Why Make-Website runs on Hostgator hosting

I’ve had my site, make-website.com on different hosting over the years. I’ve learned a lot – and had lots of frustration. Going with Hostgator has been fantastic. The lightning-fast support and reliability wins hands-down.

SPECIAL OFFER

Just one penny for your first month with Hostgator.
Remember to use the coupon code 1CENT when ordering.
(If you wish, you can then create a free, professional, one-click WordPress website, or whatever type of website suits your needs.)

What I’ve experienced with Hostgator:

Great support
Hostgator has an instant chat feature – in moments you’re talking with a real person, no matter what time or day or night.
The support staff are well-trained and know their stuff. You can have your questions answered quickly and efficiently and there are lots of staff available – so there’s usually no waiting.
You can rate your experience after the chat session – from 10 down to 1.

Great Uptime
My sites have been up all the time, without experiencing downtime.

Great Support Forums
Questions are answered and there is lots of information available.
Negative feedback is dealt with without being deleted.
It’s not a bad thing that there is ever negative feedback. It’s impossible to keep 100% of people happy all the time. It’s how the negative feedback is dealt with that is the important thing, and Hostgator takes out time to politely resolve the issue.

Free Website Transfer
You can have your website that you have at other hosting transferred over for free!
I didn’t use this service as I wanted to totally rebuild make-website.com. But what Hostgator did do was to create a temporary URL for me, so I put my site together, and then they changed it back to it’s proper URL once I had finished. So, this meant that I built my site and entered in all the content while my website was still online at my other hosting! My visitors experienced no down-time.

Transferring your website is free for 30 days after buying Hostgator hosting. And if you purchase Reseller Hostgator hosting – you can have free transfer of 30 websites!

Green hosting!
Staying environmentally-aware is important to me. Hostgator servers run on green energy. Climate Friendly, Wind Powered, Certified RECs.

Sign-up issues
When I first signed up with Hostgator, I failed to verify myself. The verification email comes from a different Hostgator email address than their main one, and went to my spam email folder. So I didn’t know I needed to verify. My hosting payment was returned to me a month afterwards. By this time I had already started building my websites. After finding out I needed to verify my account, I had trouble with the phone number given. I’m from Australia and the US number given for verification didn’t work. So – if you’re from a country other than the US and have trouble contacting Hostgator for verification – use their instant chat to ask how you can call from your country. I needed to re-buy the hosting after verifying my account. Also, if you’re buying Hostgator hosting – ensure you set them as a safe sender in your email account so that you receive all their emails.

Tip: It’s actually a good thing that Hostgator verifies accounts and makes sure of who owns an account. If you’re with Hostgator, you wouldn’t want them hosting spam sites!

Hosting Features
Unlimited bandwidth, unlimited websites. Free SEO analysis of your website. Cpanel. Fantastico (one-click install of free software such as WordPress and also update from the Fantastico panel.) Unlimited MySQL databases (You need these for software such as WordPress.) Free website Builder (I haven’t tested this.)

Hosting Plans
Hosting Plans start with the Hatchling Plan, The Baby Plan and the Business Plan.
If you’re only going to have one website, the Hatchling Plan could be for you. If you’re going to have lots of websites (or at least more than one), the Baby Plan is for you. (There’s nothing ‘baby’ about the baby plan – it’s fully featured.) The Business Plan comes with a free toll-free number, private SSL and dedicated IP.

Tip: If you’re signing up for the Hatchling Plan, remember to use the ‘1cent‘ coupon code after you click on the Hostgator banner below.

The problems I experienced previously with other web hosts:

Poor Support
Support phone numbers do not work – you just get recorded messages directing you to the host’s ticket support system.
Support tickets may take anywhere from a day to two days to be answered, and then days to resolve.
Over Christmas 2010, support took A WEEK to resolve an issue I had, resulting in my site being down for a week.
Staff are poorly trained and don’t seem to understand your questions half the time and can also be rude.

Poor Uptime
Despite guarantees of 99.99% uptime, my site was down for hours at a time, often.
My site was also getting slower and slower.

Poor Support Forums
Negative feedback that gets instantly deleted without answer, especially if downtime is reported.
Moderators who are rude and give out misinformation about websites and the internet.

My personal choice for low-cost websites with Hostgator

The Hostgator BABY PLAN allows you to create as many websites as you wish.
If you buy 3 years hosting, it works out extremely cheap!

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