Hostgator vs Bluehost ?

I have a client who has not been too impressed with the uptime or availability that Bluehost offers (they no longer guarantee 99.9%???) And I have to admit that I have see some availability glitches, though nothing I can’t live with.

That said, they are a small financial-oriented institution and would like to try a different host. Does anyone have experience with a small bank or insurance office MODx-based website running on different host providers that they could recommend? The client suggested Hostgator but I have never worked with them.

I realize this is a bit of an open ended question and the advice is most likely what I will find in the threads in the remainder of this subforum. But I thought I’d ask just the same ...
MattC

I resell hosting through Hostgator and have found them generally helpful. They periodically update php and mysql versions. They provide plenty of notice about potential downtimes (they usually do updates at 1-3 am on a Sunday). On one of the updates it broke all my sites when the client updated their site the next time. The simple yet tedious fix is to go in and repair the database for all your sites immmediately after the upgrade and then it will automatically update / change data syntax to match newer version of phop / mysql. (I am not a database guru, but that is my terminology for the process). They also support innodb, which is great if you are going to host a magento based eccommerce solution. If your client uses the less expensive shared hosting, you have to be careful with how you set up your email so that you add domain keys because the email won’t show it is coming from your client’s website, it will show that it is coming from the shared host’s domain name.

Heope that is helpful.

-Noah

I have 2 years (max) Shared host from Bluehost and I have no problems with it.
uptime is ~ 99, 85% for 2 years i use mon.itor.us for monitoring.
i have no problem with php, sql bd and all other...nice support, nice price