Fancy a web host that won’t bite your hands off?

Outages, technical problems, and surprise bills. If you’re a HostGator customer experiencing any of the above and struggling to get any real human help from your provider, you're not alone.

HostGator has developed a reputation for its unreliable customer service, and for being unreliable when things go wrong. It’s especially difficult to get help if you’re tricked into paying expensive renewal fees for products and services you didn’t consciously plan on buying.

If any of that sounds familiar, now could be the right time to look at your options.

Customer Support is supposed to support customers

Disappointed HostGator customers have been sharing stories with the same set of complaints. Websites going down, server outages and unexpected bills showing up in the mail. They’re the kind of problems that bring unwanted stress your way, all the while your website and other business-vital services aren’t even working.

If you reach out to HostGator’s customer service to resolve these problems, you’ll quickly realise they’re not actually in the business of helping customers.

“Doesn’t HostGator offer 24/7 hosting support?”

Technically, that claim is true. But according to customer reviews, their idea of “support” prioritises dealing with basic enquiries as quickly as possible, or handing you off to someone else, rather than providing genuine assistance.

Recent HostGator reviews show how difficult it can be to get help. It doesn’t take long to find disgruntled customers calling HostGator’s helpdesk a “black hole”, complaining about being bounced around between six different support representatives, or never getting to speak to a human.

If you’re running a small business, you can’t afford to wait 24 to 72 hours for HostGator to sit on issues that they may or may not solve.

Did you put that in the cart?

HostGator’s problems go beyond bad support—their business model relies on a deceptive design trick known as “basket-sneaking”.

It’s unfortunately common across many hosting and domains companies, and it doesn’t happen by mistake.

HostGator frequently chucks “free” things into your shopping cart, with sneaky auto-renewals attached. You take the freebie because it’s free, and they charge you the full price bill for it a year later when it comes up for renewal. You’re stuck paying full price for an item you never actively chose to buy—as far as you were aware, it was supposed to be free.

To test it, we tried to sign up for a HostGator Baby Hosting Plan. After entering our domain name, it then automatically added a “free” domain for one year and a “Professional Email Trial” to the cart.

This is me trying to add the $4.50 p/m Baby Plan to my cart. Suddenly a $140.95 bill appeared, with 3 extra items tacked on.

And sometimes instead of being “free”, HostGator tries to lure buyers in with really cheap introductory discounts. Everyone likes a good discount or freebie, but when a service renews annually, or monthly, once that initial discount period is over your costs will skyrocket.

Finding out what you’ll actually pay next year requires some digging as well, because HostGator hides the actual renewal prices on Knowledge Base articles rather than anywhere near the product’s sales page.

Thankfully we’ve done that digging for you, and shared the real renewal prices on our MyHost vs HostGator comparison page.

How did it get like this?

HostGator wasn’t always like this. The company was founded in the early 2000’s by a passionate entrepreneur who grew the business for 10 years. That same entrepreneur built the business on the promise of 24/7/365 phone support.

Well, he sold the business in 2012 to a mega-company now called Newfold Digital, the same conglomerate who runs Crazy Domains and Bluehost. And from what we can tell, all Newfold’s entities play the same game with their customers.

Each acquired company had a remarkable drop-off in customer support quality after they were bought out, and they all seem to have the same basket-sneaking tendencies.

In 2024, the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (equivalent of New Zealand’s Commerce Commission) pinged Crazy Domains’s parent company for these subscription traps. In this case, “free” domains and website builder subscriptions were being added to customer’s shopping carts. But these seemingly “free” services also had undisclosed renewal costs that were charged to customers after the “free” period ended. Does that sound familiar?

HostGator, Crazy Domains and other Newfold hosting companies all try to rope new customers in with the promise of huge discounts or freebies. At first it seems nice, but it’s a lot less nice when you’re receiving a big bill for the freebie the following year.

While disappointing, we aren’t surprised to see these tricks still being used. We recently did an investigation of our own into some of Crazy Domains’s more headscratching hosting and domain bundles where similar patterns showed up.

You won’t find any ‘gators here in New Zealand

We know choosing a hosting provider is a big decision. It’s exactly why we created a whole Web Hosting Shopping Guide to help newcomers spot traps and avoid rip-offs. As the guide says, price, support and service reliability are all really important. But if your provider doesn’t take your problems seriously, everything else falls apart.

On the surface, HostGator and MyHost offer similar services. They both offer hosting, they both offer domains. But that’s where the differences start and end.

We keep our pricing transparent. At MyHost, what you see is what you get. There’s no sudden surprise renewal cost markups. Nothing is added to your cart without you putting it there.

MyHost prioritises real support from real people. We have expert engineers ready to help all MyHost customers, for problems big and small. And most importantly, there aren’t any alligators here in New Zealand. Get in touch if that sounds like a bit of you.