Are you tired from hostgator and looking for an alternative? Then please read this article where I expose some pros and cons of hostgator and also the best hostgator alternatives.
This article is only for shared webhosting. I will write about VPS and Dedicated server soon after doing a bit more research, and put the links on this same article.
Although considered by many as the number 1 solution for hosting, offering “unlimited” everything for a low price on their shared hosting plans. They have some pretty good pros and some very bad cons on their hosting. This cons are normally enough for you to search for hostgator alternative.
Some of the major drawbacks that some people claim about hostgator include big blackouts (offline time), the time one has to wait to be able to contact someone from the staff when a problem happens, the inode limits and of course the account getting blocked by “weird” reasons (usually too much CPU load or traffic).
Most of the unsatisfied costumers of Hostgator started to show up after June 2012, when Hostgator was bought by Endurance International Group (EIG).
There are lots of alternatives, but for a low price and better service, they are rather limited, here I’ll mention the best alternatives that I was able to gather:
NEW: For a limited time, Bluehost dropped the price from $6.95/month to $4.95! [Promotion expired]
Bluehost at first, seems to be a better alternative to Hostgator, they have only one plan (that you can see it as the “Baby” plan of Hostgator) and for basically the same price and you get a free domain. You also have inode limitations identical to Hostgator.
A great feature of them is the “ANYTIME MONEY BACK GUARANTEE”, in other words, they will give you the remaining money of your contract with them.
All of this turns Bluehost into a “clone” of Hostgator, just too identical right? Coincidence? No. Bluehost is actually from the same company behind Hostgator (EIG) even the server-farms / datacenters are shared between them (along with Justhost and Hostmonster, also from EIG). But it tends to get better reviews than Hostgator.
So if you don’t want simply a new face and web interface, and are really looking for something new and out of the EIG, the next alternative will be more appealing to you.
Dreamhost is more expensive that hostgator or bluehost ($8.95/month at the time of writing) for the same kind of plan. On the other hand, they offer an overall better service, per example, they have a “100% uptime guarantee”, in other words, if your website (or websites) is/are offline they will credit your next invoice with 1 day of free hosting for each hour it was offline.
They offer a 97 day money back guarantee, enough for you to test their services, and in case you want to cancel your contract with them after the 97 days, like bluehost, they will refund you for all the remaining time!
They have nothing to do with EIG and they are totally open to where their servers are hosted:
Alchemy Communications, a Los Angeles-based dedicated server and colocation provider, has been offering reliable and high-quality service to small, medium, and large-sized businesses in Southern California since 1996.
There is no inode limit (those who need to host a lot of files know that this is a major plus!) in their terms of service, nor users complaining about accounts getting banned for random reasons (only the ones that used their accounts for fraud, spamming or illegal activities). In general, it is a more expensive service, but a better one also, often quality comes with a price.
Here is a video showing why Dreamhost is different and is actually good to know how things work on the other side and that people do show their face, this company doesn’t simply hides in the shadow as most other hosting companies who actually tend to be all the same (EIG) simply with a new webpage, face, logo and name.
