Speed and uptime are a cloud hosting service’s priorities.
HostGator Cloud aligns its hosting service with these priorities that website owners have come to expect from cloud hosting. And it does so at an affordable level.
With plans starting as low as $4.95 per month with introductory pricing, small websites and businesses can benefit from having the resources their site needs always available in the cloud.
But while HostGator Cloud plans allow you to scale your resources as you need them, their bandwidth and storage aren’t quite as scalable. Both are unmetered, but they’re not unlimited.
Is HostGator Cloud right for you? We’ve detailed its top features and compared it to our other web hosting top picks to help you decide.
Compare HostGator Cloud to The Best Web Hosting Services
HostGator is known for being one of the most budget-friendly web hosting services. Whether you have a small or large site, you can find a plan that fits your needs without breaking the bank. That’s exactly why we chose HostGator as the best web hosting service for scaling on a budget. HostGator Cloud is just as affordable, with unmetered bandwidth and storage plans starting at just $4.95 per month.
We reviewed dozens of web hosting services over the years and have narrowed down the options to seven of the best options. See all of our top picks along with details about each service to learn what company might be your best fit.
HostGator Cloud: The Good and The Bad
The Good
Affordable Pricing: With plans starting at just $4.95 per month, HostGator Cloud has some of the most affordable pricing of its kind. Each plan even comes with a free SSL certificate and unlimited subdomains to lower your costs.
Helpful Customer Service: HostGator’s customer service offers 24/7 help through live chat, phone, and fax. With multiple support centers across the globe, you can always be a quick call or chat away from assistance.
Clean Dashboard: HostGator Cloud uses cPanel for site management with a simple interface that makes it easy to find everything you need. Manage your email preferences, installations, SiteLock, and more.
Reliability: Because cloud hosting draws on stored resources across multiple servers, it can quickly grab what it needs to make your site function. HostGator Cloud uses automatic failover in the event of any hardware failure to keep your site up and running.
Speed: The same reasons HostGator Cloud is reliable also make it fast. HostGator Cloud caches and stores your content in the cloud to pull when it needs to, allowing faster load times and better user experiences.
Scalable Resources: If you need more resources, like storage or bandwidth, for your site, you can adjust the amount in your dashboard. This feature essentially creates a completely customizable plan based on what your site needs.
The Bad
Unmetered, Not Unlimited: HostGator Cloud boasts unmetered storage and bandwidth, but it’s important to understand that unmetered doesn’t mean unlimited. Unmetered simply means that HostGator won’t monitor how much data you store or transfer as a basis for boosting the cost of your plan. HostGator can still limit your resources if it believes you’re using too much.
Renewal Fees Can Be Pricey: HostGator Cloud’s best renewal pricing is reserved for those who renew for 36 months. Even then, you’ll pay almost double what you paid for your first term when you renew.
Extra Data Restoration Costs: Data mirroring keeps copies of your data on other devices for added security. However, you’ll need to pay extra each month for CodeGuard if you want daily backups and simple, one-click restoration.
HostGator Cloud Pricing and Options
HostGator Cloud Pricing
HostGator Cloud’s three pricing tiers allow you to choose the options that are right for your website. The core differences between the plans focus on how much memory and the number of CPUs you’ll have, but there are a few feature additions in higher tiers, too.
Hatchling Cloud starts at $4.95 per month. It includes hosting for one domain, 2 GB of RAM, two CPU cores, unlimited subdomains, and unmetered bandwidth and storage.
For $6.57 per month, the Baby Cloud plan adds hosting for unlimited domains and gives users 4 GB RAM, four CPU cores, and unlimited parked domains. Opt for Business Cloud for $9.95 a month with six CPU cores, 6 GB RAM, and a dedicated IP.
It’s worthy to mention that these prices are only available when you choose a 36-month term for your hosting package. Choose a shorter term, and prices go up. One-month to six-month terms for Hatchling Cloud bring your price to $12.95 per month, $13.95 a month for Baby Cloud, and $19.95 a month for Business Cloud.
Renewal prices will also cost more than the introductory prices for 12, 24, and 36-month terms.
Even with the jump in prices upon renewal or with shorter terms, HostGator Cloud pricing is competitive for what each plan offers. The most you’ll pay is $19.95 per month on a Business Cloud plan, which gives you all the benefits HostGator Cloud has to offer.
HostGator Cloud Resource Management
A top benefit of cloud hosting is that it gives you opportunities to share resources—CPU, RAM, storage, etc.—where and when they’re needed. Your resources are in the cloud, ready for your site to use as necessary.
HostGator takes this benefit of cloud hosting one step further with its resource allocation feature. If you have more than one website on your plan, you can budget resources for each one.
Say, for example, you have a smaller site without much traffic and a large site with thousands of visitors each day. You might lower the bandwidth and storage limits for your smaller site and broaden the large site’s limits to allow it more resources. You can do this with a few clicks in your control panel.
HostGator Cloud Dashboard
HostGator Cloud users have access to cPanel within their account’s simplified dashboard. There’s no need to know all the details about web hosting configurations and features with this beginner-friendly dashboard, which divides everything into categories to help you find what you need.
cPanel is where you’ll do everything from managing files to setting up your domain email accounts. The search bar offers a quick way to locate a setting if you can’t find something specific.
Need help from HostGator’s knowledge database before you tweak settings? Use the Help feature to search for support articles without navigating away from your dashboard.
You can also get a quick overview of your website stats within your dashboard. View your website hits, number of visitors, and bandwidth usage for specific dates. Check on website uptime, page load speed, and other factors that affect the usability of your site.
HostGator Cloud Speed and Optimization
Cloud hosting is often hailed as one of the fastest types of web hosting. HostGator Cloud meets the needs of cloud hosting enthusiasts with its multiple servers designed to optimize your site’s performance. If one server isn’t performing up to par, HostGator will automatically move your site to another server to allow that one to pick up the slack.
This can also happen in the case of a server hardware failure. With a feature known as automated failover, HostGator moves your site to another server that’s working properly until the problem gets fixed.
HostGator Cloud uses internal and external SSD drives, giving you quick access to your information as your site needs it.
The following information compares HostGator Cloud servers to HostGator’s shared and reseller hosting servers. As you can see, HostGator Cloud’s servers provide significantly more storage than shared and reseller servers.
HostGator Cloud Data Backup and Security
Making sure your site’s data is backed up and secure from threats is a primary concern for many website owners. For this website, we have multiple safety and security protocols in place to keep everything running reliably.
When it comes to your hosting plan, you should have no shortage of features for protecting your site’s information. HostGator Cloud has several safeguards in place.
First is data mirroring. This feature replicates your site three times across different servers to ensure that it’s always available and safe. You’ll need to pay for daily automatic backups and one-click restores, though, by adding CodeGuard to your site.
HostGator also protects its servers against distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, which target the server and interfere with traffic and bandwidth. HostGator’s detection settings and rules enable flood protection to keep your data and site safe. This protection applies to all servers with HostGator.
For additional security, you can purchase SiteLock as an add-on to your hosting package. The feature adds malware scans, vulnerability scans, and bot blocking to your site.
HostGator Cloud Customer Service
We always appreciate web hosting companies that prioritize customer support.
So many things can go wrong with a website, whether you’re a beginner or an expert website owner. Being able to rely on help that’s just a call or a couple of clicks away is invaluable.
HostGator offers the same customer support pathways to its Cloud customers as it does to customers on any hosting plan: live chat, phone support, and self-help.
The self-help comes in the form of HostGator’s knowledge base filled with content that answers website owners’ most common questions. You might be able to find what you need in there for simpler tasks, but you can move onto expert support for more complicated issues.
Live chat and phone support are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Find them by logging into your account and clicking the Support link.
We tested out HostGator’s live chat by asking a few questions as a new customer. After waiting just a couple of seconds, we were connected to a specialist, who was extremely thorough in answering our questions.
HostGator Cloud Bandwidth and Storage
HostGator Cloud gives you what’s known as unmetered bandwidth and storage. What this means is that the company won’t charge you more money if you happen to use more bandwidth or storage one month than another. Your costs don’t rely on how much of these you use.
That doesn’t mean that you get unlimited disk space and bandwidth, though.
As you can see from the screenshot from HostGator Cloud below, customers must remain compliant with HostGator’s Terms of Service regarding disk space and bandwidth. If you use more than what HostGator deems appropriate, HostGator may ask you to reduce your usage and could interfere with your site if you don’t comply.
A site with high amounts of traffic may not be able to utilize HostGator Cloud. However, HostGator Cloud isn’t really intended for large business or really high-traffic websites, anyway. For that, you’ll want to go with the company’s virtual private server (VPS) or dedicated hosting.
HostGator Cloud Add-Ons
We mentioned that HostGator Cloud offers CodeGuard and SiteLock as add-ons to any Cloud plan. These low-cost add-ons are only $2.00/month and $1.99/month, respectively.
Additionally, you can add a professional email address to your account using Gmail from Google Cloud for $6.00 per month. There are also SEO Tools for $2.95 per month that submit your site to search engines and analyze its pages to make sure it’s performing its best in search engines.
Finally, you have the option of adding an upgraded SSL certificate to your site for $3.33/month. Your Cloud website will come with a free one, but the premium version allows you to add an SSL badge to your site and gives you warranty protection.
Are any of these add-ons necessary? CodeGuard and SiteLock aren’t a bad deal, giving you the benefit of site backups and malware attack prevention for less than $4/month. And the upgraded SSL could be beneficial to ecommerce websites.
But think twice before adding the others. If you already use Google Workspace for your business, you’ll have Gmail and Google Analytics at your disposal for email and SEO included in your plan.
Comparing The Best Web Hosting Services
We’ve spent countless hours researching and using different web hosting services to find the best of the best. Check out our comparison guide here.
- Bluehost – Best web hosting overall
- HostGator – Best for scaling your small business
- Web.com – Best for simple business websites
- Hostinger – Best if you need a lot of storage
- DreamHost – Best for simple hosting
- SiteGround – Best for keeping uptime above 99.99%
- InMotion – Best price for hosting two websites on one plan
- Nexcess – Best for experienced WordPress users
- A2 Hosting – Most dependable web hosting for global traffic
We believe that HostGator Cloud is an excellent service that most small site owners can use reliably. It’s affordable, reliable, and fast, which is everything you need in a site. But for scalability, you’ll probably want one of HostGator’s professional hosting plans instead.
