The article neglects to mention several important things.
First, the $4.50 per month price for the shared "Baby" plan is a "teaser" rate for new customers. And to get it, you'd need to pay for three years up front. The price goes up to $6.00 per month if you're only willing to pay for one year. And if you want to try it for only one month, the price is $13.95.
Once that initial term is over, the price goes up. A lot. If you're willing to pay for three more years up front, it will cost $15 per month. For one year, it's $17 per month. And if you want to pay one month at a time, it's $22! This excessive renewal price, which Hostgator raised enormously last year, is one reason I moved my Web sites after 17 years with Hostgator. (Since this post is not an ad, I won't mention where I moved them.)
Second, while the article briefly mentions that Hostgator is owned by Newfold Digital, it doesn't explain what that actually means. Newfold Digital is the successor to Endurance International Group (EIG). EIG's business model involved buying up dozens of hosting companies, gutting them, moving their accounts to heavily-loaded centralized data center, and leaving the shell of the former hosting company as a "brand." They also spent heavily on promotion and "affiliate" marketing. Numerous sites purporting to review hosting companies and help you choose the "best" are bogus, and intended to steer people to EIG "brands."
Newfold Digital is owned by two private equity firms. One of them acquired EIG; the other owned web.com. They merged EIG and web.com to form Newfold. They also seem to have abandoned EIG's "engulf and devour" business model. They have closed many EIG "brands" to new customers, referring them to Bluehost, Hostgator, or web.com. Private equity is entirely about maximizing short-term gain for its partners and investors. One way they do that is to minimize costs. When it comes to hosting, that means cramming as many users as possible onto overloaded servers, and outsourcing technical and customer support to contractors in countries with low-cost labor, such as India and the Philippines. The most accurate way to look at it is that Newfold Digital is not in the hosting business. Hosting is strictly a source of revenue for their investment business.
That explains the mediocre performance noted in the article. Many hosting companies go into great detail about their servers and data centers. But if you look at Hostgator's Web site, you won't find any information about their infrastructure or data center. They apparently don't want you to know the truth, that if you keep your Web site with them after the initial "teaser" term, you're paying a premium for mediocre performance and less-than-mediocre support.
To summarize, you can easily find hosting companies not owned by Newfold Digital or by private equity that offer better performance and value for money than Hostgator. I found the new home for my Web sites through the "Web Hosting Talk" forums, but there are other ways. Just don't trust Web sites devoted to reviewing hosting companies, since most of their recommendations are based on generous "affiliate" payments from companies like Hostgator.
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