Shared Hosting Plan Highlight - Hatchling
As I mentioned before, HostGator has 12 hosting plans to choose from - shared, reseller, and dedicated. They have a couple of Windows hosting packages (more coming soon, they say), but mostly run on Linux. Today I will be going over HostGator’s basic shared hosting package, called “Hatchling”. This plan is a great way to get started if you are not looking for tons of bells and whistles - it does, however, offer considerable amounts of space and bandwidth.
The Hatchling plan comes with 350 GB of server space - that’s gigabytes, not megabytes. Wow! I doubt that you’ll ever need any more than that unless you are running a file hosting site or something. It also comes with 3,000 GB of bandwidth, which again is tremendous for a starter shared hosting package.
The only real limitation of the Hatchling package is that you are only allowed 1 domain, so no add-on domains. However, you are allowed unlimited subdomains. It also comes with a variety of one-click install scripts, like Fantastico, Soholaunch, PHPnuke, hotlink protection, forums, guestbooks, counters, and much more. Along with these scripts, HostGator provides a site builder, instant backups, unlimited MySQL databases, and all sorts of programing language support, including:
- PHP 4 & 5
- ASP
- Python
- Ruby on Rails
- CGI
- SSH
- Perl
- SSI
- Curl
- GD
- ImageMagick
As for email, HostGator offers unlimited POP3 email accounts with auto-responders, forwarders, spam protection, webmail access, and IMAP and SMTP support.
Some additional features that HostGator provides with their Hatchling plan is shared SSL, Agora Cart, osCommerce, Zen Cart, Cube Cart, AWStats, Webalizer, and 24×7 support (chat, email, phone).
Now these are some pretty great features - so what are the prices? Not bad, not bad at all. The prices are:
- $8.95/month if you pay monthly
- $6.95/month if you pay yearly
- $5.95/month if you pay every 2 years
- $4.95/month if you pay every 3 years
These are great prices for what you are getting - and I wouldn’t be afraid to pay yearly or every 2 years, either, since I don’t think that you will be leaving HostGator (I haven’t after 4 years). So, if this shared hosting plan sparks your interest, go check it out on HostGator.com.