HostGator Review: Unlimited Hosting for a Small Price!
With its reliable and affordable hosting services HostGator has managed to reach over 2,500,000 domains in 5 years. It offers unlimited disk space and bandwidth per month and a wide range of great features, such as flexible, easy to use Control Panel, Safe Harbor certification, Free Google credits to promote your website easily, SSH Access, programming language such as CGI, Fast CGI, PHP 5, Automatic weekly off-site backups and much more.
It also offers 24/7/365 award winning technical support, phone and chat, which is very convenient, if you require immediate assistance for your website.
Our research shows that you can use both HostGators shared and VPS hosting plans for you Magento based website. The following review is dedicated to the shared hosting accounts.
HostGator has a very convenient control panel from where you can manage your hosting account and website. HostGator uses the latest PHP version. Shell access is optional. We recommend to enable it, since it makes the installation a lot easier, as you will see below. InnoDB are enabled for magento, which is a requirement for it to work.
Unfortunately HostGator does not offer a free Magento Installation, nor is there a one-click installer. But you can follow our instructions on installing Magento manually (link to resources) and you will be able to do that by yourself. In many forums users are complaining about errors during installation. We have found out, that it is best to enable SSH, and change the file permissions in order to solve this problem. Alternatively you can pay for the installation, which will cost you ca. $25 at HostGator.
As already mentioned, HostGator has different channels from where to require support. HostGator also has a forum, where you can receive help and information about your Magento installation and running your website.