Penguination Project

We decided to take a serious step to create a good hostgator hosting review.  To take a closer look on what’s going on we created a Hostgator Basic hosting plan. After about 10 minutes we got notification email that hosting was successfully installed. Ok hostgator we are gong to review your place.

We logged in with provided cpanel access, and we greately surprised in hostgator load times, very clever crocodile, works very fast.  Cpanel load time was very fast , that’s very cool because hostgator hosting located in USA and we are browsing from North Pole ( Pengland ) !

Once logged in, we amazed on lots of functions and features, we also didn’t wait long while browsing from one page to another.

We uploaded Zend Framework based application done by us, it worked GREAT , Hostgator hosting supports ALL versions of  Zend framework !

Here is the first screenshot of hostgator cpanel :

And the second one :

So what actually hosthator hosting offers to you  ?

We will start our review from fantastico inside of hostgator cpanel, this review will be useful for any starter hosting user that wants to install and view his website in just one click. Yes , it is -> just one click, you don’t need to pay thousands of dollars to programmers for online shop or forum creation, or maybe you are happy  blogger ? There are blogger softwares such as wordpress also could be installed fast and easily.

Ok, what’s inside fantastico cpanel ?

Blogger software :

• b2evolution
• Nucleus
• Wordpress

Classifieds script :

• Noahs Classifieds

Content management systems ready to install

• Drupal
• Geeklog
• Joomla 1.5
• Joomla
• Mambo
• PHP-Nuke
• PHP WCMS
• PHPWEBSITE
• Post-Nuke
• Steframe
• TYPO3
• Xoops

Customer Relationships scripts

• Crafty Syntax Live help
• Help center live
• osTicket
• PerlDesk
• PHP Support tickets
• Support Logic Helpdesk
• Support Services Manager

Discussion Boards ( forums )

• phpBB
• SMF

E-Commerce – online shops

• CubeCart
• OS Commerce
• Zen Cart

F.A.Q

• FAQMasterFlex

Hosting Billing

• Account Lab Plus
• PHPCoin

Image galleries

• 4Images Gallery
• Coppermine Photo Gallery
• Gallery

Mailing list

• PHPList

Polls and surveys

• Advanced Poll
• LimeSurvey
• PHPEsp

Project Management

• dotProject
• PHPproject

Site Builders

• Soholaunch Pro Edition
• Templates Express

Wiki

• TikiWiki CMS/Groupware
• PHP Wiki

Other Scripts

• Dew – New PHP links
• Moodle
• Open-Realty
• phpAdsNew
• PHP AUCTION
• PHP form generator
• WebCalendar

Extras

• Language
• Side Menu appearance
• Email notifications
• Installations overview

Only hostgator’s fantastico features ( they are completely free ones )  that load fast and work smooth are enough to kick other hostings ass such as godaddy ugly and slow linux hosting. Sorry godaddy, we have had bad bad bad experience with you, we paid you money and you didn’t do anything to improve your hosting services.

Another great feature is Site builders :

• Site Studio
• Parallels site builder – builds beautiful and complex websites in minutes

Now let’s look at hostgator’s hosting logs features.

There are variety of log scripts installed with hostgator cpanel :

• Awstats – advanced log , statistics plugin that collects information on whats going on on your website, it counts visitors by IP, where they are coming from, daily stats , monthly and weekly stats what parts of your website best browsed. All the information viewed as graphs.
• Error Log – This function will display the last 300 errors for your site. This can be very useful for determining what links are broken on your site, or what files do not exist that should. Checking this log frequently can help keep your site running smoothly.
• Raw access log – Raw Access Logs allow you to see who has accessed your site without the use of graphs, charts or other graphics. You can use the Raw Access Logs menu to download a zipped version of the server’s access log for your site. This can be very useful when you need to see who is accessing your site quickly.
• Webalizer FTP – Webalizer FTP is a complex stats program that produces a variety of charts and graphs about who has visited your site using ftp protocol.
• Webalizer – Webalizer is a complex stats program that produces a variety of charts and graphs about who has visited your site.
• Bandwith – This function allows you to see the bandwidth usage for your site. It shows the current month’s bandwidth usage as well as your total bandwidth usage. This will include all HTTP (web) and POP (mail) bandwidth usage and may include FTP bandwidth usage if your system administrator has enabled FTP bandwidth logging.
• Latest visitors stats – This function will show the last 300 people that have accessed your site.

Hostgator Cpanel file management

There are two cpanel file management scripts installed – file manager and legacy file manager, you can edit your file’s code with variety of code editors installed, easily manipulate with your files and archived files, you can change directory and files permissions .

BackUp wizards

You can backup your files and databases with backup scripts installed with hostgator hosting.

FTP – WebDav  SSH access

In comparison with other hostings, ftp , webdav and ssh are installed with hostgator hosting and you can use them any time. Ftp loads stable , without disconnections in time of files transfer, here is a good point to bash godaddy hosting again. Godaddy hosting’s ftp disconnects sometimes fail on files transfer, I wouldn’t use their hosting even for free… seriously. It has full shell access for the linux penguins, password protected dirctories, hot links protections, ssl/tls manager, ip deny manager, GNUpg keys.

Mailing / Mailing from script

Lots of mailing managers inside of hostgator hosting, mailing executed from script is done really fast, we mailed 1200 users with vbulletin script, mailing executed in just a few seconds. That’s really cool !

Domains

• Subdomains – Subdomains are URLs for different sections of your website. They use your main domain name and a prefix.
• Addon Domains – An addon domain allows you to reach a sub-domain when entering the name of the addon domain into a browser. This means that you can host additional domains from your account, if allowed by your hosting provider. Addon Domains are relative to your account’s home directory.
• Parked Domains - Parked Domains (Domain pointers) allow you to “point” or “park” additional domain names to your existing hosting account. This will allow users to also reach your website when entering the “parked” or “pointed” domain into their browsers.
• Redirects – Redirects allow you to make a specific web page redirect to another page and display the contents of that page. This way you can make a page with a long URL accessible by a page which has a shorter and easier to remember URL.

Databases

Remote MySQL, PHPMyAdmin , mysql database wizard – to create your database fastly, databases manager.

Variety of Software / Services, server configurations

PHP.ini configurations, ruby gems, ruby on rails, sitemap builder, Perl modules, CGI center

Apache handlers, Image managers, Index manager , Error pages, Cron jobs , Front page extensions, Network tools, MIME types.

There are lots of other additional function and every each of features described below contains it’s individual features.

You can visit hostgator hosting , check out their hosting plans offered and sign up.

We think it’s a great offer for beginners and professionals, especially for zend framework developers that are looking for good stable hosting with linux shell access that supports all PHP 5 features and zend framework ( or other framework ) classes.

Good luck !