Founded in 2002,
HostGator has grown to become one of the leading website hosting providers in the world. The company is based in Houston, TX, with additional offices in Austin, TX. The company offers a wide range of services, including:
Website Hosting
The host offers four basic types of hosting packages. They include:
Reseller Hosting: This is a service for individuals and corporations that want to make a profit from reselling hosting services to third parties. To ensure that resellers get a neat profit margin, the package is reasonably priced. The package comes with a master control panel, which makes it possible for resellers to open and manage hosting accounts as well as to receive payments.
Dedicated Hosting: This is a hosting package for large organizations or companies that are in need of a private server because of the sensitivity of the information they deal in, which demands for maximum security. E-commerce websites that receive a lot of traffic round the clock may also benefit greatly from dedicated server hosting, which gives these sites access to all the server resources. Dedicated hosting plans come with at least one dedicated IP address, which is important in Internet security as well as brand reputation management.
Shared Hosting: HostGator simply calls this package ‘website hosting’ on its website. This is an affordable website hosting package designed to meet the needs of new websites, startups, blogs, marketing websites and any other site that does not receive a lot of Internet traffic at any given time. All shared hosting packages are affordable, but subscribers should know that if several users get too much traffic at the same time, the server may crush. Users should also know that they will be sharing a single IP address with all the websites that are hosted on that server.
VPS Hosting: Virtual Private Servers have become increasingly popular. This is where the hard drive on the host server is partitioned several times to create numerous partitions, each of which can have its own dedicated IP address and server resources. This is advantageous because users get the full benefits of dedicated server hosting but at a much lower cost. It is best suited for clients who need the privacy and dedicated resources that come with dedicated servers, but at a much lower cost.
Windows Hosting: Most servers in the website hosting industry are running on Linux-based operating systems, such as Fedora and Ubuntu. However, there are organizations and individuals who need to run MS Windows applications, scripts and programming languages that can only be supported by servers running on Windows. HostGator offers Windows hosting to accommodate the needs of different types of clients. This means that clients who need to run ASP.NET scripts and applications, or C++ and C# scripts can have their sites hosted on the company’s Windows servers.
Domain Services
The company also offers three types of domain services, including:
Domain Name Registration: This service allows Internet users to run a search on their preferred domain name to check for availability. If the name is available, the company can register it after payment of the standard domain registration fee. In case the name is already registered, but available for sale, the company can oversee the transaction and transfer all ownership rights to the client.
Domain Transfer: Clients whose websites are hosted by other hosting companies but wish to switch to HostGator can easily achieve this objective. The company will handle the entire process and help them set up their new hosting account, at a small fee.
Domain Maintenance: Domains must be renewed every year and renewal fee paid. HostGator is a domain registrar and handles all domain renewals for their clients.
