Starting At
$2.75/mo*
Starting At
$3.95/mo*
Starting At
$5.95/mo*
disclaimer
Starting At
$2.75/mo*
Starting At
$3.95/mo*
Starting At
$5.95/mo*
HostGator web hosting provides a vast array of tools to take your idea or business online today. From site building tools and templates, to our one-click application installer, you'll find everything you need to launch your new website. Got questions? Our 24/7 Live Support team is here to help!
For example, our own Website Builder provides an incredibly convenient drag-and-drop building experience. You can choose from a wide selection of themes, and even pre-built sections, to craft your own amazing website and publish it in no time!
With our QuickInstall tool, available on all Web Hosting plans, you can create any type of website: blog, forum, CMS, wiki, photo gallery, E-commerce store, and so much more! Since HostGator runs on Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP, thousands of existing applications and software are compatible.
One of the most widely-used building platforms in use today, WordPress is an excellent tool for almost any site.
Trusted by millions, and a growing force in the CMS world, Joomla is known for being both highly customizable & user-friendly.
Generally used for more ambitious websites, Drupal allows for a customizable and highly-scalable environment.
Designed with E-commerce in mind, Magento provides user-friendly tools intended for building online stores.
The gold standard of crowd-sourced content creation, a wiki is the perfect platform for information sharing.
An excellent tool for creating an online community, phpBB is ideal for building a forum or bulletin board website.
HostGator is one of the world's top 10 largest web hosting companies, with over 8,000,000 hosted domains. We have over 850 employees to provide you superior around-the-clock support. We are the perfect choice whether you are looking for business, personal, or even Fortune 500 hosting. All shared web hosting plans include our 45-day money-back and 99.9% uptime guarantees.
In basic terms, web hosting is where your website actually lives. Or to get slightly more fancy about it: a website is a collection of files that exist on a server connected to the internet and accessible to be viewed via a web browser. When someone visits the given domain, these website files are displayed within the web browser as the actual website. When you combine the website files with the hosting server and a properly-pointed domain, you have all the ingredients necessary for a website to be visible online. And that, in a nutshell, is web hosting.
Shared web hosting is simply when one server hosts multiple customers. This is the most common and cost effective option for web hosting, and something we excel at truth be told. Our shared web hosting servers are configured for maximum security and performance relative to the number of customers, and types of websites, being hosted. In other words, there's no need to give any thought to the other websites on the same server as you; we've got all that handled.
The primary difference between shared vs. cloud hosting is that on cloud hosting the website files actually exist on multiple servers, these servers themselves are also shared so it's kinda-sorta like having multiple, duplicate shared hosting accounts. The reason is that with shared hosting if the one server goes down, the websites become unavailable, but with cloud hosting if one server goes down then the other cloud servers ensure that the websites remain available online.
It basically works like this: if you intend to conduct eCommerce on your website, accepting credit cards and selling goods or services, then you need the Business plan. If you don't need eCommerce functionality, but do intend to host more than one domain, then the Baby plan should be perfect for you. If your intention is to host a single domain without eCommerce, then the Hatchling plan should meet your needs. It's really just those 3 factors that determine the best plan for you.
We make it very easy to transfer your existing website files, and even your existing domain registration(s), to us. For primary domains on new hosting accounts, we will perform the domain registry transfer for free. To prevent any downtime on a live website, the correct order of operations is: create new HostGator account, transfer a copy of your website files to the new server, update the DNS of any domain(s) to point to the new server, wait 24 hours and verify everything loads from the new server, cancel old hosting account, initiate domain registration transfer, verify the domain registration transfer completed successfully. This sounds daunting at first, but taken one step at a time it's a very easy and logical sequence.
View the full information on transferring your website to HostGator.
View the full information on transferring your domain registration to HostGator.
In order to have a website live on the internet, you will need both web hosting and a domain name. Both of these things can (and do) exist independent of each other, though it is generally considered universal to employ both in order to have an actual website. Metaphorically, let's say you want to invite people to a party (your website). Your party is at a location, such as your house or apartment (web hosting). In order for people to know how to get to the specific location, you must provide them with an address (domain name). So, web hosting is the actual server space where your website files live, and a domain name is the address visitors need in order to view these files as your website. You can have a domain without a website, and you can have a website without a domain name, but to truly benefit from having either in the traditional sense, you actually need both working together.
*Prices reflect discount on first term
† All brand names are trademarks of their respective owners. All prices, plans, and options listed are what has been publicly disclosed as of 01/23/2018. Prices and features are subject to change without notice.