hostgator.com: are they good?

[wildwildwest]

I am doing some research on different hosting companies, and I need some feedback. I was wondering if anyone has used or done business with hostgator.com. I spoked to a rep this morning, apparently their tech/sales offices are in Houston. Servers are in the Dallas/Plano area.

They offer 3 different plans:

Low: 350gb disk space, 3,000gb bandwidth $8.95/month
Med: 600gb disk space, 6,000gb bandwidth $9.95/month
High: 1,000gb disk space, unlimited bandwidth $14.95/month

Would any of these plans be a good option for 500,000 visitors per month? These prices seem awfully... low...

Or can you recommend a good but inexpensive hosting company?

Thanks in advance for your smart remarks... I appreciate your help.

[gaybucks_chip]

You get what you pay for.

3 TB of bandwidth for $9 a month is a joke. What they're doing is putting you on a server with probably 300 other customers and hoping that none of them will actually use anything close to what they're paying for, because if they did (a) the host most certainly doesn't have the bandwidth to support it and (b) the server itself probably wouldn't be able to handle the throughput.

If you really have a half million *visitors* a month and not *hits*, then you should be on a dedicated server. How much bandwidth you need is a function of what type of content you have, how much of it, and how many people are viewing it. Expect to pay a rock bottom price of about $100/month for a self-managed server and 1500-2000 gigs from one of the large providers with not-so-great support, and $175-400/month for a fully managed server.

Just to give you an idea, the absolute cheapest bottom feeder bandwidth from off-brand transit providers is in the range of $15-20/Mbit in volume. So to be able to provide you with that level of transit, they would be paying a minimum of $200/month for the 3000 gigs of bandwidth they are offering to sell you for $10.

[wildwildwest]

...
Just to give you an idea, the absolute cheapest bottom feeder bandwidth from off-brand transit providers is in the range of $15-20/Mbit in volume. So to be able to provide you with that level of transit, they would be paying a minimum of $200/month for the 3000 gigs of bandwidth they are offering to sell you for $10.

Thanks for your reply.

Just to be clear, the page loads vary, depending on the counter, from 708k to 722k; total/unique visitors vary from 412k to 430k. Most of the digital media (such as images/video, etc) is hosted elsewhere.

What you say in the last paragraph absolutely doesn't add up. Is this promotion then, some sort of bait-and-switch deal?

[gaybucks_chip]

What you say in the last paragraph absolutely doesn't add up. Is this promotion then, some sort of bait-and-switch deal?

Sort of.

What these companies do is offer ridiculous amounts of bandwidth to all their customers, knowing full well that almost nobody uses anything close to that amount of transit. It's like the cell phone companies offering unlimited nights and weekends; if everyone used their cell phones all the time nights and weekends, the cell carrier's network would not be able to handle the volume.

The biggest problem with these $9 plans is that you're sharing a server with god-knows-who-and-how-many other people and if any of the other servers have traffic spikes as a result of a news story or mention on Slashdot or something, your site will simply stop responding.

If you're running a business, particularly a membership site, you want people to be reliably able to get to your site. You might get lucky and not have problems with a deal like this, but the odds are that your site will be glacially slow at times, unreachable at times, etc. And when you're paying $10 a month, don't expect they will be jumping up and down to resolve problems quickly, either. One phonecall to tech support that month will pretty much eat up any profit they might have been able to make.

For a dinky site with no traffic, a $10 host can be ok. For anyone running a serious business, it's a bad idea, at least in my opinion.

[wildwildwest]

I understand. Here are some quotes from hostgator.com's TOS (some of which I don't understand) (quote)

[...]Your use of the service is at your sole risk.

We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone. Any material that, in our judgment, is obscene or threatening is prohibited and will be removed from our servers with or without notice.

Resource Usage
User may not:
a) Use 25% or more of system resources for longer then 90 seconds. There are numerous activities that could cause such problems; these include: CGI scripts, FTP, PHP, HTTP, etc.
b) Run stand-alone, unattended server-side processes at any point in time on the server. This includes any and all daemons, such as IRCD.
c) Run any type of web spider or indexer (including Google Cash / AdSpy) on shared servers. [...]

[Chilihost]

do a search on the other forums and you will find out very very quickly that places like hostgator and dreamhost are crap. You are running a business that relies on your web hosting to be available and reliable. If you have a host that is slow, oversold, suffers a lot of downtime or places throttles and restrictions on things like cpu cycles, your galleries will not get accepted, your freesites will be removed, your surfers will not bother waiting for your pages to load, overall your business will suffer severely. Of all things that you should not "cheap out" on, its hosting.