Hostgator seemed like a good hosting company until they were bought by EIG (on June 2012).
They offered a decent service for a very small amount of money, which made them pretty popular and considered by many at the time as the hosting company of choice. Nowadays more and more people get into random problems with them which make some people to smell a scam all over it. Why did this happened?
Well, as said before, Hostgator seemed like a legit company, but they were bought by EIG (click on the link to read more about who and what EIG does), only after that did lots of complains kicked in, like the blackouts where their servers were down for hours without any response from the support team. Calls being redirected from a decent support team who actually got things fixed and knew what they were doing, to rude call centers in India who spoke barely English and simply repeated over and over that you had to email or open a ticked with the problem and hang off the phone on you.
People got mad when their websites were mysteriously turned offline and got their account banned for no apparent reason, some data estimative from this websites concluded that Hostgator seems to simply cut off the sites that are consuming more resources then the other ones, so they are able to fit more websites on less servers making more income and spending less, bringing a bigger profits.
Things get even worse, people can get their website offline and/or account blocked by simply a competitor of your website making a fake DMCA complain and sending it to Hostgator. This has happened already, Hostgator don’t seem to care about getting to the bottom of the issue, that simply takes too much time for them and they are so cheap that they prefer to lose a costumer then having a lawyer or someone with some kind of experience on this to actually look at the papers and conclude if they are fake, forged or actually the true thing.
Bottom line, Hostgator is not a scam, but they did fell pretty heavy on the quality of service they once gave to their clients. If you run some small blogs and have a very tight budget, then you have what you paid for, but if you run one, or some, websites that are very important or bring you a good revenue and you can spend a few more bucks on the hosting then avoid Hostgator! There are a lot of Hostgator alternatives out there, like Dreamhost (with unlimited plan, VPSs, etc) and MDDHosting (a very professional and FAST hosting company). Also avoid any EIG companies (click on the link for a list) because they basically share the same datacenter and have the same support system.
