There are actually countless host business to select from– yet if you read this after that you’re probably attempting to make a decision in between 2 of the titans– HostGator or Bluehost. They are both exceptional hosts in regards to common holding and they both have a great deal of various strategies, rates choices, and various other attributes
that they use– however that’s the most effective? Which one has the very best uptime? That is the fastest? That has the most effective prices? There’s a lot info available it’s sufficient to make an individual lightheaded! Yet that’s where this web page can be found in– we’ve checked both hosts over the duration of a whole year and damaged down every little thing that we assume a potential customer ought to understand. We have actually been producing sites and internet buildings for greater than 15 years and have experienced understanding in webhosting. We likewise have expert experience with numerous organizing firms over years, so we understand not just what’s excellent however we likewise recognize what’s poor! On this web page, you’re going to obtain an unfiltered, truthful, and total specialist contrast of Bluehost vs HostGator! Complete disclosure: if you buy organizing by means of any one of the web links situated on this contrast web page, we could make money a reference
payment. This does not impact any one of our referrals and we am extremely significant concerning that. There are a lot of hosts that we do not such as(most of which pay high compensations)and you can check out the hosts that we do not advise.Without more trouble, allow
‘s dive in and have a look at the contrast in between Bluehost and HostGator. HostGator vs Bluehost: The Measuring Stick When contrasting webhosting, there are 5 primary metrics that we such as to utilize. We assume these metrics repaint an outstanding photo of the top quality of a host (click any one of the fast web links listed below to leap to that area ). These metrics are : Performance & Speed Uptime Assistance Alleviate of
Use/User Interface Attributes & Pricing We’ve gone on and place these hosts to check over the in 2014, so allow’s lookat that wins in each group! Total Performance and Speed– Bluehost Compared to Hostgator Initial point’s initial– when it involves internetorganizing, rate is extremely vital. Some internet search engine are currently making use of web page rate as a ranking consider their search engine result, so slower-loading internet sites might be revealed listed below faster-loading web sites. This suggests that it’s extremely crucial to pick a host with quick web servers that is proficient at handling their sources, specifically on
- common
- web servers
- . For this contrast, we have
- a web site that has actually been
organized on Bluehost for over a year and a site thathas actually been organized on HostGator for over a year. While these are not 100%the same websites, they are really comparable forthe function of screening. To start, we ran a web site rate examination making use of Dotcom-Monitor’s web page rate examination device(Dotcom-Tools. com). It’s a cost-free examination that anybody can utilize, and it offers you tons times from all over the world. For this examination, we selected Dotcom-Monitor’s American network which examines tons rate from 11 areas throughout North and South America. The rate examination results for Bluehost are summed up in the table and photo listed below:
As mentioned above, HostGator was put through the exact same tests as Bluehost in order to determine who had the best web performance and who is the fastest. The HostGator speed test results are summarized in the table and image below:
Looking at the tables and images (including the waterfall chart), you can see that Bluehost had an edge on load times with the fastest time coming in at 1.4 seconds in the Argentina datacenter, compared to HostGator’s fastest load time of 2.1 seconds in the Colorado datacenter.
However, if you look at the images of our 12-month monitoring test below, you’ll see that Bluehost had a 1.1521 second server response time over 12 months, and HostGator had a 1.0981 second response time over 12 months, giving a slight edge to HostGator.
Looking back at the speed test table again, you can see that the average load time for HostGator on a one-off speed test was 7.3 seconds as the 50 second time in Florida really brought down HostGator’s average. The average load time for Bluehost was 3.3 seconds because it didn’t have any super long wait times.
The winner for speed and performance: Bluehost by a tiny bit.
HostGator is still an excellent option for a speedy web host, but according to these tests and our interpretation, Bluehost had a very slight edge in speed and performance. Granted, this was a 12 month test but with only two sites; if there had been a larger sample size, it’s possible that the outcome could’ve been different. Either way, these are both excellent hosting companies and two that we use regularly. Keep reading to see the breakdown of results over 12 months for uptime/downtime.
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Uptime: Bluehost vs. HostGator
Simply put, uptime is the measurement of how long a host is up or online, compared to how often they are down. If a host experiences a lot of downtime, this means that your website will be frequently down or inaccessible which is a bad thing; you want a host that experiences very little downtime.
Most hosting companies have an uptime guarantee or SLA, which is usually 99.9% or a similar number. Bluehost no longer guarantees a specific percentage for uptime, but Hostgator does offer 99.9% as a number for their uptime guarantee.
In order to put these hosts to the test, we monitored their uptime for an entire year using Dotcom-Monitor’s ServerView platform. Each website hosted on Bluehost and Hostgator was pinged every 3 hours from multiple datacenters in North America. Testing over a long period of time is important because it helps to create a larger sample size with more data points. 12 months is a fairly long term test when it comes monitoring and this length of time gives a pretty fair assessment of the reliability of a host. Having a test that goes for 12 months ensure that each host had the opportunity to recover from downtime here and there and still have a decent long term average for uptime and reliability of their servers.
Astonishingly, after 12 months, HostGator came in at a whopping 100% uptime! This is absolutely excellent as Dotcom-Monitor didn’t detect a single outage on the HostGator server over an entire year!
Bluehost also did well, but unfortunately fell a bit short of the industry standard 99.9% uptime guarantee coming in at 99.81% for the year, which is still really an excellent uptime rating.
The winner for uptime: HostGator, with an astonishing 100% uptime measurement over 12 months!
We think HostGator is the best when it comes to uptime because not only do they guarantee a specific number that you can measure against, but they also had amazing uptime during our year long test. Have a specific SLA for uptime (such as 99.9%) is really important because if a host doesn’t offer that (like Bluehost) you have no way to measure the uptime against anything. This makes it tougher to actually make a claim if you have monitoring data to support the fact that your site has been down too much, and honestly, when hosts don’t have an stated uptime SLA percentage, it makes it seem a bit like they’re trying to get out of being held to a specific standard.
Support & Customer Service: HostGator vs Bluehost –Who’s the Best?
In all honesty—when it comes to customer service and support, it’s really a subjective thing. One person may have a good experience with a particular host, while another person may have a different experience.
Both Bluehost and HostGator offer phone, chat, and ticket support 24/7/365 which we really think all hosts should do. There are multiple ways to get in touch with them, and this is excellent if you’re having a problem late at night or need help on a holiday, etc.
However…We have noticed that in the past 6 months or so (prior to the time of writing), HostGator’s support is not what it used to be. We had a ticket open and waited days for an answer, to the point that the technician apologized and issued me a month’s refund for having to wait so long. Sometimes their chat support hangs and the wait times are more than 20 minutes. They also ask you to sign in to get chat support if you’re an existing customer, which makes sense, but also seems like a bit of a nuisance.
To be fair, their support has been awesome in the past, and hopefully it will be better in the future—and of course, this is just our opinion. Their support as it stands now is not bad per se, but it just used to be better from our perspective. HostGator was the first commercial hosting that we’ve ever bought, and we have multiple accounts we’re using with them at the time of writing, so they’re definitely a host we trust, it’s just that we’ve been a bit disappointed with their support recently.
In comparison, Bluehost support seems to respond quicker, and they seem to be a bit more helpful overall. They do seem to outsource their support just like HostGator, but if you ask you can get connected to a higher level engineer.
Who has the best support: Bluehost, right now.
A couple years ago we would’ve said HostGator hands down, but we just haven’t seen it that way lately. They are technically owned by the same parent company, EIG, so we hope that they can get things sorted out with HostGator and bring the support back to the level that it used to be.
Setup and User Interface: Bluehost and HostGator
As we’ve mentioned in other reviews, we really think that Bluehost is very “noob friendly” which makes them a great host if you’re just getting started out online. They do an excellent job of providing help documentation and laying everything out in a way that makes a lot of sense for people who might be new to hosting. One thing we like about Bluehost is that when you log in, many aspects of the account and hosting are immediately visible. You can easily switch back and forth between your hosting control panel and the main account dashboard. With HostGator, you need to go through a few more clicks to get to cPanel and in our opinion, it’s a bit more cumbersome to navigate. This doesn’t mean that HostGator is hard to use, we just don’t think it’s as easy as Bluehost right off the bat. Once you know what you’re doing though, either panel is just as easy to navigate.
Both hosts offer either Softaculous or Fantastico so installing WordPress is a breeze, and there are a lot of automated tools in order to make managing your website easier. Again, we think it’s a bit easier to find these things in the Bluehost interface if you’re new to dealing with web hosting, but once you know your way around, HostGator is also easy to use.
Who has the best user interface and ease of use? Bluehost.
Bluehost wins in this category in our opinion, primarily because we think their user interface makes “more sense” than the HostGator user interface.
Features & Pricing
When it comes to features, both hosts are extremely similar—it’s almost an even tie. This is because they are both full-featured hosts that use cPanel and all the bells and whistles that come along with it. We think it’s a little easier to manage domains in Bluehost, but other than that they are very similar.
Feature-wise, there isn’t much that one host offers that the other doesn’t. We have found that HostGator is a bit more willing to honor custom requests, especially when it comes to modifying shared hosting accounts in some way.
As far as pricing goes, they are fairly close, but we would give the edge to Hostgator here. As with any hosting, the longer term you sign up for, the cheaper it will be. In addition to that, renewal rates are usually always more expensive than the introductory rates. In this sense, we think HostGator has a little less “renewal shock” in our option, and over the years, they have been more willing to adjust renewal pricing than Bluehost.
In terms of pricing for Bluehost, they often have specials that give hosting for under $4/month ($3.49/month at the time of writing), but you generally need to sign up for multiple years at a time in order to get this pricing, and it’s typically not available on renewal. Bluehost usually doesn’t allow people to pay monthly on shared hosting, with a minimum 12-month payment.
Bluehost coupons or discounts are available from time to time as well. Currently, we have an exclusive coupon deal with Bluehost that allows you to get $2.95/month pricing on shared hosting plans, which is as low as you’ll ever find.
HostGator, on the other hand, has more coupons that are available throughout the year (in our experience) . At the time of writing, the lowest non-coupon price available on HostGator’s hatchling plan was $3.30/month with a 36 month package. Again, there are often coupons and specials around holidays that can get this price even lower from our experience, but we can’t really say the same for Bluehost.
Who is the cheapest? HostGator.
We’ve had many hosting plans over the years with HostGator and Bluehost, and we can definitely say from our own experience that both initial pricing and renewal pricing has been cheaper with HostGator. This doesn’t mean that Bluehost is too expensive per se, it’s just that HostGator does a little better on the pricing.
So Who’s the Winner? Bluehost or HostGator?
The answer to this is—it depends. They are both great hosts, so it’s hard to nail down a definite winner. In our opinion, it really depends on your needs an experience level.
Best shared host for those new to web hosting: Bluehost
If you haven’t really managed a server before or built a website, we believe that Bluehost makes that experience a little bit easier with better support and a more clearly-organized dashboard. They are a little bit more expensive, but they are a great, full-featured web host and you really can’t go wrong with their shared hosting if you’re just getting started.
Best shared host for those with hosting experience: Hostgator
When it comes to uptime and pricing, HostGator is hard to beat. Their servers are extremely well-managed and reliable, and their pricing has been the cheapest of the two in our experience dealing with both hosts on a professional level.
Regardless of which host you pick, both are well-known, reliable and solid choices for web hosting. The choice in the end comes down to you and your preferences. While we think Bluehost is a little better for beginners and HostGator is a little cheaper, we believe that both hosts offer good quality shared hosting at an affordable price. To learn more about web hosting, feel free to check out other pages on this site and take in some hosting knowledge!
Gentry 
Gentry