SiteLock Hostgator Essentials
Hostgator Essentials, the base SiteLock package, is what you get when you sign up for a Hostgator web hosting account. It improves core hosting by scanning your site for malware and giving you a CDN to store your static files.
SiteLock Hostgator Essentials Pricing
SiteLock’s Hostgator Essentials plan costs $1.99/m. This special pricing is only available to Hostgator customers. This pricing is not available on the SiteLock website. This pricing can be obtained by selecting the SiteLock addon during checkout. Two coupons are available:
You need to select the Hostgator Essentials Plan with SiteLock when you check out:
This can be added to your regular hosting anytime after you have purchased Hostgator web hosting. You can also upgrade your SiteLock package from there.
Hostgator Essentials Features
SiteLock’s Hostgator Essentials package includes the following features. You may also be interested in alternatives to SiteLock.
Daily Malware Scanning
SiteLock scans your website for malware once a day when you subscribe to the Essentials plan. SiteLock will immediately remove any malware it finds. You can scan unlimited pages so it can be used even on large sites.
Blocking automated bots
According to some estimates bots account 40% of all website traffic. This is not only harmful to your website, but it also has some useful features like search engines. This can waste your site’s resources and often tries to target vulnerabilities on your website. It should be a top priority to block the majority of these bots trying to harm your website.
Hostgator Essentials plans do exactly that. It keeps a list of bots, which it blocks from accessing your site. This can slow down the site. This is a very useful feature, especially for lower-priced hosting plans that don’t have enough CPU power to deal with the attacks.
SiteLock CDN Content Delivery Network
Hostgator Essentials comes with a CDN, which is a network that distributes your website files across servers around the world. The CDN is able to respond quickly to remote users of your website – much faster than if your site had been serving the files by itself.
A CDN is crucial to be competitive with faster sites these days. This is where the free Cloudflare CDN excels. The Hostgator Essentials CDN is already installed, so you can track its performance from your dashboard.
Image Compression
SiteLock Essentials also allows you to reduce the number of images displayed to your visitors. This is especially important for people who are visiting your site from places where Internet speeds are slow or on mobile devices with data plans. Images account for a large portion of your traffic. Certain websites have more images than others. They can slow down your site’s speed and are often not optimized.
Hostgator Essentials makes it easy for your visitors to see your images faster and is less likely to cause frustration.
Sitelock Ticket Response Time of 12 Hours
Many people don’t know how to react if their website has been hacked. How can you locate and fix it? What tools should you use? These are difficult questions to answer, especially if you have been in the business for a while. If you select the Hostgator Essentials Plan, you can get a ticket for someone to help you.
At 12 hours, the basic plan’s response times are quite long. It’s better than nothing, however. SiteLock plans with more advanced features allow for responses times of 6 hrs and 4 hours, respectively.
SiteLock Hostgator Essentials: Missing Features
SiteLock’s most basic plan, the Essentials plan lacks many features. You can see:
- Web Application Firewall (WAF).
- Database scanning
- PCI Compliance (for electronic commerce)
- DDoS protection
SiteLock offers the more expensive “Prevent” or “Prevent Plus” plans to gain access to these features. Cloudflare is my preference at the moment, because they offer a superior service. Their domain nameserver speeds are great.
Bottom Line: Useful for Newbies
Hostgator Essentials is for those who prefer a more hands-off approach to security. The features are “ok” for the price. The Essentials plan provides regular malware scanning, which is something Hostgator’s plans don’t offer. If you are willing to pay more, better hosting such as NameHero is a good option. This plan not only offers free malware scanning but also free offsite backups.
