99 Problems But a Plus Ain’t One

Do you use Hostgator?  Sadly, so do we.  Many years ago, Hostgator was a nice “budget”-level webhost for smaller clients and they offered support exceeding what you paid.  Now-a-days, things are bad.  Such as offerings for a cloud backup service that they don’t tell you until after you’ve set up payment and complained, that there’s a KNOWN BUG with no “fix” ETA, preventing databases from getting backed up.  But enough about that….today I’m here to talk about logging in to your Hostgator account despite having set it up with a plus sign in the email address.

If you manage multiple Hostgator accounts and opted to append “+something” to your billing email so that you could manage all the Hostgator accounts from a single email, then you’ve likely discovered by now that you can no longer log in to Hostgator billing.  Due to validation rules implemented by HG, all logins with the ‘+’ character in the email address are rejected.  Recovering your account can be a chore, involving scans of the credit card used to pay for the account (I hope you remember which one it is!) and painful communication with Hostgator Support.  This needs to be repeated for EACH AND EVERY account with Hostgator you used an email address with a plus sign in it.

This is the solution that HG support offers, rather than fixing their broken email validation on their login page.

I have an easier solution for this!  If you open the billing login for Hostgator (https://gbclient.hostgator.com/) and “Inspect” the email login field with your developer tools, you’ll see that the email input field has the following classes: “login_field email-input has-validation event-blur fn-emailValidate fn-required”.  Remove the classes: “has-validation” and “fn-emailValidate” from the input, and you can log in normally!  I recommend you change the primary email address on the account to an email alias instead of primaryemail+account@your-domain.com.

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