Saturday, January 23, 2010

A Look At Affordable Hosting: HostGator Review

By Mike Gates

It can be hard to find a decent web host to meet your needs. Many of them offer limited storage and bandwidth, others claim that customer service is not the best for the price, and on top of that, they require a set-up fee which may be unnecessary and just as expensive as the monthly and domain fees. You just need someone to host it and forget it. One of the best and most talked about web hosts is HostGator, which as been praised by every webmaster and others who have written a HostGator review.

If it is just for Reseller, Shared, and Dedicated hosting, or for a business, HostGator has the hosting you want. The Shared packages, Hatching, Baby, and Business include unlimited storage, bandwidth, MySQL databases, POP3 (email) accounts, and sub-domains. On their Baby and Business hosting plans, unlimited domains can be hosted for no additional cost.

HostGator includes the popular cPanel software for management of your website, including Fantastico that installs well known website software for your instant gallery, forum, blogging, content management, and guestbook needs, as well as 50 other scripts for your website with one-click.

Other web software can be installed from image galleries, blog software, guestbooks, portals, and over 50 others. In addition to a growing community, but with limited time and the knowledge of HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) can build a website in minutes using over 4,500 free website templates.

If you would rather install software the traditional way, it can be done with File Transfer Protocol, or FTP for short. HostGator also supports FrontPage for design savvy webmasters. To manage databases, cPanel has PHPMyAdmin that lets users manage databases via a user interface. A wide range of other programming languages are also supported: Perl, SSH, PHP 5, Ruby on Rails, CGI, and Python.

For businesses, HostGator's Business plan includes Chillsoft ASP for programming, Anonymous FTP, Dedicated IP, and a Toll-Free number for your customers to contact your business. On all hosting plans, HostGator also features E-commerce tools such as shopping carts for small business.

Once your website is up and running, HostGator provides a few statistics tracking software for seeing where on the web your visitors originated, as well as managing the bandwidth of your website. If you run into any problems, there is also an error log to see which page is missing from you and your visitors.

For your domain needs, HostGator offers domain names for an additional fee when you sign up for an hosting account. You can also set up an existing domain if you are moving from another web host that can be assigned per instructions on their support page. Of course, doing it by someone who does not know what he is doing can be a little scary. HostGator's customer service will be glad to help.

As you can see from this HostGator review, I highly recommend them for your hosting needs. You will also have the same experience of a quality web host for an affordable price with everything you will need for the webmaster in you.

About the Author:

No comments:

Post a Comment