Is HostGator any good? I've subscribed to their web hosting services for about 18 months now, and overall, I'd say yes. There are a ton of hosting companies out there and what you really want to look for are a good price, fast, reliable servers, and solid customer service. HostGator measures up pretty well on all three counts. Let's take them individually.

• Price - At $4.95 a month for the Hatchling, single domain plan and $7.95 for the multi-domain Baby Croc plan, you really can't do much better. You might be able to save a buck a month somewhere, but HostGator offers a great bottom line price.
• Server speed and reliability - Just about every hosting company brags about 99.xx% uptime, so its hard to differentiate among them. I mean, any web host that stays in business for any length of time must have good reliability or they'd lose their customers pretty darn quick. All I can say about HostGator is that I've never encountered any downtime when accessing my domains, and web pages load very fast indeed. I'd count myself totally satisfied with server performance.
• Customer service - Most web hosts are low margin businesses that pray that their customers never have to contact them directly. At five bucks a month, a single service incident pretty much blows any profit margin they make from you. Like most web hosts, HostGator uses a "ticketing" system to deal with typical issues. You access the ticketing system through the Control Panel, tell them what your problem is, and they'll get back to you within a few hours at most. I'd tell you about my own experiences with the ticketing system, but I've never actually had to use it. If you need more direct hand-holding with a live human being, they offer a business hosting account with a dedicated 800 number for customer service.

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Let's face it, web hosting is the ultimate commodity business. What you want from a host is easy to use access to all the usual features like PHP/mySQL, support for Wordpress and other blogs, good logging and traffic stats, and easy access cPanel and File Manager. On all these counts, HostGator scores.

As soon as you log in to your account, you're taken to the famous cPanel, where you can easily upload files to your domain, check web stats, manage your mySQL database, add Perl or CGI scripts, fill out a customer service ticket or a dozen other thing you probably don't need to deal with. I was a total newbie at web hosting when I first signed up with HostGator, but I found everything very intuitive and easy to use. I recommend them highly to first time web masters.

Hosting Plans: Hatchling vs. Baby Croc

HostGator offers dedicated servers and reseller plans, but if you're reading this article that's probably waaaay more that you need. For a regular old dot com for your blog or small business, you'll either want the Hatchling, Baby Croc, or Business Plan. As of this writing, the fees were $4.95, $7.95, and $12.95 a month respectively.

If you only have one domain (i.e. "mysite.com"), the Hatchling plan is probably just fine. After all, why pay for more than you need. If you intend to have multiple domains, then go for the Baby Croc plan. It's very, very easy to add new domains to your account, and whether you have two domains or ten, it doesn't cost you an extra dime. I'm currently signed up for the Baby Croc plan myself, which I use to host five different domains. I found it totally easy to add and manage multiple domains with the Baby Croc plan.

The business plan is mostly if you need more intense customer service than you can get from the HostGator "ticketing" system. If you know you'll want hand-holding from someone over the phone, then go for the business plan.

Getting Started With HostGator

Once you've signed up for an account, you'll need a domain name to associate with the account. If you don't already have a domain name, you can get one directly through HostGator, but most people in the know seem to recommend that you use a separate domain registration service from your hosting service. Namecheap and GoDaddy are probably the most popular. I use Namecheap myself because they offer a free privacy guard to protect your "Whois" information from spammers and other with bad intent.

After you've registered your domain name, just point the nameservers to the HostGator servers that were given to you in the registration e-mail confirmation. It may sound complicated, by it's really quite easy to do.

Hosting a Blog on HostGator

Nothing could be easier than installing a Wordpress blog on HostGator. All it takes is a few clicks, and you'll be done in less that a minute. There's an icon in the Control Panel labeled "Fantastico Deluxe" under "Software/Services". Click it, follow the instructions for Wordpress, and you'll be up in blogging in literally a few minutes. It's dead easy.

The same goes for Drupal, Joomla, PHP-Nuke or whatever other content management system you want to use. HostGator supports them all, and once they're installed you should never have to worry about the back-end mySQL stuff. It's all done through the Control Panel and your CMS's administration page.

Good luck with your website, and if you do decide to go with HostGator please sign up by clicking though the affiliate link below. It won't cost you anything extra, and they'll throw me a few much needed bucks for referring you their way. Through my experience hosting five domains with HostGator, I can honestly recommend them very highly.

Click Here to Sign Up With HostGator