HostGator Cloud Review
The priorities of a cloud hosting service are speed and uptime.
HostGator Cloud aligns its hosting service with these expectations that website owners have of cloud hosting. And it does so at a reasonable cost.
Small websites and businesses can benefit from having the resources their site requires always available in the cloud, with plans starting as low as $4.95 per month with introductory pricing.
HostGator Cloud aligns its hosting service with these expectations that website owners have of cloud hosting. And it does so at a reasonable cost.
Small websites and businesses can benefit from having the resources their site requires always available in the cloud, with plans starting as low as $4.95 per month with introductory pricing.
However, while HostGator Cloud plans allow you to scale your resources as needed, bandwidth and storage aren't as scalable. Both are unmetered, but not limitless.
Is HostGator Cloud a good fit for you? To help you decide, we've detailed its top features and compared it to our other top web hosting options.
Compare HostGator Cloud to The Best Web Hosting Services
HostGator is well-known for providing one of the most affordable web hosting services. Whether your site is small or large, you can find a plan that meets your requirements without breaking the bank. That is why we selected HostGator as the best web hosting provider for scaling on a budget. HostGator Cloud is similarly inexpensive, with unmetered bandwidth and storage plans beginning at $4.95 per month.
Over the years, we have reviewed dozens of web hosting services and have narrowed the options down to five of the best. See all of our top picks, as well as details about each service, to determine which company is the best fit for you.
HostGator Cloud: The Good and The Bad
The Good
Helpful Customer Service: HostGator's customer service is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week via live chat, phone, and fax. With multiple support centers around the world, help is always just a phone call or chat away.
Clean Dashboard: HostGator Cloud manages sites with cPanel, which has a simple interface that makes it easy to find everything you need. Control your email preferences, installations, SiteLock, and other settings.
Reliability: Because cloud hosting uses resources stored across multiple servers, it can quickly retrieve what is required to make your site function. To keep your site up and running in the event of a hardware failure, HostGator Cloud employs automatic failover.
Speed: HostGator Cloud is fast for the same reasons it is reliable.
HostGator Cloud caches and stores your content in the cloud for later retrieval, resulting in faster load times and improved user experiences.
Scalable Resources: If your site requires more resources, such as storage or bandwidth, you can increase the amount in your dashboard. This feature essentially generates a completely customizable plan based on the requirements of your site.
The Bad
Unmetered, Not Unlimited: HostGator Cloud advertises unmetered storage and bandwidth, but it's important to note that unmetered does not imply unlimited. Unmetered simply means that HostGator will not use how much data you store or transfer to increase the cost of your plan. If HostGator believes you're using too many resources, it can still limit them.
Renewal Fees Can Be Pricey: The best renewal pricing for HostGator Cloud is reserved for those who renew for 36 months. Even so, when you renew, you'll pay nearly double what you did for your first term.
Extra Data Restoration Costs: For added security, data mirroring keeps copies of your data on other devices. If you want daily backups and simple, one-click restoration, you'll have to pay extra each month for CodeGuard.
HostGator Cloud Pricing and Options
HostGator Cloud Pricing
The three pricing tiers of HostGator Cloud allow you to select the options that are best for your website. The main differences between the plans are the amount of memory and the number of CPUs, but there are a few feature additions in higher tiers as well.
Hatchling Cloud is available for $4.95 per month. It includes one domain hosting, 2 GB of RAM, two CPU cores, an unlimited number of subdomains, and unmetered bandwidth and storage.
The Baby Cloud plan adds unlimited domain hosting for $6.57 per month and includes 4 GB RAM, four CPU cores, and unlimited parked domains. Choose Business Cloud for $9.95 per month, which includes six CPU cores, 6 GB RAM, and a dedicated IP address.
It's worth noting that these prices are only available when you sign up for a 36-month hosting contract. Prices rise if you choose a shorter term. One-month to six-month terms for Hatchling Cloud bring your monthly cost to $12.95, $13.95 for Baby Cloud, and $19.95 for Business Cloud.
Renewal prices will also be higher than introductory prices for terms of 12, 24, and 36 months.
Even with price increases at renewal or shorter terms, HostGator Cloud pricing is competitive for what each plan provides. The most you'll pay for a Business Cloud plan is $19.95 per month, which includes all of the benefits of HostGator Cloud.
HostGator Cloud Resource Management
One major advantage of cloud hosting is the ability to share resources—CPU, RAM, storage, and so on—where and when they are needed. Your resources are in the cloud, ready for use by your site as needed.
With its resource allocation feature, HostGator extends the benefits of cloud hosting even further. You can budget resources for each website in your plan if you have more than one.
Assume you have a small site with little traffic and a large site with thousands of visitors per day. You could lower the bandwidth and storage limits for your smaller site while increasing the limits for your larger site to allow it more resources. You can accomplish this with a few mouse clicks in your control panel.
HostGator Cloud Dashboard
Users of HostGator Cloud have access to cPanel through their account's simplified dashboard. With this beginner-friendly dashboard, you don't need to know all the details about web hosting configurations and features because everything is divided into categories to help you find what you need.
cPanel is where you will manage your files and set up your domain email accounts. If you can't find something specific, you can use the search bar to find it quickly.
Need assistance from HostGator's knowledge base before making changes to your settings? Use the Help feature to find support articles without leaving your dashboard.
Within your dashboard, you can also get a quick overview of your website stats. View the number of hits, visitors, and bandwidth usage for specific dates on your website. Examine your website's uptime, page load speed, and other factors that affect its usability.
HostGator Cloud Speed and Optimization
Cloud hosting is frequently referred to as one of the fastest types of web hosting. With multiple servers designed to optimize your site's performance, HostGator Cloud meets the needs of cloud hosting enthusiasts. If one server isn't performing well, HostGator will automatically move your site to another server to make up the difference.
This can also happen if the server's hardware fails. HostGator's automated failover feature moves your site to another server that is operational until the problem is resolved.
HostGator Cloud uses internal and external SSD drives to provide quick access to your data as your site requires it.
The following information compares HostGator Cloud servers to shared and reseller hosting servers from HostGator. As you can see, HostGator Cloud servers offer far more storage than shared and reseller servers.
HostGator Cloud Data Backup and Security
Many website owners are concerned about ensuring that their site's data is backed up and secure from threats. We have multiple safety and security protocols in place for this website to ensure that everything runs smoothly.
When it comes to your hosting plan, there should be no shortage of features for protecting the information on your website. Several safeguards are in place at HostGator Cloud.
The first step is data mirroring. This feature replicates your site three times across multiple servers to ensure that it is always available and secure. By adding CodeGuard to your site, you will have to pay for daily automatic backups and one-click restores.
HostGator's servers are also protected from distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, which target the server and disrupt traffic and bandwidth. HostGator's detection settings and rules enable flood protection, ensuring the safety of your data and site. This safeguard applies to all HostGator servers.
SiteLock can be purchased as an add-on to your hosting package for added security. Your site will now have malware scans, vulnerability scans, and bot blocking.
HostGator Cloud Customer Service
We always appreciate web hosting companies that put customer service first.
There are numerous things that can go wrong with a website, whether you are a novice or an experienced website owner. It's priceless to know that help is only a phone call or a few clicks away.
HostGator provides the same customer support channels to its Cloud customers as it does to its other hosting customers: live chat, phone support, and self-help.
The self-help comes in the form of HostGator's knowledge base, which contains content that answers the most frequently asked questions by website owners. You might be able to find what you need there for simpler tasks, but for more complex issues, you can seek expert assistance.
Live chat and phone support are available seven days a week, 24 hours a day. Log in to your account and click the Support link to find them.
As a new customer, we tried out HostGator's live chat by asking a few questions. We were connected to a specialist after only a few seconds, who was extremely thorough in answering our questions.
HostGator Cloud Bandwidth and Storage
Unmetered bandwidth and storage are provided by HostGator Cloud. This means that the company will not charge you more money if you use more bandwidth or storage one month than the next. Your costs are independent of how much of these you use.
However, this does not imply that you have unlimited disk space and bandwidth.
Customers must comply with HostGator's Terms of Service regarding disk space and bandwidth, as shown in the screenshot from HostGator Cloud below. If you exceed what HostGator considers appropriate, HostGator may request that you reduce your usage and may interfere with your site if you do not comply.
A site with a high volume of traffic may be unable to use HostGator Cloud. However, HostGator Cloud isn't really designed for large businesses or websites with a lot of traffic. You should use the company's virtual private server (VPS) or dedicated hosting for this.
HostGator Cloud Add-Ons
We mentioned that CodeGuard and SiteLock are available as add-ons to any HostGator Cloud plan. These low-cost add-ons cost only $2.00 and $1.99 per month, respectively.
In addition, for $6.00 per month, you can add a professional email address to your account via Gmail from Google Cloud. There are also SEO Tools available for $2.95 per month that submit your site to search engines and analyze its pages to ensure it is performing optimally.
Finally, for $3.33 per month, you can add an upgraded SSL certificate to your site. The free version comes with your Cloud website, but the premium version allows you to add an SSL badge to your site and provides warranty protection.
Are any of these extras required? CodeGuard and SiteLock aren't a bad deal, offering site backups and malware attack prevention for less than $4 per month. Furthermore, the upgraded SSL could be advantageous to ecommerce websites.
However, think twice before including the others. If you already use Google Workspace for your business, your plan will include Gmail and Google Analytics for email and SEO.
Conclusion:
We believe that HostGator Cloud is a fantastic service that most small business owners can rely on. It's inexpensive, dependable, and fast, which is everything you want in a website. However, for scalability, you should probably go with one of HostGator's professional hosting plans.
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