Bluehost and HostGator are two of the most well-known web hosting service provider and among the leaders of the industry. Both the well-known hosting providers give cut-throat competition to each other and promise a top-tier service.
But which of the hosting provider is better than the other? How to go for one of these when you are in a dilemma to choose from the above two options.
We will look thoroughly at the two hosting providers by comparing the major aspects that you must know about before signing up for any of the web hosting services.
The major features that we will be comparing and giving an honest review are as follows. This will give you a clear picture of both the web hosts and you can proceed to select one among them.
- Ease of use
- Uptime and speed
- Plan and pricing
- Security
- Customer service
Bluehost vs Hostgator: Ease of Use
When you select any web hosting provider to launch your website, you want it to be user-friendly. WordPress should be a one-click install, or other website building tools if needed are available. There are many features that must be available.
Free Domain Registration
Bluehost makes it much easier for any new user or website creator to come on board. With any of the plans you choose for there is one free domain registration included. The free domain is included free for one year with any of the plans you choose. After the first year, the domain gets renewed as you renew the web hosting plan with additional charges. The process is easy and makes it comfortable for any website creator to start their web journey.
Hostgator also provides a free domain for any new user with each of their plan. You can sign up for one year, two years, or a three-year plan at once, and with any of these, you will be getting a domain name registration free for one year. Hostgator also is good for new websites as they provide you domain with web hosting plans upfront and this can kickstart your website.
Winner- Tie
WordPress
Bluehost is specially designed for WordPress users. They are among the older recommended hosting providers by the official WordPress.org website. Bluehost shared WordPress hosting plans start at a mere $2.95 a month. You get a single click WordPress install and all Bluehost hosting dashboard has everything simplified for you to use. You also get cPanel access. Bluehost has a blend of cPanel and their own hosting dashboard provided to the users.
For WordPress, you get plans ranging from shared to managed hosting. As your site grows you can easily upgrade your plan and you won’t have any issues managing the high amount of traffic coming in. The managed hosting platform is built on a VPS platform with custom engineering to deliver unprecedented performance to the users.
All the WordPress plans come with a free SSL certificate for a year. SSL certificate is a necessity for the security of your website. You also have a free Cloudflare CDN included for a year to make website content delivery faster for your users giving better performance.
Hostgator offers WordPress cloud hosting plans starting from $5.95 a month with 2.5x speed. With Hostgator, you get a single click WordPress install. You will be able to manage all the features of your new website from the cPanel. Hostgator provides you the cPanel access and is among the most enhanced cPanel you get from any of the web hosting providers.
Hostgator has a range of plans from shared, managed, VPS, and dedicated hosting server, you can choose from any of the options as per your requirement. You will get a free global CDN with any of the plans you choose from. An SSL certificate is also included for the first year.
They promise the website speed to be faster and pages will load at a great speed. The caching features work great and this will surely result in faster webpage loading speed of your website.
Winner- Bluehost
Website-Migration
Migrating to Bluehost, they offer a free switching service for websites that qualify their criteria. The criteria include having the latest version of WordPress and the website being malware-free.
But if your website doesn’t qualify for the same, case if you are using any other website builder then Bluehost will charge $149.99 to migrate. One more thing is that the migration fee will not include migrating email accounts more than 20. You will have to pay extra for those.
Hostgator promises to make website migration easier for the users. Hostgator will migrate the WordPress/cPanel website files including the database. They also transfer one domain registration for free with any new account signup within 30 days.
This makes it easier and affordable in case of transferring a website to HostGator.
Winner- Tie
Scalability
Bluehost has numerous options as your website grows larger. You can move from shared hosting plans to managed hosting plans as you grow. With visitors in larger amounts coming into your website, you need your hosting plan to be uptight for providing great performance.
The managed hosting plan will give you the option to focus only on the development part and the backend health of your website will be taken care of by the hosting provider. Bluehost doesn’t disclose the exact amount of visitor capacity with each of the plans, but this is nothing to worry about. As your website will grow Bluehost themselves will keep you informed with the number of visitors coming in, which plans to upgrade to.
In case your website gains over millions or even more than a million visitors a month, then they also offer you a tailor-made plan for your website. Everything will be managed and handled by Bluehost. You can scale up with ease at an affordable price.
Hostgator specifies the number of visitors capacity of each plan they offer. This just gives a numeric idea to the website creators. Hostgator also has enough options for you as your website scales up. The Basic plan in the managed hosting category itself has a capacity of around 100k visitors a month.
You have options of shared hosting plans starting from $2.08. As your website grows you can move up to the ladder and choose the hosting plan that suits you best for you. You won’t have any issues as your website grows and the number of visitors increases, Hostgator has many plans available for you. They will keep you informed in case of any plan upgrade is needed. In any case, when you have visitors in millions, you will have to ask Hostgator for a tailor-made plan for your website so that there is no depletion in performance.
As you move up the ladder, it is for sure that you will be paying more. If compared between Bluehost and Hostgator, the higher range plans prices will be more in case of Hostgator than Bluehost.
Winner- Tie
- Ease of use round is won by Bluehost. In most of the features and options both Bluehost and Hostgator are almost equal, but in case of WordPress optimization and in case of ease to onboard a new website creator, Bluehost is the winner without any doubt. Most new website creators start with Bluehost because of these easier options and plans they offer.
Bluehost vs HostGator Uptime and Speed
Website uptime speed and response time are something you can never neglect. Your website should load fast, should have great uptime speed and your host should not disappoint at any time.
Bluehost knows the significance of website speed and performance. They certainly do not disappoint in this case. They deliver excellent server speed consistently and they live up to their popularity.
The better is the speed of your website, the better the response time will be, the faster your webpages will load and the user experience will be great. Even a one-sec delay in your response time can cause a lot of damage. They also use Cloudflare CDN for better caching and faster content delivery. This depends a lot on how your hosting provider keeps the server healthy. Bluehost does a wonderful job in this.
Bluehost has an uptime of over 99%. the industry uptime standard is generally around 99% and Bluehost does better than that. The average uptime for Bluehost comes up to 99.9%. Uptime refers to the portion of time your website is online on the server. How users will access a website if it is not online. So better uptime results in better performance. Bluehost does not let websites go down. With the dedicated and VPS hosting plans of Bluehost you can expect the uptime to touch 100%.
The response time of Hostgator is also up to the notch. They value their users’ website should not go slow and works a lot towards this. They also use the Cloudflare CDN network for better caching and faster response time of the website. They utilized their data centers efficiently. You get the speed needed and the performance is up to the mark from the quality hosting providers. Hostgator won’t disappoint their user in terms of server speed and response time.
HostGator is one of the hosting providers that guarantees an uptime of 99.98-100%. This is a major factor that makes HostGator stand out. The uptime guarantee shows how much they value this aspect. The hosting provider says if the uptime drops below 99.90% Hostgator will give the user free credit for a month.
Winner- For response time I would consider Bluehost a winner and for an uptime guarantee, HostGator is the winner.
Bluehost vs HostGator Plans and Pricing
Bluehost plans have so much flexibility and options that from new website creators to large enterprise owners, you have got every option available. The Basic plan starts at $2.95 a month which include one website, single-click one WordPress install, 50 GB of SSD storage which is way too much for almost all kinds of website.
Bluehost Basic plans come under the Shared hosting category. If you want more resources and want to upgrade you can go for Managed Hosting or for Dedicated hosting as per your requirement. Managed hosting will let you focus on the core website needs and the back-end maintenance will be managed by the Bluehost team. Dedicated hosting is the option to go for if you are a large enterprise and a big website has to be hosted.
The Bluehost Basic plan will cost you $2.95 a month. This will come with one WordPress install, one free domain, Free CDN, Free SSL certificate, and 50GB of SSD storage. You can pick higher plans if you have more than one website to host. For the PLUS and Choice Plus plan, you will be paying $5.45 a month and you will have an option to install an unlimited number of WordPress and you can host unlimited websites. With these plans also the free domain, free SSL certificate, free CDN, automated backup, and SSD storage will be unlimited in this case. There will be a ton of resources that will be more than enough for you to kickstart your website.
Bluehost has enough options available and a lot of flexibility in its pricing. You won’t run out of options for any kind of website to host.
On the other hand, HostGator provides you with many options too but cannot match up with Bluehost. Hostgator’s Hatchling plan does start at a mere $2.08 a month and this will come with one free domain for one year, a free SSL certificate for a year, unmetered bandwidth, and hosting for one website. This plan is enough for a small starter website.
As you move up you have Baby and Business plans respectively costing you $2.98 and $4.48 a month. With the Baby Plan, you will have an option to host unlimited websites and with the Business plan, you will get the option to host unlimited websites and also you will have a few add-on features such as Free SEO tool, Free dedicated IP, Free upgrade, and positive SSL.
As you move up to Managed hosting category, the Starter plan starts at $5.95 a month. This plan will come with a free SSL certificate and a free domain for a year. You will be able to host one website with an estimated traffic capability of 100k per month. Hostgator specifies the amount of traffic capability of their plan to let you decide which plan suits best as per your website traffic and usages.
One drawback to note, with any of the Hostgator, plans free emails, free automated backups, and automated updates are not available. You will have to pay for automated back-ups on a yearly basis if you opt for this. And plugins and WordPress versions have to be updated manually. This is one major drawback in the case of Hostgator. If you are familiar with how to do these tasks easily then it won’t cause any difference for you and Hostgator will definitely save some buck for you.
Winner: Bluehost wins this round for the affordable and flexible plan and pricing option they provide for each category of the user from beginners to pro.
You can surely opt for Hostgator if you are comfortable with WordPress plugins and updates and can do some tasks manually.
Bluehost vs HostGator Security
Security of your website data is most important. Bluehost does a good job in keeping their customers’ websites secure from bot attacks and data leaks. Hostgator is a little behind Bluehost in terms of security features. Let’s see one by one about the security features provided by both the web hosting providers.
Bluehost offers top-notch security to its users. They provide all kinds of protection so that their customers’ websites cannot be breached through attacks. They have secure shell access (SSH) so that admins can securely access files.
With the higher plans, you also get the automated backup option. To keep the backup of your website is essential. There can be times when making changes in the back-end you mess up with the original site. Keeping a backup helps you not only from outside attacks but also from human errors you can make yourself.
Bluehost also uses anti-spam tools like SpamExperts, Spam Hammer, and Apache SpamAssassin to keep bot attacks at bay. These help to keep your website threat-free. Bluehost does a tremendous job in terms of security.
You also get a free SSL certificate with all the plans, so that your website is secure and users can browse safely. An SSL certificate will allow users to make transactions and also share data on your website securely.
Hostgator provides an SSL certificate to all the websites and that too is a premium one. Hostgator provides a Comodo SSL with all the hosted domains on their server. Very few hosting providers give you a premium SSL certificate unless you buy it as an add-on.
You do not have to worry about encryption on your website between the web browser you use. In this term, Hostgator does a good job.
They do not provide automated back-ups. You will have to manually back up your website and keep a copy so you don’t lose any data in case of any mishaps. For automated backups, there is a paid upgrade that you will need to buy.
Hostgator has signed up with Sitelock for regular scans and provides powerful and reliable security from malware. They protect your website from DDoS attacks and the company states that they have implemented an extensive custom firewall ruleset that protects servers from the many forms of attack.
In terms of security, Bluehost wins over Hostgator due to their strong backend server protections. Bluehost keeps attacks at bay better and guards your website successfully from all sorts of attacks on the web.
Bluehost vs HostGator Customer Support
Faster the customer queries get solved better the customer believes in their web host. Both Bluehost and Hostgator have dedicated teams for customer support service.
Bluehost offers several ways to reach their support team. They offer live chat functionality that is tested to give instant response to all its customer. The call option is also available 24*7*365, and it redirects you to experts instantly. Both the chat and call options response time is within seconds and the customers rely on these.
Apart from the call and chat option, they also have a support ticket option and a knowledge base which has tons of frequently asked questions and their answers available. The knowledge base is of great help to any beginner as it also helps to learn a lot by reading and exploring on their own. The support ticket is one option where the response time is not determined, it can be within minutes or sometimes it may take a few hours.
Overall the customer support of Bluehost is top quality and reliable. You can reach them out anytime with any of your queries and it will be solved at the least time possible.
Hostgator customer support also has different options to reach them. The easiest and the fastest ones are chat support and call support. The chat support is quick enough to reply to you within seconds and they try to solve your queries instantly.
You can also reach the customer support team via call all the time. The phone support team is full of WordPress experts, so you can rely upon that your queries will be solved at the best possible time.
Apart from call and chat support, Hostgator also has separate billing support which deals with any form of query regarding your plan and bills. The response time in this is from minutes to within a business day.
Hostgator also has different forums where you can find many questions and answers which are regularly faced by website creators. There is also a YouTube channel where you can find tons of answers which might be useful for a user.
In terms of Customer support, both Bluehost and Hostgator are doing a great job and the response time is minimum in both cases. Both the customer services are reliable to their users.
Conclusion
Bluehost and Hostgator are two of the leading web hosts out there. There is no doubt that they both provide exceptional service to their customers. They both give stiff competition to each other and for users this might be difficult to choose which one to opt for. This is why we created this detailed comparison to make your task easier.
Use Bluehost if you want tons of plans and pricing options from beginner to advanced. If you are a beginner then I will always suggest you opt for Bluehost. For a beginner, Bluehost makes onboarding on the web very easy and smooth. They are also one of the few officially recommended web hosts by WordPress.org
They provide excellent WordPress-specific support and will help you throughout. If you are looking for site migration and your website doesn’t meet the free migration criteria, i.e. your WordPress should be upgraded to the latest level and no your site should contain no malware and a few more points you will have to go through. In that case, you will have to pay an extra $150. If there is no migration involved and you are looking to build a new website, Bluehost is one of the best options available out there.
Hostgator is a better choice if you are a pro and looking for advanced c-panel access. Hostgator is one web host which provides you with the most advanced c-panel access. Looking for higher uptime then also Hostgator will be a better choice for you.
In terms of migrating a website to Hostgator, they will provide you a free migration included with their plans that you will choose from. So this will be a better option when looking to migrate an old website to a different web host. They provide everything unlimited with all the plans available which can be a boon for big websites which need higher bandwidth.
Comparing all the options and your requirements you can easily choose between the two web hosting services for your WordPress website. The user-friendliness, uptime speed, plans and pricing, website migration features, web host security, and customer support; are the criteria one must look at while choosing between any of the web hosting services. Comparing thoroughly among these will automatically give you the right choice as per your requirement.