Hostgator vs Bluehost Comparison

There are many web-hosting providing pages these days. Two probably most popular are BlueHost and HostGator. Many people still argue about which one is better. They both provide great services for acceptable price and right now they are both selling their services with about 40% off their standard prices. Anyway, the point of this article aren’t their similarities. The real point are their differences, so first, let’s take a closer look on both of them, make some comparisons that will help us decide which one does the job batter. There are several categories we can compare.

Pricing

This is one thing which is quiet hard to compare for the prices depend on many thing such as type of hosting you choose, the way you pay for it and many others. The price could be 2 or 50 or even 150 dollars. In general HostGator plans are cheaper by several dollars (however, the provided services are worse as you will see in a moment) Of course, there are free trial and money back guarantees. HostGator provides 45-day and BlueHost 30-day guarantee.

In BlueHost you get the domain for free right after you sign up. This is registered for one year then it’s renewed when you alter your web hosting plan. With HostGator there are no free domains. The price depends on which one you decide to use (.com, .org…). The cheapest one is about 12 dollars.

I think we have no winner here.

Uptime and Speed

Neither of this web hosting sites comes with solid state drives (SSD). However there are HostGator’s Cloud and WordPress hosting plans including SSD and BlueHost’s server infrastructure is powered by an enterprise level SSD database storage.

When it comes to uptime, BlueHost using Tier3 promises 99,982% uptime. An average owntime per year is about 1.6 hours. HostGator promises at least 99,9% uptime and uses SLA, cutting edge Linux container technology and proprietary technologies.

CDN (content delivery network) is powered by CloudFlare in both cases.

And this looks like another tie to me.

Easy Use for (not Only) Newbies

Installing WordPress is easy in both cases. BlueHost has makes the process easier by using the MOJO Marketplace for all of its installations. So does the HostGator. In FAQ or help sections you can also find instructions how to do it. If you are “lost“ on the site (which I think is quite hard but everything is possible) you can contact a support team. On both sites it is available 24/7 and responses are as quick as possible.

More differences are visible when it comes to moving your site. In BlueHost you can do it by yourself for free. Then you have an opportunity to have it done automatically. For 150 $ you can migrate up to five sites and 20 email accounts from your former hosting company. HostGator promises to move your page as easy as possible. The truth is not different. HostGator automatically moves automatically all the files from your site including databases, scripts, and one domain registration transfer for free with each new hosting account within 30 days of sign-up, as well as to newly upgraded account.

BlueHost: 0 – HostGator: 1

When You Need to Build a Website

On the BlueHost you can build your website using Weebly, WordPress and there are some more options in Mojo Marketplace. New thing there is a drop and drag site builder. HostGator provides you number of templates and you can create sites simply. You can also get some upgrades for free.

Both have pros and cons. Depends on if you don’t have enough programming skills and want something simple or you want to create your site from the base. Still I think that with BlueHost you have more possibilities.

BlueHost: 1 – HostGator: 1

Security

BlueHost provides automatically generated backups for free. It’s up to a customer whether they occur daily, weekly or monthly. However, this doesn’t mean everyone has to create them. BlueHost doesn’t guarantee the backups and recommends that all customers create their own backup.

BlueHost also provides a free shared SSL for accounts which reside on a shared IP. For Standard and Pro accounts, there is only one Dedicated IP and so only one SSL Certificate. For VPS, dedicated, managed, or reseller accounts, you can purchase multiple Dedicated IP and SSL Certificates.

Then there is a DDOS protection. Nonetheless, these attacks can be foretold, the BlueHost team will do everything to restore your service quickly.

Malware scanning is available, too but this one is not for free. The SiteLock addon contains: basic spam monitoring, business verification, site verification certificate, blacklist monitoring and basic malware monitoring.

With HostGator you can’t create automatically generated backups. Instead, you can make an instant manual backup and after this you can use this file to restore your account on the servers if it’s needed. There is also CodeGuard, it creates daily automated website backups for all your web files and databases with a 1-click restore. For this upgrade you have to pay several dollars a month.

When it comes to SSL certificate, it is not for free either. Only the Domain Validated SSL is issued for free. This means things like: Domain Validation, Company Validation, Extended Validation, Wildcard and Multi-Domain. Notice that the “Hatchling” hosting package is not able to utilize SSL certificates.

What HostGator protects you from for free are DDOS attacks. The site has implemented extensive custom firewall rule-sets that are supposed to protect servers from many different forms of attack. As well, their data center has enabled network-level flood protection.

Like BlueHost, HostGator has partnered with SiteLock to provide high quality malware scans. The HackAlert monitoring service checks your website every day and notifies you right away if it finds out that your website has been hacked or injected with a malicious code.

As you can see, BlueHost offers you more security for free and that’s why the next point goes to it.

BlueHost: 2 – HostGator: 1

Both, BlueHost and HostGator provide high-quality services with their pros and cons. In some cases they are on the same level, sometimes the HostGator is better but there are more cases when the better one is the BlueHost. If you seek for more information visit www.bluehost.com and www.hostgator.com

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