HostGator Hosting Review: Just Overlook the Downtime? (2025)

Ease of Use

My rating here is 3.8 out of 5.

Here’s why:

• The user interface of HostGator is straightforward and user-friendly.
• Having display ads is especially frustrating if you’re not careful and accidentally click on them, potentially leading to unintended purchases.
• HostGator offers a simple site setup process directly from the client area, which is a plus for users who might be overwhelmed by cPanel.

HostGator’s ease of use is commendable, with a clean and intuitive interface that simplifies website management.

However, the presence of ads after login and the lack of distinctiveness compared to its sibling company, Bluehost, slightly diminish its appeal.

User Interface

Darrel already has a HostGator test account, so I might only be able to show you some things from the start (and not completely from scratch).

After logging in, you will see a similar ad that you can see from Bluehost about offering you a domain privacy and protection bundle.

Like this:

⚠️ Note: If you don’t know yet, HostGator and Bluehost are actually owned by the same company, Endurance International Group (EIG).

Anyway, if you have used Bluehost in the past, it’s like you’re using a Bluehost clone here with HostGator as they’re mostly the same.

After skipping the ad, you will arrive at the site selection page in the client area:

The user interface is a little simple (not completely old) and it’s easy to use and navigate with its large buttons and text.

This page can bring you to:

• A site’s settings page
• WordPress dashboard
• Add another site

If you want to configure the settings of the website, this is what you will see:

This page would show you different site information and update status in a glance, and manage some of them in a single click.

There are also some shortcuts and quick links here to different features like security, quick connect, file manager, and more.

👉 Related: Bluehost Hosting Review: Slow Load Times Problem

Hosting Environment/Setup

You must’ve seen the add site button on the site selection page (you can find it in the top-right corner of the page).

When you click on it, you will have two choices:

• Install WordPress
• Other (empty environment)

Like this:

I’m not sure why I’m not seeing the option to migrate a site here like in Bluehost, maybe from the plan this account has.

If you press further, you will go through a little setup process where you enter some information about your site like the title and domain.

After that, you will see this:

Like with Bluehost, you will appreciate the little setup process even if there are only two steps here. 😅

Well, no matter how short it was, for newbies, it beats the experience of going through the cPanel and setting up the website from there.

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Best Features

My rating for HostGator’s features is 4.2 out of 5.

Here’s why:

• HostGator provides a comprehensive suite of features, even on its lowest plans.
• The similarity between HostGator and Bluehost in terms of features is noticeable, especially since they share the same parent company.
• HostGator’s WordPress onboarding and website management features are user-friendly and cater well to beginners.

The integration of cPanel and user-friendly tools makes managing websites straightforward.

However, the similarity to Bluehost’s offerings and the potential limitations in customization may not appeal to everyone.

⚠️ Note: If you’re looking for what each hosting plan brings to the table, you can find them in the pricing section of this review as what I’ll be talking about here are hosting features.

Here are some notable features of HostGator:

1. WordPress Onboarding

If I didn’t click the new site that was created, I wouldn’t have known about this. 😅

Basically, HostGator has an onboarding process for new websites where you would be able to configure the website from scratch.

Like this:

It’s pretty nice since it will take you from entering the basic information of the site down to recommended plugins (though I don’t like the plugins listed).

It’s also pretty detailed, like the design menu, which includes:

• Theme styles
• Colors
• Fonts
• Header and menu

Newbies would appreciate this since it’s an easy way to set up the website without diving through the customization screen right away.

2. Website management

Similar to Bluehost, Hostgator also includes a nice plugin that makes website management easier to handle.

Basically, this plugin integrates the site with the HostGator control panel so you can configure the performance, security, and update features.

For example, the settings option includes so many things that you can do:

It includes:

• Coming soon page
• Enabling Wonder Blocks and Help Center
• Configure the automatic update settings

Naturally, there are some similarities here between the Bluehost plugin and the HostGator plugin, and even share similar features.

3. Email management

Despite the different features you can do from the control panel and in the plugin, HostGator uses cPanel under the hold.

That means you also get cPanel features, like email management — and you can even see it when you click the cPanel email button.

Like this:

Since it’s cPanel, you can virtually create unlimited email accounts.

You can also use tools like:

• Global email filters
• Spam filters
• Autoresponders
• Email routing

When you click on any of the tools in the cPanel email in the client area, that will bring you to the app or tool in the cPanel.

Reliability

I rate HostGator’s reliability at 3.2 out of 5.

Here’s why:

• HostGator demonstrates decent performance in terms of uptime, with an estimated uptime of 99.85% over a year.
• A major drawback is the lack of a centralized system status page, which means users cannot easily check the status of services and features across the platform.
• While its uptime and load time are adequate, they fall short when compared to better web hosting services like Kinsta and SiteGround.

HostGator is an okay web hosting provider with reasonable uptime and performance metrics, which could make it an okay option for some users.

However, the lack of transparency in service status and the presence of better-performing alternatives might deter those seeking top-tier reliability.

Performance

I actually keep an eye on about 20 different web hosts using Pingdom and track their performance as Darrel uses them for the videos.

In terms of uptime, HostGator was up 99.94% of the time for five months — and it got a downtime of 3 hours.

⚠️ Note: For the hosting plans, we usually get the cheapest one from each web hosting service. Well, if their lowest plans suck, we can’t expect much from their more expensive options, right? We also use the same Elementor template kit and plugins.

Well, it’s a little worse than Bluehost considering it’s already down to 99.94% in five months — it’s likely that it’s uptime in a year is around 99.85%.

For the page speed, HostGator had an average load time of 4.12 seconds and got a 77/100 performance grade from Pingdom.

Now let’s compare HostGator’s performance with the results from other well-known web hosting companies (1 year):

If you look at the uptime and downtime, it seems that HostGator is really worse than Bluehost by a few percent.

On the bright side, HostGator seems to be doing fine in terms of performance and load time, though for load time (at least better than Bluehost).

Truth be told, HostGator belongs to the group of web hosts that I don’t really recommend simply based on the performance. 😅

Updates and Maintenance

But how about updates and maintenance?

Unfortunately, similar to Bluehost, HostGator doesn’t have any centralized system status page where you can check the status of services and features in the platform.

What they have is the service information from cPanel:

If you don’t know what this is, cPanel has a “server information” page where you can find out more information about the server and the status of its services.

In a way, this tells you the information about your own server where your website is located, and whether or not there’s a problem.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t say anything about the services and features in HostGator in case there’s a blackout or maintenance. 🤷

Support

My rating here is 3.8 out of 5.

Here’s why:

• The live chat support is particularly efficient, with a response time of about two minutes after navigating through initial bot interactions.
• The live chat support experience includes a bot that asks numerous questions before connecting to a human agent.
• The knowledge base is well-organized and contains detailed articles with annotated images, making it a valuable resource for users seeking self-help.

While the live chatbot interaction could be smoother, the overall support experience is positive and effective.

The knowledge base is particularly strong, providing in-depth information and guidance.

Customer Service

As expected, HostGator has similar support options to that of Bluehost.

They basically have three main support options:

• Live chat support
• Phone support
• Knowledge base

As you might’ve guessed from the screenshot above, I tested out the live chat support to see how well they handle issues.

Surprisingly, they handled it quite well as it took them only two minutes for an agent to reply as soon as I finished the tasks the bot was giving me.

Here are more details:

• Their bot starts with the typical “help” in an attempt to show you first to a knowledge base article related to your issue.
• This part took me around 2 minutes to complete. 😅
• The bot has too many questions, that I felt like it was only stalling while getting an agent’s attention.

But all in all, I guess the experience was quite okay, the 2-minute reply time is still okay in my book, and the agent was able to give me a direct answer. 🙂

Knowledge Base

As I explained earlier, HostGator also has a knowledge base that looks quite similar to Bluehost’s knowledge base.

Here’s what the front page looks like:

There are different categories here like:

• WordPress
• Features
• Transfer
• Hosting information

You can click on an article directly, or see all the articles for that category, which will take you to filtered search results.

Anyway, here’s what an actual article looks like:

As you can see, HostGator has well-written articles complete with annotated images (and even has some internal links).

Most of the articles I visited actually went in-depth and made sure to cover as deep as they could on that topic. 🙂

Pricing

My rating here is 3.3 out of 5.

Here’s why:

• Their entry-level shared hosting plan is reasonably priced, starting at $3.75/month, which includes a free domain for the first year.
• The pricing displayed on HostGator’s website often reflects discounted rates, and the renewal prices are significantly higher.
• HostGator’s money-back guarantee is limited to certain hosting products, such as shared, WordPress, and VPS hosting.

HostGator provides a variety of hosting options at competitive introductory prices, which makes it accessible to a wide audience.

However, the steep renewal rates and the restrictive refund policy may deter some potential customers.

⚠️ Note: HostGator has a lot of products, but since we’re talking about hosting, I’m going to focus more on their hosting products.

1. Web hosting

Surprisingly, HostGator has web hosting plans and WordPress plans that differ in price and capacity (though I can see why they’re different).

Here are the web hosting (shared) plans:

The plans start from $3.75/month for 10 websites with 10 GB SSD storage and can go up to $6.25 for 50 websites and 50 GB SSD storage.

All of them include:

• A free domain for a year
• Unmetered bandwidth
• Basic email
• Free SSL certificate
• WordPress pre-installed

As you can expect, the higher plans have exclusives like more vCPUs, daily website backup, and domain privacy for the first year.

2. WordPress hosting

After some digging, I realized that HostGator’s “WordPress” plans are actually managed hosting (a little different from the usual shared web hosting).

Here are the plans:

The plans start from $4.50/month for 20 websites with 20 GB SSD storage and can go up to $13.95 for 100 websites and 100 GB SSD storage.

What you get is a little similar to what they offer for web hosting:

• Free domain for the first year
• Free SSL
• WordPress pre-installed

Maybe the difference is that this time, even the lowest plan can enjoy malware scanning, Cloudflare CDN, and more vCPUs.

3. Dedicated hosting

If you prefer to have more control over your server and its system resources, HostGator also has dedicated hosting.

Here are the plans:

The plans start at $91.98/month for a 4 core/8 thread processor with 8 GB RAM and can go up to $141.99/month for an 8 core/16 thread processor with 30 GB RAM.

All of the include:

• A choice of HDD or SSD for storage
• Unmetered bandwidth
• Free migration

There are no additional features for a higher plan though as they only differ in the capacity of CPU, RAM, and storage.

4. Other products

Besides that, HostGator also has other hosting products.

One of them is VPS (virtual private server) hosting that starts at $36.99 for 2 GB RAM, 2 core CPU, and 120 GB SSD.

HostGator also offers reseller hosting that starts at $36.99 for basically the same capacities as VPS hosting.

Other products include:

• Domain registration
• SSL certificates
• Codeguard
• SiteLock

If you’re going to use HostGator and you need these services, the bright side is you don’t have to buy from outside sources.

Money Back Guarantee/Refund

It’s nice to know that HostGator offers a 30-day money-back guarantee for most of its hosting products.

They actually have a dedicated page for this in their knowledge base:

The gist is that:

• They guarantee only covers shared (web) hosting, WordPress hosting, and VPS hosting.
• It doesn’t apply to dedicated hosting, domain registration fees, services with a monthly term, and any fees for add-on services.
• The guarantee is only valid for the first package purchased for billing accounts less than 30 days old.

If I understand correctly, older accounts that purchased additional hosting products can’t claim a refund. 🙁

Going further, if you use checks, money orders, or even bank wire transfers, you’re not eligible for a refund.

Final Thoughts

When considering HostGator, it’s important to carefully review the terms of the introductory pricing and be aware of the higher renewal rates.

I also recommend that you read and understand the scope of the money-back guarantee to ensure it covers your specific hosting choice.

To make the most of your investment, compare the included features with your actual needs, and consider the potential long-term costs.

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