You probably guessed it right – Bluehost and HostGator are two of the largest hosting platforms across the world.
And did you know that these two hosting platforms are owned by one company – Endurance International?
And since these two hosting platforms are big and popular enough, they have the cash to splash in their business – in providing excellent services to their customers.
Both of these hosting platforms provide all kinds of services to their users – from shared hosting to registering domain names.
We used a Pingdom tool for performance measurement – to measure the performance of both Bluehost and HostGator. We will share with you the information we gathered below.
Bluehost vs HostGator
1. Uptime Reliability
We will base this comparison on ten months of data research.
We have been observing these two hosting platforms for a couple of years, say, three years now.
And these two hosting platforms didn’t have a pleasing uptime record.
Their tech infrastructure did a significant overhaul two years ago, and since then, there has been a considerable improvement.
For quite some time now, Bluehost has been able to provide excellent uptime of approximately ninety-nine point nine percent. And even though we have had some hiccups, the outages did not last for long.
Bluehost Uptime
We tried to determine the average uptime of Bluehost over ten months, and we found it to be less than 99.99 percent – five minutes of outages and nine minutes of downtime.
HostGator Uptime
We also looked at HostGator for a period of up to ten months, and we got an uptime of 99.97 percent – around twenty outages and nearly two hours of downtime.
2. Speed
Page speed is as critical as uptime.
Let’s be honest; a sluggish or a slow-loading website can jeopardize your business in several ways – from driving away your potential customers to boldly telling your customers you don’t care about them.
Maybe if you’d ask us to give you a comparison of Bluehost’s and HostGator’s page speed two years ago, we would not give you a realistic answer.
The reason is that the page speed of both was pathetic – terrible, but these two hosting platforms have recorded positive results since they did an overhaul.
Bluehost Load Time
When we look at our records, Bluehost has been consistent – ranking fifth in terms of page speed (averagely 439ms). But the benchmark we are about to report to you is 3x percent faster since 2018. That means that Bluehost is currently staying above most of its competitors.
HostGator Load Time
We can say that HostGator’s average speed has improved over the years, though we must admit that they aren’t good enough – there’s more it still needs to do.
In our ten-month testing, HostGator managed to record an average speed of 755ms. To be honest, this isn’t a comparison, in our comparison, because HostGator beats Bluehost by more than twice.
3. Affordable Long-Term Package
We can quickly conclude that Bluehost and HostGator have the same packages. Let’s start with Bluehost:
- Basic: Bluehost’s lowest plan starts at $2.75 every month. For this package, you’ll get everything you need for one website – a domain name, SSL certificate, unlimited bandwidth, five email accounts, among others.
- Plus: For their second most affordable package, you’ll have to pay $5.45 every month to secure the features. With this plan, you’ll be able to host unlimited websites, both bandwidth and storage are unlimited, among other lucrative features.
- Choice Plus: Now, this package is almost similar to the plus plan. You’ll pay $5.45 every month, get all the features in plus, and more other features such as domain privacy, spam help, and backups.
Having said that about Bluehost, it’s time to see what HostGator has to offer, shall we? Here’s what it has for its users:
- Hatchling: This is the most affordable shared hosting package you will find on HostGator. You’ll have to pay $2.75 to get the features in this plan. Some of the features in this package include no paysite migration, a free SSL certificate, unlimited bandwidth, among others.
- Baby: The second plan is called Baby. To secure the features offered in this plan, you will have to pay $3.95 every month. Features in this package include a free SSL certificate and unlimited disk space.
- Business: This is for people who need something better – people who want to scale their businesses. You will have to pay $5.95 every month to unlock the features in this plan. In this package, you’ll get a better version of SSL certificate, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited domain names, among others.
4. Support Experience
You see, one of your top priorities when choosing a hosting provider will be support – how best do a hosting platform provide customer support? Bluehost has improved in the past few months.
Bluehost’s customer support team is always quick, and that shows how it values its customers. Even though they are excellent at that, we realized that they would take a bit more time when technical questions are posed to them.
Fortunately enough, you can always find help by going to their YouTube channel if you are in a hurry or just need to get something done in the shortest time possible.
But what about HostGator – how’s its customer support? To be honest, HostGator has also improved their customer support of late. In the past, you could wait up to sixteen minutes to connect to a live chat support team, though you’d be served quickly once you are connected.
5. Features
We shouldn’t call a spade a big spoon. We can confirm that these two hosting platforms have deep pockets.
And the good thing about that is that they have been trying to wow their customers by improving their services, as well as throwing a few additional perks to their customers.
For instance, Bluehost provides its users with tons of spam-focused tools such as Spam Hammer, SpamAssassin, among others. These tools are meant to help you get rid of spam comments.
Bluehost goes the extra mile to partner with CloudFlare to ensure that its customers get extra attention as far as hotlinks and hacks are concerned. The hosting giant allows its users to device password-protection directories, as well as add two-factor authorizations.
HostGator also has a ton of extras for its customers. They offer SSL certificates, daily backups, as well as protection from malware.
Additionally, you can be assured of a website builder when you use HostGator. They have an e-commerce feature, as well as mobile-friendly templates that you can leverage on.
And the best of all is that HostGator gives its customers $200 in free advertising for people who are signing up with them for the first time.
With all these, we have nothing but to conclude that HostGator is a better deal in this category – features extras. And if you are a beginner, this sounds even the best deal.
Verdict – Bluehost Wins
We can’t deny the fact that both hosting providers have similar features. Honestly, they are better deals for newbies as well as large businesses, but Bluehost is way better.
And here’s why we arrived at this conclusion:
- Near-flawless uptime
- Ranks in the top five in page speed
- Best packages
- Exceptional customer support
- More security extras.
via https://www.aiupnow.com
by Brad Liebing, Khareem Sudlow
