Hostgator used to be my first choice when choosing or recommending hosting service to anyone, but lately my thoughts have changed, and Hostgator seems to have left a bad impression on me, due to their bad services.

At this time, daPazze is hosted on Hostgator, and recently we are experiencing a lot of irrelevant issues with Hostgator, and in addition some poor quality customer support served to us. I am starting to feel that Hostgator has stopped respecting their customers and has also stopped caring about them.

Hostgator was known for good quality service for years, but now things have changed, as witnessed by us, and believe me, I have experienced some terrible things with Hostgator that I don’t want anyone to experience, and that’s why I am writing this article, to let you why Hostgator may not be the right choice for hosting your site.

In this article I will not be imposing some false accusations on Hostgator, or promote any other hosting services. I will just share my experiences that I have had with Hostgator and the Hostgator support team.

Poor quality service served with a high price tag

Image Source: jessicainspace

Some of your who are regular readers of daPazze might have witnessed some time when this site was unavailable to you and was showing some errors like “403 Forbidden”. Well I would like to take some time, and thank Hostgator for shutting down our site, making it unavailable to you people, and showing up that error message.

The reason they gave for shutting down our site is that our site was causing a high CPU load of about 84% suddenly which was caused by the plugins that we had installed on our site and we had to remove all plugins like security plugins, backup plugins and make out site “plugin free” to get our site back again.

Now let me tell you the funny and extraordinary part, we had been using the same plugins for the last 6 months on the same server and on the same site, and for the last 6 months they didn’t cause any such problem, while recently all of the plugins started to cause high CPU usage, strange isn’t it?

Even funny was the fact that I had another site hosted on the same server, which had exactly the same plugins installed, and strangely, that site seemed okay to them. I couldn’t understand this part that how can one site with some plugins cause problems while the other with same plugins stays fine.

Now comes the best part of them, they shut our site down suddenly without any prior notice to us. That is not the kind of service I had expected from them, but unfortunately I had to experience these kinds of problems recently, even after removing those plugins, we are still having some hiccups with the hosting service, as they shut down our website without prior notifications over and over again.

Customer support team, which really don’t support

Image Source: Cimetrix Inc.

After all these happened, when we asked for help, rather than being helped in the right way, we were presented with the same error log report repeatedly. If you think that was it, then let me tell you the whole thing.

When I told them about the situation that we were using the same plugins for the last 6 months, and there was another site hosted on the same server which had exactly the same plugins, then instead of understanding the situation, they forced us to remove all the plugins, even SEO by Yoast, I wonder what a SEO plugin has to do with high CPU usage.

Recently I had experienced another great support from them. I told them to fix a thing on this blog, but instead of fixing the thing, they messed up the whole site, shut the site down for a long time, and then when I filed a complaint about it, they took hours to reply to me, and fix the things.

As far as I know, support team members are there to help out customers with problem, and not to create new problems and make the situation worse. Unfortunately, this is the kind of treatment that we had experienced from them recently.

Hosting that’s not reliable enough

Image Source: Tom Raftery

I have illustrated some cases, which clearly indicates that hosting service from Hostgator is not reliable enough. If you are planning to host your website on Hostgator servers, the you should be aware that your site might be suddenly shut down by them based on some invalid reasons, and you might suffer damage to your site’s reputation.

Moreover, the kind of support that I have got from them is of no use, and I would rather solve my own problems instead of asking for help to them, as they do what they feel without taking your prior permission, and they might mess up your site making it difficult for you to fix things.

Due to this kind of generous and excellent treatment from Hostgator, we are planning to move to a new server, where we would not face these kinds of problems, downtimes, and site blockage without prior notice. Many of you reading this article own a site, you might suggest me a better alternative, which would be a better place for daPazze.

You can help us have a better and healthy place to host daPazze, where daPazze would be available to you, always and would be helping you out whenever you need, instead of being shut down by some server issues. You can provide us, your affiliate links also through comments, and if we find your recommendation to be perfect for us, then we would certainly use your affiliate URL and purchase a hosting package, so as to say a thanks to you for letting us know of a better hosting.

Hostgator alternative

Eleven2 is a good alternative to Hostgator and other related hosting services, and provides good support and quality hosting, you might want to give this hosting a try.

I would be happy to have your comments, suggestions via comments, so do take some time and leave a comment below, and engage yourself with our community.

Featured Image Source: torkildr