ASP.NET is a widely used to build dynamic websites, web applications, and web services. ASP.NET works on top of the HTTP protocol, and uses the HTTP commands and policies to set a browser-to-server bilateral communication and cooperation. Today, we would like to introduce a one of favorite ASP.NET hosting option— HostGator. We will analyze HostGator ASP.NET Hosting around features, prices, performance and customer support to figure out whether it is good enough to get your online store up and running.
HostGator ASP.NET Hosting Company Background
HostGator is one of the largest and most popular ASP.NET hosting companies in the world. They offer shared hosting, VPS hosting, dedicated servers, and managed hosting plans.
HostGator was founded in 2002 and grew quickly to become one of the biggest hosting companies in the world. You can credit the monstrous growth to their great shared hosting plans, reliable web hosting, and quality customer service.
Today it is headquartered in Houston, Texas and hosts over 8 million domains. They have 850+ employees that offer around the clock support and serve businesses of all sizes.
HostGator ASP.NET Hosting Performance
What would you do if you sign up for a ASP.NET host and find that your website is painfully slow and often disappears? You’d have to switch providers, and this will cost you more money and headache.
That’s why you want to choose a web hosting company that is reliably fast with stable performance record all around. But how would you get this information?
We decided to check HostGator’s performance by running our own tests. Let’s find out how well it performed.
HostGator Speed Test Results
The most important performance indicator is the speed. A faster website is good for your users, and it also helps your SEO rankings.
We have tested to measure their speed test using Pingdom and found their speed is not so good. We sometimes experience huge delay time to load our site. Below is the result
As you can see above, to load their site, it require almost 4 seconds. Just imagine, if your site host with them, how fast your site can be opened? How would your site perform under peak traffic hours? If we compare it with ASPHostPortal, it only takes 1.3 seconds to load, this is faster than HostGator
We also test using other tools called LoadImpact and the results are almost the same:
As you can see on image above, their speed is not stable, sometimes go up and go down. Remember that on a shared hosting account, you share server resources with other sites hosted on that same server. You will need to upgrade your hosting account if you start getting more visitors at the same time.
Uptime Result
Beside speed test, uptime is really important for your business. HostGator claim to give 99.99% uptime guarantee but the fact sometimes it is very difficult to reach their result. We have tested their uptime and found this result:
HostGator Server Response Time
The content of your website significantly affects the page load time. For example, if your website has many images, then it will increase the page load time.
This affects your server’s speed test results. We wanted to see how fast the HostGator server actually responds.
To test this, we used a tool called Bitcatcha. It works differently than other website speed testing tools. Instead of loading the content, it only tests the response time of the server.
It also runs the test three times from multiple locations spread all over the world to get the average response time for each location.
Here is how HostGator performed in these tests:
If we combine 3 results above with different tools, we can make conclusion that HostGator shared hosting server is not good for ASP.NET website. If you need fast and reliable server performance ASP.NET hosting, we would recommend you to use ASPHostPortal.
HostGator ASP.NET Hosting Pricing
We admit that HostGator is one of the cheapest options for ASP.NET hosting. There are the three plans on the roster:
- Hatchling ($7.96 per month): This basic plan can be used to host a single website. It is perfect for you to host single personal ASP.NET site.
- Baby ($9.56 per month): The standard plan will host one or two ASP.NET websites and supports up to 200,000 combined visits per month. It should be more than enough to handle modest service sites and small ASP.NET platforms.
- Business ($14.36 per month): As its name implies, this plan is suitable for established business sites and for ASP.NET developer. It can be used to host as many as three websites and can handle up to 500,000 visitors per month.
They might be very affordable options for ASP.NET hosting. They also have money back guarantee. If you don’t satisfied with their services, you can claim for 30 days money back guarantee.
Customer Support is Lack of Knowledge
Although you can contact their customer support using phone and live chat, sometimes their support team can’t solve your problem on the spot. They sometimes hanging you for 20-30 minutes and then ask you to create ticket via their admin portal. They outsource their support team in India, so when you called them, their English is not too good. You can’t communicate with them easily/fluently using phone.
Over the past years, we have kept receiving complaints on HostGator ASP.NET hosting service. Up to now, we have received HostGator received reviews from their customers, among whom only 25.4% of them are satisfied with the overall performance, and 30.8% appreciate the quality of technical support from the company.
Is HostGator ASP.NET Hosting Worth for Money?
HostGator is big name for web hosting services, however their ASP.NET hosting service is not recommended for those who’re looking for fast loading shared server at a low rate.
Actually, there are many ASP.NET hosting packages you can found over the Google search and search via our top recommended ASP.NET hosting review that come with a good combination of affordable price, excellent reliability, fast speed, and quality technical support.