2. Affiliate HOSTGATOR

-->


About HostGator
HostGator was founded by Brent Oxley in the year 2002. Based in Boca Raton, Florida, it is home to more than seven hundred thousand websites, making the company one of the largest hosts in business. HostGator is noted as ThePlanet’s (a multinational provider of datacenter infrastructure) biggest reseller. They reportedly have hundreds of full-time employees including both maintenance personnel and support staff.
All of HostGator’s servers are located in Dallas Texas among four of ThePlanet’s datacenters. Folks at the company have stated that they are completely dedicated to customer service: “Hostgator may eat up the competition, but we have nothing but love for our customers!”
Plans and features
HostGator offers three hosting packages: the hatchling, baby and the swamp.
The ‘Hatchling’ (economy) plan comes at $4.95 per month and allows 350 GB of storage with 3000 GB of monthly bandwidth. Unlike other hosts, HostGator does not require a contractual agreement and you can avail hosting at the same price for as little as one month. However, you can only host one website on this package without any add-ons or parked domains.
Email accounts, subdomains, FTP, autoresponders and MySQL databases are unlimited. Major programming platforms like CGI, PHP 5, Ruby on Rails, Perl, and Python are supported. In your account’s software section, there are plenty of free, one-click-install scripts; these include, b2evolution, Mambo, phpBB, OSCommerce, Zen Cart etc.
The ‘Baby’ plan costs $7.95 and allows hosting of unlimited add-on and parked domains along with 600 GB of storage and 6000 GB of bandwidth. All other features, however, are similar to the Hatchling plan.
The ‘Swamp’ plan comes at $12.95 and brings 1000 GB of storage with unmetered bandwidth. Other features are similar to the Baby plan.
HostGator secures all packages with a 45-day money-back guarantee.
Hosting Environment
The user control panel at HostGator is a standard version of cPanel. This allows access to all portions of your account including the file manager, FTP, email applications and the software scripts. Databases can be created and configured with phpMyAdmin which can be located within the user control panel itself.


Wordpress Features
Wordpress is included as a free add-on inside the Fantastico script pre-installed in your account. HostGator has a great background of hosting blogs and has helped numerous bloggers get their own websites up and running.
Tech Support
HostGator’s technical support staff is among the best in the industry; they are available 24/7 and can be contracted by a toll-free hotline, email or online chat through their website. Also, there is an extensive FAQ section, and a forum where thousands of members participate and help each other solve technical problems.