The pros they advertise in their page are true. In their shared baby and swamp web hosting packages you do get what they say, including the most attractive features:

• unlimited domains (as in, in one account you can add as many domains as you want)
• 6,000 GB of bandwidth in the baby package and unlimited in the swamp one
• 600 GB of disk space in the baby package and 1,000 GB in the swamp one
• unlimited MySQL databases (important if you are going to install Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla or other packages)
• Fantastico: easy one-click installation of most of the known scripts/CMS
• …

And an advantage which I have tested myself on a dozen of occasions by now and has always been excellent: answers from their support quick (usually in less than 6 hours) and helpful.

But, these pros and perks of Hostgator have a hidden side to them, which you will see when I explain the cons I have “suffered”.

Now the cons, or fine print details that you should consider before getting one package or another or even deciding if Hostgator is good enough for you. Right now I know of three cons. They have appeared at different times and although they haven’t made me switch to another web hosting provider, they have made me frown at them for a few hours/days. As I said, they do mention them, but until you understand what they mean, they sound like unimportant, when they are not. I am going to describe the three cons and when should you take them into account and take appropriate measures.

1. “Users may not: Use 25% or more of system resources for longer then 90 seconds”

Translation: if you have many web pages or visitors or scripts, even if you have unlimited space, bandwidth, etc., you might use up more than 25% of the CPU, which would cause them to shut down your service. So far it only happened once when a cron job lost the pot: they automatically shut down my cron job facilities without any warning and without me realizing till two weeks later. I say lost the pot because I still don’t really understand what happened. After talking to their support, they enabled the option again.

2. “The use of more than 50,000 inodes on any shared account may potentially result in suspension.”

Translation: each file and directory counts as an inode. When I encountered this problem, less than a week ago, I searched for explanations of the problem in several forums and I found quite a few places where people were saying that 50,000 inodes is such a large number that surely people that fret over them are exaggerating. Then how come I got two of my three Hostgator accounts with quotas above the inode limit? and not above by a few inodes, I’m talking about a few tens of thousands in one and even a hundred thousand in another! With a week to reduce the amount of inodes within the allowed quota, I’ve had to do some research to understand it better. I mean, I had 50 GB of my 600 GB disk full. How come I had over 200,000 inodes? Two things to know regarding inodes: how to find out how many do you have and how many inodes do different programs/scripts generate. I am working on two follow-up posts, one with instructions on how to obtain the number of inodes of your account or folders and a second one with a table with the number of inodes that standard packages like Wordpress or Moodle have to start with. So the problem is, you might have quite a large amount of disk space, but you cannot have more than 50,000 files, which means 12 MB per file if you were to use the 600 GB. An image displayed on a web page is usually around 30 to 50 kB and a simple html page say around 100 kB… so the magnanimous disk space will be usually unachievable, due to other restrains, and a bit of a misleading offer. Then again, you could use the extra disk space for backups, if not for many web pages.

3. “Mail policy and limits: There is a 200 hourly email limit per domain. If you send over this amount in any hour, most of the e-mails will bounce back with a undeliverable error.”

Translation: Now this policy I did not find in the Terms and Service page. You have to go search for it in their Knowledge pages. Again, surely 200 emails per hour are enough? Think about it, if you have one email account, it is unlikely you’ll ever send 200 emails in an hour. But what if you create 10 accounts? That means that each user should not send more than 20 emails in an hour. Doable? sure… unless you are emailing your siblings, which means you send an email to say two people, they answer and you reply again to both of them and… you can only do it 10 times in an hour. Still ok? The Hostgator offer is “Unlimited mail accounts”… sure, but the moment you have a few users, you will reach the maximum number of emails allowed per hour a lot quicker. It seems Yahoo mail has a limit between 25 and 100 emails per hour, depending on the account and Googlemail 60 per hour. And Hostgator only gives you 200 although you could in theory create a hundred email accounts. By the way, each email counts as an inode! So if you have 20 email accounts with say 500 emails in their accounts each (you can make their inboxes as big as you want, so why not be generous?), that’s 10,000 inodes. But when this really matters is when you have some package installed like Moodle or any other which relies on emails to inform students/members of any news. Say you have a Moodle installation with one course and 5 forums. Say 9 students enrol and there is one tutor. If you want all the students and the tutor to receive an email when somebody comments, that’s 10 emails that will be sent. Say a student enters the course and comments on all 5 forums, one after the other: that’s 50 emails. If another student happens to participate in the forums in the same hour, that’ll be another 10 emails per comment. Add to that exercises (and emails sent to the tutor letting him/her know) and then offer a few courses and you can reach the 200 email limit very easily.

Update: just when I was about to publish this post I decided to contact Hostgator live chat and ask about this email limit. It seems that from quite recently the limit has been increased to 500 emails per hour and that it’s 500 emails per hour per domain, not per hosting service as I thought. So, for example, if in one hosting package you have 3 domains, each of them has a 500 email limit. That still means that if you have 10 email accounts under one domain, you have 500 emails per hour to be divided among those 10 emails. Furthermore, there is a 60 pop-check per hour per domain. This means that if you are checking your email using Thunderbird or MS Outlook, you can only do it 60 times per hour. More than enough. If you have 5 email accounts, each can only check it, 12 times in an hour. If you have 20 accounts, each person should maximum check for new emails every 20 minutes. And if a user has a quick finger, other users might not be able to check their emails in an hour. And you still have to remember that each email is an inode! You can check out the complete new mail policy of Hostgator here.

Some conclusions:

Hostgator’s offer is very good, but you should consider what packages are you going to need (Moodle, b2evolution, Xoops, WebCalendar…), how many emails do you think you’ll need to send per hour, how many domains you’ll want to host and their inodes sizes, etc., before deciding what web hosting you need. You might need a few web hosting accounts, in Hostgator or any other provider! Getting a few hosting accounts could still be cheaper than a semi-dedicated or dedicated server and if you take into account the limitations of the service I’ve described, it can help you choose the best hosting package and distribution of domains per hosting account for your project/situation.

To know how to obtain the inode count of your folders, check out my next post. And if you need any help on deciding what would be the best option for you, do comment, and I’ll be happy to help you out.

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