Hostgator WordPress Review: Features + Pricing

Hostgator Cloud Architecture

Normal web hosting stores your data on a specific server in a specific location. The Hostgator WordPress packages however, use the same architecture found on Hostgator cloud hosting. Meaning that the data is spread out across three different servers, instead of just one. This makes it much more secure, since if one copy fails, the others are there to gracefully pick up the slack.

Note however, that all three of these servers are located in the same region. It does not mean that your site will be served from a different region depending on which is closest. The cloud architecture only increases security and provides a failover.

SSD Drives Instead of HDD

For its basic shared hosting, Hostgator uses HDD instead of SSD drives. This allows them to offer “unlimited” disk space in their plans since storage is so cheap with HDD. However, this comes at a price – SSD drives are much faster, especially when talking about dynamically generated content from databases.

However for its WordPress plans, Hostgator uses their Cloud architecture, and that means SSD drives! Which is perfect for a database heavy CMS like WordPress.

Dynamic Caching: Optimized WordPress Hostgator Plans

WordPress pages are generated dynamically from the database whenever a visitor comes to your site. It means that on each visit, your database is being hit, the server’s CPU is being used to create the page. This slows things down and can even bring your site to a crawl if you get a lot of visitors suddenly.

Dynamic caching stores a copy of these pages after they’re generated the first time. For all subsequent visits, the static pages are served to visitors, meaning there’s no additional load on your server. This allows your traffic to scale up significantly without much strain on your server.

Here’s an in-depth article about caching on shared hosting, along with a list of hosts that support server side caching.

All good WordPress sites use dynamic caching in one way or another. Most of them resort to using a plugin like WP SuperCacher, W3 Total Cache, or W3 Rocket Launcher. While these do work, they’re still slow. The Hostgator WordPress plan however, takes care of this at a server level, and this places hardly any load on the server.

Not many web hosts include dynamic caching as a default part of their regular web hosting. SiteGround is on exception with their “SuperCacher” functionality. Here’s a list of SiteGround coupons if you want to compare prices. The Hostgator web hosting plans don’t include dynamic caching, but the WordPress plans do. If you’re running WordPress, dynamic caching is a “must have”.

Hostgator CDN Included

This is a unique feature of the Hostgator WordPress plans, that’s not found anywhere else. They all include a global CDN supplied by the “SiteLock” add-on. While with normal web hosting you have to specifically purchase SiteLock, it comes free with all optimized WordPress Hostgator packages.

The CDN is a “Content Distribution Network”, and allows your site to serve images, Javascript, and other static content from servers all around the world. So a visitor from Japan will see the same loading speed for these resources, as a visitor from Brazil. Without a CDN, at least one of these locations will experience slow loading speeds.

While the value of a CND is unquestioned, I personally wonder if the SiteLock CDN is the best one to use. My opinion is that free Cloudflare is the best CDN, and I recommend that you use that as well. But if you don’t want Cloudflare, then SiteLock is fantastic, because otherwise you would be paying for the CDN itself.

More Resources Compared to Normal Web Hosting

Just as with the cloud package, Hostgator WordPress plans have fewer users on each server compared to normal shared hosting. In fact, here are the comparisons to standard web hosting vis-a-vis compute power:

• WordPress Starter – 2x the power
• WordPress Standard – 2x the power
• WordPress Business – 5x the power

Note that you’re still on a shared server. It’s not a VPS plan. But these servers are very “low density”, and this means faster site load speeds, and fewer chances of you being throttled.

Malware Scanner and Removal with SiteLock

All Hostgator WordPress plans get free complimentary malware scans. This is extremely important in today’s world because of the scary number of site hacks being discovered every day. A compromised WordPress site can leech visitors off your business, plunge your rankings in the search engines, and you might even lose control of your site altogether. A good WordPress malware scanner looks for known vulnerabilities and notifies you before they can do any harm.

Regular web hosting includes a complimentary malware scan of the first five pages of your site daily. But optimized WordPress Hostgator hosting includes all the features including automatic removal as well!

Customized Dashboard Instead of Hostgator cPanel

While cPanel is a staple feature of all Linux hosting, it’s not really necessary for running your website properly. Most people don’t need all the features anyway. Hostgator WordPress hosting comes with a custom built cPanel that’s specifically geared towards WordPress. From there, you can:

1. Change your cache settings
2. Configure your e-mail accounts
3. Manage CodeGuard and SiteLock
4. Manage FTP users etc

In other words, it has everything you need to manage WordPress without the clutter of cPanel. For many people, this is a significant benefit, since it also reduces the chances of messing things up accidentally!

Automatic Updates of Plugins and Themes

A shocking number of WordPress installations are out of date and insecure. Most of this can be avoided simply by keeping your plugins and themes up to date. But this usually needs to be done manually, and when you don’t log in for a while, routine maintenance can build up.

The Hostgator WordPress plans can do this for you automatically, so you always have the latest versions of software running. This improves security and ensures that you get the latest bugfixes without any delay.

Free SSL

Just like with all their plans, Hostgator WordPress hosting includes free SSL with Let’s Encrypt. While these are not “positive SSLs”, they’re still good enough to get you the “green lock” icon on your site, which means that all traffic between you and your visitor is encrypted, and no one can snoop on it. Plus is correlates with higher rankings in search engines too. Google in particular has made it very clear that it prefers SSL sites.

Also, browsers like Chrome won’t display scary warnings!

Hostgator Websites Limitations on WordPress Hosting

Because of the management and resource intensive nature of optimized WordPress Hostgator plans, there’s a limit on the number of WordPress sites you can install on each plan. Here they are:

1. Starter: 1 site
2. Standard: 2 sites
3. Business: 3 sites

It also means that you can’t have multi-site WordPress installations, unfortunately.