IT AI Index

Index › Vendors › HostGator · September 2026 Edition

1 category · Named, not ranked

HostGator

19Judge labels

0First choices

18Negative labels

11 of 12Models named it

1Category

September 2026 Edition. Every number here is derived from the raw labels under vendor table vv2026-09.2, every buyer segment counted.

Standing

8 labels, too few to rank

A product needs 10 labels in a category before a share or quadrant is stated. HostGator was named 8 times in Cloud hosting, where Amazon Web Services led with 29%. The labels and the evidence are below, counted exactly.

By buyer segmentRead the same way at every buyer size.

Small business69 of 70

under the label threshold

Mid-market76 of 78

under the label threshold

Enterprise49 of 53

under the label threshold

In cloud hosting · each standing computed within its segment · bars are 0 to 100 · the accent bar is the product's own best reading

Standing by category

Every category where a model named HostGator for a mid-market B2B company. Share is first choices across the direct, paraphrase, budget and scale prompts; rank is within every product named in that category.

Category	Function	Share	Rank	Negative rate	Labels	Quadrant
Cloud hosting	Cloud and infrastructure	0%	76 of 78	88%	8	under 10 labels · led by Amazon Web Services at 29%

Movement

This is the first edition on this tier, so no move can be computed for HostGator yet. From the next edition this section shows, per buyer segment, whether its share moved by more than the measured noise floor.

By model

How each model treated HostGator across every prompt where it was named for a mid-market B2B company. Twelve models, six prompts per category.

Model	Mention	Negative	Labels
Claude Haiku 4.5	0	1	1
GPT-5.4 mini	0	0	0
Gemini 3.5 Flash	0	1	1
Perplexity Sonar	0	1	1
Grok 4.1 Fast	0	1	1
Mistral Small	1	0	1
DeepSeek V4 Flash	0	0	0
Llama 4 Maverick	0	1	1
Qwen 3.7 Flash	0	1	1
Kimi K2	0	0	0
GLM 4.7 FlashX	0	1	1
MiniMax M2.5	0	0	0

By framing

Which of the six questions produced the naming. By model says how often; this says asked what. The first-choice count on the right carries the marks of the models that produced it.

FramingLabels by classFirst choices

Direct0 labelsNone

Paraphrase0 labelsNone

Comparative0 labelsNone

Budget-constrained1 labelNone

Scale-constrained0 labelsNone

Negative18 labelsNone

First choiceAlternativeMentionNegative19 labels in all, every segment counted; 0 of the 0 first choices count toward share, since the comparative and negative framings do not. The bar is one segment per label class, to scale within the framing.

What the models said for it

Verbatim evidence the judge attached to positive labels.

No positive label carried a quote.

And against it

Verbatim evidence attached to negative labels. A warning on a product with few labels is a warning; on a product with many, it is one voice among them.

“HostGator and Bluehost are commonly listed by reviewers and community posts as hosts to avoid” Perplexity Sonar · Cloud hosting · negative prompt · hard negative

“including Bluehost, HostGator, HostMonster, iPage... consistently poor customer support” GLM 4.7 FlashX · Cloud hosting · negative prompt · hard negative

“Complaints highlight long wait times for help and unreliable server speeds.” Claude Haiku 4.5 · Cloud hosting · negative prompt · hard negative

“It's recommended to avoid or be cautious when using these providers.” Llama 4 Maverick · Cloud hosting · negative prompt · hard negative

Named alongside

The products named in the same answers as HostGator, over the 19 answers that named it. Took the first choice instead counts the answers where the other product was the first choice and HostGator was named but was not.

ProductSame answerTook the first choice insteadHead to head

Bluehost17 of 190Not in the top three

GoDaddy15 of 190Not in the top three

Amazon Web Services14 of 191Not in the top three

Azure11 of 191Not in the top three

DigitalOcean10 of 191Not in the top three

Google Cloud10 of 191Not in the top three

Newfold Digital10 of 190Not in the top three

iPage9 of 190Not in the top three

Cloudways8 of 193Not in the top three

Akamai Connected Cloud8 of 191Not in the top three

A head-to-head page exists where both products are in a category's top three. The other rows are the same fact without a page behind them, so they link to the product instead.

What carried it into the answer

The sites and pages cited by the answers that named HostGator. A fact about retrieval, not a lever on the model.

Citations exist only for the models that return a source list, four of the twelve in this edition, so these counts come from 17 of the 19 answers that named HostGator and are not a share of its labels.

Domains cited

techradar.com11

reddit.com10

theweather.agency10

trustpilot.com7

digitalocean.com6

dev.to5

g2.com5

hostingadvice.com4

hostproreviews.com4

liquidweb.com4

Sixty-six of the sixty-six domain citations in answers naming HostGator came from somebody else's page.

Pages cited

techradar.com/news/best-cloud-hosting-providers11

theweather.agency/blog/hosts-from-hell-the-worlds-worst-web-hosting-companies-and-why-they10

reddit.com/r/webhosting/comments/ux7nuc/what_companies_should_someone_never_use7

digitalocean.com/resources/articles/cloud-service-providers6

webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php4

blog.empex.co.uk/cloud-hosting-small-business-20253

dev.to/dkechag/cloud-provider-comparison-2024-vm-performance-price-3h4l3

g2.com/products/cloudways/reviews3

Pages are listed as the models cited them.

Is this your product?

Claim this page

Claiming is free and changes nothing in the data. A claimed page shows a verified contact who is told when each edition publishes and when HostGator's standing changes by more than the noise floor; the right to propose corrections to the vendor table, meaning names the judge wrote that should or should not read as HostGator, applied by version and listed in the change log; and a one-line description supplied by the vendor and marked as such.

It does not get any change to labels, shares or verdicts, any preview, or any say over which quotes appear. A verification link goes to your work email; an address at hostgator.com is approved on the spot, any other address is reviewed by hand.

Your name and company appear on the claimed page, or the company alone if you ask below. A title and a LinkedIn address appear there too if you give them, and are left off if you do not. Your email address is never published.