Many of you know that I have been having major hosting issues as of late.  From July till now, my sites have gone down daily, and Bluehost’s support has been less than helpful.  I have used them for almost two years, so it was truly sad for me to have to even think about leaving.  I have never had the problems I was having.  If you read my blog, you will notice long absences (when I couldn’t even post due to not being able to even get to the backend of my blogs!), and I wrote about a lot of my issues.  My final straw was when support finally told me to delete my old posts and put them on a static page.  Well, that kind of defeats the whole purpose of a blog.  I think I just outgrew them. I do have to say that to cancel Bluehost was super easy, super fast, and they were super nice.

I had asked around quite a bit about what other hosts were out there that people liked.  One I heard a lot of good things from was Hostgator.  Before I made my decision, I even online chatted with some of their sales people.  The other thing that impressed me was that they are green.  I personally believe that every little bit helps and that if I can help the environment with my hosting, why not. Granted, Hostgator isn’t running their own windmills in downtown Houston.  Instead, they have bought RECs for 130% of the electricity used to power and cool its shared and reseller servers. What’s a REC?

Renewable Energy Credits (RECs) are tradeable credits representing all the environmental benefits of 1 megawatt hour of renewable energy. So when HostGator purchases 4,009 Texas wind RECs, it’s basically paying a Texas windfarm to generate renewable energy on HostGator’s behalf. HostGator doesn’t own the windfarm, but for every REC purchased by HostGator, that windfarm generates 1 megawatt of Texas wind power and puts it into the grid. When HostGator draws power from the grid, it can then claim credit for that wind power generated on its behalf.

Another thing I really like is that if there is a problem with one of your sites, they don’t pull them all down. That was a big grievance of mine before.  They will also transfer your domains and your files to them for free!  That was what really got me to come over to them.  They saved me hours of time of having to move my sites!  Every step of the way, I got an email letting me know what they were up to.  The only thing you end up having to do is check to make sure that your site looks good and to change your DNS settings.  It doesn’t get easier than that!

Any issues I have had so far have been dealt with quickly.  When I didn’t get my welcome email (due to my own typo), they responded to my ticket in 15 minutes.  I ended up sending in a ticket due to a WP hiccup last night (which I think was my fault too – lol) and had a response in about 2 hours.  I love that kind of customer service!  They have been nothing but nice and helpful.  The thing I love the best is that I went from throwing errors on all my blogs to not throwing any.  I am not sure how that happens, but I’ll take it!

If you are in need of new hosting, I highly recommend checking out Hostgator.  They are very competitive in pricing, and they are everything I wanted in a host.