Ask The Admin Reviews: Host Gator
Hey Kiddies, Commodore 64 here to bring another tidbit of good advice from all of us to all of you. Along with this tasty piece of techie goodness is a brief admin-ography of the history of AskTheAdmin.com. We’ve come a long way folks, and we think we’ve finally found the true nexus point of our platform needs.
HostGator!
If you’ve been following us throughout the years, you’ve probably experienced the growing pains we’ve had moving from platform to platform, host to host. Our humble beginnings on Blogger dealing with all the limitations and WYSIWYG inconsistencies, then our HUGE fiasco getting our posts, media, and comments migrated, exported, and sometimes even re-written from scratch and re-imported one by tedious one.
Following the imports to our now defunct web host, Bansal-Inc, we were plagued with outages, server errors, php errors, unexpected reboots, files disappearing (wtf?) and older versions re-appearing (seriously now, WTFluck). It was like something out of The Twilight Zone with the title of “Ghost in the Machine.” It was utter chaos.
On top of all the server-side issues, I’d like to spend a minute to mention how far WordPress has come as a platform as well as an all around user experience from front to back.
Back then, around version 2.5 or 2.6, the WYSIWYG was HORRIBLE. Having already spent many years in the field of front-end web development, the amount of “code rewriting” and “automatic formatting” that went on was horrible. Mixed into that was the advent of Windows Livewriter, which in my opinion, was too good of an editing tool to be justifiably paired with a crappy, built-in, wordpress wysiwyg from back then.
Essentially what would end up happening is that in a writers role, it wasn’t half bad. You said your peace, did a little formatting and published. But from an editor’s perspective – re-opening a post and simply switching from HTML view to Visual view would change the code drastically: replacing massive amounts of tags and flucking up all bullet points and various other elements. Aside from editing issues, plugins we were utilizing were crashing the site here and there. I remember there being a lot of fear associated with running a well-trafficked site in our situation, as it was.
Reaching out to tech support, especially when it’s overseas, was painful at best. Response times, even when they were responding, took days sometimes. We ended having to fish through our emails and find the email address of the company owner. It was only then we could get something done.
Just when we thought our problems were over… the company got sold to a web hosting service then called Inspirit Networks. We had a decent run with Inspirit. At first they were eager to please. But as time went on (we’re talking months, not years) the servers and support’s response times were getting worse and more unresponsive with each passing week. Ultimately we suffered major outages for days at a time which also seemed to strangely roll back our files to older versions. This was the last straw.
After major shopping around and considerations we decided on HostGator. The reviews were all good, and after testing their US based voice support lines, as well as chat lines we were thoroughly impressed.
Enter HostGator…
So far I’ve been personally using them for about a year now with no issues, and so far %100 uptime. Utilizing a free service called aremysitesup.com, I’ve been able to see that we have had NO DOWNTIME. The cpanel has all the options I’ve ever needed or wanted in a LAMP hosting account. We are currently running 8 different well trafficked blogs on one hosting account and see no slowdown and no issues. Truthfully, I’ve never been accustomed to being this fear-free and comfortable with my web server.
These days we can spend our time concentrating on publishing quality content rather than keeping our sites running and healthy.
Edit: We now have our own coupon discount code at Gator, which means we can pass along a savings of $9.94 off of your initial purchase with Gatorhost.
Use discount code “asktheadmin” to get your discount today!
This is commodore64 signing off.
Let us know what your web hosting experiences were in the comments below…
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about 2 years ago
you know, I’ve been a long time reader of your blog, but i really have to disagree with this one. Hostgator operations are not at all top notch. I mean c’mon the COO used to run cell boutiques?! Now I know everyone has to start somewhere, don’t get me wrong, but as a service owner you have to have faith in a companies leadership and if you read the reviews from inside employees, glassdoor.com you would see what i mean. I’m just glad they don’t run their own datacenters or you’d have bigger problems on your hand. The Planet runs it but its not like they are a top notch company either vs rackspace, savvis, ibm, etc. I would just suggest reviewing your SLA’s with them, try calling support and seeing how professional they are, and make sure to have local backups of all your stuff.
about 2 years ago
Hey Scott,
We welcome your agreements as well as disagreements. You have to consider the reason behind why I opted to give a brief history of our trials and tribulations – We come from hosting HELL. Our files ended up on a server in India and might very well still be rattling around there somewhere. So our point of view is one of despair, so in contrast GatorHost is a good host for the money and is suiting our needs very nicely.
Our old host used to make us communicate with them via email only. We used to have to wait days for a response and then weeks for a solution. It was utterly disgusting.
When we started out with Gator I made sure I could get a voice on the phone. Since then I’ve been getting voices on the phone for any and all, even if useless, questions I’ve had for them; even completely speculative questions yielded an American (no offense, India or any other countries who provide tech support) voice on the phone and an immediate solution.
For us this was simply enough.
Using aremysitesup.com also further drove the uptime point home.
I appreciate your critique, as it was an educated one. But we’re very happy with gatorhost and it’s the ONLY reason we would EVER give a product a positive review.
Thanks and be well,
C64 ,8,1
about 1 year ago
Scott – thanks for the comment. We love GatorHost and it offers the most bang for your buck. We have not had ANY downtime with Gator and always can get a support specialist on the line.
Who would you rather use Scott?
about 1 year ago
Scott – I wouldn’t doubt that “rackspace, savvis, ibm” and others of that ilk will provide better service, more uptime and better support. But you are going to pay handsomely for that.
It’s really about matching the host to your needs. Not to belittle ATA at all, but it really doesn’t make sense for them to pay for the same level of reliability and support that a much larger, more heavily trafficked site needs.
about 1 year ago
Well Peter the host gator account we are running on is very low cost sub $20 a month and we have 15 or so sites running off of it. I have several other accounts at this level or below for other clients. It works well for big and small site.
about 1 year ago
how can i level up fast in epicduel and have some cool gears plss do it iwill pay you 30$ plss
about 1 year ago
Hello,
I’m the owner of hostgator and based on the comment Scott made I’m going to assume he had a personal issue with Lance.
Lance is somewhat of the enforcer at hostgator so there’s probably a good chance this person may have been fired by him. We take customer service very seriously and as a result we endup having to get rid of many employees who aren’t up for the challenge. A few of those employees endup posting on glassdoor. It’s pretty simple those who are good at their job usually love it at hostgator. Those that don’t perform well usually hate it and blame management.
If a customer of ours ever has an issue with our services they are more then welcome to reach out to me and I’ll personally help them. That goes for our employees to. =)
about 1 year ago
Thanks for stopping by Brent. We agree with you 100% and absolutely LOVE hostgator. AskTheAdmin and all of our clients are hosting on HostGator.
You have an awesome company Brent! Let us know if you have any interest in corporate sponsorship here at AtA.
about 1 year ago
I find it funny that most of the time that Brent posts in a forum defending his company, 90% of the time it’s actually Level 2 Sales pretending to be him.