Hostgator hosting question

FredJones · Apr 22, 2023

A friend of mine, who is an accountant, is hosting on Hostgator since about the past 10 years or so. It is a shared baby plan ($12.95 per month currently, if anyone knows what I am talking about.

He has a small website, but a large number of email addresses - a few hundred, I think, but could check with him to confirm the actual number if needed. He hadn't faced a single issue till about a year back, but since then, sending emails has been an issue for him, from any of those accounts. Emails, and often the ones with attachments, and even more often the ones with slightly larger attachments, bounce when randomly sent.

I look after his backend on a friendly basis time-to-time if needed, not as a business, I don't charge him any money for this. I had contacted Hostgator support for this issue, many months back. They fixed something, goodness knows what. The emails started going for some time back then. But of late, it is again back being a problem, as bad as it was earlier. Emails, and especially with attachments, still disappearing in the blak hole.

What is a potential solution, if someone has used Hostgator? Switch to a higher plan of Hostgator (and which one if so)? Switch over to a different host (even though creating so many email addresses is a pain and I have no idea how hard it is to move the current default ostgator email server to another one)? Configure something more in Hostgator?

Please suggest! Thanks!

tazarbm · Apr 23, 2023

I'm not knowledgeable enough to give any suggestions, but if it previously worked but now it doesn't it means that there's something wrong with hostgator. And considering how many bad reviews hostgator got over the years I wouldn't be surprised if they are doing this purposely to force your friend into upgrading to higher plans. Big companies that lose market share start being evil all of a sudden, so that's one of my theories...

The other theory is, like I said, something must have broken on HG and they don't care enough to fix it, or - worse - they don't know how to fix it, in which case moving to a different hosting is what I would recommend (well, I recommend moving to a different hosting anyway, but that's because I never liked HG

).

I know that re-creating 100s of emails is a PIA, but hey, if you have to take 1 full day to do this once in a lifetime to save your business put your head down and start doing it. Besides, not less than a week ago I have created about 20 emails for my sites in under 10 minutes, multiply this by 10-20 (I don't think your friend has more than 500 emails, and if he/she does... well, I'm not asking why, but WHY ?!?)

So anyway, I guess it would take your friend several hours maximum to set up few 100s emails if need be, but the point is that he/she should move to a different hosting. Which hosting exactly, I don't know because I'm not doing things at scale yet to know which hosting is good for which features. I am personally hosting my sites with HostKoala and I'm OK with it, but like I said, I don't do things at scale so for my goals HK is ok.

About 1 year ago I would have recommended Namecheap, but NC are going down, too (a lot of complaints about them on the forum), so I really don't know what else to recommend. Hopefully, someone that's more knowledgeable than me chimes in with the proper answers.

And in the meantime tell your friend to come to his/her senses and only use a few emails. Well, if it's a woman you probably shouldn't tell her to come to her senses, but if it's a guy you can tell him

FredJones · Apr 23, 2023

tazarbm said:
I'm not knowledgeable enough to give any suggestions, but if it previously worked but now it doesn't it means that there's something wrong with hostgator. And considering how many bad reviews hostgator got over the years I wouldn't be surprised if they are doing this purposely to force your friend into upgrading to higher plans. Big companies that lose market share start being evil all of a sudden, so that's one of my theories...

The other theory is, like I said, something must have broken on HG and they don't care enough to fix it, or - worse - they don't know how to fix it, in which case moving to a different hosting is what I would recommend (well, I recommend moving to a different hosting anyway, but that's because I never liked HG ).

I know that re-creating 100s of emails is a PIA, but hey, if you have to take 1 full day to do this once in a lifetime to save your business put your head down and start doing it. Besides, not less than a week ago I have created about 20 emails for my sites in under 10 minutes, multiply this by 10-20 (I don't think your friend has more than 500 emails, and if he/she does... well, I'm not asking why, but WHY ?!?)

So anyway, I guess it would take your friend several hours maximum to set up few 100s emails if need be, but the point is that he/she should move to a different hosting. Which hosting exactly, I don't know because I'm not doing things at scale yet to know which hosting is good for which features. I am personally hosting my sites with HostKoala and I'm OK with it, but like I said, I don't do things at scale so for my goals HK is ok.

About 1 year ago I would have recommended Namecheap, but NC are going down, too (a lot of complaints about them on the forum), so I really don't know what else to recommend. Hopefully, someone that's more knowledgeable than me chimes in with the proper answers.

And in the meantime tell your friend to come to his/her senses and only use a few emails. Well, if it's a woman you probably shouldn't tell her to come to her senses, but if it's a guy you can tell him

Thanks for the response. Appreciate it a lot!

My friend actually has created an email for each of his clients. He is a tax consultant, and helps people file income taxes, sales taxes etc. His clients won't bother maintaining those emails or understanding Govt. of India's (that's the country of operation) legal terms, so those emails need to be handled by him. Plus he cannot afford to lose historical emails too for legal reasons.

I am really hoping someone who understands this space can come and respond. My friend will be okay to switch, he has no special love for Hostgator. But in that case, which is a good company is something I don't know sufficiently. Aweber-type or Woodpecker-type providers would not be meaningful for email hosting in his case. He has even asked me about Google hosting but I don't have first hand experience to know how Google is, especially in terms of letting him host so many of his clients' emails.

Still looking for help. Any help will be highly appreciated. Thanks!

tazarbm · Apr 23, 2023

FredJones said:
My friend actually has created an email for each of his clients. He is a tax consultant, and helps people file income taxes, sales taxes etc

oh... in this case yeah, he probably need those emails. I can see why he's having them...

FredJones said:
Plus he cannot afford to lose historical emails too for legal reasons.

true, true! I didn't think of this particular niche, my bad

Anyway, I can't help further, sorry! Let's hope that someone who's in the know can chime in...

Good luck!

FredJones · Apr 24, 2023

Many thanks @tazarbm for your wonderful effort to help.

I do hope someone else can chime in too. It is a real-life real-problem, all "whitehat" for whatever that means, and needs a solution.

Site Arrow · May 3, 2023

There's always several factors that could be at play here, because email is messy.

First possibility is that HostGator's IP or the domain of their server might be on a blacklist used by the recipient, which is causing the outbound emails to end up in a blackhole (ie the recipient's spam filtering service).
Second possibility is there's a configuration issue with the DKIM/SPF settings on that domain, and the HostGator IP isn't allowed to send on behalf of that domain.
Third possibility is that your friend's domain is on a blacklist.

Given that he's on a shared hosting plan with HostGator, it would be relatively easy to take a full account backup and restore it with a new provider, which would include all of the email accounts and their contents.

Happy to help get him moved to a new provider, send me a DM to arrange setup and migration.

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