WebHosting For Small Business – Hostgator saves you money!


I just got off the phone with a small business owner that had his website shut down by his own webdesigner. As absurd as this may seem, the story is not unusual amongst offline entrepreneurs:

They pay a bunch of money for the design and then the webdesigner sticks a small “maintenance fee” on them that includes web hosting. This gentleman that was on the phone with me had been paying $35/month for over 5 years!

What really kills me is that the maintenance fee didnt include anything – He told me that once he wanted to change the pictures on the site, and the guy sent him an extra bill for $150.

Small business owner, take charge of your hosting!

Let me make something extremely clear to everybody  - as I explained on this post (stuff to want on a hosting) and then discussed on the unlimited bandwidth hosting post – small businesses dont need to pay a ton of money for hosting.

What you need is a reliable, efficient, and secure hosting like Hostgator – one that has free 24 hours customer support and that will fix any problems WITHOUT extra charges.

Wanna know what happened to this friend of mine?

I told him to get his FTP info from the webdesigner, get an account with Hostgator, and use their FREE DOMAIN TRANSFER SERVICE to get his websites up.

Now – he’s going to pay less than $100 PER YEAR, instead of the $420 he was paying. How does that sound?

Sign up for Hostgator today – and start saving money immediately!

(use coupon code “wordpress” to get your first month for $0.01!)

What can Hostgator’s unlimited bandwidth do for you?

hostgator unlimited bandwidth

Yes, hostgator offers unlimited bandwidth, but what does that mean?

So yesterday we spoke about what things you want from your hosting company, such as unlimited bandwidth and unlimited addon domains.

I just realized that we never really talked about what those things really mean – such as how much traffic will take 1 gb of bandwidth, and where to see it.

First of all, you dont need to understand any of this. I sure dont, but since I want you to know how good Hostgator is, we’ll venture into this topic.

Bandwidth goes right along your average daily traffic. Every piece of information on your site is stored somewhere, and everytime somebody visits your site, that information is retrieved and loaded into that visitor’s browser.

The traffic between the servers and the visitor’s browser is what determines your bandwidth usage. The volume of transfer can increase your decrease depending not only on your traffic, but on the content of your page.

For example, if you have a JPEG picture of about 50kb, plus a small FLash animation of 600kb, the bandwidth it will take to load your site will be bigger than the one necessary to load a site with just plain text.

How does bandwidth influence your site’s performance?

CNN’s homepage is about 200kb. That means everytime a single visitor comes in, 200kb of bandwidth is used to load the page  - since they get well over 500,000 visits/day, they require a minimum of 100GB of bandwidth for their homepage alone.

Your page wouldnt need nearly as much, but account for that occasional viral traffic – better safe than sorry.

So that’s bandwidth for dummies – arent you glad Hostgator offers unlimited amounts of this stuff?

That means you dont even have to pretend you know what you’re talking about ;)

Sign up for Hostgator NOW!

(get your first month for $0.01 – use coupon code wordpress)

What do you want from your Hosting?

Hostgator provides what you want with everything you might need

First – do you know what you want from your Hosting?

People tend to think of hosting as an expense – therefore they look for the cheapest one, which often leads to a disappointing experience.

You need to consider the impact of having your website(s) down for even an hour – how much would that cost your company?

Once you realize how crucial a reliable Hosting server is, you start to think more careful about which one to choose.

1. What’s the Uptime Percentage?

Pretty self-explanatory – how often is the server up, or how steady are their services?

There are no perfect servers – but there are those with guaranteed 99.9% uptime. Hostgator was one of the first ones to achieve that percentage, and has won many best hosting awards because of it.

2. How much bandwidth do you need?

This is ridiculously hard to calculate because you may not use a lot of bandwidth right now – remember that bandwidth = traffic volume to your site. But chances are that for 99% of businesses that have a website, more traffic is always welcome.

The way the internet works, you have plenty of opportunities to go Viral – and what happens if a sudden spike in traffic collapses your website?

Hostgator offers UNLIMITED BANDWIDTH even on their most basic packages. You may not need it, but you definitely WANT IT.

3. How many domains per account?

Let’s say you run a gym – and you want a domain for fitness, one domain for bodybuilding, and one for martial arts.

Usually, you’d need to get a hosting account for each one of those domains. That means one monthly bill is now 3x bigger.

With Hostgator, you get unlimited addon domains – you can have a multitude of domains on the same account, without compromising the bandwidth, because – yes, it’s UNLIMITED.

Those are the most basic and fundamental features you want from a hosting company. I make it clear that those are things you WANT – not necessarily what you need.

Hostgator’s features cover way more than your needs – they focus on taking care of your wants.

Sign up now and get your first month for $0.01! (use coupon code hgc25)

A true story of Hostgator’s support effectiveness (hacked wordpress)

Hackers attacked my wordpress sites - Hostgator saved them all

Hackers attacked my wordpress sites - Hostgator saved them all

About a month ago, several of the domains on my primary Hostgator account suddenly went blank.

On my primary account, there are several client’s pages that run on PPC traffic, so even a single hour that the pages are down means a lot of $$ down the drain.

I honestly dont know how long they were down before one of my clients called me asking what was up with the blank page – but I – freaking out – immediately started a live support chat on Hostgator.

Of course, when something like this happens, my first instinct is to punch somebody – it’s like when you’re trying to get something done over the phone with At&t – but the support agent was right on the money.

My Super Hosting Save

When I told the agent that several of my sites were down, he quickly browsed over them and sent me a couple of lines of PHP code that he thought looked weird.

To me, it looked even WEIRDER because I dont use PHP (except when hosting wordpress) and when  I told him, he quickly identified signs of an invasion.

Yeah, it sounds unreal, but hackers do attack us.

As I started freaking out, my agent logged in to cPanel and started to remove alien .PHP files that were placed throughout my sites.

Honestly, I have no idea how it happened – but within less than 15 min, he had it all taken care of for me. He instructed me to change all my FTP passwords and cPanel, and gave me the special email address for the Hostgator security team.

After he fixed everything, the security team went in and double checked my account, worked their magic, and recommended I upgraded my wordpress suites.

At the end of the day, the entire process took less 1/2 hour!

That’s how effective the Gators are!

Sign up today and get Hostgator for $0.01 (coupon code: hgc25)

Love Hostgator Super Hosting Super Recap

Hostgator's SUPER Hosting makes the web more fun

Hostgator's SUPER Hosting makes the web more fun

This blog is only a week old and already we’re causing a stir around the stiff web hosting industry with our ultra cool ways to talk about all of Hostgator’s amazing hosting services. Some folks have pointed out that we’re so cool that they dont mind all of the geek talk we have here.

Though he admitted that the amount of geek talk is here is minimal when compared to other hosting-related sites. And yes, I dont talk as much about technical aspects because honestly, I care more about how effectively Hostgator works than WHY it works so darn well.

But we’ve addressed some pretty technical issues here already – specifically when we discussed ASP.NET hosting with Hostgator and when I explained how cool having a free cpanel hosting account is.

We also taked some geeky when I exposed their best seller hosting package and how reseller hosting accounts work. But the coolest thing was the video tutorial.

I had a blast trying to make a video tutorial on Hostgator’s free domain transfers – I thought I should teach folks how to transfer your site to a new host, but the fact is that HG does all the work.

So I shot a 4-minute tutorial that shows you how to get your old IP address and paste it over to their free transfer form.

Seriously, how easy is that? And why did I take 4 minutes to finish the video? Good question!

Before I wrap this up, I just want to point out that the $0.01 Hostgator coupon has limited availability and you will be unable to use when HG pulls it off their list.

It’s been a pleasure writing this blog and we have lost more coming up – so stay tuned and enjoy your gifts!

Sign up to Hostgator NOW!

A Look Into Hostgator’s Best Selling Hosting Package

Hostgator's hosting packages have won several awards -  because they rock!

Hostgator's hosting packages have won several awards - because they rock!

In their 5 years of existence, Hostgator has won an average of 4 awards per year – they have 22 awards listed on their website as you read this. That’s why hostgator hosting rocks

What does this mean to you, soon-to-be Hostgator fan?

It means you’re not the only one that thinks they’re good. A lot of people (that probably know what they’re talking about) investigated and confirmed that Hostgator is by far the best hosting service.

(Check out some of their awards in the bottom of this post)

But what’s so good about Hostgator?

Check this out:

I’m going to post below the SIMPLEST package they offer, just so you can see how cool they are.

Keep in mind that the $7.95 price is for when you pay ahead for the whole year – regular price is $9.95 if you pay monthly.

But still… 10 bucks a month gets you all this:

UNLIMITED Disk Space
UNLIMITED Bandwidth
Host UNLIMITED Websites
FREE Instant Setup
99.9% Uptime Guarantee
45 Day Money Back Guarantee
CGI, PHP 5, RoR, Perl
MySQL, SSH, SSL, IMAP, POP
FREE Site Builder
cPanel Hosting ( View Demo )
24/7/365 Upgraded Support

This means you can have over 30,000 visitors to your site daily, and it would not crash. You could also have 1500 different websites in the same hosting account (for 10 bucks a month). HOW COOL IS THAT?

SIGN UP FOR HOSTGATOR NOW