Hostgator with over 2.5 million websites hosted would have to be considered one of the bigger players in the hosting arena. I must admit that when I was doing my homework on who to use for my sites  Hostgator’s size was a major attraction for me.

If you are now building your first site and have been looking around the how too websites around the web then you almost certainly have seen the Hostgator logo already.

Their strong affiliate programs in which they reward the people that send them clients make them a good advertising partner to have on “how to build a website” type of sites. This will have helped their popularity there is no doubt, but you don’t keep over 2.5 million customers without providing some sort of reasonable service. If my experience with them is reflective of how they treat all their customers then I can see why they have managed to keep these customers.

Some background on me as a client , I have, with Hostgator, a reseller account this enables me to create websites for clients which in turn are hosted on a shared Hostgator server. For this I use their $24.95p/mth reseller hosting package.

I have no real training in building websites and blogs so when I first grabbed this reseller package I had no idea how to use it and I would in no means call myself an expert even  now.

I will admit right now that in building some of my earlier sites I made one or two mistakes, would you believe three or four….. ok, ok I made heaps of mistakes.

I pointed the url to the wrong name servers, I had issues getting different wordpress plugins to work some of which needed things white listed on the server which I had no idea how to do, I accidentally deleted sites the list goes on and on.

Most of these were part of me learning what I was doing and after some frantic googleing  I managed to rectify most of these issues.

There is no more sinking a feeling though to stuff something up and strike out with google.

It is on these occasions that I had to call on Hostgator’s support, they primarily use support tickets where basically you email them your problem and they get back to you. the first time I used them I admit to concern over how long they were going to take to respond, but it turns out that concern was ill placed. In all cases I had a reply within 2 hours and in most cases within 30 minutes.

All cases were solved quickly and to my satisfactin and as a bonus they treated me with respect, even though some of the issues were obviously caused by my lacking knowledge.

I finds the speed of the sites I have with Hostgator to be good even though it is a shared server and if any sites need more resources there are plenty of options to upgrade the hosting to what is needed.

Their hosting plans start at $4.95 a month and if you hunt around you will find their are plenty of  coupons around that will get you a discount when you first sign up.

Their hosting comes with the popular Cpanel which enables you to add your emails maintain your database and heaps of other handy stuff the most useful being Fantastico, which enables you to  install some of the more popular website frameworks with in a few clicks, but more on that later.

All in all a good reliable host with all the bells and whistles that most websites will need at a competitive price. You can visit them here or feel free to click my affiliate link on the front page .

( Disclaimer:  I intend to set up affiliate links to all hosting accounts that I review, whether the review is good or bad,  to do so is free for me and you and a way of me monetizing my blog, I will however strive to make each review as impartial as possible and will always make it easier to click an unaffiliated link within the article. I  invite all readers to post in the comments their experiences  with the hosting company being reviewed).

Fantastico has helped with this, making it possible for newbies to install the wordpress framework with a click of a few buttons.

WordPress was designed as a blogging platform and this it does very well, but its usefullness has expanded because of its ease of use and the vaste availability of supporting plugins and themes.

Now it is possible to build a member only website, an eCommerce shopping cart website, a gallery website, a review website, a forum, and the list goes on and on, and all this with just a few clicks and usually some simple configuration of a plugin or theme or both.

Want to add ad-sense to your website take your pick from a huge amount of plugins that will do it all for you, simply put in your code and away you go.

Want to automate your backups another simple task using a easy to install plugin.

WordPress’s main strength is in its adaptability, you can pretty much make your WordPress install do anything, so if you are looking for a Blog / Website platform that is easy to use, easy to adapt to your needs and will grow with you, has support, both paid for and free for both the expert and the beginner then WordPress is for you.

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