I know how important a good web hosting is to my site. Having tested more than 10 hosting services, I decided to engage Host Gator to host this site.

Let me share with you how I go about choosing Host Gator. I hope by giving you my insight, you’ll know what to look out for in choosing your own hosting.

My site is running on Wordpress platform so I need a control panel which fulfills Wordpress minimum requirements as follows:
- PHP 4.3 or greater
- MySQL 4.0 or greater
- The mod_rewrite Apache module

Host Gator current software version is PHP 5.2.1, MySQL 4.1.19 and Apache 1.3.37 so they are fully compatible with Wordpress.

To install Wordpress program, Host Gator’s cPanel allows you to do it with just a click of the button. Take a look at this screenshot. Get your Wordpress admin username, password and other information ready and you are all set to install the Wordpress program in the server.

Also, there are more than 52 scripts with instant installation in the Fantastico section and I am sure you’ll be able to find some useful scripts for your blog.

Even though I am only using less than 100 MB of diskspace at the moment, I know that in the next 2 years I’ll increase my database to at least 100GB (that’s 1000 times more than the current value). Hence, I need a host that offers huge diskspace.

Host Gator baby plan offers 6000GB of diskspace so that is more than enough for me taking into consideration of my future expansion.

Always plan for future expansion. You might not need huge diskspace now but one day your blog will become very rich in content and graphics.

My site currently has more than 1000 unique visitors a day. I am sure that as long as I keep working on this site, my daily visitors will eventually exceed 8,000 after two years. It is simply unacceptable if my site is down due to the excessive use of bandwidth.

I have done a rough calculation about how much bandwidth my site needs if I get 8,000 visitors daily. I have estimated that average each visitor will transfer 300kb of data. Base on this, my daily bandwidth will be 2.4GB and monthly bandwidth to be 72GB. Taking 50% safety margin, I need a host that can provide me with 144GB of bandwidth.

Host Gator baby plan offers 6,000GB of bandwidth! That is way above my long term bandwidth requirement of 120GB. Therefore, I am able to get the excessive-bandwidth-usage issue off my worry list

Find out your daily and monthly bandwidth usage. Then estimate how much your future bandwidth after 1 year will be like. From there, you can calculate how much bandwidth your site needs.

A real quick way to decide how much bandwidth you need is to take my site as the benchmark. If Host Gator Baby plan works well on this site and if you think your site is not as heavy traffic as this site, you will be very safe.

This is one of the most important areas that I consider. I have tested many hosts in terms of how fast and relavent their response is and am very impressed with Host Gator.

I contacted Host Gator via email, live chat and phone after midnight and the following is how they fare:
Email
Email sent at 2am Eastern time
Reply time: 1 hour later

Email Content
My question: Why are changes I made in SiteStudio not reflected on my site?

Their reply:

Hello Brian,

If the changes you made in SiteStudio do not reflect on your site, it is because your password for SiteStudio does not match the password for cPanel.

Your cPanel password and username must always match what you submitted when you requested the SiteStudio.

Sincerely,

Bobbie N.

Technical support

Live Chat
Contacted live chat support at 3am Eastern time.
Waiting time: 10 seconds

Live Chat ContentWelcome to HostGator Live Chat! You are now chatting with ‘Brandon E.’

Brandon E.: Hello and welcome to HostGator Live Chat, my name is Brandon how can I assist you?

Brian: Hello Brandon, I would like to know more about the money back policy

Brian: the 45 day refund. is it full refund or partial?

Brandon E.: We have a 45 day money back guarantee

Brandon E.: You receive 100% of your money back

Brandon E.: Unless its a setup fee for the Hatchling plan

Brian: ok. that’s great. thanks for the info!

Brandon E.: Is there anything else I can help you with?

Brian: nope. that’s all i need to know. thanks!

Brandon E.: You’re Welcome , and have a great day

Brandon E.: Thank you for using HostGator Live Chat! If you could take a minute to rate your experience with HostGator as well as my overall performance, that would help us to improve our customer service. To do that, just click the button that says “close” in the upper right hand corner. The survey takes less than a minute to fill out.

Phone support
Called made at 4:30am Eastern time.
Holding time: 4 mins

Transcript of the Phone Conversation
Alex: Hi, this is Alex. How may i help you?

Brian: Hi, I’m interested in signing up for the Baby plan for 3 months. Do you allow quarterly payment for the plan?

Alex: Of course. We can make your payment to every 3 months if you would like. This is an option we have. Do you want me to proceed with the signup now?

Brian: That’s great! Let me consider it and I’ll get back to you in a few days.

Alex: Sure. You can dial the same number and one of our representatives would be glad to help you out in the signup.  Thanks and have a great day!

Brian: Thanks for help. Bye.

Alex: Bye.

You need to make sure the tech support is always there for you regardless of the time. Try contacting the support via email, live chat and phone and see how well they respond to your enquiries. In this aspect, I think Host Gator is the best. Don’t take my words for it. Test it for yourselves!

How many times have you visited a website only to find out the server is down? If that happens a few times, you’ll never visit the site again.

Templatelite.com was launched in July 2008 but I have been testing Host Gator’s server for more than 3 years on my other site. Alertra is the program I’ve been using to monitor my site’s uptime. You can view the server uptime report over the past three years.

As you can see, I enjoy 99.97% uptime over the 3-year period and I am extremely happy with the stability and reliability Host Gator server offers.!