Hostgator Shared Hosting Insights - do you know them?

Are you using HostGator's shared hosting? I'm using Hostgator's Hatchling plan and I'm very happy with my sites. Total number of visitors recently went up to 8000/day but my sites were still fine.

For backups better buy one hotfile account where you can upload CPanel backups daily. Or you can use free ones with Megashare.

Do you know HostGator's online chat is free and is excellent and best in the world I've ever seen! Even before buying you can as well chat with their technicians who will make sure you leave happily.

Insights

Sending emails

We can send large emails from our accounts( even 27 MB is allowed). Run a cron job daily night which will zip and email you the backup of all your databases. You can use this php code to send your backup in attachment.

HostGator system times

They are fairly accurate and synced by NT

How can I change server timezone to that of my country?

The server timezone is by default set to Central Standard. We can change the timezone to that of our country's so that all the php code gets time in our country's timezone. Read more for information.

CPanel Backup limits

They won't run if the total file size in my home directory in more than 4GB or total number of files(inodes) is more than 100,000. Also CPanel full backup can also be restored.

Bandwidth

My one site is download site so I was not sure how much bandwidth HostGator will allow in my shared hosting account. I did have a good chat with them and I assume that even more than 5-7 GB may be allowed by HostGator. Here is the chat with HostGator technician about maximum bandwidth usage.

Also when I raised this question : "So I assume that 15 GB of data size isn't a problem with HostGator. Only that CPanel backup won't run; secondly if I take backup of 15GB of data and transfer it to remote server for backup so will 15GB be added in the bandwidth of my hosting account? What will be the side affects of this for my Hatchling account?" I got the following reply from HostGator technician:

Nothing, you have unlimited bandwidth.

Sending mail with attachment using PHP & SMTP on Hostgator

I've tested it on Hostgator command line and saved it in b.php. It is sending attachment correctly.

<?php
require_once "Mail.php";
require_once('Mail/mime.php');

$from = "contactusds@downloadformsindia.com";
$to = "rag.fjraggupta1@gmail.com";
$subject = "this is the message from your domain";
$body = "give your message body here";
$host = "mail.downloadformsindia.com";
$username = "contacdtus+downloadformsindia.com";
$password = "passwd";

$headers = array ('From' => $from, 'To' => $to, 'Subject' => $subject);
$file="./a.php";
$crlf="\n";
$mime = new Mail_mime($crlf);
$mime->setTXTBody($text);
$mime->setHTMLBody($html);
$mime->addAttachment($file, 'text/plain');
//do not ever try to call these lines in reverse order
$body = $mime->get();
$headers = $mime->headers($headers);



$smtp = Mail::factory('smtp',
  array ('host' => $host,
    'auth' => true,
    'username' => $username,
    'password' => $password));
$mail = $smtp->send($to, $headers, $body);
if (PEAR::isError($mail)) {
  echo("
" . $mail->getMessage() . "
");
} else {
  echo("Message Sent successfully");
}
?>

Sending email using PHP/SMTP on Hostgator command line

If you want to send email from Hostgator command line there here is the working sample.
Just replace from email id, to email id, host,username and password.

<?php
require_once "Mail.php";

$from = "contactus@mysite.com";
$to = "to email id";
$subject = "this is the message from your domain";
$body = "give your message body here";
$host = "mail.mysite.com";
$username = "contactus+mysite.com";
$password = "pass123";
$headers = array ('From' => $from,
  'To' => $to,
  'Subject' => $subject);
$smtp = Mail::factory('smtp',
  array ('host' => $host,
    'auth' => true,
    'username' => $username,
    'password' => $password));
$mail = $smtp->send($to, $headers, $body);
if (PEAR::isError($mail)) {   echo(" " . $mail->getMessage() . " ");
} else {   echo("Message Sent successfully"); }
?>

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