HostGator Sold to EIG For $225 million USD

Here is a big news for all Hostgator customers, (Even ShoutMeLoud is hosted on Hostgator). Hostgator is sold for $225 million USD to Endurance International Group.

Hostgator Sold To EIG
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According to reports, Mr. Hari Ravichandran, CEO of EIG, offered $225 million to Hostgator CEO, Brent Oxley and he accepted. This news came out as a shock for Hostgator users and people are already discussing the same in Webhosting forum.

Some background about Endurance International Group:

EIG is a business group, which has acquired many popular Web-hosting company and domain registrar. If you are not aware of the fact, Fatcow, iPage, Bluehost, VPSLInk and many more companies are part of this group.  Since, Hostgator is one of the top Webhosting company, with this acquisition EIG will get get hold in Webhosting market.

You can learn more about EIG and list of Web hosting companies owned by them here. In the complete list of hosting companies, only Bluehost is considered as one of the top hosting, else all others are budding hosting companies. With Host gator in the list of companies they own, they already created a lot of buzz in the hosting market. You can see what others are feeling about this on Webhosting forum discussion post.

What’s in for Hostgator customers?

There is good and bad news as with great financial background of EIG, We can expect better service & support from Hostgator. As it is, they are known for their excellent customer support. Bad news is, we are not sure about the future of our sites on Hostgator. As, this acquisition of Hostgator means, moving our data center to different location, and if you are into Web hosting, you might know that there are chances of losing data (Websites) at the time of  data center migration.

Now, as confirmed in an Email, Brent Oxley mentioned that this whole process will take 3-4 weeks and once Hostgator is completely sold to EIG, they will sign the lease agreement for Houston and Texas data center. And, if everything goes planned, they will be expanding the infrastructure. The only sad part is, CEO Brent will not be a part of the company once Hostgator is sold to EIG.

Well, I’m still uncertain if this is good or bad news, as the only scary part is data centre migration, we need to be ready with all the necessary backup. I suggest you set up a daily backup of your site as if Hostgator data centre moves after the complete deal agreement is done, it may be a disaster for many. Better safe than sorry. I’m using ManageWP to take backup on my AmazonS3 account. Also, HostGator offers cPanel backup, you can use that too.

Also, if you are renewing your hosting package or buying a new package from Hostgator, I suggest to stick to monthly bill payment until everything is done or opt for Bluehost (Discount coupon) which is one of the best alternatives to Hostgator for now.  I will be moving my site to a VPS server in the coming week, as I have read many horror stories related to data centre migration.  I will keep updating you about the latest news on Hostgator and EIG, you can subscribe to my Email newsletter for quick updates.

  • Read: My Experience in Withstanding a hosting outage

Do let us know, What steps are you going to take? Will you be moving your site to any other host or will you be simply taking a daily backup of your site to avoid any disaster situation.

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Authored By
A Blogger, Author and a speaker! Harsh Agrawal is recognized as a leader in digital marketing and FinTech space. Fountainhead of ShoutMeLoud, and a Speaker at ASW, Hero Mindmine, Inorbit, IBM, India blockchain summit. Also, an award-winning blogger.

50 thoughts on “HostGator Sold to EIG For $225 million USD”

  1. Mike Hanson

    EIG is now quickly becoming a monopoly. I hate EIG. They have bought 3 hosting companies I was with in the last 9 years. Ipowerweb, Hostgator, and Site5. I had to move my clients 3 times. I am a reseller.
    EIG is only about money. No customer service or support. They are terrible. If you want to see how many hosting companies they have bought up now, take a shocking look here.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endurance_International_Group

    1. Simon says

      I moved to Siteground and have no regrets. Their cPanel is different and other to-be-expected variances, but Tech Support via IM is around 25 seconds-or-less response time. That was how HG used to be before the takeover.

  2. Duane Reeve

    I have given Hostgator the benefit of the doubt that there service will improve to at least where it was 5-6 years ago, but after 6-8 months of waiting, I wait no longer. HG Support Sucks, with it taking as long as 3-4 days to respond to new tickets. In most instances their LiveChat often takes 20+ minutes before someone responds, which is unacceptable. If I log a ticket today, it takes 3-4 days to get a pathetic response, to which I reply; the answer to my reply takes another 2-3 days REALLY 🙁

    Time to move my Reseller Account elsewhere…

    1. john kelly

      unfortunately, i can confirm this experience… even after begging and yelling for advanced tech support, you get a call back from some guy named James who explains to me the basic workings of email without even looking at my error logs… when it is apparent it is outside his competency, he says that it is outside the scope of hostgator support.
      Amazingly and pathetically poor.
      Where did the Hostgator of 5 years ago disappear to? it’s gone!
      anyone have a good and technically competent hosting company to recommend?

      john

  3. Aden Clark

    Hello Harsh,

    I’ve been hosting with HostGator for at least 5 years now and have never had any serious issues. My websites have been hacked in the past and have gone offline, but this was due to me not updating my WordPress core files, along with having outdated plugins and themes installed which can sometimes leave a backdoor open for hackers.

    When this did happen, HostGator was quick to respond on live chat and reverted my website back to the last known safe backup, so I did not have to do anything to get my website back online, which would have been a real headache if I had to do that myself, so kudos to HostGator for that.

    Apart from that issue, which was my own fault, I have not had any issues at all in the last 5 years, with no downtime I can remember other than the hacking incident.

    I’m subscribed to their hatchling plan, which allows me to host unlimited websites and is very affordable, so I’m pleased with that, although I register my domains with namecheap and just change the nameservers to point to their servers as their domain prices are quite excessive.

    Overall, I personally believe that HostGator is an excellent hosting provider, even if live support response times has become longer than in the past, but I still recommend them to anyone who wants to run a personal or business website.

    All the best,

    Aden Clark.

  4. Kory

    Worst experience ever. I’ve been with them for 5+ years. Had a TOS issue due to mysql issue. Took my site down and without notice, stated they no longer do Malwear checks and seemed completely disinterested in helping me get my site back up. Couldn’t even whitelist me correctly so I could check out to see if SQL injection or wtf happened.

    Down 18 hours as of now.

    I’ve never heard NO SO MUCH from CUSTOMER SERVICE.

    Used to love them. Now, f#@k them. But, where do you go. So many others suck too. I’m just going to use my Azure account I guess.

    Hostgator is indeed dead.

    Kory
    The Frame Room

    1. you are not alone. i have had several websites on HG for like 8+ years and no issues what so ever . suddenly, i get an email from SiteLock saying that my websites could potentially be hacked and if i wanted to secure them for $… 2 days later, i got hit with malware.called HG and they said to go to SiteLock. Just for fun i ran and estimate and the price was $199 per site. I have like 15 sites with different clients. Scam!! moving all my websites somewhere else!! Run!!

      1. Simon

        Jump while you can. Or sooner. The EIG takeover was predicted to be a disaster and it’s exceeded all expectations. Been gone for a year now and no regrets. Apart from paying for the remaining time I don’t use. Such is life.

  5. Luis

    I got a vps with them, after a couple of weeks of normal usage i got bandwidth capped to a halt, i couldn’t believe they did this (for a $75/month vps…) until i found out it was sold and not longer was the hostgator i knew.

    Hostgator is dead.

  6. Twilight Fairy

    hostgator is one of the MOST pathetic unprofessional organisations with their India team full of duds who don’t know a thing. Horrible experiences. they have even lost my mail data of last 6 months now and have no resolution!

  7. Hostgator is the worst host on the web now, support tickets unanswered for 7 days, and one was for suspected Malware on a site and the phone support is pathetic.

    Slow servers, and even their own billing interface is slower than a turtle, Brent cared about this customers, these people do not!

    I just closed 3 accounts I had with them for 5 years, worst experience ever!!!

  8. Shishir

    Hostgator is having a pathetic service. Their windows server crashed and till now (even after 8 days) they are unable to make the server up.. Worst they don’t give us the backup.

  9. Hasan

    I have been using HostGator for more than 3 years and they remained awesome during that tenure. Still I am HostGator user, haven’t experienced anything worst so far. I hope the new company which has acquired HostGator will maintain the quality service in future.

  10. Tanvir

    EIG ripped HG their support and service all gone beyond nightmare, HG customers are leaving one by one. If you see the web-hosting forums you can see many customers complaining , searching for new host. i was one of them. now i am with another good brand but scared if they also sell out their business to EIG. In hosting industry EIG means nightmare.

  11. Bruce Simmons

    Mr. Ross,
    I too have had a site on HG for several years. And within a few weeks of EIG buying them, I got shut down for using too many resources. This then happened every 6 weeks or so for a few months.

    Their reasoning why?

    “WordPress starts becoming inefficient at handling the number of posts somewhere between 1500 and 2500 posts, at over about 5000-6000 comments, and over around 7000 tags, give or take a little depending on plugin configuration.”

    I few friends of mine who have been running popular blogs for several years had pretty colorful responses when I showed them this. I’ll leave it at that.

    The next time they take me down, I’m gone from HG. I don’t need, what I feel, is pressure salesmanship. Just an opinion based on timing and other stats.

    -Bruce

  12. Mr Ross

    The sale of hostgator worries me. For the first time I had a site taken down because it was using too many of my shared server account resources. Its a small website with hardly any traffic. Are they cutting back in order to make an extra buck I wonder?

    1. Che

      This has happened to me as well. The site hardly had any visitors because is a custom application built for a company and some of the features of the application have stopped working all together.

      Hostgator does not care to respond to support ticket raised for over a month ago. Now I understand what has happened. Bloody Greed of QoQ Profit has destroyed the experience. I migrated the Application to their in-house server and they are happy.

  13. Nima H.

    The quality of service at hostgator has gone down exponentially since the takeover. I’ve been paying HG $95 a month for hosting for the past 5 years and have decided to move elsewhere. HostGator’s servers go down more often than before, their customer srvice takes for ever to respond to issues, and their prices are too expensive compared to others.

  14. Shruti

    What precautionary measure do you think should be taken?
    I mean, people should already be making backups etc…
    If things go down, a simple transfer out would do.
    I hope HostGator is another EIG success story though 🙂

    Thanks,
    Shruti

    1. Prateek

      Take a complete backup of your hosting data, emails, databases and other things from complete backup feature of cPanel. This process is single click option but may take time if site contents are large in number.

  15. Diego

    The quality of service and technical support of Hostgator, has deteriorated terribly. I canceled most of my plans and next month will do the same with the last 2.
    I do not recommend Hostgator.

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