For many people, the thought of having to cancel my HostGator account may not seem like a big deal. Heck, they will say that there’s nothing wrong with it considering that people do it all the time.

But for me, canceling my HostGator account is the hardest decision I’ve ever made in my author business.

I decided to switch to using SetraHost instead after using HostGator for almost a decade.

So, what makes it hard for me to leave HostGator after all these years?

Does it have something to do with me who has been using HostGator for such a long time?

Believe it or not, it’s not much to do with me being their long-time customer. Rather, it has more to do with the HostGator mascot, Snappy.

Sure, Snappy may only be an alligator mascot for HostGator. But he’s an iconic mascot.

I doubt that I will ever remember HostGator if it’s not because of Snappy.

Guess that I won’t be seeing Snappy anymore since I no longer use HostGator.

What got me to cancel my HostGator account

I was no different from those people who decided to cancel my HostGator account. My websites were down for hours.

Since it’s not surprising that the websites would be down for days, I decided to sign up with SetraHost and requested them to migrate to their server as soon as possible.

The good news was my websites were up and running again after a few hours.

But at that point, it was already too late. The ship has sailed and I don’t think I will come back to using HostGator again.

Even if I have no issue with them at all, I will still cancel my HostGator account, though.

Sure, it can be due to me moving to a better server that can accommodate a high volume of traffic such as WP Engine.

But for the most part, it has a lot to do with how HostGator fares over the last couple of years.

If it’s not because my websites experiencing downtime, I will still be using HostGator until I’m migrating to WP Engine.

My beef with HostGator

To be honest, I do find that HostGator is an amazing web hosting service even if they were sold to EIG later on.

What’s not to love about HostGator when they have amazing support? And let’s not forget that they also offer a monthly billing option when many hosting services only offer annual billing.

Despite all that, HostGator seems late to implement what seems like a standard in other hosting services.

Yes, they did eventually offer those things in the end.

But it still took them a long time to offer it in their hosting plans.

One of them is offering a free SSL certificate.

While other hosting services already offer a free SSL certificate in their hosting plans, HostGator didn’t have that until a few years ago.

It’s either you buy the SSL certificate from them and they will install it for you. Or you can get the SSL certificate at a far less price from Namecheap and pay HostGator for the installation fee.

It was only almost a year after I got the SSL certificate from Namecheap that HostGator finally offers a free SSL certificate in any of their shared hosting plan.

That’s great since I no longer have to renew my SSL certificate anymore. But there are still some things that HostGator doesn’t have.

And the way they handled things sometimes rub me the wrong way too.

Here are some of them.

They don’t offer free malware protection on their server

Imagine receiving an email from HostGator, saying that they have to take one of your websites offline due to the website being infected with malware.

Well, that was what happened to me when I received an email from HostGator, telling me that my fiction author website got infected with malware.

Since the website would be offline until I removed the infected file on my server, that didn’t leave me much choice other than to remove the file immediately.

Believe me, that wasn’t a fun thing to do when you received the email alert at 3 a.m. And they refused to have the website back online until the infected file was no longer on your server.

Thankfully, removing the infected file wasn’t as hard as I thought since the email mentioned the pathway for the infected file.

And the website was online once again once I notified HostGator that I already removed the infected file from my server.

While that was a wake-up call for me to install Wordfence Security on both of my websites, this problem should never occur if they already have malware protection in the first place.

Sad to say, they don’t offer that. My only way to protect my websites from being infected with malware is to use Wordfence Security.

That plugin is a savior for both of my websites.

Receiving a threatening email from their legal department

When you receive any email related to a legal issue, it can only mean that you did something wrong.

Well, it sure does feel that way when the HostGator legal department sent me an email at that time. They told me that someone flagged my fiction author website for copyright infringement.

The scariest part of all? HostGator even threatened me that they would take down the website if I didn’t comply. Talk about being threatened at a gunpoint here.

Since the email already stated which blog post has a legal issue, it didn’t leave me much choice other than to remove the post and moved on with my life.

And so I did. I removed the blog post and told the legal department that the blog post was no longer on my website anymore.

Funnily enough, the party who filed my website for copyright infringement contacted me a few days later, stating that they flagged my website by mistake. There was nothing wrong with the blog post and I could have the post online once again.

But for whatever reason, HostGator didn’t seem to budge and refused to listen to them.

Knowing how much of a pain to deal with the HostGator legal department, I notified them once again about it and even pasted the email that the other party sent to me.

The post that got flagged with copyright infringement went back online once again after the legal department gave me a clear sign.

I have a blog post that details every single thing that I went through during the ordeal. You can read the blog post right here if you’re interested.

My fateful encounter with SetraHost

If you think that I was aware of SetraHost all this time, you’ll be amazed to find out that I’ve never heard about them before that.

Yes, I was already familiar with hosting services like HostGator, Bluehost, and SiteGround since they’re pretty popular and many people are using them.

But SetraHost? I’ve never heard anyone talking about them, let alone recommending them.

And the reviews about them are pretty scarce too, with only one review from Website Planet.

Even with little to no reviews about them, I don’t have any reason not to give them a try when the price isn’t that much different from what I pay HostGator.

What’s more, they also offer enterprise-level DDOS protection and 24/7 malware protection in all of their hosting plans.

And your website will load faster too thanks to them using NVMe SSD Drives on their servers.

How fast the website will load when you compare it to WP Engine is something that I’m not sure of.

But the fact that they have a much better deal than Hostgator with a similar price point makes SetraHost such a steal.

If you’re curious about SetraHost, you can take a look at them right here:

Learn more about SetraHost

Hostgator isn’t that bad, to be honest

While it’s true that I do have issues with HostGator sometimes, it’s still not a bad hosting service overall.

Does it mean that I’m still recommending you use HostGator?

Well, I’m sure you can tell that I no longer recommend Hostgator anymore. But if you think that HostGator has what you need, then I don’t see anything wrong with it.

As for me, I won’t be coming back to using HostGator for sure no matter how much I love Snappy.

P.S Social media can still be a good thing to have when you want to post a quick announcement.

Sure, you can let your readers know that your book is out now. But you can also use it to let them know that your website was down and when it would be back online. That was what I did on my Twitter profile where I let my readers know about my websites having downtime for the time being.

If you’re thinking about getting started with Twitter but don’t know where to start, then my Twitter Marketing for Business is perfect for you.

In this guide, you learn everything you need to know about Twitter from setting up your Twitter profile to how you can be active on Twitter without taking too much of your time.

Think the guide is something that you need? You can take a look at the guide right here on my Payhip store:

Twitter Marketing for Business guide

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