The process of cancelling your account is pretty easy - just have to create a ticket and state why you are leaving. I will write another post on the hosting I eventually settled on, but it did however unfortunately mean an end to my days with Hostgator. For me however, I didn’t want to fork out for support I probably wouldn’t ever use. It should be said however that this is more managed hosting with 24/7 support, which of course is included in the price. To get anything half decent you have to fork out $50/mo - and that’s just 2 cores, 2GB’s of memory and 120GB’s of disk space, so hardly ground-breaking.

The cheapest is $12/mo and you get 0.5 cores (seriously), 512MB of memory and 25GB’s of disk space. I first started at Hostgator, but man are those expensive. Again I can see why they do this, but still that’s pretty unbelievable pricing for shared hosting.Īnd so started the search for a new VPS plan. That’s where hosting companies really sting you - $9/mo when you are on a rolling monthly plan vs. I would have just ended immediately and have the site down for a few months, but I still needed access to my domain email. So I switched over from a two year plan to rolling monthly to get me through the search for a new host. I planned to switch to a VPS when the existing plan ended, but it crept up on me and I was blissfully unaware when it eneded and I was completely unprepared. I needed root ssh access and some more powerful hardware to play around with. It became clear that shared hosting simply wouldn’t cut it anymore. I had the hosting throughout the bulk of University which was fine at first, but as your knowledge increases (particularly after placement), you start wanting to try out different things. With hindsight, I should have threatened to leave which is when they start trying to discount things, but at the time I really didn’t want the hassle of moving everything over to a new host and was happy with the service I was getting. I can of course understand why they do that in the business sense, but still I would expect some kind of special offer on renewals once in a blue moon. Even if you have marketing emails from them, their offers are always for new accounts - never for existing customers which is a real shame. There are never any renewal discounts that I can make out. Not only had the base price increased slightly, but you don’t get that nice 20% discount that you take for granted when you initially sign on. The renewal invoice was sent to me and the price had increased by a third (about $70 for the two years). Then my initial two year contract expired and I realised why the initial price was so cheap. cPanel is ridiculously easy to use as well so no issues there setting things up. I also didn’t get notified of any usage issues as a lot of people do with shared hosting (again this was really only Wordpress so that’s to be as expected). Throughout my use of Hostgator speed wasn’t an issue - although granted I wasn’t using it for any real strenuous activity.

Most importantly actually was the ease of getting hold of personalised email with my domain - something that it turns out is quite messy without cPanel as I found out recently. I was able to host my Wordpress blog with no issues and could easily play around with FTP and a few MySql databases on the side. They provided a good service to me for the duration of my stay. At the time I payed $5.95/mo for 2 years of hosting which included a 20% promotion (which I later learnt is pretty much a constant thing). To be honest even by today’s standards that’s pretty good going. I got myself their most basic shared web hosting plan which consists of a single domain and unlimited (yeah, until you start using too much of course) bandwidth/email/databases. They had pretty good reviews and the prices for shared hosting were good for a minimal setup like mine. The tutorial recommended Hostgator and that seemed fine to me. I registered my domain with GoDaddy as recommended (and still do with no issues) and then had to move on to actually hosting my site. At the time I think I was just following some online tutorial which ran through the process of setting up and hosting your own site.

Therefore of course I had no idea what constituted a half decent web hosting company. When I first launched my blog way back in 2011 I didn’t really know a whole lot about web hosting at all and just wanted to get something tangible up and running as quick as possible.

Hostgator ftp disk full error