Hostgator Black Friday 2010

If you’ve ever thought about hosting a website or are considering switching hosts, now’s the time!

HostGator is doing their biggest Black Friday sale ever: 80% off all plans!!!!!!!! (8 exclamation marks, one for every year they’ve been in service) If you haven’t heard of Hostgator yet, you will. Next year they’re will become an official domain registrar and start taking a bite out of Godaddy with their own commercials. I’m hoping it’s a parody of the Godaddy Girl wandering into the swamp, never to be seen again.

HostGator Review

I’ve being using HostGator for a year now (Hatchling account) and I can 100% guarantee it’s quality. They quickly transferred my website far away from Godaddy for free. They have lots of online tutorials, which came in handy since I was not familiar with cPanel (high-end control panel), which Godaddy does not include it.

I won’t lie, I was initially second guessing my decision to go with Hostgator as L7 World went down during the first week, but I called up Customer Service, which is 24/7 and more importantly toll free, and it was back up with an hour. After that I decided to start using Pingdom.com to monitor uptime. In the following 11 months 3 weeks, I have had 99.92% uptime.

Unlike some unlimited bandwidth hosts, Hostgator has very high CPU usage limits (25% for 90 seconds). This website isn’t very demanding but there have been spikes well into the thousands on some days and it doesn’t seem to be an issue.

The only real problem I experienced was a database error that made all my posts vanish! Fortunately, Hostgator does backups every Sunday and they will restore your database for free so long as you weren’t doing something you shouldn’t have.

If for some reason your experience isn’t like mine, no worries. Hostgator has one of the longest money back guarantees: 45 days!

HostGator Black Friday 2010

All day Friday Central Standard Time you can save 50%, but the 80% off is only from 5 – 9 AM CST or until supplies last, which I’m guessing will be 5:01 AM. Despite what some affiliates are saying to get you to sign up through them, there is no special coupon code. Hostgator Twitter: “No, the discount will be given automatically.” That said, if your do sign up I’d appreciate it if you do it by clicking on my affiliate ad (picture right).

One final note, Hostgator does not allow coupons on existing accounts, including upgrades so don’t be cheap like I was and sign up for their lowest package Hatchling ($35.64 for 3 years),which only allows 1 domain, get the Baby account ($57.24 for 3 years), which allows unlimited websites!

Even if you don’t plan on hosting multiple websites now, three years is a very long time, and you’ll be kicking yourself later for not spending the extra $21.60 (a large pizza)!

UPDATE:

Hostgator Twitter: “The limit was for 100 signups. However the many attempts after it was reached caused our billing system to experience issues.”

Those “issues” being many angry customers who received timeout messages. I gotta say that was pretty shady advertising 5 – 9 AM since there was no way 100 accounts would even last 4 minutes let alone 4 hours! They should have said how many accounts were available in the first place or just said until supplies last and leave at that, instead of raising hopes.

Nevertheless, 50% off is still a good deal or you could take your chances and wait for the next deal on Cyber Monday (no details yet).

UPDATE 2:

Good news everybody (who order between 5 – 9 AM)!  Hostgator owner Brent Oxley says, “We are going to honor the 80% off for anyone who placed their order between 5am-9am. In order to take advantage of the difference please open a ticket by emailing [email protected] to request we refund the difference.” (link) Kudos to Hostgator for trying to make it right. It will be a big loss in money but great gain in credibility.

UPDATE 3:

If you missed out on the Black Friday Sale, you have another chance to save big on CyberMonday (12:00AM – 11:59PM CST) with 50% of your first invoice on shared and reseller accounts and 50% off your first month of VPS and dedicated servers. Hostgator Coupon: CYBERMONDAY2010