HostGator VPS and Shared Hosting Review

Easy to setup and manage

Shutterstock Web Hosting Image with Hostgator
(Image: © Shutterstock, Hostgator)

Tom's Hardware Verdict

HostGator is a well known web host that comes with some of the easiest tools for setup and management of your site, but bang-for-the-buck on VPS plans is lacking.

Pros

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    Affordable shared hosting options

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    cPanel comes standard

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    No database size limits

Cons

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    VPS among the priciest

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    Middling VPS performance

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    Low amount of concurrent traffic

Why you can trust Tom's Hardware Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about how we test.

One of the most popular names in web hosting, HostGator has been operating since it was started in 2002 in Founder Brent Oxley’s dorm room. The company has since expanded greatly, opening localized versions for China, Russia and Brazil. It’s now owned by Newfold Digital, which also operates Bluehost, one of HostGator’s main competitors.

To compete with the best web hosting plans on the market, HostGator offers a mix of packages for different needs and budgets. On the low-end, shared hosting plans start at just $2.75 a month. Then there are VPS (Virtual Private Server) plans that go for $36.99 and up while the company also offers dedicated hosting ($91+), and ecommerce hosting plans. These aren’t the cheapest prices on the market, but you do get cPanel, the easiest and best control panel software, included with your VPS and shared plans, while competitors such as Hostinger charge extra for it. 

We tested a pair of plans from HostGator: the Baby Plan in the shared hosting category, and the Snappy 4000 VPS plan and found easy setup, but middling performance and sharp limits on concurrent traffic. 

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Plans We Tested
Header Cell - Column 0 VPSShared
Plan NameSnappy 4000Baby
Price$58.99$3.05
CPU2 coreN/A
RAM4GBN/A
Storage165GB20GB
BandwidthUnmeteredUnmetered
Database LimitUnspecifiedUnspecified

HostGator VPS Plans

Selecting a VPS plan on HostGator offers a good balance of hardware, storage, and bandwidth. VPS plans from HostGator are more expensive than those of some competitors, however. 

Our test VPS package was the HostGator Snappy 4000, available for $53.99 a month with a 12-month term. This is for a virtual server with a dual-core CPU, 4GB of RAM, and 165 GB of storage, with unmetered bandwidth. There is no database size limit and we were able to upload a 4GB database without a hassle.

As with other hosting services, HostGator’s VPS plans feature an introductory offer. Consequently, renewals will be more expensive – specifics can be found in the cPanel after signing up.

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HostGator VPS Plans
Header Cell - Column 0 Snappy 2000Snappy 4000Snappy 8000
Price (12-month term)$54.99$58.99$89.99
CPU2 core CPU2 core CPU4 core CPU
RAM2GB4GB8GB
Storage120GB SSD165GB SSD240GB SSD
BandwidthUnmeteredUnmeteredUnmetered

(More detailed options for monthly, quarterly, six-monthly, bi-annually, and tri-annually, each with their own discount, are also available.)

By comparison, Bluehost currently charges $46.99 a month for 2 vCPU Cores, 4GB of RAM and 100GB of storage or $65.99 for 4 cores, 8GB and 200GB. Hostinger, which charges $6.99 a month for 2 vCPU mores, 8GB of RAM and 100GB of disk space or $10.49 a month for 4 vCPU cores, 16GB of RAM and 200GB of disk space. However, with Hostinger, you need to pay about $22 a month extra for cPanel (which you could live without) and those prices are for a 24-month term.

Each of HostGator’s packages include the option of free migration, and unmetered bandwidth. (This is dependent on adherence to the HostGator ToS. Your site should not require “25% or more of system resources for longer than 90 seconds.”)

All three VPS plans include root access, MySQL, and Let’s Encrypt SSL, which made it easy for us to enable https on our sites. The Softaculous script installer streamlines the installation of web applications and CMS tools, and you get unlimited email accounts. Unsurprisingly, the mailboxes are limited by the capacity of the SSD. 

HostGator’s VPS plans feature a network uptime guarantee, US-based data centers, and a full network redundancy. Where there is a point of failure, multiple routes should provide a path for data to circumvent this. Multiple providers supply bandwidth to HostGator. Meanwhile, the VPS package has centralized protection against DDoS attacks, and backups can be scheduled or made manually.

Most importantly, the plans come with the combination of cPanel and WHM control panels at no extra cost. WHM is the panel you use when you want to exert control over the server itself – reboot it, create user accounts, etc. cPanel is what you use for most site-related functions, including managing databases, setting up scheduled tasks (Cron jobs), checking email, installing WordPress or browsing the file directories. While other hosting services have cPanel / WHM alternatives such as Virtualmin, these are the gold standard for ease-of-use and features.

In our experience, working with HostGator’s online tools was really simple and straightforward. If you don’t go directly to WHM or cPanel, you can see the settings for all of your purchased plans by logging into HostGator.com directly and then navigating to My Account -> Hosting.

(Image credit: Tom's Hardware)

Setup was very straightforward, except for one issue. We registered all of our test domains with Namecheap under the *.sbs top-level domain (ex: tomshosting1.sbs). However, HostGator would not allow us to add our existing .sbs domains and, to do our testing, we had to register two new domains with different TLDs (ex: tomshosting1.site) to connect them to our plans. HostGator certainly allows you to use externally-registered domains, but when tried to add it, the “add as external domain” feature just kept loading and never stopped.

Overall, performance of the VPS plan was a very mixed bag, with the shared plan actually achieving faster numbers on many of our benchmarks, including two out of three database tests and the WordPress Hosting Benchmark test. The plan also failed to handle our 500-concurrent requests test. On the bright side, our endless shell script never timed out on the VPS plan.

HostGator Shared Hosting

If your online project is more modest, the shared plans from HostGator might be a better fit. Again offering a good balance, these options also have unmetered monthly traffic. Should a blog post or item in your online store suddenly become popular, HostGator will not punish you with additional fees or force you onto a higher plan. However, its support team will issue automated emails encouraging upgrades to other plans should your site look as though it is getting too big.

We chose the HostGator Baby Plan to assess what its shared hosting offerings. This is $4.50 a month on a 36-month plan, and has 20GB of SSD storage. As with the VPS, the database size is limited only by the plan’s storage. This will, of course, be reduced by the amount of space your CMS (WordPress is available as an easy install) or static HTML pages take up on the server.

Another factor that is similar to the VPS plans is the renewal price. While the listed price might seem attractive, it may be higher at the end of the term. As with the VPS, other prices are available. HostGator’s shared plans are all introductory offers, and have 1 month and 12 month options with discounts.

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HostGator Shared Plans
Header Cell - Column 0 HatchlingBabyBusiness
Price (36-month term)$2.52$3.05$4.67
Storage10GB SSD20GB SSD50GB SSD
Monthly Traffic MaxUnmeteredUnmeteredUnmetered
DB Size LimitUnspecifiedUnspecifiedUnspecified

Unlike the VPS plans, HostGator’s shared plans are among some of the cheapest available. This makes all three of them a great choice for small projects, start-ups and even just playing around with web design and staging.

Signing up and logging into the HostGator back-end presents you with the cPanel hosting control panel. A collection of installer tools are also available, with a range of blogs, forums, shopping carts, and other web applications on offer. WordPress, Joomla and Drupal are included, along with the Magento e-commerce platform. Most of these feature “one-click” installation. Various statistical tools are also included, including AWStats and error logs.

HostGator’s shared plans include unlimited email addresses (POP3 and IMAP) with webmail, SpamAssassin, and various forwarding and responder tools. For file management, unlimited FTP plans are supported, but you may prefer to use the cPanel browser-based file manager.

Cloudflare CDN is available on the Baby and Business plans, and HostGator’s shared plans (except monthly) have the option to buy a free domain name. A 30-day money-back plan is in operation, and payment is by PayPal or credit card. Various additions can be added at the checkout, including a premium SSL certificate and Yoast SEO Premium subscription.

In our tests, the HostGator shared plan was easy to set up and enabling SSL using cPanel’s built-in AutoSSL integration was a snap. Performance was actually better than the VPS plan on two out of three database tests and slightly better on the WordPress Hosting Benchmark. It did, however, have a 9 minute limit on shell script execution and , like the VPS, failed to handle our 500-concurrent connections test.

Database, WordPress, and Scripting Performance

Each hosting plan under review is subjected to three performance tests that measure the server’s ability to handle complex MySQL queries.

The first MySQL test inserts 87 million rows of data. These have been compiled from historical page view data from the Tom’s Hardware site. Both hosting plans rely on MySQL, rather than MariaDB. The latter is generally faster than Oracle’s MySQL, and many hosts have switched to MariaDB.

HostGator is yet to make the switch, and perhaps because of that,, with both shared and VPS hosting delivered acceptable, but unimpressive times. Surprisingly, the shared plan was actually faster.

(Image credit: Tom's Hardware)

The next stage of the test is to introduce ransom numbers into the database, across all 87 million rows. Once again, the results of this test for HostGator’s shared and VPS plans are pretty unimpressive.

(Image credit: Tom's Hardware)

A further test of the database uses the JOIN command to combine two tables (traffic and articles) and queries the SUM of page views and other traffic across several dates for each article. This is a time-consuming task for the servers to handle.

Once again, HostGator doesn’t deliver anything particularly quickly here. However, the shared hosting performs this task far more efficiently (around 50% faster) than the VPS.

(Image credit: Tom's Hardware)

The test was run three times, and the chart displays the average, so this is not a fluke. Bluehost Shared could not complete the test so is not on this chart.

Further testing was performed, subjecting our chosen HostGator VPS and shared hosting plans to the WordPress Hosting Benchmark Tool. This can be installed within the CMS and benchmarks your installation and server, issuing a score from 0 to 10, the higher the better.

A number of calculations are performed here, such as filesystem speed, database speed, and network performance.

(Image credit: Tom's Hardware)

The overall scores for VPS (7.1) and shared (7.3) hosting were similar. More surprisingly, shared hosting outdid VPS in several key areas, including complex database queries on multiple tables. CPU operations with large amounts of text data also scored higher for the shared hosting plan, as did a couple of the filesystem writing tests.

Given the difference in price between shared and VPS hosting, not to mention the stated hardware configuration, this is surprising.

HostGator Traffic and Uptime

Most websites exist to attract visitors. As HostGator offers unlimited bandwidth and unmetered visitors, its hosting plans should be able to deal with a lot of traffic without performance issues affecting the server.

To test this, we use the Apache benchmark, which hits the server with 500 simultaneous requests and measures performance. For the closest real-world, production experience, we used a WordPress site, targeting its home page with the Apache benchmark test.

The test results in a report displaying the total requests per second that the server was able to deliver, and the average of milliseconds per response. For clarity, this is the time taken for the server to respond, rather than the home page to load.

Unlike some other hosts, which handled the test relatively well, HostGator’s shared plan appeared to have a 149 request limit. Meanwhile, the VPS plan returned a “SSL handshake failed” error.

(Image credit: Tom's Hardware)

What do these results mean?

Two possibilities seem likely. Either HostGator employs protection against concurrent requests to handle spam traffic or rudimentary DDoS attacks, or the server simply fails with too much traffic. The “SSL handshake failed” error certainly indicates some sort of issue with communication of the site’s SSL certificate, perhaps impeded by the Apache benchmark test.

HostGator’s VPS plan was able to handle 5.16 requests per second when hit with 100 concurrent requests. That’s significantly less than the 21.53 requests per second Hostinger’s VPS handled or the 16.12 that the Bluehost VPS managed, both at the same 100 concurrents.

(Image credit: Tom's Hardware)

The shared plan couldn’t handle even 100 concurrent requests, only working when we changed it to 10 concurrent requests, at which point, it delivered 6.11 requests per second. That’s less than half of the 13.46 requests that Bluehost’s shared plan delivered at 10 concurrents.

(Image credit: Tom's Hardware)

HostGator Support

Running a website is tough enough without issues arising from the hosting. In most cases, things should run well, but in the event of disaster, what does HostGator’s support resource offer?

HostGator provides “AI-driven support resources” available via HostGator.com/help. This is a collection of tools and guides to assist in getting started, including material for VPS hosting.

Should you run into any issues, HostGator’s support channels can be accessed via an initially-automated chat bot. After the filtering process has determined which type of agent to send your query to, you get to chat with an operator. This is 24/7 access, with response times usually quick but subject to other customers. Issues that require escalation to a technician will have their own time scale for resolution.

HostGator also provides telephone support, with an international number provided beyond the USA.

Our chat with the HostGator support agent resulted in a fast response and comprehensive answers. While the chat box initially commences with an automated response to determine the nature of the query, it soon puts you in touch with an agent. In reviewing HostGator’s shared and VPS plans, I had conversations with several support agents, and all provided comprehensive, prompt, and (most importantly) accurate answers.

Bottom Line

HostGator’s hosting offers a curious mix of ease-of-use with mediocre performance and mediocre pricing. Its VPS plans are more expensive than some competitors, but you do get built-in cPanel for that price. While the VPS is usable, its performance is disappointing, both in terms of database processing and traffic handling.

By comparison, HostGator’s shared hosting plans are affordable and offer reasonably good performance compared with other providers. If you’re looking for a shared plan, HostGator is a compelling choice. The lack of database size limit on both VPS and Shared plans is an advantage as many competitors cut you off after your database exceeds 4 or 5GB.

If you’re looking for a VPS with better performance and a better price, Hostinger is a far better choice, though it charges extra for cPanel and it has bandwidth limits. Bluehost, while a bit pricey, also offers superior performance and has no bandwidth metering.

However, if you’re looking for shared hosting that performs really well and is easy to use, HostGator is hard to beat.

  • das_stig
    Smells of being a sponsored review, credit though for being honest on its short comings.
    Reply
  • Dementoss
    das_stig said:
    Smells of being a sponsored review, credit though for being honest on its short comings.
    I don't know what the regulations are in the US but, it certainly looks like a sponsored article and, in the UK that would have to be clearly indicated.
    Reply
  • kyzarvs
    Surely this is a thinly-veiled ad?

    Anyway, +1 for OVH. We've used them for a couple of years. Free DDoS protection that works really well (we've watched it in action a few times now) and very cheap. I don't think we've had a single downtime in 5+ years of 3x VPS's, I love 'em.
    Reply
  • JarredWaltonGPU
    kyzarvs said:
    Surely this is a thinly-veiled ad?

    Anyway, +1 for OVH. We've used them for a couple of years. Free DDoS protection that works really well (we've watched it in action a few times now) and very cheap. I don't think we've had a single downtime in 5+ years of 3x VPS's, I love 'em.
    Having scanned the review, other than the intro, I'm not sure which part of this would qualify as being an advertisement or sponcon. This is a subject that the "Powers That Be" would like to see covered, and Avram has been working to figure this out. There are benchmarks, the overall rating of HostGator is quite mediocre, and both the good and bad are discussed.

    We do recognize that testing web hosting companies can be complex and difficult. Avram is still giving it a shot, with help from a freelancer. Future is paying for the hosting packages. Will it end up being financially beneficial? That remains to be seen, but HostGator most certainly did not pay us to have a review saying their VPS product is often mediocre overpriced, but that shared hosting actually did pretty well.
    Reply
  • Murissokah
    JarredWaltonGPU said:
    Having scanned the review, other than the intro, I'm not sure which part of this would qualify as being an advertisement or sponcon.

    Could be that a huge hostgator banner in the homepage of the site may be misinterpred as an ad. It even has the price clearly stated.
    Reply
  • JarredWaltonGPU
    Murissokah said:
    Could be that a huge hostgator banner in the homepage of the site may be misinterpred as an ad. It even has the price clearly stated.
    Yeah, and I do recognize that fact. I've suggested we need a different image at the very least. Problem is finding a good image to convey "web hosting review of " where there's not really a physical product to photograph. But let me try to get something else in there...
    Reply
  • Murissokah
    JarredWaltonGPU said:
    Yeah, and I do recognize that fact. I've suggested we need a different image at the very least. Problem is finding a good image to convey "web hosting review of " where there's not really a physical product to photograph. But let me try to get something else in there...
    The new one looks much better.
    Reply
  • JBHapgood
    The article neglects to mention several important things.

    First, the $4.50 per month price for the shared "Baby" plan is a "teaser" rate for new customers. And to get it, you'd need to pay for three years up front. The price goes up to $6.00 per month if you're only willing to pay for one year. And if you want to try it for only one month, the price is $13.95.

    Once that initial term is over, the price goes up. A lot. If you're willing to pay for three more years up front, it will cost $15 per month. For one year, it's $17 per month. And if you want to pay one month at a time, it's $22! This excessive renewal price, which Hostgator raised enormously last year, is one reason I moved my Web sites after 17 years with Hostgator. (Since this post is not an ad, I won't mention where I moved them.)

    Second, while the article briefly mentions that Hostgator is owned by Newfold Digital, it doesn't explain what that actually means. Newfold Digital is the successor to Endurance International Group (EIG). EIG's business model involved buying up dozens of hosting companies, gutting them, moving their accounts to heavily-loaded centralized data center, and leaving the shell of the former hosting company as a "brand." They also spent heavily on promotion and "affiliate" marketing. Numerous sites purporting to review hosting companies and help you choose the "best" are bogus, and intended to steer people to EIG "brands."

    Newfold Digital is owned by two private equity firms. One of them acquired EIG; the other owned web.com. They merged EIG and web.com to form Newfold. They also seem to have abandoned EIG's "engulf and devour" business model. They have closed many EIG "brands" to new customers, referring them to Bluehost, Hostgator, or web.com. Private equity is entirely about maximizing short-term gain for its partners and investors. One way they do that is to minimize costs. When it comes to hosting, that means cramming as many users as possible onto overloaded servers, and outsourcing technical and customer support to contractors in countries with low-cost labor, such as India and the Philippines. The most accurate way to look at it is that Newfold Digital is not in the hosting business. Hosting is strictly a source of revenue for their investment business.

    That explains the mediocre performance noted in the article. Many hosting companies go into great detail about their servers and data centers. But if you look at Hostgator's Web site, you won't find any information about their infrastructure or data center. They apparently don't want you to know the truth, that if you keep your Web site with them after the initial "teaser" term, you're paying a premium for mediocre performance and less-than-mediocre support.

    To summarize, you can easily find hosting companies not owned by Newfold Digital or by private equity that offer better performance and value for money than Hostgator. I found the new home for my Web sites through the "Web Hosting Talk" forums, but there are other ways. Just don't trust Web sites devoted to reviewing hosting companies, since most of their recommendations are based on generous "affiliate" payments from companies like Hostgator.
    Reply
  • Vanderlindemedia
    I was about to write ... A hosting company review on a tech site that pretty much never had covered actual hosting (benchmarks) ?

    I find it weird; hosting is not just a VPS or a shared hosting account. It takes quite the (additional) software in order to properly work with it. Think of front-end like Directadmin or Cpanel, Litespeed for it's performance, but also server side security and things like that.

    Your own VPS if you don't have any experience is the dumbest thing you can do, esp when you do not know why you should not install a website under Root access on a server. People should start with the very basics, a (shared) hosting package is often more then enough and there's lots to tweak if you get into it.

    A VPS is handy when you need your own configuration, have specific wishes or you need absolute performance for your application, website or services. Also note that; lots of services are overpriced, support will cost you or your paying way too much for a certain, simple website.

    Esp in the wordpress business there's lots of (problematic) updates, testing, hacks, i mean sniff through any servers traffic and you'll understand that 50% of total traffic is often caused by bots on the net searching for weak installations. Since people run their website(s) and perhaps sensitive data this is a big issue.
    Reply
  • gerbilroaster
    The company is run by world-class a$$holes.

    I have a hosting account with them, on the "baby" plan. After the introductory period, the cost jumps up to $12.99/month ($467 for 3 years).

    I used their free website builder product - it lets you design up to 5 web pages. If you want more than that, you have to buy their website builder pro, for $131. I paid the $131, designed several more pages, then never used the product again.

    Not quite year later, I start getting emails saying unless I pay them for another year of the website builder pro, they'll take down my website. There had been nothing in the initial signup to indicate the website builder pro was a subscription-based product or that I'd lose any pages built with it if I didn't pay a new yearly subscription fee.
    I'd get a new email every couple days, demanding payment. The way they came off, it was like the mob saying, "You'd better pay us protection or your house might catch on fire or some windows might get broken." It was extortionate.

    I chatted with their customer service and the agent told me that the emails I was getting probably came from imposters. So I did nothing.

    Then they took down my entire website. The only thing left was a hostgator icon. World class a$$holes.

    I solved that problem by re-doing the site on Wordpress.

    Another thing: they serve as my domain registrar. Every time I go to renew a domain, they'll sneakily add on another three years of the hosting plan (even though I have two years left that I've already paid for) So you go to check out, the charges are like $668 for what should be a $50 purchase! So you have to go delete the three extra years of the baby plan (now priced at over $200 per year) and then check out. I'm wondering how many people checkout without deleting the spurious charges?

    Then last March, I paid $100 for them to install SSL on my site. Since then, I've had mass problems with my email because the site certificate came up invalid. I've spent hours with their support, chatting, and every time was told they'd fixed the problem - but they hadn't. In the last week, I've spent several hours with their support. One told me the certificate had a missing DMARC record, and that he'd fixed it - but the problems still persisted. Then finally today, the person I chatted with told me the problem was that SSL needed to be installed - and then she did that.

    And now, finally, my email works without errors. But it took them four months to install SSL on the site? World class bad customer service.

    I've decided that if I have any more problems, I'm going to eat the two years of service I have left with them (worth $311) and move the site to a different hosting company.

    I wouldn't recommend hostgator to my worst enemy.
    Reply