LSO Award

In 2008 when we outgrew the hosting we were using for the Lansing Star and our other Web sites we did a lot of research, looking for hosting plans that could handle our rather large archive or articles and pictures at an affordable price.  We looked at hundreds of reviews of hosting companies.

Most hosting company reviews included the good, the bad, and the ugly.  They had as many bad reviews as good, if they were lucky.  Hostgator had very few bad reviews.

The downside of trusting customer reviews is that you don't know who is writing them, what their experience level is, or whether they are being fair or are just mad at some tech support guy who was having a bad moment.  But the numbers of good to bad reviews were impressive, and the price and features were right, so I decided to give them a try.

I'm glad I did.

I moved over a dozen sites to the Hostgator account, and it was simple and pain free.  I needed technical support about a half dozen times because of obscure issues to do with how our old host handled something versus how Hostgator does.  I found their support to be quick, professional, and helpful.  A couple of times I asked for help on problems that turned out to be related to how my sites are set up, not hosting.  In other words they were my problems, not Hostgators.  In every case their support staff helped me anyway, professionally, without complaint.

The sites have been up continually, and anecdotally at least they seem to run faster.  The former was a dealbreaker when I was reading the reviews -- all the hosts say they are up 99% of the time, but we have some sites on another host that doesn't meet that goal.  The latter is very nice -- the host we left was also rock-solid and pretty fast for shared hosting.  But this one seems faster.

We got the middle-ranged account, the one they call the Baby Croc.  Despite the cutsie name, the features included are outstanding, giving us all the storage space and bandwidth we need and instant control over whatever we want to control instantly.

Over the years I have used a half dozen Web hosting services, and between that and experiences collegues have related I have a good sense of what is good and bad in these services.  So far, so good!