HostGator has been online for 17 years, and it's one of the most popular web hosts in the USA, the Texas data centers come with lots of benefits and there is customer support available 24/7 to get assistance and fix any problem. If you think that HostGator is slow, or not the best for WordPress, then, think again as if you try any of the other blog hosting providers on shared environments, you'll find them awful. I noticed many users of the HostGator control panel don't even use the features and tools there, so, when someone never uses the full blog files compression, of course, he'll find pages work slower than expected. In cPanel, users get dozens of tools that are premium and HostGator paid for, so you get them for free, and when you use some of them as I recommend above, everything will work faster.