HostGator is known for their unlimited web hosting and 24/7 tech support. They were founded in 2002 and now host over 9 million websites. Their data centers are located in Provo, Utah.
I have purchased a hosting plan on
Here is the plan information I chose:
| Plan Name | Hatchling |
|---|---|
| Cost | $8.95/month |
| Disk Space | Unlimited |
| Bandwidth | Unlimited |
| Uptime Guarantee | 99.9% |
| Money Back Guarantee | 45 days |
| Notes | Site was ready within minutes after I purchased. |
On this page: Uptime | Speed | Support | Alternatives
Contents
- 0.1 Uptime Test
- 0.2 HostGator: How Good (Or Bad!) Is Their Uptime & Hosting Speed? Uptime Test Results
- 0.3 Recent Raw Results for HostGator: How Good (Or Bad!) Is Their Uptime & Hosting Speed?
- 0.4 Page Speed Test
- 0.5 HostGator: How Good (Or Bad!) Is Their Uptime & Hosting Speed? Page Speed Test Results
- 0.6 Recent Raw Results for HostGator: How Good (Or Bad!) Is Their Uptime & Hosting Speed?
- 1 Does HostGator: How Good (Or Bad!) Is Their Uptime & Hosting Speed? Suck?
- 2 Still think HostGator: How Good (Or Bad!) Is Their Uptime & Hosting Speed? sucks?
- 3 HostGator: How Good (Or Bad!) Is Their Uptime & Hosting Speed? Alternatives: Better speed, reliability, and support
- 3.1 Hosts faster than HostGator: How Good (Or Bad!) Is Their Uptime & Hosting Speed?
- 3.2 Hosts more reliable than HostGator: How Good (Or Bad!) Is Their Uptime & Hosting Speed?
- 3.3 Hosts more helpful than HostGator: How Good (Or Bad!) Is Their Uptime & Hosting Speed?
- 3.4 HostGator: How Good (Or Bad!) Is Their Uptime & Hosting Speed? vs Other Hosts
Uptime Test
I use Pingdom to report website uptime. Pingdom is configured to make an HTTP request to the host every minute, and report if it is unreachable. It'll also report an error if the host takes longer than 30 seconds to respond (Yes, that's not actually down, but if your site takes that long to respond it is unusable in my opinion). Pingdom performs this test from at least 3 servers worldwide, and reports a problem if 2/3 servers do no respond.
This test is important if you are concerned about the reliability of your web host (this is important!)
HostGator: How Good (Or Bad!) Is Their Uptime & Hosting Speed? Uptime Test Results
Let’s see if
Recent Raw Results for HostGator: How Good (Or Bad!) Is Their Uptime & Hosting Speed?
| Date | Uptime | Downtime | Outages | Avg Response Time |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 100.000% | 0 mins | 0 | 769 ms | |
| 100.000% | 0 mins | 0 | 768 ms | |
| 100.000% | 0 mins | 0 | 827 ms | |
| 100.000% | 0 mins | 0 | 797 ms | |
| 100.000% | 0 mins | 0 | 802 ms | |
| 100.000% | 0 mins | 0 | 809 ms | |
| 100.000% | 0 mins | 0 | 806 ms | |
| 100.000% | 0 mins | 0 | 862 ms | |
| 100.000% | 0 mins | 0 | 810 ms | |
| 100.000% | 0 mins | 0 | 864 ms | |
| 100.000% | 0 mins | 0 | 801 ms | |
| 100.000% | 0 mins | 0 | 840 ms | |
| 100.000% | 0 mins | 0 | 780 ms | |
| 100.000% | 0 mins | 0 | 768 ms | |
| 100.000% | 0 mins | 0 | 769 ms | |
| 100.000% | 0 mins | 0 | 798 ms | |
| 100.000% | 0 mins | 0 | 780 ms | |
| 100.000% | 0 mins | 0 | 783 ms | |
| 100.000% | 0 mins | 0 | 779 ms | |
| 100.000% | 0 mins | 0 | 775 ms | |
| 100.000% | 0 mins | 0 | 806 ms | |
| 100.000% | 0 mins | 0 | 824 ms | |
| 100.000% | 0 mins | 0 | 797 ms | |
| 100.000% | 0 mins | 0 | 843 ms | |
| 100.000% | 0 mins | 0 | 825 ms | |
| 100.000% | 0 mins | 0 | 753 ms | |
| 100.000% | 0 mins | 0 | 713 ms | |
| 100.000% | 0 mins | 0 | 816 ms | |
| 100.000% | 0 mins | 0 | 742 ms | |
| 100.000% | 0 mins | 0 | 703 ms | |
| 100.000% | 0 mins | 0 | 736 ms | |
| 100.000% | 0 mins | 0 | 717 ms | |
| 100.000% | 0 mins | 0 | 671 ms | |
| 100.000% | 0 mins | 0 | 739 ms | |
| 100.000% | 0 mins | 0 | 682 ms | |
| 100.000% | 0 mins | 0 | 694 ms | |
| 100.000% | 0 mins | 0 | 624 ms | |
| 100.000% | 0 mins | 0 | 680 ms | |
| 100.000% | 0 mins | 0 | 662 ms | |
| 100.000% | 0 mins | 0 | 640 ms | |
| 100.000% | 0 mins | 0 | 588 ms | |
| 100.000% | 0 mins | 0 | 523 ms | |
| 100.000% | 0 mins | 0 | 521 ms | |
| 100.000% | 0 mins | 0 | 539 ms | |
| 100.000% | 0 mins | 0 | 511 ms | |
| 99.000% | 7 mins | 1 | 540 ms | |
| 100.000% | 0 mins | 0 | 574 ms | |
| 100.000% | 0 mins | 0 | 571 ms | |
| 100.000% | 0 mins | 0 | 548 ms | |
| 100.000% | 0 mins | 0 | 626 ms | |
| 100.000% | 0 mins | 0 | 642 ms | |
| 100.000% | 0 mins | 0 | 643 ms | |
| 100.000% | 0 mins | 0 | 660 ms | |
| 100.000% | 0 mins | 0 | 670 ms | |
| 100.000% | 0 mins | 0 | 636 ms | |
| 100.000% | 0 mins | 0 | 660 ms | |
| 100.000% | 0 mins | 0 | 615 ms | |
| 100.000% | 0 mins | 0 | 670 ms | |
| 100.000% | 0 mins | 0 | 650 ms | |
| 100.000% | 0 mins | 0 | 655 ms |
Page Speed Test
This test is performed by submitting a typical web page served on the host to WebPageTest and recording how long it takes to load. This test web page is 56 KB of HTML, 287 KB of JavaScript, 51 KB of CSS, and 1,128 KB of images (these are typical according to the HTTP Archive). WebPageTest (a 3rd-party, vendor-neutral organization) uses servers located in Virgina and California to measure the page load waterfall in the latest version of Chrome, on a very fast internet connection. The test is ran 5 times each, and the middle (median) result is what is counted from each location. Then the east coast and west coast times are averaged, which should eliminate any bias due to server location. We're interested in first page load, not the repeat/cached view.
If you're really interested, I use the 'Load Time' measurement that's returned from WebPageTest for ranking page speed. I still collect other metrics such as TTFB
(time to first byte), fully loaded time, and the speed index, in addition to server setting scores which are translated to grades. You can see these detailed values in the "Raw Results."
This test is important if your site resembles a typical website and you're concerned about speed (which you should be!)
In September 2014 I updated this test to be more accurate, and you'll notice page speeds were a bit higher before then. The test used to be run only 3 times from one location using a simulated cable internet connection on Internet Explorer 11. The new method provides much more consistent results.
HostGator: How Good (Or Bad!) Is Their Uptime & Hosting Speed? Page Speed Test Results
Let’s see if
Recent Raw Results for HostGator: How Good (Or Bad!) Is Their Uptime & Hosting Speed?
| Date | Location | Load time | TTFB | Fully loaded | Speed index | Keep-alive Score | Compress Score | Caching Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2.7 | 0.7s | 2.8s | 1.1s | A | A | F | ||
| 2.7 | 0.7s | 2.8s | 1.1s | A | A | F | ||
| 2.6 | 0.5s | 2.7s | 1.0s | A | A | F | ||
| 2.5 | 0.5s | 2.6s | 0.9s | A | A | F | ||
| 2.5 | 0.5s | 2.6s | 0.9s | A | A | F | ||
| 2.5 | 0.5s | 2.6s | 0.9s | A | A | F | ||
| 2.5 | 0.5s | 2.6s | 0.9s | A | A | F | ||
| 2.5 | 0.5s | 2.6s | 0.9s | A | A | F | ||
| 2.5 | 0.5s | 2.6s | 0.9s | A | A | F | ||
| 2.7 | 0.5s | 2.8s | 1.0s | A | A | F | ||
| 2.7 | 0.5s | 2.8s | 1.0s | A | A | F | ||
| 2.6 | 0.5s | 2.6s | 0.9s | A | A | F | ||
| 2.6 | 0.5s | 2.6s | 0.9s | A | A | F | ||
| 2.5 | 0.4s | 2.6s | 0.9s | A | A | F | ||
| 2.6 | 0.5s | 2.7s | 1.0s | A | A | F | ||
| 2.6 | 0.5s | 2.7s | 1.0s | A | A | F | ||
| 2.6 | 0.4s | 2.7s | 1.0s | A | A | F | ||
| 2.6 | 0.4s | 2.7s | 1.0s | A | A | F | ||
| 2.7 | 0.5s | 2.8s | 1.0s | A | A | F | ||
| 2.5 | 0.4s | 2.5s | 0.9s | A | A | F | ||
| 2.5 | 0.4s | 2.5s | 0.9s | A | A | F | ||
| 2.5 | 0.4s | 2.6s | 0.9s | A | A | F | ||
| 2.5 | 0.4s | 2.6s | 0.9s | A | A | F | ||
| 2.7 | 0.5s | 2.9s | 1.1s | A | A | F | ||
| 2.7 | 0.5s | 2.9s | 1.1s | A | A | F | ||
| 2.6 | 0.5s | 2.7s | 1.0s | A | A | F | ||
| 2.6 | 0.5s | 2.7s | 1.0s | A | A | F | ||
| 2.6 | 0.4s | 2.7s | 0.9s | A | A | F | ||
| 2.6 | 0.4s | 2.7s | 0.9s | A | A | F | ||
| 2.5 | 0.4s | 2.7s | 0.9s | A | A | F | ||
| 2.5 | 0.4s | 2.7s | 0.9s | A | A | F | ||
| 2.9 | 0.6s | 3.0s | 1.2s | A | A | F | ||
| 2.9 | 0.6s | 3.0s | 1.2s | A | A | F | ||
| 2.9 | 0.5s | 3.0s | 1.1s | A | A | F | ||
| 2.9 | 0.5s | 3.0s | 1.1s | A | A | F | ||
| 2.4 | 0.4s | 2.5s | 0.9s | A | A | F | ||
| 2.4 | 0.4s | 2.5s | 0.9s | A | A | F | ||
| 2.5 | 0.4s | 2.6s | 0.9s | A | A | F | ||
| 2.5 | 0.4s | 2.6s | 0.9s | A | A | F | ||
| 2.4 | 0.4s | 2.5s | 0.9s | A | A | F | ||
| 2.4 | 0.4s | 2.5s | 0.9s | A | A | F | ||
| 2.5 | 0.4s | 2.6s | 1.0s | A | A | F | ||
| 2.5 | 0.4s | 2.6s | 1.0s | A | A | F | ||
| 2.5 | 0.4s | 2.5s | 0.8s | A | A | F | ||
| 2.5 | 0.4s | 2.5s | 0.8s | A | A | F | ||
| 2.5 | 0.4s | 2.6s | 0.8s | A | A | F | ||
| 2.5 | 0.4s | 2.6s | 0.8s | A | A | F | ||
| 2.8 | 0.7s | 2.9s | 1.2s | A | A | F | ||
| 2.8 | 0.7s | 2.9s | 1.2s | A | A | F | ||
| 2.5 | 0.4s | 2.6s | 1.0s | A | A | F | ||
| 2.5 | 0.1s | 2.6s | 0.9s | A | A | F | ||
| 2.5 | 0.1s | 2.6s | 0.9s | A | A | F | ||
| 3.1 | 0.3s | 3.2s | 0.9s | A | A | F | ||
| 2.4 | 0.3s | 2.5s | 0.7s | A | A | F | ||
| 2.9 | 0.5s | 3.1s | 1.1s | A | A | F | ||
| 2.4 | 0.3s | 2.5s | 0.8s | A | A | F | ||
| 2.4 | 0.3s | 2.5s | 0.8s | A | A | F | ||
| 2.4 | 0.3s | 2.5s | 0.7s | A | A | F | ||
| 2.5 | 0.4s | 2.6s | 0.9s | A | A | F | ||
| 2.4 | 0.3s | 2.5s | 0.7s | A | A | F |
Does HostGator: How Good (Or Bad!) Is Their Uptime & Hosting Speed? Suck?
Some people may think
Is HostGator: How Good (Or Bad!) Is Their Uptime & Hosting Speed? slow?
This test measures the total time it takes to load a standard web page. Lower is better. Learn more about the Page Speed Test.
Let’s take a look at some of the times that
| Date | Location | Load time | TTFB | Fully loaded | Speed index | Keep-alive Score | Compress Score | Caching Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| None found! | ||||||||
Is HostGator: How Good (Or Bad!) Is Their Uptime & Hosting Speed? unreliable?
This test is performed by measuring the % uptime of a host. Higher is better. Learn more about the Uptime Test.
Let’s take a look at some of the times that
| Date | Uptime | Downtime | Outages | Avg Response Time |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 99.000% | 7 mins | 1 | 540 ms |
Does HostGator: How Good (Or Bad!) Is Their Uptime & Hosting Speed? have poor customer service?
This test measures how quickly the host’s support team responds to your request. Lower is better. Learn more about the Support Response Test.
Let’s take a look at some of the times that
| Date | Support Ticket Submitted | Support Ticket Resolved | Response Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| Feb 24, 3:28am | Over 7 days | 168.0 hours | |
| Jan 27, 5:54am | Feb 1, 12:46pm | 126.9 hours | |
| Nov 28, 4:33pm | Dec 2, 4:18am | 83.7 hours | |
| Oct 26, 10:55am | Oct 28, 12:13am | 37.0 hours | |
| Sept 6, 6:46pm | Sept 7, 5:48am | 23.0 hours | |
| Aug 9, 2:46pm | Aug 10, 3:18pm | 24.5 hours | |
| July 13, 2:07pm | July 14, 7:03am | 16.9 hours |
Still think HostGator: How Good (Or Bad!) Is Their Uptime & Hosting Speed? sucks?
I’ve presented you with lots of data that will show you whether or not
Support Response Test
I personally contact each host's support department with a new question/concern and measure how long it takes for them to get back to me.
This test is important for every host - it's imperative your web host is able to quickly address your concerns in a timely manner, even if you're an expert webmaster. Who wants to deal with a host that has poor customer service? Tech is hard, and tech support is critical!
HostGator: How Good (Or Bad!) Is Their Uptime & Hosting Speed? Support Response Test Results
Let’s see if
Recent Raw Results for HostGator: How Good (Or Bad!) Is Their Uptime & Hosting Speed?
| Date | Support Ticket Submitted | Support Ticket Resolved | Response Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mar 10, 4:19pm | Mar 10, 4:34pm | 0.3 hours | |
| Feb 24, 3:28am | Over 7 days | 168.0 hours | |
| Jan 27, 5:54am | Feb 1, 12:46pm | 126.9 hours | |
| Dec 20, 2:51pm | Dec 20, 3:10pm | 0.3 hours | |
| Nov 28, 4:33pm | Dec 2, 4:18am | 83.7 hours | |
| Oct 26, 10:55am | Oct 28, 12:13am | 37.0 hours | |
| Sept 6, 6:46pm | Sept 7, 5:48am | 23.0 hours | |
| Aug 9, 2:46pm | Aug 10, 3:18pm | 24.5 hours | |
| July 13, 2:07pm | July 14, 7:03am | 16.9 hours |
HostGator: How Good (Or Bad!) Is Their Uptime & Hosting Speed? Alternatives: Better speed, reliability, and support
Are you having problems with
Hosts faster than HostGator: How Good (Or Bad!) Is Their Uptime & Hosting Speed?
This test measures the total time it takes to load a standard web page. Lower is better. Learn more about the Page Speed Test.
If
| Host | Average | Best | Worst | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2.79 s | 2.00 s | 15.02 s | Test Results | Signup Now |
Hosts more reliable than HostGator: How Good (Or Bad!) Is Their Uptime & Hosting Speed?
This test is performed by measuring the % uptime of a host. Higher is better. Learn more about the Uptime Test.
If
| Host | Average | Best | Worst | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 99.970 % | 100.000 % | 97.500 % | Test Results | Signup Now |
Hosts more helpful than HostGator: How Good (Or Bad!) Is Their Uptime & Hosting Speed?
This test measures how quickly the host’s support team responds to your request. Lower is better. Learn more about the Support Response Test.
If
HostGator: How Good (Or Bad!) Is Their Uptime & Hosting Speed? vs Other Hosts
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