http://laravel.io/forum/02-13-2014-how-to-install-laravel-on-a-hostgator-shared-server. Only took 10 seconds to find this, have you searched, have you tried this thread alsohttp://laravel.io/forum/04-04-2014-can-connect-to-local-sever-with-artisan-but-not-hostgator. Others came up in search. Would you consider searching?

Asking a question on here is a last resort, much like stack overflow people tend to be a bit harsh in their responses. I have serched all day and have done everything on here and on other sites. and all of a sudden it's working. I don't know if its a delay with Hostgator or what. But I backed off from frustration gave coding a break, was looking at other hosting alternatives clicked my site out of curiosity and there it was in all it's glory! it's up and hopefully it continues to work. If you see a post from me, it's after I googled for a while. Thanks for your responses. And those articles are not how I got it to run.

Sorry, wasn't trying to be harsh. But glad it's working now.

It's all good. was looking at the link again there is no bootstrap/start.php, it's bootstrap/app. and there is no bootstrap/paths.php. in fact his directions are a bit verbose. I'm going to write my directions and post them on here

Or maybe put on github, just a thought.