I would like to know if I'm actually just lucky or if other people have had this experience too.
I was using HG for probably 7 years or so. But I believe they recently got acquired by EIG[1]. I'm not saying there's a connection, but I've experienced several incidents that made me change my mind.
At some point I was moved to new servers. The migration process was very sketchy. HG did not send notification emails about the migration on time, which meant once the migration took place, I had to try to figure out which DNS changes to make (were not provided), whilst the service was effectively down.
Afterwards they've had a rather major issue with their email servers, which got blacklisted as a result of a large amount of spam being sent from compromised Joomla apps[2]. This resulted in many forwarded emails to bounce and (my) customers being both aware of the forwarding (which wasn't always desirable for me), and that their emails bounced. The Hostgator response to this incident was painfully slow and they did not seem to appreciate the gravity of the effect on their customers.
I already had shared hosting services running with webfaction, so I moved most of it away to them. For more heavy-weight hosting, where I need more control, I use Linode and AWS.
[1]http://www.shoutmeloud.com/hostgator-sold-endurance-enduranc... [2]http://blog.hostgator.com/2013/08/23/global-blacklisting-res...
I'm using Hostgator for around 3-4 years now. Never had any problems with them and the support was always great.