I know many here are fans of Hostgator. I was too until recently. I've been with Hostgator for 5 years with relatively minimal problems over the years but due to my latest experience, I have to now change web hosts.
Over a week ago, I started noticing problems connecting to my website. Sometimes it'll take 15 seconds or longer to connect, other times it'll just time out. So I tested my website from several different testing services like Pingdom and GTMetrix which showed that after finding and making the initial connection to the hostgator server, it's just waiting 15+ seconds for the hostgator server to start sending the first data. Once hostgator begins sending data, the page loads within 1 second. Talking to 4 different techs, I realized these techs are trained to blame everything else but their server. For example, your ISP is slow, you have too many javascripts, you have too many CSS, you need to set leveraging caching longer, etc. Even when it's obvious the problem is with their server. I even created a blank empty webpage with no javascripts, plugins, or etc and it still took 15+ seconds to load this empty page verified from several different testing servers.
My request to be moved to a different server was denied. They won't even acknowledge something is wrong with their server and says their server is perfectly fine. Despite all the test results I sent them showing that the server is non-responsive. After speaking with 4 different techs, all that refused to do anything, I just can't deal with hostgator anymore. Can anyone recommend a good web host I can move to?
