Hostgator: Research the host and test-drive the gator

Here's my research on HostGator (HG). It'll be short and to the point.

Positive:

- HG do explain what they really mean under unlimited disk space and bandwidth usage :

- Documentation to help users (e.g. for setting up WordPress ):

- Community forum where people can ask even not comfortable questions and HG doesn't delete them (kudos to HG!)
- HG offers free phone support and live chat in addition to ticket system (and regardless of lots of negative reviews, they can be helpful )
- HG's Control Panel has tutorials (good for total newbies):

- WordPress goes with plugins WP Super Cache installed and Jetpack is suggested (good for WP newbies)

Negative:

- longer support than expected and not high quality of service (some examples here , here and here ).
- HG is a part of EIG which is 'famous' for caring about their money first, and not about their clients (opinions and experiences can differ of course, but this is my point of view).

Other notes:

- No automatic backups guaranteed (although they offer the service for $19.95/year additionally for daily backups to the cloud):

- QuickInstall and Fantastico can be used to install CMS and other software (there's no Softaculous):

Performance test-drive:

Here are 1-day performance monitoring results for a new HG shared hosting account (Hatching Plan, the cheapest, $7.16 monthly payment or $66.72 yearly payment, only 1 domain allowed), where I installed a typical WordPress site (with WP Super Cache plugin).

Please note that the test-drive is not 100% objective to judge about HG, because for more reliable results such research should be done the following way:
- Analize much longer period of time
- Take exactly the same website platform and content when comparing different hosting providers
- Test many hosting company's servers, not just one.

However, the testing gives some perspective.

I've made a couple of Pingdom tests in a row to see the full page download.

Well, the performance isn't great.  

Here is a server response time overview:

I'm using several dozens shared hosting services, and I can say that I wasn't impressed with HG performance during the test-drive. Although generally it showed quite fast server response time.

Conclusion:

In my opinion, although HG is newbie-friendly and many users are happy with it (HG has about 9 mln sites), there are better hosts for the same price considering customer support and reliability.