HostGator is one of the most popular and leading hosting providers in the world. Found in 2002, HostGator offers many different hosting plans such as web hosting, cloud hosting, VPS, and more.
In this review, I will be reviewing HostGator’s relatively new hosting plan: WordPress Cloud Hosting.
They claim that WordPress Cloud Hosting is 2.5x faster than other hosting providers and offers many features. Let’s see if this claim holds true.
What Is HostGator Cloud WordPress Hosting?
HostGator’s Cloud WordPress hosting is specifically designed for WordPress and to offer such a performance that shared hosting is not capable of providing.
With this in mind, HostGator Cloud WordPress hosting is 2.5x faster than any other hosting service provider. This is possible with the use of cloud architecture, multiple caching layers, low-density servers, and CDN.
This assures that your WordPress site will be blazing fast and you won’t have to go through the trouble of optimizing your website speed using a bunch of plugins and tools.
Now, before we get further into this cloud WordPress hosting, let’s first understand the difference between a web hosting and cloud hosting.
Web Hosting Vs Cloud Hosting – What’s The Difference?
Cloud hosting is becoming widely popular these days because of the advantages it has over a standard web hosting.
Here’s the between a web hosting and cloud hosting.
A web hosting refers to hosting all your website’s files in a single server. This means all your sites files are stored in a single server physically.
There are many types of web hosting such as:
- Shared hosting
- Dedicated hosting
- VPS
- Managed
The type of web hosting you select is based on your requirements such as the traffic you receive, size of the website, and more.
A cloud hosting on the other hand, doesn’t store your website’s files in a single server. In other words, all your server hardware is virtual.
With cloud hosting, you have unlimited resource expansion as you aren’t bound to a single server. Your site can be shifted to another server if one server is not performing well.
Cloud hosting has the following advantages over a standard web hosting:
- Flexible Pricing: You only pay for the amount of resources you are using. This means you can easily scale up or down based on the amount of traffic your website gets.
- Scalability: If your website is on a shared host, you will face scalability problems. For example, if your website suddenly gets high traffic and your web host is not capable of handling it, your site would crash. But this is not the case with cloud hosting. You can easily scale up or down to fit your needs.
- High Performance: It’s no doubt that cloud hosting has a better performance than web hosting. And even in cloud hosting, your servers are switched if you’re facing low performance issues.
Now that the difference between cloud and web hosting is crystal clear, let’s jump into some of the features of HostGator Cloud WordPress hosting.
HostGator Cloud Hosting Features
1. Free WordPress Migration
If you already have a WordPress site and want to move to HostGator, you will get a free migration. This free migration also helps you get started with HostGator and make sure you have everything required.
2. Easy To Use Control Panel
HostGator also offers an easy to use control panel without any complexities. This will allow you to manage your website seamlessly.
You can perform auto-backups with a single click. It also offers one-click scalability to handle any traffic spikes.
Lastly, you can manage all your email accounts easily from the control panel.
3. Mojo Marketplace Theme Access
Mojo Marketplace is a very popular marketplace for WordPress themes. HostGator integrates Mojo Marketplace so that you can quickly access and install any of their themes.
4. Advanced Security
HostGator gives you complete control over your security. This means that you can manage your resources and monitor them without any problems. It also protects your site from DDOS attacks.
5. Daily Database Backups
All HostGator Cloud WordPress hosting plans offer daily database backups including file level restores. This means that you can perform different types of backups.
Some of the file level backups included in HostGator are Full cPanel backup, home directory backup, MySQL backup, and more.
6. Automatic Malware Removal
The features you get in HostGator also include automatic malware removal. This protects your website from malwares so you can get off blacklists. It helps you protect your online reputation with search engines and your website visitors.
7. Unmetered Storage
HostGator provides unmetered storage which means that you can use unlimited amount of storage and you will not be charged for it.
However, HostGator does state that you should only utilize your disk space in normal operation and not violate their terms of service.
8. Unlimited Email Addresses
You can create unlimited email accounts in HostGator’s cloud WordPress hosting. So, if your website is managed by many people, you can easily create email accounts for them.
9. Free Domain Privacy
You can protect your personal information about your domain with free domain privacy. This will keep your information protected from people.
10. Free CodeGuard & SiteLock Services
Codeguard protects your website data by performing daily automatic backups and SiteLock protects your website from viruses, malwares, and hackers.
HostGator cares about their customer’s data and security and therefore they provide free CodeGuard and SiteLock services.
So these were the features of HostGator cloud WordPress hosting. Let’s not discuss about its performance.
Performance
1. Uptime
As website uptime is one of the most important aspects of a good web host, one cannot just choose a hosting provider without checking the uptime it offers
HostGator guarantees 99.9% site uptime and they deliver on this promise. Their average site uptime is always above 99.9% and sometimes even 100%.
This is a big plus point considering how important website uptime is.
2. Speed
Speed is an important ranking factor in the Google algorithm and you cannot afford to have a website with slow speed.
HostGator cloud WordPress hosting also wins the race of speed against its competitors as it is blazing fast.
The average loading times of a website hosted with HostGator’s cloud server is under 1 second which is quite impressive.
Further optimizations to your website will make this go even low and you can notice in under 800-900ms.
3. Security
HostGator protects your website from DDOS attacks, provides free SSL certificate, offers daily database backups, and comes with automatic malware removal.
One can say that HostGator does its best to protect your website from any threat so that you don’t lose your traffic, rankings, or data.
On top of that, HostGator also provides free CodeGuard and SiteLock so that your website is scanned regularly for malwares and viruses. It also protects your data by daily auto-backups.
Support & Customer Service
Support and customer service is also an important to consider when choosing a web host. Often times, you might face any technical difficulties and you can require help from the customer support.
In such situations, you cannot afford to wait to get your problems fixed. Maybe your website is down at a crucial time and you want to get it up and running as fast as possible.
At such times, have a responsive support team is very important.
HostGator offers 24/7/365 support through phone, email, forums, ticketing systems, and live chat.
The customer support team is responsive and makes sure your questions are answered and you don’t walk away disappointed.
Apart from this, HostGator also has an extensive knowledge base with articles and guides regarding the different problems and issues a user might face.
HostGator also has a forum for discussions where many problems are fixed by their support team and the HostGator community itself.
It is safe to say that HostGator offers a good customer service and their support team is very responsive in handling queries as well. Not to mention the knowledge base and the forum also help in many ways to make sure the customer is always satisfied.
Pros & Cons
Let’s take a look at some of the pros and cons of HostGator’s cloud hosting.
Pros:
1. Free site migration: This is a really a useful feature as migrating from one host to another is nothing but a nightmare. Their free site migration service ensures that your transition to HostGator is smooth and without any troubles.
2. 45-day money back guarantee: HostGator is again ahead of their competition as they offer a 45-day day money back guarantee while other hosting providers only provide a 30-day money back guarantee.
3. 99.9% site uptime: Site uptime of HostGator’s cloud WordPress hosting is always above a staggering 99.9% which is remarkable. You don’t ever have to worry about your website being down.
5. Blazing fast: The cloud hosting is very fast and your site loading times will always be low which ensures better search engine rankings.
6. Affordable: The starting plan of HostGator’s cloud WordPress hosting costs only $5.95 which is very affordable. Other hosting providers are providing shared hosting at this cost while HostGator is playing big and offering cloud hosting at this cost which is 2.5x faster than shared hosting.
Cons:
1. Unmetered storage is not truly unmetered: While HostGator seems to offer unlimited storage in their cloud hosting plan, this is not true. HostGator states that you should use this storage under normal operation and if your storage is above 25% of the normal use, you will be contacted by HostGator regarding it. This means that while you do have unlimited storage, there is still a limit to this storage space.
2. HostGator doesn’t support NGINX: HostGator does not support NGINX servers at this point. They also don’t support HTTP/2 currently.
Let’s now move on to the most important part of this review: pricing.
Pricing & Discounts
The WordPress cloud hosting by HostGator offers three plans namely starter, standard, and business.
The starter plan costs $5.95 per month and allows you to host 1 website. The traffic limit for your hosted website is 100k visits per month which means that if your traffic exceeds the given limit, you will have to upgrade to a higher plan.
This plan offers free site migration for 1 website only and you get 1GB automatic daily database backups. You also get $100 worth of Google Adwords credit.
The discount on this plan is 40%.
The standard plan has a discount of 50% and thus costs $7.95 per month. With the standard plan, you can host 2 websites and with a traffic limit of 200k visits per month.
You get 2GB of free automatic daily database backups and $100 Google Adwords credit.
The last plan of WordPress cloud hosting is the business plan. This plan has a 57% discount and the discounted price for the business plan is $9.95 per month.
You can host 3 websites and you have a traffic limit of 500k visits per month. HostGator has bumped up the relative computing power of this plan. So you get 5x power in the business plan which means this plan is faster than it’s two predecessors.
You also get 3GB of free automatic daily database backups and $100 Google Adwords credit.
Here is a quick overview of the three pricing plans:
Conclusion
So this was my review of the HostGator WordPress cloud hosting. From the review, it is clear that HostGator is offers very good service with some awesome features.
The cloud hosting for WordPress is very affordable and with 99.9% site uptime guarantee. If site uptime and speed are an important factor to you, then HostGator’s cloud hosting is the perfect fit for you.
