HostGator and WordPress have their beginnings in consecutive years and in many other ways seem made for one another.  Both have won many awards.  HostGator’s emphasis on strong tech support and easy installation has meant many individuals and companies have turned to them to host a WordPress website.  Although HostGator is not among the few especially recommended hosting providers on WordPress’s website, it seems to fulfil all the qualifications as a satisfactory host for this software.

From its early beginnings in 2003 the blogging system WordPress has become the largest self-hosted blog tool on the planet, used every day on millions of websites visited by tens of millions of users.  It is used for everything from personal homepages to the largest websites in the world, including eBay and Ben & Jerry’s, and has evolved from a blog tool to a full content management system.  It is free open source software, and known to be very user-friendly, so is widely used across the world.  This means its support community is large and developers are constantly producing new features to make websites look attractive and professional.

Shared hosting is the most common type for WordPress users, and is perfect for individuals and smaller businesses looking for affordable website function.

WordPress’s requirements for installation are PHP 4.3 or higher, MySQL 4.1.2 or higher, with Apache or nginx recommended.  HostGator meets these and provides LINUX shared hosting, so should be very suitable for WordPress.

The Houston provider, which now has five million websites, is one of the easiest web hosting platforms on which to install WordPress.  It offers a one-click install, and using this ensures your WordPress blog will be up and running in less than five minutes.  Although WordPress is relatively trouble-free it will be reassuring to users to learn that HostGator places great emphasis on tech support, which is provided round the clock by freephone, live chat or email; which they say is never outsourced.

Although HostGator is not the cheapest in the marketplace, WordPress hosting with custom themes and plugins, and your own domain name, can be purchased for under $5 dollars a month under its popular “hatchling” plan by using 2016 HostGator coupons.  Other plans for medium and large users are the “baby” and “business” plans.

Both are leaders, and they do seem to be made for one another.  Why does WordPress not feature HostGator on their site as a recommended provider?  A long look at reviews of this provider across the Net brings very few unfavorable comments except for the price issue.  HostGator is not the cheapest, but not by much.