About Host Gator

HostGator was founded in 2002 by entrepreneur Brent Oxley in Boca Raton, Florida. The company is now one of the most popular and preferred web hosts, currently housing an incredible 700,000 websites on their servers. They are also the internet’s number one provider of reseller hosting having already served more than 10,000 independent resellers. HostGator has over 130 employees working for them; all of their infrastructure is distributed among four datacenters in Dallas, Texas, owned by ThePlanet.

Their website states that they exhibit “Insane Customer Dedication” and that “Hostgator may eat up the competition, but we have nothing but love for our customers!”

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Plans and Features

HostGator’s shared hosting comes in three plans: hatchling, baby and swamp.

The basic Hatchling Plan costs a cheap $4.95 and comes with 350GB of disk space and 3TB of monthly data transfer. Notably, there is no contract involved and you can test their service for as short a period as one month.

You may create unlimited email accounts, autoresponders, FTP accountss and MySQL databases. Most of today’s popular scripting languages are supported including cgi, php4 and php5, Ruby On Rails, SSH, Perl, Chilisoft ASP, Python, CronJobs etc. Perl Module installation can be availed for free.

In the software section, you are offered a free gift of over 52+ readymade scripts which are available as one-click-installations. A small list of these includes b2evolution, WordPress, Drupal, Mambo Open Source, PHP-Nuke, Help Center, phpBB2, FAQMasterFlex, AccountLab Plus, PHPlist HOT!, Advanced Poll, dotProject, Soholaunch Pro Edition, PhpWiki, Agora cart, OSCommerce, Zen Cart and many, many more.

On to the Baby Plan, $7.95 per month, lets you host unlimited domains including addons and parked domains, plus 600GB Disk Space and 6,000GB of Data Transfer, A free private SSL is thrown in the deal as well.

The final Swamp Plan, $12.95 per month, steps up to 1,000GB of disk space and Unlimited Bandwidth.  Another additional feature is the ability to use anonymous FTP addresses.

All of these plans are backed by HostGator’s generous 45-day money-back guarantee.

Hosting Environment

Your account is administered on HostGator through standard cPanel. From within here, you can configure any aspect of your account including your email addresses, FTP, website files, additional software etc. MySQL can be managed through phpMyAdmin found within cPanel.

Joomla

Joomla is available as a one-click-installation feature along with the Fantastico script that comes preinstalled. No technical knowledge is required for installing Joomla and the entire process can be done in less than 5 minutes.

Tech Support

HostGator sports an excellent support department that stands head-and-shoulders above most competitors. Technical support can be reached through toll free telephone, email and online chat all available 24/7.

There are also dedicated FAQs and a forums section with over 13,000 members participating.

Conclusion

If HostGator isn’t the industry leader in hosting, it’s definitely catching up. The company values its customers so highly that you can actually request for the owner to personally look into your issues. Not only that, you get amazing value for your money with their feature-rich hosting plans, all backed by a spotless-clean guarantee. For the final word, HostGator is simply one of the very best options for hosting your Joomla site.