Hostgator getting worse by the day?

Hosting
1

I have been a Hostgator user for nearly 10 years now and their service in the first 8 years was always fantastic. Quick to respond on chat, polite customer service and no major issues.

In the last 2 years, I have noticed that their service levels have gone done considerably. Many of the emails sent using our company accounts are being marked as spam and same for incoming emails from our customers, who have been emailing us for a long time, without any problems before. They are not even interested in looking at the issue and simply blame the ISP’s of senders, even though the same senders had no issues at all.

Their chat response time, which used to be 2-3 minutes waiting has gone up to 20+ minutes of waiting on most occasions.

They never do any automatic back-ups of my falls, because of their “file” limits.

I tried to submit a support ticket on their website and the form was buggy so the ticket never got submitted (and I am not a new to all this). I am seriously considering migrating now and my only concern is that because my websites have been hosted their for so long, what sort of SEO impact would my sites have if I migrate servers?

Also very keen on some recommendations for alternatives, but only those offered from large companies that have been in business for a few years and have a very solid reputation online.

2

Moving hosts is not painless - but a lot easier than people think. Or you could find a web host offering a free site move and let them do the work.

Just backup your database and restore it on the new host - then move all your files and make sure it is all working - there is always something that is a problem - but that the web. The bit you see is all pretty and shiny - but what holds it all together is scary.

Just don’t change your DNS until after you have everything working.

Your SEO impact should be none. Google doesn’t care about where your servers are physically - they link to the domain and the DNS sorts it all out.

3

If hostgator is no longer fulfilling your needs, it might be time to move along to another hosting provider.

I’ve always seen host gator as the “quick n’ dirty” solution for web hosting. Not the best on the market, but it gets the job done for most situations.

For smallish sites, I’ve used surpasshosting.com and hostdime.com (both are essentially the same company–the former is online support only, and the latter includes phone support).