Anyway I will likely stick with my FB page or go with wix, they seem to be more no non-sense. Bottom line buyer beware the online tech support is not hit or miss.

Shawn

2 — 

BAD CUSTOMER SERVICE

Very disappointed, they just charged me 150$ for their service, After 10 days hard to get response, I almost became rude to get respond from them, they promised me to give me good discount on this year, i had a open ticket for that but they did not give me any discount.

I was with this company for 5 years and this company started really good but they are not good now , They know how to charge people’s credit card, you realize they charged you for un-necessary services which you never know about these services and if you have free time you have to fight with them to return that money to your account, poor customer service. If you value your time, DON’T GO WITH HOSTGATOR

Dan

3 — 

Worst Ever

I reactivated an account that someone tried to access in 2008. Not even the name on the account but yesterday I signed on to a new account and they apparently already had me in the system. I said great, but come to find out it was frozen based on their Fraud department wanting me to submit all this info to verify the transaction. Great business practices. Instead of saying ok it is active but if you dont verify in X days we will deactivate my account. The rep said nothing about this issue or else I would have made a new account and avoided the hoolie. Regardless now I am waiting to the fraud idiots to review my email and activate my account. Meanwhile I am loosing $1000’s every minute that server isn’t provisioned. Thanks Hostgator. Oh yea the best part is these a holes dont have direct contact numbers. LOL what a joke.

Robert

2 — 

Decent service, but abysmal support

Our company has rented a dedicated server from HostGator for a couple of years, as well as using them as a registrar. The uptime and performance of the server have been as you’d expect. Mostly no issues. However, their customer service is basically non-existent. Their live chat operators basically don’t understand anything about the products they are working with, and will often disappear for 10 minutes at a time without saying anything, and then come back with an answer to a question I didn’t even ask

You might think that this isn’t much of an issue since you might not need support that much, but when you do need it, it’s usually when something has gone wrong. If your website has gone down, or your server is not responding, and you need qualified help with that issue, that’s when you’ll be in for a big problem. Your agent will not know anything, and all they will be able to do is make a ticket after making you wait for an hour or more. That ticket may be answered quickly, but more often it will be simply closed without comment, or closed as ‘Resolved’ when the problem still exists, or just ignored for days, and perhaps even weeks.

Currently, we have a ticket that’s been on hold for over a week now, because we transferred a domain into HostGator and it hasn’t shown up in our control panel. That ticket has been closed twice over a two week period with no explanation, and any actual responses have basically said that they don’t know what the issue is, and they’ll be back in touch when they do.

A few days ago they charged us $4000 on one of our credit cards for no reason that we can discern, relating to an invoice that is not due for quite a while. When we contacted them they, of course, had no explanation, and couldn’t figure out why it was charged. They couldn’t refund it though. They have to, you guessed it, open a ticket.

NATHALIE

1 — 

HORRIBLE

Very bad customer support. They made it very complicated to access my account but gladly and very easily accepted my 300 dollars for 3 years.

as of now, I stopped using it but got no refund.

Stay away from them at all cost.

Angela

2 — 

Clueless support

I work full time, and act as the web guru for a business my sister and I own. I don’t have time for complications–when I purchased a WordPress hosting package from HostGator I expected them to walk me through what needed to be done. For some odd reason I have one login my “customer account” and one for my “control panel” perhaps so these can be given to different people? No idea why. I went with HostGator because I was able to use WordPress’ free period to get my website up and looking the way I wanted, before I paid for it–since I work full time all this had to be done when I had spare time. I paid for my package and suddenly my website was down. I called, and tech support was nice and seemed very helpful, and my website was up again. This happened over and over, NOT ONCE, until long after my “free transfer” had expired, did ANYONE ask me if I had requested a migration. WTF? I feel like everything I want to do is more complicated than it needs to be–so they can get to pay for someone else to do it. My full time job is software support, I get paid to figure this stuff out–and I have a hard time figuring out HostGator! My sister and I just decided that it was a lesson learned and money down the tube. We’ve given up and we’re going with a different service.

Charles I

2 — 

Not worth the hassle

I spent over 10 years with HostGator. For the first 7 or so, things were great. But around 2015, their performance began to slip. By 2016, they left me no choice (as my sites were down for over a week and no responses from support) but to move my host.

Thus, I don’t recommend their hosting. I also had a domain that was registered with them that I forgot was there (long term commitment). Now, I’ve been trying to transfer that domain and it’s been 9 days and they still haven’t released the domain registry to the new domain registry company.

So, in short – STAY AWAY!!

Yasar A

5 — 

HostGator Approved to be The BEST!

Recently I migrated my blog from my local hosting to HostGator and found the service much appreciated.

It took me just a few hours my entire blog along with all the data, plugins, themes, posts and CPANEL to be migrated to HostGator’s fast Turbo servers.

Feel much better with their Service.<

Niels B

2 — 

Make customers pay for security problems

I have a reseller account at Hostgator. I am using a very long and auto generated password to access my reseller account (WHM).

In the last few months the reseller account has been hacked and hackers have deleted all my sites. What is important to note about a reseller account (WHM) is that it is just a web interface hosted and managed by Hostgator which allows you to configure different things, such as setting up new sites and DNS. The WHM is not a site in itself and I have no freedom to configure WHM itself.

Even so, I received the same response from their customer support for about 20 times, that they will take no responsibility for security problems in my account because I might have compromised security by putting malware or scripts on the accounts. Every time they ignore the fact that none of my sites were hacked, only their own WHM platform, managed by them.<

Finally, today, after 3 months, someone actually read what I wrote. He said that they couldn’t know for sure whether I have a keylogger installed on my laptop, so that might be how it was hacked. The key here is they won’t investigate it at all, because who knows, it could possibly be a keylogger on my laptop that showed the password to a hacker.

They don’t seem to mind spending hours after hours sending me bullshit answers in the support, but spending any time at all to actually look into their own security problems is not interesting. Why do they spend so much energy NOT solving any problems? Who does it benefit. Certainly not me. Certainly not themselves, because they just manage to piss off a large customer.

They want me to pay them to look into their own security problems. No thanks.

Additionally, at the first hack I discovered the issue before they managed to make any damage to my account. However, they acknowledged receiving my message, but explicitly refused to do anything to prevent the hacker from causing harm to my account. Again, even if they are just following processes, what kind of process is this? Who came up with these rules that the support team is apparently following.

However, I would like to acknoledge that they at least have been responding to my messages regularly. That’s why they get a rating of 2 instead 1.

Sara

3 — 

Horrible tech support

Started out loving Hostgator. They were fantastic when I was migrating our websites over from GoDaddy and our loading speeds have vastly improved. However, once we were signed up and websites were migrated, the support went downhill really fast. Not sure if they have different chat supports for prospective customers vs. current customers but I spent two hours on chat with two different agents, both of whom were unable to tell me how to access the FTP. Clearly these agents were in India, not America and helping multiple customers at the same time as they would disappear for 10-20 minutes at a time then come back and try to help me with the wrong problem. They had absolutely no clue what they were doing. On top of that, Hostgator did not migrate our entire website, they left our podcast, which is over 20GB in size. When I reopened the ticket, I called and they said it would be taken care of immediately. Fast forward a week and guess what? Nada. I feel like it’s been a bait and switch with the tech support. My advice – always call, don’t do chat support because you’re being sent off to Bangalore. If you are highly technical and can handle your websites yourself, that’s great, but for people like myself who need help occasionally, it’s disappointing.

Patrick

1 — 

Customer service is usel3ss

Don’t waste your time calling or contacting support in any way other than their ticket system. Nobody can or will help you… The ticket system can take days to get a response, and it may not even be relevant.

Pete

2 — 

Why is cancelling so hard?

I set up an account, but ended up not using it, after almost a year, Hostgator told me that they were going to charge me, unless I cancelled by following a link. I followed the link, hit cancel, and thought I was done. A month later, I got notices that they were trying to process payment, but couldn’t. Knowing that I didn’t want it, I thought they would cancel. After 4 declined charges, they got my bank not only to give them all the money in my account, but actually overdraw it. It was an account that I thought was closed, but turned out it has some money, but that wasn’t enough, they wanted to take more than I had.

Eric

2 — 

Hard to cancel

My site was up to autorenew at $262.80, up from $50. I was no longer using the site and had almost forgotten about it. I clicked the link to cancel and my password did not work. I thought this was odd because I use a password manager (Lastpass) to hold my credentials. I tried logging on to the billing portal instead and it worked. I am currently on a 10 minute hold for live chat in hopes of cancelling.

Ed

1 — 

Horrible

No speed, no resources and the worst service I’ve ever seen. No email support, just chat and most times they don’t know how to help.

Goran

1 — 

Bad bad bad...

I am using Business Cloud package and in time of writing this my site is down, they messed up something about my SSL and still waiting for response. It might be that hostgator was great sometime ago. But now it is not.

Also too many restrictions in hosting account.

Harish G

1 — 

extremely slow server

I have done big mistake for going with business hosting plan with hostgator. I have paid for whole year for more than $599 USD 6 months ago, I have never seen inefficient company and such a slow server and it was better off if I donate $ 600 dollars to some charity organisation. I would not recommend any one this company. its shit company with shitty service

Dan

5 — 

I'm satisfied

I guess I’m one of the view lucky who hasn’t any complaints against HostGator.

But then again, I’m using their Cloud hosting (not the regular shared hosting).

My website is up most of the time – I assume it’s around 99.99% and the loading time is pretty fast. Especially compared with iPage which I used to use.

Kelle S

1 — 

Uptime sucked

I spent a little over a year with Hostgator. In that time, I started with a Hatchling plan for what was a WordPress brochure website (not a ton of traffic, so we didn’t need a lot from hosting). Our uptimes was bad. Really bad. We’d have 20-40 minute outages on a regular basis and load speeds were really slow. When I called, they told me that this was a function of the plan I was on. So I upgraded to the Business Plan. And NOTHING CHANGED. They just charged me more money for the same shitty service. So I migrated all my sites off of their servers. Now they’re trying to get me back. Good luck with that.

Tony

5 — 

So far pretty ok

A few hours ago I signed up for the hostgator shared-business (dedicated ip plus ssl) for 3 years with 60% discount which seemed like a good deal. Previously I’d been with midphase for 3 years whose shared-business plan offered a little bit more (included a free domain) for only a little more money (extra us$20 over 3 years) and I would have stayed with midphase except the renewal was more expensive. I can’t remember who else I’d been with prior to that but over the years there have been many that I’d not use again.

I read some of the bad reviews of hostgator on this site and whilst it may be too soon to have a balanced opinion here is what I’ve found:

The initial purchase using paypal and automated site setup was fast and efficient.

They have the usual billing and cpanel arrangement that looks a little different but works the same as other hosting sites.

I didn’t have much configuring to do since I only have a few email accounts and uploaded a few folders of web content but for what I did it worked fine.

The real pain I felt about the hostgator support is that they don’t have support tickets (that I could see), they only have online chat. So far I’ve had 2 support calls (online chat) which took longer than I wanted to wait (about 15mins each) regarding SSL but both times got a resolution. Had I been able to submit a support ticket via email or online (as with midphase) then I would have been happier than sitting and waiting for the progress bar to slowly inch across the page before chatting.

Thus the lack of tickets takes a few points away from them but otherwise they seem (so far) to be doing everything right.

Rick C

2 — 

Poor Support

I found Hostgator to be difficult to work with and slow. It took a full two days to get a domain name transferred and support would rather argue with me than to help. Their web site reports “error!” rather than status information and they tell me that is what they intend it to do.

Martin P

1 — 

SSL Certificate

Hostgator does not offer an SSL Certificate service. If you need an SSL certificate, witch almost very one today need one because without it. Your e-mail and your website will be tags as not being secure and this will cause your e-mail to end up in a spam folder and your website will be tagged by Google or other search engines as a none secure website. You do not want any of these things to happen to you. For Hostgator to not support SSL certificate properly is very unprofessional and definitely can cause major problems for their clients. Hostgator not offering a proper SSL service is like if your bank telling you that if you don’t renew your bank pin every year and the bank will not remind you it’s your responsibility and it could take up to 1 week to set it up again. But the bank also does not tell you this information. Would you use this bank? No, you would use the bank down the street that does it all for you because you need access to your bank accounts and this is what you expect your bank will do for you. Hostgator is a hosting company this is what they are supposed to do. Do not use Hostgator if you need an SSL certificate. There are many other good companies that offer this service and will not tell you that you are in a queue and we will get to you when it is your turn.

Dan P

2 — 

About my reseller account

I have a reseller account and my main account exceeded bandwidth with zero warning. Still don’t know why, because I can’t get in. There is still lots of bandwidth in the total reseller account, but because the main account is exceeded, I can’t get in to see what is going on.

The Tech was silent but I could feel the agreement when I said only terrible management would not give him to power to give 10 MB whatever of bandwidth to my main account to see what was going on, do a 5 sec adjustment to the main account to keep it open, keep our emails flowing for the biz.

Keep in mind, the reseller account as a whole still had surplus bandwidth, but because the controlling account had exceeded, with no warning, I cannot get in to fix anything. There should be an auto adjust for this.

Okay, there was a workaround, that maybe Tech should have known, so going from 3 to 7 and Tech was apologetic for time (25 mins) so I guess 8, as I am a Telus ISP Internet customer in Canada and therefore am not hard to please. Why not switch? There is an unspoken plunderocracy among the 3 big ISP players in Canada, which includes tech support that varies widely, but at the low end, which is most of the time, would fit into a Monty Python sketch.

So I didn’t get cut off, broken promises for call back or pretty well anything else, having to repeat some very basic message over and over, to the same person, like separate modem rather than traditional combo modem/router they put into houses and businesses alike; so that I can hook up a router that most businesses need with separate modem etc. etc. The parrot’s not dead, it’s pining for the fjords should be Telus’ greeting message.

RM

3 — 

Problems with email, otherwise good

I have hosted my client sites with Hostgator for several years and was really happy till lately.

Recently, Time-Warner began blocking emails to their customer from Hostgator IP addresses because some Hosgator customers were spamming or simply sending too many emails to TWC email customers. This means that my clients cannot use their email aliases to email any TWC customer, which has caused me no small amount of embarrassment. And my clients were sending only about two emails daily!

I have addressed the issue with Hostgator many times, and finally reached level 3 tech support. They told me that if I changed to a cloud account the issue would be corrected. I did, and it wasn’t. All they could say, then, was that there was nothing they could do. In other words, it’s my problem, even though it’s their servers that are getting blocked.

In general, Hostgator will work hard to help you resolve your Joomla issues. But if you plan to use email aliases with your site, stay away from this host. Tonight, I am moving to Siteground

Gabrielle

1 — 

HostGator is Awful! Avoid at All Costs.

I have been a longtime HostGator customer, but I’m so frustrated with their customer service and increased rates, as well as the propensity to be flagged as SPAM, that I am going to switch providers. At times I’ve gotten very good customer service, but recently I have had terrible reps who do not listen and who do nothing to solve a problem. I just spent 90 minutes with a rep named Emily who was awful and falsely concluded there was no problem, so she did nothing to help resolve the matter which has been ongoing for quite some time. Wait time can be hours just connecting with a chat agent. I’ve had bad experiences with HostGator for years, and each time I’ve been convinced to upgrade my package to a more expensive one. I’ve done so with hopes the higher priced package would help the problems go away, but that has not been the case. I really despise my experience with HostGator and will be leaving as soon as possible!

RR

5 — 

So far, so good

I used HostGator when creating my first blog a year ago, and it made the process simple and fast. No problem ever with gaining access to the site, never out of service. An chat support person recently walked me through logging into the cPanel for the first time, and I love all the detailed traffic metrics it provides. Getting a freelance IT person for website help in NYC costs $50 to $175 an hour, so I really appreciated that Host Gator offered that chat support free of charge. The yearly membership fee did double once the second year began but, hey, Host Gator has to make money somehow. And to be fair to other web hosting services, I have nothing to compare HostGator with either favorably or unfavorably because it’s the only one I’ve tried.

G P

1 — 

Disgraceful service

Worst service I have ever seen from any company as a new customer. My first transition with HostGator. Simply transferring a domain name to them. Simple technical problem arose. Like Groundhog Day, I kept calling — getting the same recommended solution — following recommendation — and getting no result. I wasted many hours on the phone with these pleasant — but obviously incompetent — people. They refused, over and over again, not to put a supervisor on the line. Just terrible.

SMD

1 — 

Simply awful.

First, I willingly admit I am a newbie. The jargon used in hosting/domain service is beyond me. Still, I figured I could muddle through building my own site. I already owned my domain, just needed a place to host.

I initially purchased a 3 year “hatchling” service for my very small business website. 4 pages, nothing complicated.

After 4 months, it became clear that I needed to add a blog.

In poking around the HostGator control panel, looking at plans and comparing prices, I found I had inadvertently signed up for a 3 year professional package “addon”. I called the company to request the add on be canceled, as I wasn’t yet ready to commit to an upgrade. Fine, no problem, money refunded.

Come to find out that my entire hosting package was canceled; I no longer had access to the Web Builder program. I called an spoke to a kind service rep who said that after an account is canceled there nothing that can be done. I got passed around from rep to rep, ultimately was told that canceling an “addon” is the same as canceling an entire account. I argued that calling it an “addon” implies that a basic service is maintained.

I finally got all my money refunded. I will certainly look elsewhere for hosting.

Victor M

1 — 

For your sake, stay away.

Everything started off well but things only went south from there. My website went down and they took days to respond. Then I called their customer support line, only to be told they could only help me by email. This would be just fine if they could respond to email promptly. I had to wait a week for an email reply. A week. The reply was terse and unhelpful. My problem took weeks to resolve. By then I had just had it. I asked for my money back hoping to move somewhere where “customer support” was understood to provide support for customer. A novel idea. Not here. Not at HostGator.

Lidia

1 — 

NO REFUND!

So, I have bought a 3month package days ago thinking that I had 45 days to cancel.

I have contacted customer service and they guide me on how to get the refund (you have to cancel the whole account). They keep coming back saying that they scheduled my cancellation for July (end of my em package). They are avoiding at all costs to give me the refund and they advertise it as something they absolutely do!!!

Just don’t – really don’t use HostGator unless you have money to throw away.

B

1 — 

They Are Scammers Stay Away

Hostgator has ripped me off on multiple occasions, ranging from not renewing my domains when they were set to auto renew, to the complete opposite, in both cases they charged me exorbitant fees to remedy the problem. In addition they have billed me for servers that I never ordered and refused to refund me the money, and never once offered to fix the problem or to pay me back for the money that they stole from me.

Stay away! There are better services out there!

Laura J

2 — 

Terrible Service for Business

We have been taken offline twice this month by hostgator. At the beginning of the month and at the end of the month. They said we were over our 25% server capacity, but we are a small business website. They then tried to upsale me $4,000 for a dedicated server. I was paying $19.99 and they wanted me to upgrade to $200 a month. When I talked at that, they said I needed to hire a WordPress professional, which I have been using WordPress for 7 years on several sites without problem. They happened to have one available for $49 dollars extra a month. So I can pay at least an extra $50 a month and have my website put back on or I will have to go back and forth with them. I am still not online. I was fine yesterday and for the last 22 days. I was fine 2 years before that, but now, we haven’t done anything new to the website or anything today, we have been taken offline.

If you have a business that uses a website DO NOT USE HOSTGATOR!!!

Vanessa

2 — 

Just stay away!

Stay away people! Their support is terrible. I had 4 different conversations trying to fix a basic problem and the last one told me he couldn’t help because I don’t host with them. Well…. I don’t host with anyone else, I get invoices from them, I have an account that I can log into, and a whois says I am hosted with them. I was logged into my account at the time of this online chat, so I don’t know what he was talking about. Obviously just confused and frustrated that he isn’t trained and can’t help his customers. They were ok when I first signed up in 2012, but have gone significantly downhill since.

Igor

1 — 

They used to be good

2 Words: Just Don’t.

Alright, where do we start? I have been using them for one month, started all great with awesome blogs and research, great hosting provider! Got a Business Cloud plan, all is good… They sold me Sitelock fix, for protection, there was an error and Sitlock called me and said it’s useless to have Sitelock fix, if it finds any error I may be charged $300-500 USD to fix it, or I can get a plan only for $170 a month.

CodeGuard backup, you need backups? Sold this useless thing for $52 that dose absolutely what I can do manually, only it doesn’t work! 5 GB for 1 year up to 10 websites. Took me 2 tickets and still has errors on restore and backup (does not work), I spent 3 phone calls.

SSL certificate, alright here is the fun part, I got 3 websites and I wanted 3 of them, after the first SSL certificate… I paid, 3 days nothing… I had to call them 3 times and each time they told me to wait… Then they said it’s because I have Sitelock on my website, and it was somehow blocking ect. Reality, they said it will take them 8 hours to fix it (In 3 days they figured out noone installed it, it was supposed to be installed within 4-8 hours), after it was installed I had to fix my website and Codeguard didn’t work…

Alright, they said I would get a free Toll Free number, never got it, after 3 calls, they opened a ticket and said no estimated time, something they will fix, but can’t say when, just wait. 30 Days so far nothing, no Toll free number.

After they charged my SSL, they figured out I had it for free on my account, so I got a credit, not a refund of $39,99 USD.

Now, I added few more domains, got 1 more SSL certificate, now it was more fun… 10 hours of phone calls in 2 days and 8-9 people from support involved…

I had a redirect from one domain to another, it was just a domain for redirect, but I wanted to make it a website, got an SSL, and paid another $39.99, they installed it over night, the next day may main website is not working… All my domains got some glitch and are redirected to a primary domain, without me doing anything with DNS. So I call HostGator and say that after install of SSL, somehow, I think because of redirect the SSL that you installed has damaged my other SSL on another domain…

They said no! It can’t be, 1st person didn’t really understand what is the issue, if website is not working, it’s not their issue… Second person said, there is no changes in DNS, oops no idea, need a higher level admin! I’ll put you on hold… 2.5 hours on hold no answer… I started on chat with support member, he sid it is not them! It is CloudFlare! I said, take the damn phone, I’m on hold for 2.5 hours… No solution…

I call again… On hold, it is CloudFalre! Its the only possible way… I said, guys, again after install of SSL, you damaged the other SSL… No, it can’t be.

F. IT, changed my name servers to Hostgator, calling again! Again, next day…. Same story, no solution, transfer, on hold, transfer! Admin almighty is here! It is your code, we are managing servers not the code… Contact the developer… I am the freaking developer, and there is no problem with the code… On hold, on hold, reading all tickets, its your code… Transfer to another highest level of IT (Finally someone who knows something), he checked everything, checked my code and finally, came to my solution, it was their SSL install that damaged my other website… Now 2 days, 2 mornings around 10 hours in total of phone calls and chats, around 8-9 people to figure out all kinds of stories to fix one thing that I told them in first 5 min, SSL was installed wrongly…

Finally, I got a sitelock on the website for one month, no total amount, they charged me for 36 months! Then I got refund and guess what? Lost around $20 CAD on conversion rates.

1 month, I have over 12 tickets and 3 of them are open and not resolved, for every dollar I gave them, I had to fight with unqualified tech support. People are working, laughing with each other, and punting you on hold when someone in the office is talking to them, typing on the keypad some other things wile you are explaining the issue to them.

Just stay away, I am looking for another host and HostGator is just useless waste of time and money. I am lucky my website is in development, it is just impossible to imagine the impact if I had customers there.

dlee

3 — 

Changes on the fly

Uptime is not a good as advertised and they will make changes without notification that will cause your website to become unusable. The do maintenance during core business hours without notification. Change limits without notification. Change software and subscription support without notification. Then you’re scrambling to get your customer’s website back up. Do not recommend. Use Justhost or Amazon AWS.

Oveis

1 — 

Terrible support

The support staff is unprofessional and ignorant about almost everything related to their services. They take hours/days to get back to you with no useful response. In my most recent interaction when I didn’t get a response for hours, I complained to a supervisor and followed up on my issue, he ended up blaming me for being impatient, told me that the agent was new, and never even tried to address my problem after that. lol. Yes it’s cheap for a reason. Stay away.

Ulvi M

1 — 

About their website builder

I subscribed HG hosting a couple of months. Since last December I also subscribed for HG professional website builder. My complaint is not about the speed of server or something like this. My complaints are for the customer service.

I have contacted them for dozens of time asking to solve issues with the HG website builder. They unexipedly suspended my plan for website builder then issued new invoice for payment. Despite the fact that I had already paid for the service. I created tickets for issues and they even didn’t care about what I asked. Imagine, I kept on paying for the service subscription, but no service. Yet another, they told me that they must terminate the original addon and then they would launch for new subscription. 3 months website which I built would be gone. No other way. So I don’t know what to do. I want to sue them. Because I worked on my website for 3 months to customise and suddenly they said I need rebuild the site again. How it is even possible? I can’t access the HT professional site builder, although I paid for that.

NotApplicable

1 — 

Avoid like the plague

Since being purchased by EIG, HostGator has become truly awful. The service is poor. Support is a joke. They won’t even let you create support tickets any more. When you do finally hear from them, they often don’t fix things and they are always making excuses. They will leave you hanging for a week or longer, even on a critical issue. Avoid them like the plague.

John

2 — 

Customer Service Review

I have only been with Hostgator for a week, and needed Customer Support for 2 things.

A password reset.

To get the completed website I have on my computer live and online.

The password reset button does not work for my work email for some reason. I went to chat support, and it was painful. They asked me for my email confirmation about 6 times… to check my spam about 6 times. It was about a 5 hour process because I would get replies every 8 minutes, but if I did not response in 2 minutes I got the “are you there?”

FINALLY got it fixed, so I figured I would ask about getting the website I have completed on my computer live. I asked if there was 1 click integration, and this was a mistake as I have totally confused the person I am chatting with to a point of no return.

So I, starting to finally lose my cool say “I don’t care, I apologize I am getting salty but this has been a crazy long process with you guys and I just want to know where to go to get the website put up. I don’t care how many clicks I just want to get it online.” The chat person comes back and says “sorry it took so long, but that was the fastest way to do the password reset.” HOLY MOTHER OF GOD ARE YOU SERIOUS. LETS MOVE ON FROM THE PASSWORD RESET AND JUST TELL ME HOW TO GET MY WEBSITE ONLINE. That was how I felt on the inside.

After condensing my emotions and writing to them, I have still not received an answer.

This is the worst customer service experience I have had in 31 years on this planet.

Selby F

1 — 

Worst Customer Service

It wasn’t until I started receiving calls from customers that I realized our website was down. After spending 86 minutes on the phone trying to get a straight answer from 3 different techs (the first-tier service is utterly useless) I finally received an email stating that our site had been taken down due to resource abuse. I don’t dispute there was a problem, and I don’t object to the action they took. The issue is that they DID NOT EVEN BOTHER TO NOTIFY US. A warning would’ve been best (fix this in 24 hours or we shut it off) but the very least they could’ve done was send us an email to let us know! Absolutely unforgivable.

Heidi

2 — 

Unhappy, Unimpressed...Walk away.

I purchased my Cloud Business plan in October. I had intentions of a quick website setup. Shortly after I had unplanned eye surgery on both eyes, which delayed my plans an extra month. In November as I was trying to get my website up I ran into issue after issue. This being my first time in years to create a site I was a bit dusty, but not dead. After several frustrating tries, days, hours and what not I finally found they were upgrading hardware, changing, moving servers, etc. During this time only some or none of their services would work. Each time I would finally make headway, there would be an error with a save. I’m a night owl, apparently this isn’t a good thing as none of their servers ever seemed to be working at night. Here I am feeling as flustered as ever to find that the plan I initially paid for isn’t showing up in my services. I have learned the hard way, and will never forget, that being a beginner looking for a decent web hosting site for an ecommerce store and blog to sell both digital and physical goods, that the “unlimited bandwith” and “unlimited disk space” is a joke! How they get away with these radiculous terms is amazing. My site isn’t even close to where I need it to be as it rarely runs long enough so I can get it started before I encounter a new error. Each time I log in there is a different look, or I’m sent in a continuous circle on their website from the log in screen to my Cpanel and I’m unable to get anywhere. As a beginner this has been a terrible experience. I’ve made mistakes, but I’m unable to even learn from them as Hostgator has not been consistent in how any of their software works. The new and old integration is a mess! I read a review on PCmagazine which lead me to choose Hostgator. I almost went with another hosting plan and now regret not doing so. *The money is an issue, but it’s the frustration in not even receiving an email from them of their system issues, outages, downtimes, server problems, links with breaks etc. Hostgator has sharp teeth and they are in my pants. If you are wanting a smooth experience (regardless if you are new or not), and if being up front is important to you when making business deals–then look somewhere else. AGAIN, I’m not experienced, but what I purchased and what I was given are not what it seemed to be.

Jennifer K

3 — 

They used to be good, but Now? Not so much.

They used to be good, back when I started in 2008. But on 12/24/2016 my sites were hacked and defaced. Instead of offering their own tech support, Hostgator now has a link that opens a SiteLock ad with 3 levels of service offered, starting with a $200 cleanup. When I clicked on that I was led to a “consultant” who said I instead needed to purchase a 6-month monitoring and malware cleaning service. Once the contract for that was signed, “Oh no, your sites will need in-person time, that will be an additional fee.” That was when I said “Stop. Wait.” My daughter had me cleaned up in 1/2 day. I called SiteLock, asked for a cancel and was told I’d have to pay $150 (50% of the remaining fee. Yeah that’s in the agreement that I that I signed in a moment of stress) for a service I did not need and did not want. I contacted Hostgator, and finally got to talk to someone, who said he could not find any evidence of his transaction in my site’s records. He talked to SiteLock, who of course refused to refund me. But he asked to close the ticket without addressing the two key issues: The bait-and-switch upselling of SiteLock, and Hostgator’s system failure to record these transactions originating from their site. Do not use!

NESTOR A

1 — 

HOSTGATOR IS THE WORST

I tried to use the service and cpanel, but was blocked due to duplicate payment. And after 3 months neither was capable to use my cpanel or see my website online. Started chat with a lot of people that just answer my questions with a book of QUESTIONS and Answers, answers was always the same with copy/paste. At the end using my chat the buttons was blocked and cannot ask more ANSWERS and use RATE and EXIT. VERY DISAPPOINTED with this company. Don’t believe advertise of these company. Alligators are they: eating confidence, your time and your money.

Qandeel J

2 — 

Old Sql servers

I was a big fan of Hostgator, until they started bandwidth saving activities (0.0.0.0/~username/ wont work anymore neither if you link to a element on the host) and because of that they have messed something else which I cant figure. I am unable to migrate WordPress sites to it and they are charging me first and then asking for 72 hours for migration help which I dont need. My databases are importing fine on other hosts but not on hostgator. Few months back it was working like a charm. Save your money and avoid the hassle. Go for a better hosting company, it will not only save time in the long run but will save you when you need saving, hostgator wont.

Wanda

1 — 

Cloud Business as bad as Dedicated Server

Hostgator has been a terrible experience:

Speed in USA is ok with Cloud Business package, but Speed on any other continent is terrible. We have a load time of 2-3 secs in the USA for our 2 mb fully optimized webshop but over 10 seconds in Europe (UK).

Customer service tries to tell you to upgrade to a more expensive package to improve speed even when you contact them to tell them the last upgrade did not do anything. They will charge you for existing packages when you upgrade. So if you pay cloud business 3 years and upgrade to dedicated server you will pay and the old package and the new package no refunds given either since as for most services they offer the 45 day money back guarantee does not apply.. did you not read the small letters?

45 day money back guarantee does not apply for Dedicated server, ssl certificates, privacy protection nor domains. What does it apply to I wonder?

I wish I never got fooled into going with this company following the obviously purchased reviews of this company on hosting compare websites this company is a hoax which cost me lots of money, time and lost customers due to terrible speed and service.

HG-Sad

1 — 

Hostgator-Sad-Bad-Disappointing

I am sad for myself and Hostgator. I’ve tolerated them for many many years, and through their good times and bad times. I feel sorry for their customer support and admins, because their management are idiots. They also got inexperienced fools that come in without understanding their business, their customer base, and especially not their re-sellers, and they screw things up massively (such as server settings), and create truly dumb polices. Then the support, and admins are stuck with their stupid internal rules and are forced to just give clients the runaround since they really cannot do anything on many issues. Sometimes the resolve is obvious or their client request is clear on what the action is client wants done, but the HG chat person refuses to do it. Very sad.

In addition, they will strip features and services promised, do things without giving notice, and some times it seems like they purposely cause problems to see if they can upsell you to a dedicated server or other packages. Due to their extremely dumb polices their staff gets frustrated and are rude, pushy, and dismissive to clients on chat. You can NO LONGER OPEN A TROUBLE TICKET or complain; it is not possible for you to simply submit a request on a problem (via web portal or email or phone), and are forced to wait a long long long time on chat window, for any issue, for a rep to respond, and even then he/she will refuse to open a ticket, and many times simply is not able to help. For some reason, they do not want their problems logged any longer and open a support ticket as a forced last action. After you wait a long time to get chat, then you are forced to chat for 1 hour to 2 hours that lead to frustration and lack of action and sometimes lack of understanding, or games to make you give up asking. So, if your issue does not require immediate action, or it will take time on their side to work on it, you will be forced to wait to get chat and wait on chat. Unlike most other places, you are not able to simply submit a trouble/support ticket and go on with your busy day.

Oh, they NO LONGER have a fast easy quick install of softwares, and outsourced their Quickinstall and it now SUCKS. You will be bombarded with tons of advertisements, and the quickinstall does not work on so many browser versions, it is too much to list.

Oh, forgot to mention they will breach contract of resellers and market to your client base. Quickinstall by itself will market a ton of stuff to a reseller’s base without permission to do so, and the reseller will not get a cent of the large money made. They will also have their name showing on supposed white-branded, or no-branded, or generic branded site builders (such as on pic images), server domain info, in files within cpanel, cloud stuff, etc as a means to lead people back to them or simply because the people working at Hostgator do not understand their customer bases or don’t care.

There is a ton more problems at Hostgator and with Hostgator, but I don’t have time to write 3 more pages.

Fernando C

1 — 

Stay Away!!!

I don’t know what is slower here: my site or the support. Everytime I have to open a ticket I know that I will have to wait for god knows how long until any issue is fixed.

Last time there was a hack that placecd a redirect in htaccess to some porn site. What I can say is that Hostgator made my readers see something else then bikes for an entire day.

And that is just one example. AWFUL support, horrible speed, crappy shared service. Don’t go into ito if you mean to grow your blog big eventually.

Nebih E

2 — 

Hostgator is not a good company

* On the last day of expiry of my hostgator account, I hit complete backup button and i received an instant message of I will be able to download soon after an e-mail arriving at me. But that e mail didnt come to me within 24 hours. I couldnt log in because my contract was finished the day before and I couldnt download my complete backup.

* Their customer service makes you wait 7-20 minutes. This is so long.

* They issue your new bill before the next payment date altough you uncheck automatic reneval. It means, if you turn back to them again, they will say you owe them.

* 5 years ago I began with hostgator with 5,5 USD or sth similar but this year they charged me 12,5 usd for the same baby package (they changed its name i think)

* With wordpress, they install some crap without permission and you need to uninstall them.

I got rid of them and now I am very very happy with Inmotion hosting. They have SSD drives for all plans and cheaper. My websites are rocket fast now.

Essam

1 — 

Site down to push us for purchasing dedicated server

Worst hosting company I have ever used, everything was going just fine until they sent us a ticket by 5:00 am Dubai time and said we will have to move to dedicated server, and for sure we didn’t see the message until 8:00 am when many of our customers called asking why site is down, So hostagtor didn’t wait even until we reply or even wake up

For sure i will have to move to dedicated server now because I have to, but for sure won’t continue with this bad company.

Charlie R

2 — 

Awful Tech Support

Hostgator’s tech support is simply awful. You get a junior “tech support” rep to look into the issue you’re having, who seems to be instructed to do everything he can NOT to transfer the call to someone higher up. My experience went like this: 3 hrs of excruciating wait time on the line with junior rep, kept telling him I understood if he couldn’t address the issue but to please pass it on to his supervisor; supervisor refused to get involved; 3 hrs later, junior rep said there’s nothing he could do so he’d have supervisor give a call back (never happened). In the meantime, our website was down… Currently working on transferring over to another host ASAP and hopefully Hostgator’s management will take a good look into these awful “service calls” and realize they’re on the right track to lose their customer base.

Sophie H

1 — 

They won't let you cancel!!!

I bought a domain name package for my blog. Eventually I decided to discontinue the blog and so I wanted to cancel. Yet lo and behold, they make it as hard as humanely possible for you to quit. Apart from having to actually call, it is very hard to find out how to cancel. When you finally do uncover that you have to live chat or call to cancel(there is no other method available), the live chat takes forever to load. It’s absolutely horrible. I’m going to warn all my friends and acquaintances not to use HostGator because of their terrible service.

Jonah

4 — 

Better than expected service

I have been using hostgator for almost 5 years now, and I am fairly satisfied. It’s all about ROI and based on cost I am paying for hosting, service is better than expected. Customer support needs to improve in terms of time it takes to talk to an agent but once connected the service provided is always helpful. Chat and email response is considerably slow. Overall a good value for money in my opinion. I am using HG VPS hosting, Domains and emails.

Scott

1 — 

Avoid at All Costs

My website is a bit long, so I needed a short domain that I can use on advertising material. Through GoDaddy the chosen domain was $70/yr and through HostGator it was only $30. Since all I need is a redirect to my current site (purchased through and hosted with GoDaddy) I figured I would save $40. That was my first mistake.

I tried to purchase the domain, and their system wouldn’t let me continue when I selected “Montana” as my state. Apparently we aren’t a state any longer. I ended up having to call customer support, wait 10 minutes, and listen to their heavy breathing as they set it up over the phone. I asked them to put in an auto-redirect to my existing site, they said no problem. This was on a Wednesday, by that evening nothing was happening, so I live chatted and got a story of 24-48 hours to propagate.

Thursday nothing was happening. No redirect, no notice that I owned the domain on their account management, nothing. I used their live chat, again another 10 minute wait and 20 minutes of chatting. They “fixed” the issue. Still no redirect and a story of 24-48 hours to propagate.

Friday came, and I still couldn’t see my info on their site. There was no redirect, and whois showed I owned the domain (which I couldn’t access). I live chatted once again, and they “fixed” the issue. I finally was able to see my domain on their site, and they said it would redirect. I said when will I see the redirect? They said 24-48 hours to propagate. I’m now over 72 hours from when I purchased the domain. I requested a refund and asked them to push the domain back into the registry so I can go somewhere else to purchase it.

Saturday, still nothing. Sunday, still nothing.

Monday, I called once again. Another 10 minutes on hold. Another 20 minute phone call. They said they would take care of it and were “sorry to see me go.” I told them their service is the worst I have ever seen. I check my credit card later that day and they have charged me $30 to renew my domain.

Tuesday, I call again. Another 10 minutes on hold and a 30 minute phone call (most of which is spent listening to hold music). They argue with me about being charged. They finally say they will refund my $30 but not the original $4 to purchase the domain, and they can’t push it back into the registry, but I can transfer it to another hosting company after 60 days. Now I have advertising material that points to a site that won’t work for 2 months. Great.

Now almost a week out, nothing has happened, and these clowns keep jerking me around. If there’s no credit to my account I’ll call my credit card and open a fraud case.

Avoid HostGator at all costs, they’re absolutely terrible.

Rick

2 — 

Horrible customer service

After being a customer for over 5 years hostgator suspended my account as they said I use too much bandwidth. No warning, just shut down my business site. I cleaned up some of the files on my own hours ago, and they still have not responded to my ticket. Horrible customer service, and false adversting as unlimited sites. I only have 5 sites.

Isa M

1 — 

4 hours to reach support and no answer!

Today I removed all 6 hostings from hostagtor and I am so happppy. I hate this guys. The main reason is Support. 4 hours on chat 3 hours on phone and no answer. No matter when you call. You will not reach them. Stay away keep away. Don’t even think of creating account with them.

Thomas

1 — 

Thieves

This company is comprised of thieves. My website was wrongfully accused of being hacked and then my hosting plan was suspended. This was just after my 3 year contract had been renewed. They called and sent a bunch of emails to try to sell me some bull**** SiteLock service which I didn’t need. I had enough and decided to switch hosting companies. After that I sent in a request to terminate my plan and get a refund for the 2+ years which I would not be using. Now they are refusing to terminate my plan and will not send a refund. I am being overcharged 2+ years! This is insane. Stay away from this company if you don’t want to be robbed.

TT

2 — 

Horrible Service and Response

Horrible experience with them….

Email unable to send out from their server. After calling them on a Monday, I need to call them on a Wednesday and Friday on the same issue and ticket number again. Issue was not resolved at all, they kept saying will delegate to the admin team to check on server. Issue not resolved and no update from anyone on the issues.

Horrible! At this digital age now, if we can do without email, there is no need for any hosting!

Mike

1 — 

Stay away

1- Websites slow.

2- Terrible, terrible support. Every issue, even simple ones, took 4-5 back and forth tickets to solve, minimum. On the phone, it’s usually 40 minutes of waiting + 30 minutes with a clueless rep.

3- Cancelling was a pain in the neck. They required me to call a salesman three separate times. Had to cancel hosting, then dedicated IP address, then SSL. They wouldn’t just “cancel everything”.

Worst hosting experience I ever had. Stay away.

brad

1 — 

30 minutes just to get to support

I have been with HostGator for about three years and I have to say that they usually fix the problems but the process is very cumbersome. If I call them with a service issue it always takes about 10-15 minutes to get to support. If I call with a new service request or sales department the connection is instant. This is very concerning, they are obviously pro-growth but at the same time I really don’t want to do business with them anymore. I am writing this while I am holding to get my website back up, which was hacked and down for two weeks. I cannot get any satisfaction from the online support chat, or creating a trouble ticket and waiting days for a response to only find out that they need more information and more time to respond. If it was easy to switch back to my original web hosting I would, but it seems like I’m stuck.

My advise is to not choose a webhosting based on ranking because at the time I signed up HostGator was among the top, and then they were sold to another company. Choose a hosting company for how long they have been providing great service to the clients, now how fast they have grown. I am very unsatisfied with HostGator.

Tom F

2 — 

Getting worse

Between phone and chat box have spent over 3 hours working to get a full refund for a domain I never ordered. There customer service is terrible, always needing to find a senior agent, that is never there.

Jonathan N

1 — 

Terrible slow support only available via chat (if it works)

I started using Hostgator in around 2008 at a time when they used to be truly excellent. They have since horribly declined in reliability, particularly when it comes to customer support (which for me, is THE most important element of good hosting).

Hostgator used to operate a ticketing system for support, alongside a US telephone number and online chat. Over the years the length of time it took to get a response via online chat and email ticketing increased substantially. As a UK business I couldn’t call the US number without incurring a huge telephone bill, so chat and email ticketing were the only option.

Early in 2016 Hostgator cancelled the email ticketing system, which was a massive backward step. Now, the only way to contact support is via online chat. This might not sound like a problem, but it can take up to an hour to be connected, and 90% of the time I found that nothing happened – I simply wasn’t connected and had to start the session again, which was infuriating. It didn’t matter which PC, ISP or browser I used, the vast majority of the time I needed chat support I was never connectedt. I was therefore left in a position where I was hosting 50+ websites (many critical business sites and busy shops) and had no way of contacting support.

Despite the decline in support options and the increase in support time-frames, Hostgator then decided to increase my monthly bill by $5 – it might not sound like much, but I wasn’t given a choice and the increase made the package I had uncompetitive (especially as there are now cheaper alternatives that make use of higher quality and faster SSD cloud storage (both reseller and VPS).

Hostgator are currently surviving off outdated 4 and 5 star reviews from a time when they used to offer quick helpful support and reasonably priced hosting packages. They are no longer reasonably priced, and their support is terrible.

Rodney

2 — 

Save money, avoid Hostgator

The most annoying thing about Go Daddy was they kept calling me to purchase more. The problem with Hostgator is they don’t listen to you.

I have contacted hostgator 4 times by email and 1 phone call to NOT renew my domain. They don’t freaking get it! I even changed my billing to not be automatically renewed and they did it anyway. I was still charged for a domain I originally canceled last November! (It’s July now) They don’t listen to you, so why bother to contact customers when you are going to ignore them anyway? Every email they sent telling me to renew my domain I replied that the account (my customer) was canceled. They emailed me telling me my billing had changed and to update it. I told them I changed it to not be automatically billed for a canceled account. After 4 emails and a phone call they ignored everything and billed me for the domain name. Now I have to go to my Credit Card bank to dispute it. I recommend you use anyone else but Hostgator.

Developers N

4 — 

Average Hosting

We are using their shared hosting plan on our websites and also on client websites. The great concern with hostgator is their slow page load time so we are thinking to move our sites to their new cloud hosting or business hosting plan or will go with other hosting alternatives.

Alex

1 — 

Terrible service

When I started out with Hostgator about 2 years ago, their service and performance weren’t fantastic but definitely adequate for my needs. However within the last year their service has been absolutely terrible. They have incredibly slow response time or no response at all.

About four days ago they suspended one of my sites. I resolved all issues requested by the immediately. 4 days later there has been no response at all. Therefore I moved all my sites to a new host. Hostgator should be avoided as they will suspend sites without anyway to get them reinstated within a reasonable time frame. In fact, I would say Hostgator is probably a bigger threat to your site being taken down due to their terrible service rather than outside hacks.

Dixie

3 — 

Just average...

I used to host multiple sites on HostGator but after they got sold to EIG, their performance has been reduced. It takes almost 30-45 minutes to get connected to thier support department at live chat. Plans at HostGator are very costly. Final verdict: Unhappy with HostGator and has moved almost all sites from them.

There are better alternatives out there…

S.A

3 — 

They became the worst

I am a customer at HostGator for more than 8 years, I always been a loyal customer because they have been the most excellent hosting provider I dealt with for 7 years, but since about 14 months they started going down and down very fast, the technical support responsiveness is almost equal to 0, days and weeks will pass before they respond to my ticket, and some tickets will never get any response!

The 45 days money back grantee is a big lie, when you buy a new hosting they will charge your card and then will send you a greeting email, then immediately will terminate your account and send you an email requesting you to verify your identity, you will have to send them a scan for your credit card and a scan for your identity that was issued by government, and after that they will not unsuspend your account and will not pay back your money and will not answer any ticket for you!

M I

4 — 

Great Hosting

I’ve been using HostGator for the past 1 year, and you believe or not, my uptime so far is 99.99%, yeah its true. In fact, I have seen many people complaining that HG is worst company. But I personally found them good at cheap rates. The bad thing I found is they charge extra charges for activating SSL.

Overall, its great company. Will recommend without any doubt.

David

3 — 

Lack of customer service

This was my very first hosting provider that I used.

The good:

Super easy to use. User-friendly interface. Competitive prices etc… I’d say it’s perfect for beginners.

The bad:

Since I forgot to update my WordPress website, it got hacked and redirected to some Chines and Russian pages. After contacting HostgGator, they tried to sell me a tool that would ‘prevent’ this from happening. But no help on recovering my current site, so I manually had to upload a backup to keep it up.

Fast forward few months, I moved out from HostGator and bought more expensive hosting package from somewhere else.

It’s not always about the cost, sometimes you need to pay more so the hosting company would truly ‘care’ about you.

Alejandra

4 — 

Could be better

It has it’s downsides sometimes depending what kind of actions you expect from it. It can get slow at times, and somewhat confusing, not really that much of a deal, perhaps better for more casual sites. The customer service is just alright, not too bad. Can seem over-pricey but good in the long-run.

Nate F

2 — 

Cheap but can be unreliable

They offer some good, cheap plans, but if you care at all about up time or reliability you might want to look elsewhere. When it is up, it’s a good service, but usually when it goes down, it’s down for long stretches (sometimes days).

Paul

1 — 

I literally hate them...

Had ongoing problems with HostGator with them constantly locking down my site due to “CPU usage” being too high and then the only fix they would offer would be for me to upgrade to more expensive plans or dedicated server… basically setting me up to fail so I would have to upgrade at considerably greater cost.

Also, their support is rubbish… extensive wait times for chat, 20 minutes, 40 minutes, 45 minutes and that’s if it would connect at all. Phone support was worse, over an hour was not unusual, and raising a ticket just meant days of waiting. All the while my site would be down, my audience drifting away and my desperation growing…

Go with a smaller company that actually wants and appreciates your business!

Benny A

5 — 

My review

Hostgator is a pretty solid host I used to use. When they say they have 24/7 support, they mean it. I had a problem once at around 5AM and they were still online to help me out! But their uptime isn’t the best.. It’s up most of the time but there’s those 2 or 3 hours of the week that their offline for maintenance. But otherwise their pretty good in that sense.

When it comes to the cPanel, it’s like any other. It has all the features any other cPanel host would have, and not as glitchy as some others that I used. When it comes to their plans, they are very cheap for what they give. For $5.95 you can add unlimited domains. But remember, you need to buy a domain and that plan, not just the plan will give you unlimited domains. I recommend buying the domains from their website since it’s very cheap @ $5.99/year for the first year then it can raise up to $14.99.

Overall, I would give Hostgator a solid 90/100 rating!

Phil

2 — 

Customer support was great... until I upgraded my plan

Customer service was GREAT… Then I got a phone call from a representative talking to me about the benefits of upgrading. One of the perks was free website migration that took up to 3 days. I like that idea so I upgraded.

Over the next 2 weeks I contacted customer service looking for an update on the migration. I finally got a response the third time that it would take 4-6 weeks! So they lied and did not update me that they were “under a heavy workload”. So they lied to me about migration time. Then the rep said he was sorry that “I misunderstood the terms and conditions”. Here we are 5 weeks in… They still have not migrated my data.

Veronica S

3 — 

Down for more than 48 hours

I was with HostGator for about 3 years. In that time we had multiple down times. Some of which lasted more than 2 days. We would try to contact them with no luck, often having to resort to Tweeting them in order to get their attention. It was a nightmare. When they were fully functional my website was fast I had no issues and was always able to manage my own servers effectively.

Unfortunately, the downtimes caused us to lose customers and I was forced to move to a different provider entirely.

George K

5 — 

Almost perfect..

Have been using them for close to 5 years now to host a large vBulletin forum and several smaller sites and the service and support has been excellent. Any issues we’ve had – a few relating to PHP version on startup were quickly and efficiently resolved. From a sever admin perspective as the admin it’s pretty much been hands off and the same for billing. It just works. Can’t say enough good about them.

John

3 — 

Low cost makes up for poor service

HostGator has terrible customer service and tends to be fairly slow getting new accounts set up. Getting in touch with support is a waste of time, and usually they can’t help anyway.

That said, you get what you pay for. If you are trying to save money, HostGator is cheap and relatively easy to figure out.

So it all depends on your needs. If you have one or two WordPress or static sites to host, HostGator is slightly better than average. Any more than that and you should probably start looking somewhere else.

Allison

4 — 

Started out strong..

I signed up for HostGator in July 2013 after participating in a twitter chat with bloggers who PRAISED HostGator.

I had come to a point where I wanted my blog to stop looking generic, I found someone who would design for free and I bought my domain. It seemed like the perfect time to use a hosting site and in the beginning HostGator was incredible. They walked me through everything. I am not techy and the gentleman from customer service showed me each step of transitioning my site from WordPress.

Fast forward to March 2016 where honestly I’m not using my blog the way I used to and it took THREE tries to get a customer service representative to chat with me via computer. The wait was around 10 minutes. I was out of practice and could not even really recall why I even had hosting so I had a lot of questions for my customer service representative since my $100+ 3 year renewal will need to be made in July again.

I’m still a little foggy as to why I should use HostGator again at such a steep price tag. Once my hosting was set up I never really utilized their services and it seemed like a pain to have to wait so long for a customer service rep. Not a major complaint, just an observation. Considering switching to GoDaddy if it’s cheaper/has speedier customer service. I wanted to cancel my auto renewal with HostGator but none of the customer service representatives would inform me of how to since my plan still has a few months. I finally just deleted my credit card information on the profile.

Hopefully that works and I can make an educated decision come July..

Rich B

2 — 

Disappointing changes

When I first began using shared Hostgator services back years ago – it was the best bang-for-the-buck that you could get. Since then, it was slowly degraded into crowded servers, poor performance, and lack-luster customer support.

The once coveted sub-$10/month web hosting deal has since been invaded by other providers offering better performance and support; leaving Hostgator behind.

Chris F

5 — 

Decent host for casual sites

We have a few websites hosted by HostGator. The sites are business pages and receive a low amount of targeted traffic from Google AdWords, and we do not need an extensive amount of hosting services. Generally, we want low downtime, quick contact with support when we have questions, and the ability to run our email servers through the hosted sites.

HostGator manages this perfectly. We’ve never had issues with our sites being offline or with email failing, and in the few instances when we have needed to contact support, I was impressed by how quickly we were able to get in touch with a representative and get the situation sorted.

We admittedly have low requirements for a web-hosting company, but our experience with HostGator has always been satisfactory and low-stress, allowing us to focus on running our businesses.

Owen

4 — 

Ups and Downs

I’ve been with HostGator for roughly 5 years. When I first started out with them everything worked great, I like that they use cPanel and that I was able to add multiple domains to one account for a very attractive monthly rate.

The first 3 years went without any problems. My websites loaded quickly and had minimal to no downtime.

Then in year 4 I started having problems with my website loading slowly, HostGator blamed it on the fact that I was taking up to many resources. I tweaked a few things on my WordPress installations, especially on the one for my most popular website. After those adjustments I was fine for a little bit, but eventually it happened again… This time I went through my records and pointed to multiple times my website went down, they did blame it on my websites again. But after I pushed the issue I think they conceded that my websites weren’t the problem. I was notified that my website was being moved to another server and that I may experience brief downtime. I was okay with this as it meant something was really being done about some of the problems I had.

Now I am in year 5 and am again a very happy customer. All of my websites are working as they should, I have not experienced any downtime, as far as I’m aware. So all in all I’ve been happy with my HostGator experience, except for the fact that maybe they could’ve delved into my problems with them a little more thoroughly the first time I experienced significant downtime. But they’ve made it right and I didn’t suffer from it too much.

Alex C

4 — 

Budget hosting for smaller sites

A lot of people are afraid of budget hosting for a variety of reasons. Most of them have to do with the support you will receive, the safety of your sites on their shared hosting, etc. I was with hostgator for nearly a decade and only had an issue with getting a refund from them after cancelling hosting.

Their small plans ran me $8 a month and I could host unlimited sites and have unlimited bandwidth/storage on a cPanel interface. Definitely great for those who are trying to break through in design, or who just want to have a few different projects for fun.

Roberto

2 — 

Blacklisted nameservers

We have a client on hostgator who cannot send email to some of their most important clients because the nameservers are on several blacklists. We use the non-SSL ports to go out to remedy this solution, but it is exposing us to other problems. The webmail sends via their SSL nameservers by default which renders it useless. I have spoken to support but they are not planning on fixing the problem. We have to move, they give us no other option. I cannot recommend them for email. And if you are looking for support, be ready to wait 30 minutes.

Joseph

3 — 

Too long waiting time

I’ve been using HostGator for few years, they are “decent”, but the main problem lies on their customer support. I don’t know if they are overselling their products/services, but it sometimes can take an hour or more to get in touch with them via live chat. This is too much, I think…

William C

2 — 

Not satisfied with the support

I’ve had quite a few issues with HostGator recently, in all cases the wait time for support has been at least 5-10 minutes and in most cases their front line representatives haven’t been able to solve the issue. That means they need to escalate it to tier two support and the waiting time for that has been two days – five days.

In some cases they still weren’t able to get the issue resolved and I had to pay for external support. Really regret choosing them for my webhost and will be making a change at sometime in the future. Don’t fall for all the advertisements.

Bamidele O

1 — 

Poor experience...

My experience with HostGator has not been great. They used to be fine in my early days with them but suddenly they started to have a lot of downtimes. Since my site was growing, I thought upgrading to a dedicated server will improve things: I upgraded to a dedicated server with them but this did not change anything. I eventually had to cancel my hosting with them.

To date, they still send me emails trying to bill me for “my” dedicated server that has been canceled long ago. In short, they have deteroriated in a long time and I will recommend avoiding them.

Erik E

5 — 

Satisfied HostGator customer

I’m in the online industry since 2010. I started with just one site, and now I own several properties with different business models.I’ve been with HostGator from the beginning of my online journey, with a Baby Plan (shared server).

For the first 2/3 years everything went smooth, but during my 4th year I’ve been experiencing a lot of account suspensions, due to excessive use of server resources (I think mostly for a big increase of traffic – around 50k monthly).

After a few months of up and down, with many optimization attempts on my sites, I decided it was time to upgrade.

I switched directly to a dedicated server (since more than one year already). UpTime is 99,9% (last incident alert refers more than 5 months ago – just a few minutes of downtime).

The server response is awesome and the loading time of my sites is amazing. I’m really happy with the customer service, they have always helped me with a quick assistance.

In overall, I’m very satisfied with HostGator. I definitely suggest it to my friends.

Mitch

5 — 

Great pick for beginners like me

They are affordable, easy to set up and easy to manage. Their customer support is great, but sometimes it might take 15+ minutes to get in touch with them. Hopefully they’ll be even better in the future