10 things that you should know about Hostgator Shared Hosting

HostGator is one of the world’s biggest web hosting company.  Almost 10 years back, it was by Brent Oxley, who was then a student at Florida AtlanticUniversity. By 2006, HostGator had passed the 200,000 mark in registereddomains. The company achieved tremendous growth in 2010 by registering over two million domains in the year alone. By the end of May 2011, the company grew to over 5 million+ domains hosted.

In August 2009, Inc. Magazine recognized HostGator as the 239th fastest growing private company in the United States.

This year, Hostgator has also started its operations in India as Hostgator.in by setting up support office and data center in Nashik, Maharashtra.

Today I will tell you some 10 important things about Hostgator shared hosting which very few people know.

1. You can host mp3s and videos on your shared hosting space, but you may not host any files with a copyright belonging to someone else, unless you have the owner’s written consent. If you want to have a website where you allow visitors to upload and share movies, audio files, or images then you have to go for VPS or dedicated hosting. This facility is not there in shared plan.
2. Hostgator create weekly backups of shared servers of accounts that are under 20 GB and 100,000 inodes (number of files/directories). You can restore your web, email and database content from those per your request. You have to pay $15 fee to restore the HostGator backups. If you can provide your own backup file, then there is no fee.
3. HostGator allows a maximum of 25% CPU usage limit. However, you may exceed this limit for no longer than 90 seconds. It is very unlikely that you hit the 25% CPU usage unless your site is script intensive and requires more processing.
4. Hostgator does not allow you to host proxy scripts and anonymizers.
5. There is currently an limit of 100k/250k inodes on their shared accounts. So what exactly is this inode? An inode is a data structureused to keep information about a file on your hosting account. The number of inodes indicates the number of files and folders you have. This includes everything on your account, emails, files, folders, anything you store on the server. Shared and Reseller servers only allow 100,000 files per cPanel. This is a "Soft limit" meaning that while the limit is reached, you will still be able to upload files. However once the account passes the 100,000 file threshold it will no longer be included in the weekly backups. Additionally, if the account happens to exceed 250,000 files then it will be in violation of Hostgator Terms of Service and can result in possible suspension.
6. Hostgator allows hosting of mature (adult) sites. However using Hostgator shared hosting for storing files and media streaming is not allowed. To see the whole list visit http://hostgator.com/tos.shtml
7. There is a 500 hourly outgoing email limit per domain on all shared servers. This means each addon/subdomain gets its own separate 500 outgoing emails per hour limit. This limit is also applied towards mailing lists. If you send over this amount in any hour, the e-mails will fail and may bounce back with a undeliverable error.
8. HostGator allows a maximum of 25 simultaneous MySQL connections per cPanel on shared servers.
9. Shared and Reseller plans are limited to 25 simultaneous processes per cPanel. If more than 25 processes are running at a time, this may bring your site down and throw 500 error message.
10. You can’t host wikileaks mirros on Hostgator. 

Posted in: Internet And Computers