Over the past decade, the web hosting industry has changed. Developers all over the world have moved from crowded shared hosting to fast and secure cloud servers managed by ServerPilot.
From the mid-1990s to around 2005, web hosting was in a primitive state. Servers were physical boxes stacked in tall racks at data centers. Leasing your own server to host a website cost hundreds of dollars a month. As a result, the shared hosting industry was born, including shared hosting companies like HostGator, which became very popular during that time.
These shared hosting companies would manage the expensive physical servers and would charge to host your website on one of these servers alongside hundreds of other people's websites. Almost all of these companies used (and still use) the same hosting control panel software on their servers. That hosting control panel software was created in the late '90s to meet the needs of shared hosting companies packing large numbers of sites on their servers. That software wasn't designed for the increasing rate of technology change and the needs of web developers.
Starting around 2005, virtual private servers (VPSes) started to gain usage. VPSes were the original name used for what are now known as cloud servers. With cloud servers, a single physical server is divided into multiple, isolated virtual servers that are really running on that one physical server. This was the beginning of the cloud server revolution.
Fast forward to 2016, and the cloud server industry has taken over hosting. It now costs less to have your own fast cloud server at a developer-friendly server provider than it does to pay a shared hosting company to host your site on a crowded physical server.
Just as the hosting industry itself changed, so did the software used to manage servers. Instead of the slow, resource-heavy, insecure control panels used by the shared hosting industry, developers now use ServerPilot to securely manage their cloud servers and configure amazingly fast software stacks on them.
If you're reading this, you're looking for a great alternative to HostGator. You may have heard of cloud servers but never were quite sure where to start. Happily, it's very easy to get started.
Even if you've never used a cloud server, it only takes a few minutes to have your website up and running on one. Just create a server at DigitalOcean (DigitalOcean is the most popular, but you can use any provider), connect that server to ServerPilot, and begin creating apps like WordPress. That's it!