For the last 15 years, I have relied on HostGator as my main hosting provider. I have hosted numerous blogs, client websites, hobby projects on their shared hosting plans. They have been rock solid in all aspects of their service – quick support, server security, etc. I have had no complaints so far.
My love for cPanel
The best part that I liked about hosting with HostGator was cPanel – the OG hosting panel! I have been using cPanel since 2009 and it feels like home. I simply love the ease of installing PHP applications – upload, unzip, database connect and done!
I know, in today’s tech landscape, cPanel might seem like legacy software but it still continues to be the best hosting panel I have ever used.
Why migrate to Hostinger?
Well, there are few reasons that made me take the jump:
1. HostGator and cPanel are outdated
No matter how much I would like to believe otherwise, the world has moved on from PHP & MySQL based sites to modern tech stacks built on JavaScript libraries like Node & React. cPanel and HostGator were built for the shared hosting era where PHP & MySQL applications ruled supreme. That’s no longer the case now. Today, it’s all about VPS and cloud servers.
2. HostGator is not optimized for WordPress
WordPress itself has grown a lot in the last 5 years. With the introduction of the Gutenberg editor and Full-site editing (FSE) capability in recent versions, WordPress has become loaded. It now has React JS library baked into it. It’s no longer a light-weight application. All of this takes a toll on the site loading times. I noticed a considerable dip in the loading times of this blog and it was super annoying to wait for 12-15 seconds for the page to load. I tried everything to optimize the loading times but nothing worked.
3. Hostinger is built for WordPress hosting
After trying a lot of other options like GoDaddy, DigitalOcean and WordPress.com I finally decided to go ahead with Hostinger because it offered a sweet spot between self-hosted control and cost.
Cloud providers like AWS, DigitalOcean offered full control over the server but it meant a lot of server maintenance related work which is time consuming. Cloud hosted version of WordPress.com was a good option but it was costly at $25/mo and also it meant I had no control over my WordPress site in terms of tweaking it’s functionalities.
I tried Hostinger for a couple of days and was amazed by the blazing fast speed of WordPress hosted there. The platform also offered a lot of other features like in-built caching support, free CDN, SSH access, SSL certificates, etc. I really liked their dashboard which they call “hPanel”. So finally, I decided to take a leap of faith and move away from HostGator to Hostinger.
