HostGator Coupon | Reviews

(02-13-2006) ponchos writes:

   A week or two ago I joined hostgator with their aluminium reseller account. Although still new to the account I think it's nice for everyone read up on my initial experience with them, I've read a lot of reviews from others and learnt quite alot from it, so the most I can do is post a review about them for people considering hostgator. i will of course post a follow up review about them in a few months time.

Presales
   Talking to presales was ace, the live chat made it easy/possible to get all your questions ironed out and answered immediately. However, it seems that some of the live chat people don' t speak English natively, though I've also encountered on a few native speaking people through chat. You can easily tell the difference when you speak to them. One of them was very friendly, he actually used my name for one of their replies during live chat, you'd think that' s be a minor thing when people call you by your name, but when you've tested out several live chat supports, you begin to feel like a robot, having your name mentioned makes you feel like you're treated as a human being instead of a ticket number of a customer id. Definitely a big plus in terms of friendliness.
I'd give a thumbs up for the lovely presale chats I've had with them

Starting up
   The choice of payment was through paypal, it was very nice that they offered a variety of payment options. Another plus as I did not want to pay the invoices manually or start touching my credit card.

   Starting up was instant, had my account setup within 30 minutes (so not really an instant) after the payment was sent. Everything was working (though it was quite annoying waiting for my domain to propagate so I had to work on my main site using the ip route). All the additional features such as enom account, link to merchant accounts (all free setups), hosting templates, and link to request for whmap were there. The startup page was loaded with all the information a reseller would need to know. It was laid out nicely so you can tackle them one at a time in the right order.

Private Nameservers
   of course, there' s a choice to use their own nameservers, (websitewelcome.com, a totally anonymous address) however I opted for the private nameservers to give my company a more professional look
private nameservers were pretty fast to setup, just create them on your registrar, and link your account to them, i updated my dns zone templates so that everytime i create an account they are linked to my private nameservers instead of their own nameservers. I' m glad that hostgator allows you to edit your own dns file as my previous hosting wouldnt let you do it. i managed to customise the dns template so it had spf and was compliant with a dnsreport.

WHMAP
   Very nice that this account comes with whmap, very useful tool for automating your ordering process. the version i received was still v2 however I' m informed that they'll be rolling out v3 very soon.

   Requesting this was fine, however, upon requesting it they assumed that I wanted them to install the script for a $25 fee. Though this is shown on the startup page, they don' t mention what you need to do to ensure that you're not getting them to install it. Perhaps a combo box to select whether or not the client requires installing. I contacted support as soon as I felt I was hanging with the thought that they would assume that and hostgator managed to quickly clarify that this was true. When I told them that i would like to install it myself they said that's fine and left their installation in progress as it is so I can finish up on it....free of charge (don' t try it though :p). Setting up crons for it was a piece of cake.

Enom account
   That worked like a charm as promised, though the account name does have hostgator as a prefix so people can easily tell that you're a reseller at hostgator. I've heard that you can work around this buy buying your own account which requires a $100 deposit.

Support and normal bau stuff
   This is probably one of the most important parts of a hosting review, ill try and make it as in-depth as the rest of my review so people can get a good idea about how the support at hostgator is like. After getting setting up with hostgator, one of the first things i did was do a nice whois lookup on the server i was on, seems like a new server as it only had records for two websites (mine and someone else). its good to know that hostgator are constantly purchasing new servers to host their customers. however, new server means new customers.

I' ve received a few httpd downtimes throughout the week, i guess this was caused by new customers setting themselves up which needs some juice to get it all started. I've sent support tickets regarding the downtimes and the problem gets fixed straight away with a httpd reboot. i requested for more information on my server status page so i could monitor my account which they granted me immediately.
I' ve setup a uptime tracker with my site (host tracker - updated every 5 minutes) and so far I' ve received about 18 minutes worth of downtime. not much for now but not a good impression for someone who just joined the account :/. however i do understand why these downtimes are occuring (some related to theplanet) and i cant blame hostgator for it. However, I hope hostgator doesn' t let me down on this one in future as uptime is one of the main reasons I chose them.

Live chat support
   Sometimes can be a bit tedious, you might spend 10 minutes of live chat with them only to find out that your answer can only be solved via a ticket, I believe that the live chat support team are only there to manage the load the actual admin receive from a day to day basis, filtering out the genuine ones. I do get some of my answered via live chat but a few times I had to resort in using the tickets, not to say that tickets is bad. Sometimes it' s just a lot easier to have everything submitted in one go instead of chatting to them in realtime.

Ticket support
   Ticket support is fast. i get replies ranging from 10 minutes to 2 hours (though the 2 hour reply was a non critical thing which could wait).One small nick about their system is the fact that you can get several people answering your question instead of one dedicated person per ticket. it would be nice to have one person talk to as you're creating a bond with the person as soon as you're asking for support from them. though its still good since you're more likely to get faster replies if the support team is helping you out rather then one person who might be flooded with tickets.

   Their knowledge base section is very informative and their tutorial guides are quite useful for first time resellers.

Support forums
   Their support forums are very friendly, its nice to go in there and listen to what other people discuss about their hosting experiences. there's a status board which announces any servers undergoing maintenance.

Server status
   When people promise 99.9% uptime, there really should be a way of universally measuring this. i've seen several hosting company' s who freely share their server uptimes and loads to everyone which I' m sure, will be used as evidence if a customer would like a refund due to downtime. it appears that hostgator does have one, but they are only for older boxes which means i cant do much with it.
I do wish this could be setup but it seems that hostgator are using a more accurate hosting tracker which is only available to the staff.

Overall feel of the plan
   I must say, after I purchased a reseller plan with them I feel well chuffed with what they have to offer, all the added features are excellent to have (whmap, enom account, hosting templates for lazy people). These features do put the icing on the cake, their overselling policy is a good idea too, you are more assured that your server won' t be filled with other accounts that will mess up your loads and memory usage.

Conclusion
   To summarise, I' d very happy I' ve chosen hostgator. They provide quality service and support and deserve to be on everyone' s good books. I' d recommend them to everyone from first time to profession resellers, worth giving them a go, and if you don' t like them, you can easily get your money back.

full article can be found here

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