The prices they advertise on their site and other sites ($3.95/mo) is the greatly discounted 3 year contract prices – so keep that in mind when choosing your hosting company. The advertised prices on this site, WHCompare, are for 1 year contracts unless specified otherwise. If you choose a 2 year pre paid billing cycle the price would be $4.95/mo. If you want to pay on a monthly basis the price would be $10.95/mo.

On sale

The shared web hosting plans from HostGator is currently on sale, as they seem to be constantly. Prepay for as long as possible to get the greatest discount. Be noted that the prices will be higher after your initial period is over. You can see those prices on the billing page, and they depend on how long billing cycle you have. HostGator has huge price differences depending on whether you pay monthly or in advance for 1, 2 or 3 years of hosting.

Extra features

SiteLock monitoring comes in at $1.67/mo and is recommended by HostGator. If you do not have this you might struggle if your server gets infected with malware or viruses and HostGator may block you if you can't find all the infected files and then fix them. Daily Backups from CodeGuard offers lets you restore your site when needed with 1-click. It costs $2/mo.

Expensive domain names

Note that HostGator does not include a free domain name with your web hosting plan, unlike many other hosts does - instead HostGator, unfortunately, charges a premium for domains, $15/year for a .com per year, and a very high price for whois privacy at $1.25/mo or $14.95/year, which is triple the industry standard. Click here for our guide with information about the best domain registrars online. Use them to register your domains and to buy whois privacy at the lowest prices.

Conclusion

Responsive live chat support is one of the benefits of HostGator. It has some drawbacks though. The regular price after your initial billing cycle is pretty high for this kind of web hosting. Lack of SSD disks is another drawback.

Expensive for a 1 domain max plan.