Personally I wouldn't use
Hostgator (but thats just me in respected to shared hosting in general).
But in my experience, I used to be partnered with a designer a couple years back who hosted all his clients on a
Hostgator reseller account. He still does to this day, but we've run into a small variety of issues such as mail propagation, a tiny bit of downtime, and often a lot of slow downs. But he won't switch hosting to a VPS or some other company because its what he's been using for years and because he's paranoid bout going to someone without free 24/7 phone support (which
Hostgator has).
Myself personally would want to get a Managed VPS especially if you're not too technical in nature (managed meaning if you need something installed, configured or fixed, they can do it for you provided you use a control panel). Right now I got two VPS accounts at
KnownHost.
The first one a VS2-tx (usually good to get a texas datacenter over a californian one if you're targeting mostly US visitors), with no control panel, and the Nginx webserver I compiled from source, which I use for my own personal sites, and to act as an IP Proxy for clients for example if mydomain.com is on a serverpronto box in panama, but you want to make google and others think its hosted on a knownhost box in texas, you would point your DNS to my VPS, and it would do a proxy_pass via Nginx to the serverpronto box, thus making your domain appear to be hosted in texas but actually in panama, or simply appear to have a different IP block as the rest of your sites. And Nginx runs nicely on only 384MB of rams, as right now with Nginx, PHP, MySQL, Ruby/Passenger/Python, etc its only using up about 25% of that.
And then the second VPS is a VS3-tx package with cpanel/whm that I use strictly for clients I host under my management. Most of them are coding clients that also needed someone to help tweak, setup and install various stuff they either don't have time for,or are not technically savvy (though the
Knownhost support team can do this for you on a managed machine, mainly the configuration/installation/migration).
The nice thing bout a VPS or a Dedicated server is that you ultimately have control of it's configuration, you can turn this or that off, you can upgrade to the latest version of PHP or MySQL if you have to, or in my case you can use a web server created by a russian hacker that to date is not yet supported by any of the popular control panel software. Some of the stuff you would never be able to get a shared hosting provider do for you (since it would affect up to the thousand other users on the same box).
And that's the key issue at hand, is the word 'shared', that is to say how much do you want to risk to the usage of your hosting neighbors. Granted a VPS account is still 'shared' in the physical resource sense, but its still quite a bit of a step up from a shared server which typically hosts a lot more users. And while dedicated would be nice, it doesn't make much sense to spend 130$+ and up if you're not going to utilize the resources.
And yes there are some hosting providers such as Server Pronto who at the moment has dedicated server packages as low as 32$ a month. But those are unmanaged, cpanel/whm cost an extra 25$, the processor is something close to an old pentium 4, as opposed to a
Knownhost VPS using an equal share of a 8-core server, and while you do get more rams, you will probably have to use more of it for caching to make up for the lower transit speeds out of a third world country.
In the end... a single blog with somewhat mild traffic, and doesn't do anything shady...
Hostgator should be fine.
PS: yes... those are ref links.
