Good cheap and reliable WordPress hosting.

This is my review of web hosting on Hostgator.

I am mostly a Windows programmer so I started building websites on classic ASP and then ASP.NET hosting plans.

In 2010 I started getting into WordPress. I tried installing it on a GoDaddy Windows shared hosting plan but to be honest it was just a piece of rubbish. I don't know if GoDaddy was underpowered or WordPress is bloated. Well whatever happened I realised I'd need to host WordPress on a standard LAMP hosting plan, i.e. one with PHP and MySQL on Linux or Unix.

That lead me to Hostgator. I'm not sure how I heard about it. I was definitely attracted by the price which was less than $5 a month.

Anyway, I now host all my websites on a Hostgator Baby plan. I had a Hatchling plan for a while. I upgraded this after I realised WordPress was the way to go and I wanted to buy more domains. Now I have a whole load of sites hosted on a single plan.

There are plenty of great features of Hostgator hosting. I like how easy it is to back stuff up - one big archive for your files and all your MySQL databases.

WordPress installation is really straightforward as well.

Billing has been reliable so no admin problems to speak of.

In fact I haven't had too many problems at all since 2011. This is really nice because I have a load of passive income niche websites that just have to sit there collecting the advertising income. Occasionally I log in and see if there are any comments or plug-ins to upgrade, but that's about it.

Back to hosting and the problems I've had that I can think of include:

1. A few years ago - I think it was 2013 - my sites all disappeared for a couple of days. That was the most serious outage.
2. Some WordPress sites have got a bit broken. I get weird error messages when trying to get certain plugins to work. Actually I'm not sure if this is anything to do with Hostgator. I kind of tracked it down to using an old version of Woo Themes. I think it's probably best to replace Themes every 5 years or so.
3. I've had my account suspended for going over the traffic limit a couple of times. Both times it was due to phpBB problems. Or hackers I should say. It seems phpBB forums are really susceptible to bots which can really hose your account if they're misconfigured and suck your server resources dry. It's a really annoying problem but if your forum is successful then you should really host it on a dedicated server or a dedicated forum hosting location. For what it's worth my friend operates a popular forum and he's forever having to deal with spammers and try to keep the forum up and running. He ended up getting a dedicated server as shared hosting is just not reliable enough for a moderately successful board.

Some anti-spammer protection would be really welcome. Kind of like a built-in CloudFlare. If they had something like this then I would have awarded them 8 stars.

So I can definitely recommend Hostgator. I know Bluehost is a popular alternative, but I've never used that one.

BrettB gave Hostgator Web Hosting a rating of