On top of the tolls, to users who are new to web design and webmastering, the 4,500 free website templates of Hostgator is meant to cater most of the users’ needs, depending on their preference and purpose of each website created. With these free templates and tools, users not only can save their time and effort in designing their web page, at the same time can also observe some ideas from the readily available templates.

Each of the templates is designed based on a category and they are arranged systematically for optimum view and easy to understand. Before selecting the template, there are some basic information available such as template type, designer name, total downloads and also template size. All you need to do is to select a website template and start customizing it using the site builder tool.

For example, under the automotive category, there are currently 28 designs available from the web hosting company. One of the top download designs is as below:

The standard templates comprise from more than 100 categories. Believe the web host will surpass the 4,500 mark as and when there are new designs available and creating more categories. Believe it or not, there are some weird or not-so-popular categories like chiropractic services, clowns, farming or roofers.

For more information, read Hostgator review or take a hosting demo tour on Hostgator hosting.

Bravo Hostgator!

100% increase of domains hosted in Hostgator in a year time

If you do not know what that means, you are losing out a lot there. Let me give you a quick run through. Each domain represents 1 independent website. With 2.2 millions of domains, it represents 2.2 millions of websites. These websites might belong to 2.2 millions of different owner or it might only belong to a few hundred thousand of individual, thanks to the host-unlimited-website feature.

The increase of domains does explain that there are more individuals who find Hostgator a great host or their existing customer decided to host more websites with them. Either way, it provides a solid proof on the quality of Hostgator.

In spite of the 100% growth rate achieved, what is more praising is Hostgator manage to maintain their hosting uptime as promised – 99.9%. For your information, when the customer base grows big, a web host will face much bigger challenge to maintain the quality for reason bigger resources are pulled by the websites visitors. Proper planning and management is very much needed especially for shared host provider. In this case, Hostgator appears to me that they have a strong technical team behind.

Again congratulations to Hostgator on the achievement! For more information, read:-

Hostgator is going to hold an open session with all existing and potential customers discussing issues regarding Hostgator web hosting. All are invited to join the discussions.

In fact this is the second session after the first one held on 2nd July. The great responses from the audiences have urged them to come out with the second session on next Wednesday (29th July 2009). Too bad I missed the first one. Let’s hope I will be able to attend the second one the next Wednesday!

There are a few things to be discussed during the session and they are:-

• Tips and suggestions on how to get the most out of your HostGator account from senior system administrators
• Discussion of HostGator’s upcoming Windows Shared Hosting launch, including questions and answers with the person in charge of Windows hosting here at HostGator
• Questions and answers about anything related to HostGator, ranging from what our servers support to what we eat for lunch in the office
• Discounts and/or free hosting to some participants who ask great questions.

Well I believe the agenda is very useful for you guys who are searching or researching web host, especially the first one on Hostgator applications revealed directly by the official. Throw them your questions and queries! You can either call in or just listen on your computers. There is also a text chat for you to type their questions.

For more event details, check out this official announcement.

With Hostgator conducting such open session, they are really serious in doing business. One has to be confident on their product, willing to accept negative comments and prepared to face attacks from competitors in order to make such event a success. So what do you think about Hostgator? Are they a good host? Please feel free to cast your vote at our Hostgator Review – Is Hostgator Deal or No Deal?

If you have followed my site for some time, you will know I am a big fan of Hostgator. Well, you must be curios on why do I like Hostgator so much. For your information, I have been a webmaster for a few years. I have a number of websites hosted with different hosting. So, believe me, I know what a web host can do, and how much they can harm a website. Because of that, I especially appreciate the effort of a good host.

Hostgator customer support: probably the best in the world

So why Hostgator? It is because of their customer support!

It doesn’t matter you are a newbie or a web veteran you need web hosting to host your site. With that said, you will not have direct control to every little thing in your web hosting. Every single setting you desire relies on the hand of the administrator. Therefore, a good customer support is very much needed where they will respond to your request at the soonest. They act as your hands, your legs, and your brains in optimizing your website and web hosting performance. But what about a web host with lousy support? You will be extremely helpless, especially when unforeseeable problems happen.

In-house support with real human!

In Hostgator, customer support is their first priority. They have 24×7 in-house technical support through several approaches such as telephone, live chat, ticket system, forum, and online tutorials. What is more important is all the approaches are actually working! You will reach a “real human” when you call the number or live chat.

As far as I know, some irresponsible web host will claim to have 24×7 support but only find out phone calls are not picked up when there is an urgent issue. Those host suck!

The CEO is ever ready for your Hostgator issue

Hostgator is also famous of its CEO customer support. No you won’t be served like a CEO. But you will be served by their CEO, Brent! If you need extra attention on your problem, you can get the CEO to look at your problem personally. By submitting a ticket with attention to the CEO, Brent Oxley, he will reply to you. Also it is not difficult to see him participating actively in forums and blogs discussions around the internet on Hostgator issue. In fact many people talk about him and his success story in the internet. After all how often you can get a CEO of a company Hostgator size to look at your problem personally?

Enough said Hostgator does impress me!

Good news to all Hostgator fans!

Hostgator is giving out promotion on all their hosting plans. As much as 20% discount is available with the coupon code and what you need to do is to key in the code upon signing up. The new prices after with discount are as below:-

Shared Hosting

Reseller Hosting

Dedicated Hosting

To use the coupon, choose the designated hosting package and click on the coupon code and it will lead to the order page. Key in the code at the designated column and you will see the discount at the following page. For more information, read:-

The gator host is 130% green hosting!

As one of the biggest hosting providers in the world, Hostgator truly understand the importance of fulfilling their obligation to protect our planet earth. With that said, all the reseller and shared hosting servers in Hostgator are powered by wind power.

Here are some short explanations if “Green Hosting” and “Wind Power” are new terms to you. When a hosting provider is labeled as “green hosting”, this means the company is operating their business using green energy; while green energy, as known as renewable energy, can come from different sources like solar power, biomass, hydro power, wind power and etc. So in this case where Hostgator is a wind-powered hosting company, Hostgator powers their hosting servers and other electrical appliances using wind power.

Why Green Hosting?

As climate change is threatening our mother earth, one of the ways to save her is to reduce carbon emissions. For your information a very large portion of carbon emissions on earth come from electricity generation by fossil. Therefore if we stop burning fossil to generate electricity we can reduce emitting carbon in a large scale.

Thus it is impressive that Hostgator has done such measure in operating their business. Not only they have neutralized their energy impact on the environment they are actually reversing it because they are 130% wind-powered. Perhaps you may be a little confused on this. Let me explain. So what Hsotgator does is not harvesting wind power themselves. Instead, they engage some engineering companies to evaluate their electricity usage each year in kWh. Then they purchase 130% of the number of kWh used from the wind farm and feed the kWh back in to the national grid. By doing that, Hostgator has directly reduced the fossil electricity needed nationwide.

Here are some illustrations on how much kWh has been fed back in to the national grid by Hostgator:-

1. Removing 444 cars from the road for a year, or
2. Powering 321 homes with clean energy for a year, or
3. Saving 5,654 barrels of oil, or
4. Protecting 551 acres of forest for a year

Are you impressive on their effort? At least I do. Perhaps you should have a closer look at Hostgator the green hosting.

Hostgator has started off the business by providing reseller hosting. They have grown big from there and further provide other hosting services. For years Hostgator has been offering shared hosting, reseller hosting and dedicated hosting. Their hard work and expertise have finally paid off that they are now well recognized in the industry. Especially their shared hosting which hosts more than a million domains. (The number is still growing furiously at the time of writing). Here is the post highlighting the service of the Hostgator shared hosting service.

Being one of the giants in the industry, Hostgator has comprehensive shared hosting plans. A total of 3 different shared hosting plans in Hostgator are offered to serve different usage which are by the name Hatchling Plan, Baby Plan and Business Plan. All these hosting plans are operated on LINUX platform and have cPanel as their control panels.

Hatchling Plan

Hatchling Plan is the cheapest hosting plan in Hostgator. The plan aims to provide hosting service to people who plan to have only 1 website for example leisure blogger or small business owner. Hostgator allows only 1 domain to be hosted with the plan. However, you will have unlimited disk space and bandwidth with the plan. Therefore it will not be an issue for subscribers to host a huge website with a lot of files and visitors.

Baby Plan

Baby Plan is the second cheapest hosting plan and it is the most popular plan in Host gator. In fact the hosting features are the same with Hatchling except for subscribers are allowed to host unlimited add-on domains. With the storage, bandwidth and domains, subscribers can basically have as many websites hosted as you want. Therefore some subscribers do take advantage on this attribute where they subscribe the Baby Plan and share the plan with their friends. 10 friends with 10 different websites with 10 independent FTP accounts with 10 email accounts. You can share the plan with your friends and family for the sake of saving BUT you are not allowed to reseller the hosting service.

Business Plan

Business Hosting will be the highlight in the shared hosting. This is because Hostgator has the first Toll-Free-Number service in the industry in their Business Hosting Plan. With the toll-free number subscribers can set up a telephone number to serve their customers. It will definitely shape a professional image and increase the sales conversion rate on subscribers’ business. On top of it, Hostgator Business Plan does come with dedicated IP and Private SSL. These 2 features are really important if you were to set up an internet transaction portal. These 2 features are exclusive for Business Plan subscribers at no additional cost for your information.

These are the highlights on each hosting plans. What I do not mention here is the free scripts, software and other hosting features that are available together with the hosting plans. I guess only a demo of their cPanel can show you the complete view of each plan.

To continue I suggest you to read my full gator review and host features as well as the cPanel demo.

(For cPanel demo, go to View Demo under Control Panel Features)

We eat up the competition! – Hostgator

Back in year 2002, a Florid Atlantic University undergraduate has decided to start off a hosting company. Those were the humble days where he used his dorm room as both office and server room. He committed to deliver the best hosting solution to his customers and since then, the company has grown exponentially from a dorm room hosting company with just 3 servers into the giant hosting provider with more than 5,000 servers today.

That is how Hostgator get into the hosting business and starts their journey to the best. The undergraduate, of cause as expected is the current president and CEO of Hostgator Brent Oxley. Hostgator today is no longer a small scale hosting provider but a cooperate-size hosting giant providing comprehensive hosting solutions. Their customers range from individual to fortune 500 company in more than 170 countries. They are so dedicated to their services that more than a million domains trust them and host with them.

Hostgator is so successful for many reasons including their performance, hosting plan, support, pricing and etc. However out of so many reasons the most impressive reason to me is their customer support. It is not by the numbers of method reaching the support, but their attitude and commitment to the service. Imagine when you submit a ticket or email to the support, the CEO himself returning the reply together with a complete solution. Have you ever imagine a CEO will attend to customer complains himself? And solve the problem and inform you personally? Well Brent does win my heart on this. Also it is not difficult to see the presence of their support team in solving complains in public forum and blogs. They do look for problems rather than waiting for your emails. Try Google “Hostgator complain” or “Hostgator sucks” to see them in action.

In term of web hosting plan, Hostgator provides shared hosting, reseller hosting and dedicated hosting to serve all level of users. Being initially a reseller hosting, Hostgator has very strong features in the plan. Their shared and dedicated hosting as well has a very strong presence in the industry. I guess this is because the customers are confident on service with their 99.9% uptime guarantee.

To learn more about Hostgator, I suggest you to talk to their Live Chat or check out their official blog. If you are looking for a quality hosting provider, Hostgator is best of the best based on our research on WebHostingDeals. Therefore I do recommend their hosting plan.