Hi simonsez, and welcome to the site.
Yes,
Hostgator is now a horrible host -- just another EIG brand. The migration ("upgrade") to Utah was the last nail in the coffin on that deal. The only thing left is (maybe) some employees from the old HG, and the cartoon alligator mascot. Sad to see it end that way. The
Borg EIG has assimilated it.
Definitely avoid all EIG brands ... which can be hard to track! (Wikipedia is missing many, and some on that list are NOT correct!) We'll be creating our own list shortly, with verifiable information. There's almost 60 brands now, as they bought several more this year, as recently as last month!
Enough of that... on to your needs...
1500 to 9000 viewers per days is more than shared hosting should be used for. It's more than most will allow. Most hosts will suspend you with that kind of usage, due to resource overuse, as that's not what shared hosting is for. That's a popular site (congratulations!) and it needs adequate resources to run properly -- AND not harm others on a server due to hogging the server resources.
If it was "fine" on
Hostgator servers, understand that they're horrible at managing customers. Ever wondered why servers are slow, or down completely? It's because (1) the servers are overloaded, and (2) they don't properly manage it -- i.e, letting a person or two ruin it for everybody else.
So you've got two choices: VPS or semi-dedicated.
- VPS can be superior, as you can select your own server settings and caches, but there's a steep learning curve.
- Semi-dedicated is like shared hosting on steroids. It's a beefier plan, intended for larger sites.
The semi-dedicated (enterprise) plans from
Stablehost are excellent. Same for the semi-dedicated plans from
MDD Hosting. Those are the two hosts that we suggest most for semi-dedicated. While shared servers have hundreds or thousands of customers each, semi-dedicated servers have a few dozen at most.
The two hosts are excellent in terms of server speeds, support effectiveness (not just speed) and server uptime. My Stablehost servers (a shared, and a VPS) are 100% up most months. In 4 years, it's been down maybe 5 times. In fact, I can't even remember the last time it was down, and would have to check my logs. I keep DETAILED logs of servers, and they're checked every 3-10 minutes, depending on the monitor (there are 3x+ monitors in use).
You've come to realize that guarantees and SLAs are meaningless. Congrats on seeing the light there. What you need to worry about is the actual uptime, not the promises. All the "guarantees" do is throw a few dollars at you, if that. It doesn't solve the problem, and it doesn't make up for it.
If you have more question, just ask.