If you’ve been following us then you must know that Hostgator has been our recommended hosting for quite some time. All of this changed last and I feel compelled to share with you what happened and why you need to stay away from them.

We have been with Hostgator for years, we were happy with their services, and we kept recommending them over and over. When services are good, hey that’s what you are supposed to do right? And we love to be resourceful, (there is so much crap out there…)

Several months ago they started to get outages, but we sticked with them, thinking that it happens and they’ll fix it. But it kept happening again and again. Our clients started to worry (and we did too!), when your site is down it’s bad for your clients, bad for your visitors, bad for your business and reputation. So we started to collect names of hostings people were recommending, that’s important for the rest of the story, you’ll see 🙂

The turning point happened last week with the huge hacker attack that happened. We installed a new Plugin called WordFence to protect our site and our blog, and I was monitoring the live traffic with that plugin to see if any suspicious activity were coming. A lot of hits were coming from China, but not too bad, nothing to worry about, I thought, I was wrong.

The threat came from Hostgator itself, because I had 2 windows opened that monitored the live traffic and the Chinese guy trying to hack to my site, that was enough for Hostgator to say I was using too much resources and they blocked my account.

No warning, nothing, just like that.

I quickly reached the chat support, but the information were too sensitive so they couldn’t talk about it, the only thing I could do was to use their ticketing system. But it took them hours to answer, and their answer was, “you use too much resource, use less and then we’ll re-evaluate”.

The problem is that I was not monitoring anything anymore!!

After the 2nd answer like that, that was enough for me. I was out.

So I started my new journey with what I thought was going to be our new hosting: LiquidWeb, I spoke with them early in January for a client that wanted to transfer several sites, asking if they could help, and they said “of course”. Long story short, an extra $150-$250 (on top of the $50/month) , to start working with you. A great way to start a relationship and nothing about charging for a move was in question for my client!

Arrrgggg, is there any good reliable hosting out there?

You can guess I was pretty upset by this time with all my sites down and no hosting. The clock was ticking.

After some research we decided to try “A Small Orange“. The transfer has not been completely smooth to be fair, but support is there, always helping trying to find a solution, and it was quick, chat or email. It has been only a week now and we are still probably in the honeymoon phase, but so far so good, the sites are way way faster, I have more control. So I am happy.

That’s the whole story. And that’s why I say that Hostgator can go to hell take a hike.

Even if I think Liquidweb provides way better services than Hostgator, they failed miserably in the support department.

Bottom line, If you are serious about your online business you should definitely stay away from Hostgator.. I can totally see it become the cheap hosting for hobby websites, which is not what we are all about here.

Now we would like to hear from you: which hosting are you with? Are you happy with the current services provided by your hosting? Please leave a commen below 🙂