Hey everyone,
Just wanted to share our experience with HostGator, hoping it might help others avoid the issues we’ve run into. This isn’t a full analysis or anything, just what happened to us and what we’ve seen others report online. Here’s what we dealt with and why we think it’s worth a heads-up if you’re considering them.
The Signup Experience… and the Problems Later On
We originally signed up because of one of those “up to 70% off” emails on new hosting plans. It seemed like a good deal, so we got a multi-year plan to lock in that rate. Everything was fine until the plan was about to end.
Here’s What Happened
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Auto-Renewal Confusion: HostGator doesn’t make it simple to turn off auto-renewal. You’d think it’d be easy in the dashboard, but it’s not there. When our plan was ending, they sent an email that looked like any other marketing email, so it was easy to miss. If you don’t respond, they assume you’re fine with auto-renewing.
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Big Price Hike: HostGator renewed the plan for the same term as before but this time at full price. We didn’t get a chance to confirm or choose a shorter term. Since we originally signed up for three years, this meant a huge price jump. From what we’ve seen online, a lot of other people have had the same experience.
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Unhelpful Support: Trying to sort this out with support was frustrating. They only have live chat, and each time we tried, we got a different rep who didn’t seem to know our case. After a while, it felt like they were just stalling until it was “too late” to get a refund. Others online report similar issues.
Why We’re Speaking Out
We’ve seen a lot of others go through this too, and just want to warn anyone considering signing up. A friend we recommended to HostGator also ran into issues, making us realize this is more common than we thought. It seems like HostGator is more interested in squeezing extra money out of existing customers than in being upfront or fair.
If you’ve had similar experiences, feel free to share. Let’s get this conversation going so others can avoid these pitfalls.