Author: Scott Whatley

HostGator vs. DigitalOcean is like Bill Nye the science guy versus Sir Isaac Newton. Both are great web hosts that meet the creative needs of people, but there’s a difference in the type of people they appeal to.

HostGator, like Bill Nye, could bring itself down to the level of an internet toddler and meet all their needs as well as the needs of creatives at the cheapest rate. But there is something about DigitalOcean, like Sir Isaac Newton, it has complete trust and pride in its services in a condescending way. It belongs to an elite class of developers and webmasters and it cannot even begin to comprehend the needs of beginners.

HostGator caters to the needs of everyone, everywhere and it does it at very cheap prices. You could almost imagine DigitalOcean users working with their VR lens in a soundproof room trying to solve the theory of everything. With all its exotic terms like droplets, Kubernetes, etc.

DigitalOcean is focused on cloud hosting services. HostGator offers shared, WordPress, VPS and dedicated server hosting. They both have differences in the services they offer. We will analyze all of these differences and similarities, and when all is said and done, we will help you choose the best web host for you. Pull up a front-row seat, and strap in.

DigitalOcean vs. HostGator Overview

Founded by Brent Oxley, a student at Florida Atlantic University, in October 2002 (whole 9 years before DigitalOcean), by 2006, HostGator had registered over 200,000 domains. Operating out of New York City, DigitalOcean is the web host for professionals, creatives and veteran developers everywhere. Its first server, launched in 2011, put it on the map in a big way. HostGator is headquartered at Houston and their data-centers are located at Provo, Utah.

In the first ten years of providing hosting services, HostGator built up a name providing for every noob and intermediate developer and was known for its reliable services. As an American hosting company, DigitalOcean does not market itself as a beginner-friendly web host, rather it promises and delivers to boost the cloud hosting work processes of developers and creatives in the most convenient way possible.

HostGator was acquired by Endurance International Group (EIG), the conglomerate that owns basically half of the Web-hosts on the internet (Check out Bluehost versus HostGator comparison to see which is better among two EIG web hosts). While some say that this has reduced the quality of hosting that the web host provides, we prefer to check things out and form our own opinion. DigitalOcean has three servers in New York City and like EIG, the company is bankrolled by Andreessen Horowitz, IA Ventures, Techstars, and Crunchfund.

Popularity Contest

DigitalOcean has over 500,000 customers worldwide. HostGator blows this out of the water with its 10 million subscribers worldwide. This makes sense since HostGator is beginner-friendly and it accommodates amateurs. DigitalOcean, on the other hand, is for coders, developers, and advanced programmers.

As a big company and as a member of a great conglomerate like EIG, HostGator has the funds to embark on great marketing campaigns. DigitalOcean was stated by Netcraft to be one of the fastest-growing web hosts in the world. In the following year, they were also considered the third-largest VPS hosting service provider in the world. The company also does not offer any features like domain or even the ability to choose a domain name, both of which will be needed by beginners.

Performance Comparison

Two things we’ll consider in this section. Uptime and speed.

Speed

Your website loads under 3 seconds? Yes, so does literally every other web host. We are, however, looking for a web host that does better. One that loads websites under a second. Let’s see if either DigitalOcean or HostGator is that kind of web host.

We measured the response time, page load speed and carried out a load impact assessment for both web hosts. Our results are analyzed below:

Response Time

How quick are the sites hosted on DigitalOcean and HostGator? We put our demo sites hosted on both to test from November 2018 to October 2019.

HostGator consistently posted response time of 500ms+, and DigitalOcean often sits between 200ms and 400ms. Seeing as DigitalOcean’s upper threshold isn’t even as high as HostGator’s number, it’s clear that DigitalOcean has a faster response time.

HostGator has a response time that’s a little below average, the same with 50% of the sites we have reviewed. DigitalOcean, on the other hand, is slightly above average, better than 70% of the sites we have tested. Both are not exceptional, but they aren’t the worst we have reviewed outside. They are OK, but we won’t be finding award winners here.

All in all, we are happy to recommend DigitalOcean based on response time, they performed suite decent. Response time has a huge impact on the Load Time of a website. Let’s find out how HostGator will keep up in terms of full page load speed.

Page Load Speed Test

We tested the site load speeds consecutively and calculated the average speed. We got an average speed of 1.2s for HostGator. It’s a decent number, quite alright, but it’s not the best among the Web-hosts we’ve reviewed. DigitalOcean, on the other hand, loaded a whole page in less than a second.

We believe that DigitalOcean has the speed advantage because it deals mostly with cloud services and frowns on the sharing of resources. Basically, if speed is your thing (and it should be), DigitalOcean is the host you want to go with. HostGator also has a faster hosting option in the HostGator cloud (a different plan from their shared hosting packages).

Load Impact Test

We sent virtual users intermittently to sites hosted on both DigitalOcean and HostGator, 10 at a time, and we found out the level of speed consistency. The chart below shows which can handle heavy traffic between websites hosted on HostGator and DigitalOcean. We already guessed though.

[Insert a chart here that shows DigitalOcean is more consistent than HostGator. Throughout the test, while HostGator spiked at 50, 70, 80 users].

As you can see, both web hosts started well. But when it got to 50 users, HostGator started to slow down. And this downward spiraling in speed only worsened as we increased the number of virtual users. We can comfortably place HostGator on the same level as GoDaddy (Read our GoDaddy and SiteGround comparison here). Not the worst in the industry, but certainly not the best.

Datacenters and Server Locations:

Both DigitalOcean and HostGator have servers located in the US. DigitalOcean does have more data centers than HostGator.

[Insert the locations of both HostGator and DigitalOcean datacenters here. HostGator has data centers and located at Houston, Texas and Provo, Utah. DigitalOcean has in London, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, San Francisco, Toronto, and Singapore.]

GoDaddy also has thousands of servers to meet the needs of its customers as seen in our GoDaddy versus DreamHost review.

Speed Optimization Tools: Which goes the extra mile for speed?

Content Delivery Systems usually make servers faster and HostGator comes with integrated Cloudflare CDN on all plans. DigitalOcean does not come with an in-built CDN.

Unlike HostGator, DigitalOcean prioritizes SSD for optimized speed that we don’t think any other web host makes use of SSD like they do. It’s utilized in all their plans. Zero tolerance for HDD. We guess if you are paying a premium price, you have to fly First Class.

Uptime:

Will DigitalOcean lock your site in Davy Jones locker? Or will HostGator drop the proverbial uptime ball?

When we are asked to choose between a web host with perfect uptime and that of a sub-par uptime, it’s Hobson’s choice really. Because it’s either great uptime or it’s nothing. We have been able to collate uptime readings for 12 months. Online results differ, that’s OK, the same test will generate the different results for everyone. Ours should be accepted more though, it is a recent test.

Web hosts like SiteGround and WPEngine are at the top of the shelve with respect to uptime; simply exceptional. Considering what we’ve seen with HostGator’s speed, we weren’t very optimistic about its uptime numbers. HostGator, quite surprisingly, posted an average uptime of 99.985%. DigitalOcean has an average of 99.989%. This slightly edges out HostGator’s number.

Uptime posted by both are considerably higher than 75% of the hosts we have tested. As you can see from the reading, both web hosts maintain very consistent and great uptime. DigitalOcean’ only had less than 100% on 4 occasions. The bare minimum uptime for any web host to meet is 99.9%, and both of these web hosts have greater uptime than that.

Uptime Guarantee:

Both web hosts have an uptime guarantee of 99.9%. This means that if uptime drops below 99.9%, you get about 5% credit of the monthly hosting fee. Luckily, both web hosts pose a decent uptime, so we didn’t have to ask for our money back.

Security:

If your site has never been struck by malware or plagued by brute force attacks, be grateful to your web host. To remain that way, we would like to help you make the right choice, preferably with no additional cost.

HostGator protects you in the traditional way. Using different features (multilayered), or allowing you to seek protection in the hands of third-party apps. DigitalOcean makes use of the SSD to effectively provide redundant security for your data.

HostGator provides free SSL certificates from Let’s Encrypt on all plans and protects your site from DDoS attacks, brute force, and other malware attacks. DigitalOcean marketplace has Vendors that provide a fairly easy way to get a free SSL certificate as part of their installation procedure, but it’s at their discretion and you may need to pay them. They also maintain multiple security and compliance certifications including those for the EU-U.S. and Swiss-U.S. Privacy Shield and PCI-DSS.

The Defense continues…

HostGator also informs users of weak passwords through their audits on a weekly basis. If you are not satisfied with the security that HostGator provides, you have the option of fighting spams with SpamAssassin and combating malware using the SiteLock Website Security (for a price).

Both web hosts have a 24/7 monitoring team for their servers to arrest any attack and stop it from spreading, but maybe DigitalOcean took it a little farther. A lot of customers have complained about being locked out of their own accounts for days. Claiming that the company provides security for their own servers and not necessarily customer security. When customers complain that their accounts are blocked because the company supposedly noticed suspicious activities, we have to wonder where the line should be drawn.

On HostGator’s website, they say they use additional “confidential methods” to protect their servers. Whether that is just a marketing tactic, we wouldn’t know. But seeing that, in recent times, HostGator hasn’t experienced massive security breaches, they must be doing something right.

If after all the security that DigitalOcean provides, you want added security for your account, you have to do some coding by yourself, not to mention DigitalOcean does not come with pre-installed cPanel and all the protection that comes with it. In fact, you have to pay a third party if you want the cPanel.

Backup and Restores:

HostGator doesn’t provide free daily backups, instead, it offers automated backups for free every week but charges $19 to retrieve the backup. A tool is, however, recommended to users which is the Codeguard automatic backup tool. It isn’t free and costs about $2 per month and allows daily backups of about five websites. The plan also allows three restores per month. The tool is also scalable. DigitalOcean’s automatic backup is provided at 20% of the droplet plan.

Ease of Use: Baby gloves or big boy shoes?

Both HostGator and DigitalOcean employ a code-driven backend. The problem is, a lot of people have complained and compared DigitalOcean with Chinese arithmetic; very difficult to navigate. HostGator’s launch, set up and management are pretty easy and beginner-friendly.

On DigitalOcean, when you deploy a Droplet, it is deploying an empty canvas. You will have to configure, secure, optimize, etc. You do this by installing and configuring the webserver (NGINX, Apache, Caddy, etc.) as well as any other programming language you may require (PHP, Ruby, RoR, Python, NodeJS, etc), and the database server (MySQL, MariaDB, Percona, etc.).

DigitalOcean, however, has pre-configured images for WordPress and some other types of software. At the end of the day though, you are on your own with the management and operation and security of your CLI and OS.

Ease of Signup

HostGator has an extremely easy and fast signup process. Account activation is a breeze; fast and easy, barely any inconvenience. Its onboarding process is even more fluid. Unfortunately, we can’t say the same about DigitalOcean.

Signing up DigitalOcean takes time. Your sign up even has to be confirmed through a phone call, especially if you are from outside the US. Although their onboarding process is also superfast. You can set up and spin droplets under a minute. With HostGator, after onboarding, you can set a website and Start hosting in a few hours at Max. With DigitalOcean, a developer can probably get a project started in a few hours but it will take a blogger at least a whole day.

Both DigitalOcean and HostGator allow credit, debit, prepaid cards, and PayPal payment options.

Control panel and dashboard

DigitalOcean has the DigitalOcean control panel. (we’ll get to that in a minute). HostGator has the industry-standard cPanel, which is graphically based on icons useful for people migrating from a web host that has cPanel. It’s best for anyone familiar with it or migrating from a previous web host that uses cPanel.

DigitalOcean does not host websites alone. They host everything from your small brain project to game development, etc. For this, they require an intuitive and more versatile control panel which is their DigitalOcean control panel. It’s a choice at first, but once you learn to use it, you’ll feel like a wizard riding a broomstick. If you do want to install cPanel, you have to know how to code and pay third parties ($15 – $20) for it. With DigitalOcean, you can also use third-party dashboards like a Centos droplet along with the Centos Web Panel which is free, convenient and informative. You just have to set it up first and to do that, you need a developer.

App Market, One-click installation and App Integration

HostGator supports a host of Content Management Systems and a couple of other apps like Drupal, Joomla, and Magento. What’s more? It ensures that users have access to these apps, plug-ins and even professional services, through the MOJO marketplace.

DigitalOcean used to have the own cloud which was scrapped for a reason we do not know and succeeded by the Nextcloud. The Nextcloud was ultimately removed and replaced by the new and ever-expanding DigitalOcean Marketplace, a platform for preconfigured 1-Click Apps and tools. You can choose the Operating System or One-click apps. DigitalOcean supports these operating systems: Ubuntu, FreeBSD, Fedora, Debian, CoreOS, CentOS. It supports the basic one-click installation of WordPress, Grafana, OpenFaas, InfluxDB, etc.

For users who would like to install WordPress on their shared hosting plans, HostGator also has one-click installation support that ensures that you can build a WordPress and other CMS sites at a go.

Website Builder

Site-building with DigitalOcean is like a heaping help of manual labor. It’s not for beginners at all. On a spectrum of site-building difficulty. Builder specific solutions like Squarespace, Weebly and Wix are on the extremely easy side. GoCentral builder would be close, followed by the Gator site builder that utilizes drag and drop features, as well as templates.

You see DigitalOcean, it is perhaps the hardest we have seen for beginners. In their defense, they never masqueraded as a beginner-friendly web host. Their multipurpose hosting solution is for developers that can dismantle a site and build it up again in minutes. You’ll have to do actual coding. Developers jargon like setup Apache2 or Nginx and, FileZilla sFTP (FTP really shouldn’t be used), PuTTY to connect via SSH, etc. will have to become important terms in your dictionary.

Domain, Migration, Staging and Site Transfer

The HostGator domain costs $3.84/month. DigitalOcean is not a domain registrar. To use DigitalOcean DNS, we advise that you register a domain name with either GoDaddy or NameCheap and update your domain’s NS records to point to DigitalOcean’s name servers. Naturally, you can add up to 50 domains but DigitalOcean can allow you to set up as many domains as you want if you have the space.

HostGator has no staging site before the push to live production. DigitalOcean allows you to use droplets and Git hooks to easily go from local to live production. HostGator has secure shell (SSH) access but no Git pre-installed, and no automatic migration. DigitalOcean gives you SSH access, log file access, as well as root access.

HostGator allows you to either transfer your site on your own or assist you through their free website content transfer service. The free content transfer is only available for new accounts that are under upgrade and require a server move, within 30 days of signup or upgrade. It’s not automatic, you have to request for it. Like all things with DigitalOcean, site migration or transfer is a bit more complicated. You create a new website, then you backup your previous data, database, etc. You have to make use of SFTP or SSH (if your current host gives SSH access) to transfer the files over. It’s manual.

Email

HostGator offers emails with its plans and the amount depends on the tier of your plan. You can set up an email service with DigitalOcean using a mail server, but it’s also manual. You could, however, use Zoho for free. You could also use Google G Suite which is cheap and it provides security.

Features:

Both web hosts have a ton of features. With HostGator, the features are available for every Tom, Dick, and Harry. With DigitalOcean, if you are lucky to find it, you have to learn to use it. And even then, it takes a lot of time and some getting used to.

DigitalOcean offers tailor-made plans for specific purposes and needs. DigitalOcean refers to its Virtual Private Servers as Droplets (touche). It provides you with root access and allows you to configure the server as you like. Unlike Shared Hosting (which HostGator offers), you have to do things like updating and upgrading software, maintaining security, installing stack, installing WordPress and performing all system admin duties, all by yourself.

With HostGator’s Shared Hosting, you sign up for the hosting provider to manage your servers among other things, and you have nothing to worry about.

Unless you install one of your own for a price, Droplets do not provide you with a Control Panel (like cPanel or Plesk). You will only be allowed to use CLI (Command Line Interface), Terminal (macOS), PuTTy (Windows), or some other shell access (if you’re running a Linux distro for your desktop).

The Fancy Droplets

The most popular defaults have already been chosen. Scroll to the end and configure your Droplet by selecting a server image from the popular OS (Ubuntu, Fedora, etc.), or available one-click apps.

You create and customize your droplets yourself. If you want to customize your Droplet, you can follow the DigitalOcean interface instructions. After the creation comes the allocation of resources. Our advice is to start small, you can upgrade later. After droplet deployment, you can use SSH to access it (typical) or open a terminal through the console of your DigitalOcean account.

They have two major Droplets from which you can select

First is the Standard Droplet for very small websites, a blog or small testing tasks. Their Standard Droplet category has subcategories; The second, CPU Optimized Droplet will cater to users who will require heavy CPU usage like batch processing.

Other features

Spaces: DigitalOcean has Droplets for app deployment, but they need something to handle storage and that’s where Spaces come in. It’s simply a security system that lets you store and send your data to applications and end-users. Spaces utilize drag and drop UI or API system to create a solid storage. Spaces can save backup files, weblogs, data analysis, etc. The service is also scalable, so your Spaces can grow with your company. Spaces can be used as standalone or together with other DigitalOcean features.

Digital storage

When you spin up and delete your droplets, you will require a storage mechanism to save its data and that’s where the following two types of storage come in: block storage and object storage.

Block storage is similar to your computer hard drive. Block storage is fast and has a size range of 1 GB to 16 TB. They can also be used together just like A2 Hosting’s RAID system. You can change the scale of the blocks and transfer them to different droplets. All blocks have SSD’s for added speed but you can also burst them for extra speed boost if you suddenly have a heavy workload.

Second, DigitalOcean also offers object storage, which it calls Spaces. Spaces are best suited for storing large amounts of unstructured data like video. Object storage works differently from block storage. The data is unstructured, with no specific format, unlike the file structures on block storage.

Kubernetes

Kubernetes allows developers to deploy and scale up a containerized app in clusters. They also have Load Balancers which share your traffic among droplets.

Customer Support and Reliability:

We consider the speed and mediums of support as well as feedback. We also compare the size of each web host’s knowledge base in relation to the ease of navigation.

First Contact

When you are looking for a web host with good support. These are the questions to ask. Could they be reached easily and fast? 24/7 support? Will you be connected to a bot or a human on the other end? If it’s human, is the human knowledgeable?

HostGator offers 24/7 phone, chat and email support. Most people prefer making use of the live chat channel, so we decided to check that out first. On our first few tries, we got connected to a live rep in a relatively short period of time. However, and this did not happen very often, we were sometimes forced to wait for more than twenty minutes before getting a hold of a live rep. It got dicier when we actually got talking to the reps we contacted. Some were quite knowledgeable and answered our questions well, while some had to take their time. We also found out their support could communicate in Russian, Chinese and of course, English.

Both web hosts have knowledgeable support. As seen in our SiteGround review, as well as SiteGround and A2 Hosting comparison. If you consider support an investment, it will help your business, especially with word of mouth.

With DigitalOcean, the reverse is the case. We have scoured the internet and we saw many comments about DigitalOcean’s prolific bad customer support, but we didn’t believe it so we tested them ourselves.

They do not have a phone option, so you can only contact them through email or ticketing. We tried both and the response was not good. We filled their customer support form and it’s buggy, we haven’t gotten a response till today and we don’t know if we ever will. It also takes them days to respond to emails. Thank God our account wasn’t blocked or hacked or worse, mistakenly deleted without backup.

When you get a customer support message like this: “We have reviewed your account and have declined to activate it. No further information or action is required from you.” you wonder if it’s a human on the other end or a robot. DigitalOcean may think they are protecting their customers, but we are cynical enough to think that they are only protecting their own servers and not one bit about the customers. And there is a fine line between those two, trust us.

Knowledgebase and Website Navigation.

HostGator has a large collection of video tutorials, forums, and even choose to share your screen with support for more hands-on help. DigitalOcean has a decent knowledge base with tutorials that explain how to run and customize your cloud.

Pricing

In the world of web hosting, pricing of plans sits with the likes of performance atop the shelf of important factors to consider while choosing a web host. In fact, no plan has the same price for more than a few months. They offer discounts all year round to suck you in. But believe it or not, a lot of web hosts will promise you the web hosting moon, only to hang you out to dry with hidden prices and upsells.

HostGator provides a host (pun intended) of web hosting services like VPS, managed WordPress hosting, Dedicated Server hosting and a few others at vastly different rates. A lot of web hosts like HostGator try to woo new customers with low prices. DigitalOcean is not a very big fan of this approach. In fact, DigitalOcean has a completely unique pricing system, the likes only offered by CloudWays (check out CloudWays versus SiteGround comparison).

HostGator has a traditional plan and annual or monthly payment plan. DigitalOcean does not have such. The company uses a form of after monthly payment system. In which case, the bill for your services last month will be sent to your mail at the beginning of the next month. That’s like the best pricing and money-back guarantee policy wrapped into one.

What’s more? They only charge you for the services you use. Where HostGator will give you everything you may need or not need at a price, DigitalOcean only charges you based on what you used. No wasted money or services, no additional costs.

Shared Hosting:

HostGator, like most Web-hosts, has three shared hosting plans. These are the Hatchling Plan, the Baby Plan, and the Business plan.

Tier 1:

The Hatchling plan costs $2.75 per month (with a 60% discount). However, much like all the other HostGator plans, this price is only available if you’re paying three years in advance. If you’re paying for lower than three years, you have to pay the regular price which is $10.95. After the first three years, you can renew the plan at $6.95 per month. This means that you’re looking at a honeymoon period of three years. After that, you’re on your own. You should perhaps consider whether or not you can afford the renewal fee before purchasing a plan, if not you’ll be forced to pay through your nose or move to another Web-host after three years. It comes with these features:

• A single domain.
• One-click installations.
• Unlimited disk space.
• Unlimited email accounts.
• Unmetered bandwidth and subdomains.
• A free SSL certificate.

Tier 2:

The second plan is the Baby plan, it costs a discount fee of $3.95 per month. The real monthly fee is $11.95 and renewals cost $9.95, as well. It comes with the following features: Unlimited domains, a free domain, all the features of the Hatchling plan.

Tier 3:

The third is the Business plan and it comes with all the features of the Baby plan plus a free dedicated IP and free SEO tools. The plan costs $5.95 per month, but renewal costs $14.95 per month. If you plan on paying per month, you best be ready to fork out $16.95 per month.

VPS Hosting:

Apart from their shared hosting plans, HostGator has another branch of plans called HostGator cloud hosting.

Snappy 2000 at $29.95/month. Included With hosting:

• CPU: 2 Cores.
• RAM: 2 GB.
• Disk Space: 120 GB.
• Bandwidth: 1.5 TB.
• IP Addresses: 2 IPs.

Extras: Advanced server features, multiple layers of security, cutting-edge server hardware, top of the line network

Snappy 4000 at $39.95/month, Included with hosting:

• CPU: 2 Cores.
• RAM: 4 GB.
• Disk Space: 165 GB.
• Bandwidth: 2 TB.
• IP Addresses: 2 IPs.
• Plus every extra that comes with Snappy 2000.

Snappy 8000 at $49.95/month. Included with hosting:

• CPU: 4 Cores.
• RAM: 8 GB.
• Disk Space: 240 GB.
• Bandwidth: 3 TB.
• IP Addresses: 2 IPs.
• Plus every extra that comes with Snappy 2000.

As the king of VPS hosting, DigitalOcean VPS hosting consists of a record of 9 different plans. All droplet plans come with solid-state drives (SSD) as standard. For the latest and up to date prices visit DigitalOcean’s website (it keeps changing).

Plan Name.   monthly price.

Cloud 1.          5.00

Cloud 2.         10.00

Cloud 3.         20.00

Cloud 4.         40.00

Cloud 5.         80.00

Cloud 6.         160.00

Cloud 7.         320.00

Cloud 8.         480.00

Cloud 9.         640.00

Standard plans offer a range of 1 to 4 servers and memory of 512 MB to 8 GB. The TB transfer rate starts at 1 with a maximum of 5 with respect to the plan you are going for, while the SSD disk space starts at 20 GB and ends at 80GB.

For a measly $5, the most popular plan (Cloud 1) offers 1 GB memory, 1 core processor, 30 GB SSD disk, and 2TB bandwidth transfer. But HostGator’s cheapest VPS plan, Snappy 2000 goes for a hefty $29.95/month and it offers 2 CPU Cores, 2GB RAM, disk space of 120 GB, bandwith 1.5 TB, and 2 IPs. There is not much difference.

Granted, on DigitalOcean’s simplest plan, it’s difficult to setup Nginx, PHP7.1, MariaDB and WordPress on a $5 droplet without running out of RAM, which leads to crashes. A simple upgrade that would still be cheaper than HostGator’s simplest plan will fix that.

We know one thing that’s certain; the HostGator cloud hosting plans are way better than the shared hosting plan. But they are also more expensive than other web hosting providers VPS plans and offer considerably lower value for money compared to their DigitalOcean equivalents.

DigitalOcean customers are billed for their actual usage alone and this makes sure that you do not spend on features you do not need or periods you are inactive. You can also pay per hour, and pay-after-use, i.e the payment for last month is on the first day of every month.

They also have a monthly cap that prevents you from spending or using more than you planned or requested.

Which VPS plan would we opt for? That’s simple, DigitalOcean. It’s cheap, powerful and we don’t have to pay for what we don’t use. Boom, done, solved it for you. Let’s go get pizza.

Hidden charges:

Generally, HostGator plans including the cloud hosting plans, have exactly the same problem. Whiplash inducing hidden charges. We won’t teach them how to host, and they won’t teach us how to review. But if they think they can sneak this past us, they are wrong. This is because we’ve reviewed Web-hosts that do not need to pull this “marketing tactic” including the web host that they are going up against; DigitalOcean. Check out our 1&1 IONOS review for other web hosts with transparent pricing.

DigitalOcean is one-of-a-kind in a sea of web hosts. A web host that doesn’t rely on upsells and renewal hikes. We didn’t even know they were allowed to do that.

Money-back Policy:

Generally speaking, since we all want the longest period to check out the performance of a Web-host, the Web-host with the longer money-back guarantee period wins. The industry standard is 30-days, and that is what DigitalOcean offers. We’ve however seen a lot of Web-hosts go beyond 30-days. We’ve even seen one go as far as 97-days. (check out our DreamHost versus InMotion comparison to see the two web hosts with 90+ money-back policies) Amazing, right?

Extras of HostGator and DigitalOcean

All Web-hosts (or most, some are utterly ordinary) have that extra features that makes them stand out. Let us see if these Web-hosts have any interesting extra features.

For HostGator, we could find the following;

HostGator Features plus Extras:

• Affordable plans.
• Windows hosting options.
• $100 in free advertising credits.
• Unlimited FTP and email accounts.
• Unlimited disk space and bandwidth.
• Green power servers (eco-conscious).
• HostGator has only one database— MySQL
• Better uptime and money-back guarantees.
• Access to Google analytics and Mojo marketplace.
• Support of multiple languages including Ruby on Rails, PHP, Python, and Perl.
• Better performance with Opteron 6000 series CPU combined with DDR3 ECC RAM.

DigitalOcean extras are:

• IPv6 support.
• DigitalOcean offers “Floating IPs,” where IP addresses can be quickly redefined.
• If a droplet fails, its IP can be reassigned to a standby droplet to keep the app running.
• You only pay for the machines you use, this saves cost and makes them popular with startups.
• DigitalOcean offers one-click apps for droplets which include: MySQL, Docker, LAMP stack, MongoDB, Node.js, WordPress, PhpMyAdmin, Ruby On Rails, Ghost, Machine Learning.

Similarities between HostGator and DigitalOcean

• They both give SSL certificates.
• They both utilize drag-and-drop tools.
• They both do not have free plans.
• They both have great uptime.
• Both have 99.9%uptime guarantees.
• Neither has a free automatic backup and restore system.
• Both offer SSH access with all their VPS hosting plans.
• Both allow easy collaboration, although DigitalOcean does it better than HostGator by making it easy for teams to collaborate in building DigitalOcean-enabled apps. To ensure security, DigitalOcean allows collaborators to work together without sharing credentials. They will also be billed on a single invoice.

Major Differences between HostGator and DigitalOcean

• DigitalOcean is faster.
• HostGator is more popular.
• HostGator has a much better support system.
• DigitalOcean has staging, HostGator does not.
• HostGator is a domain registrar, DigitalOcean is not.
• HostGator comes with in-built CDN, DigitalOcean does not.
• HostGator has cPanel. DigitalOcean has DigitalOcean control panel.
• HostGator crumbles under heavy Traffic, DigitalOcean stays strong.
• HostGator has 45 days money-back policy, while DigitalOcean only has 30 days.
• DigitalOcean does not provide free email, HostGator does, depending on your plan.
• HostGator gives you a lot of control, with DigitalOcean, you control everything.
• DigitalOcean can host anything from websites to game servers. HostGator only hosts websites.
• HostGator has multiple layers of security but it also allows you to seek third party protection. DigitalOcean lets you secure yourself.

Conclusion

HostGator is a multipurpose web solution: it is a domain registrar, web host, and has a web design and website builder tools at pocket-friendly prices. They have an above-average money-back guarantee and customer support. It is good all round for bloggers, Joomla, WordPress and all niches that are related. DigitalOcean is targeted towards developers who know what they want. Steve Jobs may dislike Wix, but he’ll absolutely adore DigitalOcean.

Let’s talk about prices:

One thing you need to know about DigitalOcean’s plans generally is that it is flexible, complicated and transparent at the same time, but if you know how to navigate the complexities, it is very cheap. HostGator is cheaper with tons of discounts all year round. To fully enjoy HostGator’s discounts, you need to subscribe for 3 years at a time. Pre-paying for a full year is not a bad thing or out of the norm. But if you are unsure about your project length, monthly plans such as those offered by HostGator can be worthwhile.

Not to mention, the web host is easy to use for every Tom, Dick, and Harry.

For us, HostGator wins this match-up. Mainly because it’s easier to use, has superior support and has a cheap shared hosting plan. I have seen first-hand situations where even experienced developers complained about DigitalOcean’s confusing mechanism, with bad support and that’s not a situation we want our readers to find themselves in.

DigitalOcean vs HostGator? The hosting ground remains the gator’s territory.

HostGator vs. HostMonster sounds like the title of a Hollywood 90’s flick where a gator that lives in a city named Host goes against a monster that lives in the same city. And then, in the end, we discover that the real monster is the city’s mayor.

Or not.

HostGator and HostMonster are two of the most popular web hosts on the internet. We are yet to see a top ten list of most popular hosts that don’t have either or both hosts on it. But which host is better?

We bought plans from both hosts to find out. We tested both platforms and came to some really revealing information, and some of the things we found out defied everything we previously knew about both hosts. At the end of our testing, we’ll give a verdict and decide the host that we think offers the most value.

However, you do not have to accept our verdict. You can come to your own conclusion, and the important thing is that you’ll have all the information you to come to an informed decision.

HostMonster vs. HostGator Overview

HostGator and HostMonster were both founded in the United States, with HostMonster founded by Matt Heaton in 1996, and HostGator founded by Brent Oxley in 2002. HostMonster is the less popular sibling of Bluehost and has many of the same features of Bluehost.

HostGator, on the other hand, is a much bigger company despite being younger than HostMonster. By 2006, HostGator had surpassed the 200,000 mark, that is, in just four years, the host had managed to register more than two hundred thousand domains.

In 2015, HostMonster managed to be acquired by EIG, five years after the same company had bought Bluehost. Coincidentally, the same company also acquired HostGator. While some say that companies owned by EIG (and there are quite a lot of them) don’t usually do so great in terms of performance, hosts like Bluehost have shattered that assumption. You can check how HostGator stacks up to Bluehost in our Bluehost vs. HostGator comparison if you want.

The business model of HostMonster and HostGator are verily similar. They both offer Dedicated, VPS and Shared Server Hosting. In addition, unlike companies like WP Engine that command a premium fee, both hosts offer great specs at the lowest prices. Well, not exactly the lowest prices, that title goes to NameCheap. Let’s get right into it. You can check out our Namecheap vs. HostGator comparison if you’d like to.

The Popularity of the Two Hosts

Both hosts may be really popular, but HostGator is clearly the more popular host, despite being the younger company. Does it really does not matter which host is more popular, though? It certainly doesn’t matter to us, and it shouldn’t matter to you.

Popularity says very little about the quality of the service you’re getting. It does say a lot about the effectiveness of the quality of the host’s marketing department, though. Since that shouldn’t be of great importance to you, what truly matters?

HostGator vs. HostMonster for Performance

We’ll be testing the performance of both hosts with speed and uptime, which are both very important metrics.

Uptime

How did we test for uptime? Simple. By buying plans from both hosts, setting up, and using tools like Pingdom to test for uptime. We tested both hosts over a three month period and here are our results;

Our tests show one thing clearly, the Gator is certainly up, on average, for longer than the Monster. While an average uptime of 99.95% isn’t the worst thing in the world, an average uptime of 99.99% is definitely better.

Uptime Guarantee Policy

We don’t like to base our judgment of a host’s uptime only on uptime statistics. We also like to check out uptime guarantees to know what happens when uptime does get bad. For HostMonster, the answer is simple, there is no uptime guarantee. Although, on their website, they promise that downtime is fixed within fifteen minutes. But that’s just it, a promise. And those are regularly broken.

HostGator, on the other hand, offers a 99.9% uptime guarantee. That is, users get a free month of hosting for every percent of downtime experienced below 99.9%. Definitely better than a fifteen minutes promise from HostMonster, wouldn’t you say?

Speed Comparison

Before checking out the speed of both hosts, let’s check out two factors that affect load speed and response time. The first is whether or not hosts have CDN support.

CDN

Content Delivery Networks allows versions of your site to be saved on servers all around the world and helps deliver better speed. HostGator and HostMonster both come with CDN support, but you’ll have to activate it from your control panel.

Datacenters

The same logic that applies to CDN applies to datacenters. Datacenters spread across the world will certainly deliver better speed that one just set on one continent. Unfortunately, both hosts only have data centers in the US.

(show a diagram of the datacenters of both hosts)

Speed is vital in today’s world, and as such, it is important to create and maintain your site on servers that prioritize speed. We went to work with our test tools and checked the TTFB (time to the first byte) of both hosts. In our calculations, we also factored in speed from different locations. Here is a snapshot of our results:

On average, HostGator had a 781ms response time, which isn’t really impressive. HostMonster didn’t perform that well either, with an average response time of 841ms. Unfortunately, both hosts post quite average response times. There are hosts definitely faster, and a good example of such hosts is A2 Hosting. You can check out how A2 Hosting compares to HostGator in our dedicated comparison.

Load Impact test

Not satisfied with our tests, we decided to check the performance of both hosts under traffic by sending virtual users to our sites. As we expected, page load speed was not stable and decidedly got worse as traffic increased.

(diagram of speed getting worse for both hosts)

It’s simply not good enough.

HostGator vs. HostMonster for Ease of Use

It’s important that the company you eventually go with provides service that is easy to understand through a great interface. It is also important that the host helps, as much as possible, to make your task easier.

User Interface

The first place to start is the user interface. When it comes to interface, the best choice, in our opinion, is cPanel or Plesk. HostGator and HostMonster share this opinion with us, and as such, both have cPanel installed on their Shared Hosting plans.

Sign-Up process

Signing up for both hosts was easy, but we had a problem with HostGator. It took a while for us to have access to the workspace that we had paid for, it took as long as thirty minutes.

Whether the payment was being confirmed or whether extra verification was being done is a question we don’t have an answer to. We scoured the internet for similar stories, but we found none, so it probably was a one-off thing. If you experience such a delay, you shouldn’t be worried.

Free Domains

Most hosts provide a free included domain on all plans, and since a year’s registration costs about $15, you’ll save some money if you go with a host that does provide free domain registration. Thankfully, HostMonster and HostGator have that in common. Free domains come with all plans.

Apps Integration, Installation and Marketplace

In this regard, we hardly saw a difference between HostMonster and HostGator. Both have one-click Installation support for WordPress, both have access to the MOJO marketplace where you can purchase templates, themes, plug-ins, and apps. Both support other popular content management systems like Joomla, Drupal, and Magneto.

Free Site Migration

In our opinion, for a new customer, all hosts should provide at least one free site migration. Unfortunately, that isn’t the case, and there are many hosts who, in fact, do not offer free web transfer services. One of such hosts in HostMonster.

While you can move your site over to HostMonster for free using FTP, it is a technical task that might not be worth your time, especially when there are other hosts who’ll do the same service for you, for free. HostGator is one of such hosts, and depending on your hosting plan, you are entitled to at least a free web transfer.

You must note, though, that HostGator’s web transfers are performed on an “as is” basis. That means you are entitled to only a web transfer, and all other related services are not offered for free. If you’d like HostMonster to transfer your site for you, you’d have to pay $149.99 and that entitles you to a transfer of five sites and 20 email accounts.

Website Builder

If you don’t want to have your site hosted on a content management system and want to build it yourself, you can make use of a website builder instead of going through needless lines of code. While most hosts make use of third party solutions such as Wix and/or Weebly website builder, HostGator has a proprietary website builder named (and this is definitely not a joke) Gator by HostGator.

Do we applause the genius of the name or do we deplore it? The Jury is still out. What we can’t deplore, though, is the usefulness of Gator by HostGator. It has drag and drop support, so you can set up your site within minutes.

We’ve used the Gator before, so we can tell you that it is one of the more efficient website builders out there. Users have access to 100 mobile-friendly templates and can start with 6 ready-made pages. It has social media integration, PayPal payment gateway, Google analytics, and social media integration. For an inbuilt app, Gator by HostGator isn’t half bad. However, this tool isn’t free and packages range from $3.45 to $8.30.

HostMonster, on the other hand, offers two choices of web builders. That is the Weebly website builder, and Concrete5.  Both web builders are great for building as they have drag and drop functionality. While Weebly isn’t quite as flexible as Wix and/or Squarespace, it is definitely easier to use. Both web builders are also search engine optimized as well.

Weebly is free to use, but you can only have six pages on the free version. For more functionality, you’ll be required to buy a package with more functionality.

Staging Environments

For a green user, there is probably nothing that will be as useful as a staging environment. Staging environments allow you to make changes to a version of your site that is not live. This way, you can see the effects that your changes and configurations choices will make on the site without actually making them on your live site.

This helps you to avoid making costly mistakes that can lead to long periods of downtime. While it is possible for you to create staging environments with some plugins and also on subdomains, it is easier if they come with your hosting plan. With HostMonster, you get absolutely zero installed staging sites and HostGator doesn’t either. That sucks.

Money-Back Guarantee Policy

Money-back guarantees are important because they reduce the risks that users are exposed to. While most hosts offer an industry-standard thirty days money-back guarantee, we believe that the best hosts often offer longer. At least we’ve seen hosts like DreamHost that offer a stunning 97-day money-back guarantee. You can check out our DreamHost vs. HostGator comparison if you want.

HostMonster offers only a thirty-day money-back guarantee, which is absolutely the lowest they could have gone. HostGator, on the other hand, adds fifteen days and makes it a forty-five-day money-back guarantee. While a forty-five-day money-back guarantee is certainly not the best we’ve seen, it is certainly longer than many.

Limitations

As usual, there are some terms and conditions. The first is that if you’ve gotten a free service, like a free domain, the fee will be deducted from your refund. Not so free anymore, is it?

HostGator vs. HostMonster: Customer Support and Reliability

Many times, great customer support can be the difference between pulling your hair out in frustration and heaving a sigh of relief. Great support is easy to contact, easy to talk to, and extremely helpful.

HostGator and HostMonster are pretty popular and large companies, and as such, we have to confess that we didn’t expect great things from their customer support. Why? Large companies often have too many customers to cater to, and as such may not spend enough time training personnel. And there’s also the matter of EIG companies being notorious for having inconsistent customer support.

Customer Support Channels

HostMonster and HostGator have regular customer support channels which are the phone, live chat, and ticketing support. All channels are open 24/7.

Testing Support

We first decided to test the live chat channel because of obvious reasons. Most people use that channel, and it is clear of many ambiguities. The first thing we discovered was that, on average, it took us a shorter period to connect to HostMonster’s customer support than it took us to connect to HostGator’s.

When we eventually connected, the quality of customer support was more or less the same. The live reps that we spoke to were cordial enough, and to some extent looked like they knew what they were talking about.

However, some questions still took a long time to answer and we were not exactly inspired. On a whole, it wasn’t a bad experience and was definitely better than many that we’ve had contact with over the years, at least we weren’t mesmerized with a bunch of article links.

You should probably be aware, though, that HostMonster has a somewhat lengthy verification process before you can connect with a live chat representative.

Phone support was more of the same, and as with the live chat support, we found that connecting to customer support was quicker with HostMonster than it was with HostGator.

Ticketing support with both hosts was great, as tickets are returned and queries are answered comprehensively within 24 hours.

Knowledge Base

Both hosts maintain great knowledge bases where users can search for answers to basic questions and go through tutorials. We would advise, in fact, that users go through tutorials or articles before attempting to speak to customer support. It is many times a more effective way of solving problems.

Security Infrastructure

The internet is a wonderful place, and it can also be a scary one. Any webmaster knows that making sure that your site is continually secure is perhaps one of the most important things to figure out when creating a site. While a lot of the responsibility of keeping your site secure lies in your hands (making sure you update your plugins and apps etc.), your host also has a lot of work to do. In fact, recent studies suggest that up to 40% of site hacks are as a result of weak server infrastructure.

SSL certificate

In the beginning, people only got SSL certificates for e-commerce websites. Today, though, the best practice is for you to have an SSL certificate regardless of what sort of site you have. In fact, Chrome will mark your site as insecure if you do not have “s” behind your “HTTP”. That will wreak some serious damage on your numbers for sure.

Thankfully, HostMonster and HostGator plan come with free SSL certificates from Let’s Encrypt, so that is covered.

Backup Policy

In case your site does get hacked or gets a virus, and you have to clear out the entire system, your backups are your only saving Grace. HostGator has a backup service that runs on a random day of every week. The backup overwrites previous backups as only one copy of the backup is stored on HostGator’s servers. Fair warning, though, HostGator’s backups are created as a matter of courtesy and aren’t guaranteed.

This means that keeping running a backup is sort of up to them. They can pretty much choose not to because they have literally zero obligation to. HostMonster’s backup policy is also somewhat like HostGator’s, with only one version of backups stored. And like HostGator, HostMonster only offers backups on a courtesy basis.

So what do you have to do to get mirrored, daily and automatic backups? Easy. You’re expected to purchase a backup tool like CodeGuard basic or Site Backup and configure it. Both tools are safer options than the custom backups provided by either host.

Firewall Protection

HostGator offers extensive Firewall protection with extensive firewall rules and large security sets that help protect servers from attacks from malware and mischievous entities. In case of heavy flooding, HostGator has network-level flood protection that can be easily enabled.

In addition, HostGator’s data centers are highly secured with extremely restricted access and have diesel backed up generators. HostMonster, on the other hand, runs a Web Application Firewall that protects against SQL injection and cross-site scripting based attacks.

Site Security

HostGator offers access to SiteLock, a third party advanced warning and malware scanning security application, from as little as $1.94. HostMonster also makes use of SiteLock, and as a HostMonster customer, you get up to 80% off on all of SiteLock’s packages.

HostGator vs. HostMonster: Pricing and Plans

To some, this is the most important consideration to look at when trying to buy a hosting plan. However, we won’t just be looking at the cheapest host, we’ll be looking at the host that offers the best value at the best price.

Shared Hosting Plans

A majority of the sites on the internet are hosted on Shared Hosting servers, that much is a fact. Therefore, we’ll be looking, specifically, at the prices of Shared Hosting plans and managed WordPress plans.

HostGator has three tiers of Shared Hosting plans which are the Hatchling Plan, the Baby Plan, and the Business plan, while HostMonster also has three tiers which are the Basic, Plus, and Choice-Plus.

Basic Shared Hosting Plan

HostGator’s basic plan is the Hatchling plan and it costs about $2.75 per month and renews at $10.95. The plan comes with single domain registration, one website, unlimited disk space, unlimited email accounts, unmetered bandwidth and subdomains, and a free SSL certificate. At $2.75, unlimited disk space, email accounts and bandwidth is great value for money, that’s for sure.

HostMonster’s basic plan costs $2.65 per month and renews at $9.49. The plan comes with one website, 50GB storage, unmetered bandwidth, one domain, 5 email accounts, and 100 MB of email storage.

It’s clear that, for the basic plan, HostGator obviously offers more, and at a relatively lower price as well. Regardless, we do think that HostMonster’s plan comparable to HostGator’s despite the gator’s enviable specs because, for one, it is extremely unlikely that a single website can use up 50 GB of space. However, we would still go with HostGator’s plan if we had to choose one.

Medium Range Plan

The medium-range plan for HostMonster is the Plus plan and it comes with ten websites, 150 GB of storage, 20 parked domains and 50 subdomains, 100 email accounts with 500mb of storage per account, and unmetered bandwidth.

Staying in line with HostMonster’s pricing philosophy, the plan costs $4.95 per month and renews at $12.49 per month. At $4.95, the Plus plan is pretty cheap. However, you might have to consider the fact that it costs $12.49 to renew. That’s almost as two hundred percent hike. Steep.

For HostGator, the medium-range plan is the Baby plan (which is weird for all manner of reasons) and would set you back just about $3.95 per month. Renewal costs $9.95 though.

For this price, the plan comes with unlimited domains, a free domain plus all the features of the Hatchling plan. So basically, all you’re paying extra for is unlimited websites, which is a pretty big deal. But after your first subscription, you’ll have to pay $9.95 which puts everything in a whole different perspective.

Comparing the two, it’s easy to see that HostGator offers more value both at the initial purchase stage and the renewal stage.

High Range Plan

HostMonster’s most expensive plan is the Choice-Plus plan and it comes with unlimited websites, storage, bandwidth, subdomains, parked domains, Spam protection, 1 domain privacy, CodeGuard Basic, and one free domain.

It costs the same initial price of the Plus plan, which is $6.95 ($14.99 for renewal). For the level of specs that this plan comes with, $6.95 is a veritable bargain. But is $14.99 such a bargain? In any case, the price hike is too high, and you may find yourself paying double for the same service in a short period.

HostGator’s most expensive plan, as expected, pulls out all the stops as well (although one wonders what stops can actually be pulled). The plan comes with all the features of the Baby Plan plus a free dedicated IP and free SEO tools.

The plan costs $5.95 per month (renewal costs $14.95 per month). Here we see yet another steep price hike. The lower price draws you in and gets you comfortable. The reality of paying almost 200 bucks per year soon dawns on you, though.

Even here, where it is a bit difficult to choose a clear winner, HostGator emerges the host with the best price. Women lie, men, lie, but numbers don’t lie.

WordPress Hosting Plan

One thing that makes a WordPress plan stand out is that it comes with WordPress pre-installed, which is sort of, well, needless, as you can always install WordPress with one click on a Shared Hosting plan. That isn’t the only thing, though. WordPress plans are optimized for WordPress users, so they are usually faster, are more stable during traffic surges and have better uptime overall. In addition, with the managed WordPress hosting plan, the host actually helps you manage your site.

This means dealing with all the technical jargon that comes with updates and so much more. While HostGator has a special WordPress plan, HostMonster doesn’t, so we’ll be looking only at HostGator’s WordPress plans.

Basic WordPress Hosting Plan

HostGator’s least expensive WordPress Hosting plan is the Starter plan and comes with one website, a hundred thousand visitors per month,  one gigabyte of backups, a free SL certificate and free domains. It costs $5.95 for new customers who would like to purchase an annual plan.

After the first period, though, the plan renews at $9.95. There is sort of a recurring theme here, and we’d advise long-term users to always check the renewal price of plans, and as much as possible, plan their budget with this price in mind.

Medium range WordPress Hosting Plan

After the Starter plan comes the Standard plan and it comes with standard features such as two websites, two hundred thousand visits per month, two GB backup space, a free SSL certificate and a free domain. The plan costs $7.95 and renewal costs about $15.95, clearly significantly more expensive than the regular Shared Hosting plan.

Since the medium-range WordPress Hosting plan costs more than the most expensive Shared Hosting plan, the question is, does it worth that much, especially when comes with only two websites? You’re the only one with a concrete idea of your needs, so you’re in the best position to answer that question.

High Range WordPress Hosting Plan

HostGator most expensive managed WordPress Plan is the Business Plan and it comes with 3 websites, a capacity of 500 thousand visits per month, 3 GB of backups, a free domain and free SSL certificate.

The plan costs $9.95 per month for an initial annual plan purchase, and renewal costs $22.95. In a space of a year, you could go from paying around $120 per year to paying about $270 per year, and that tells you all you need to know, really.

HostGator vs. HostMonster Extra features

HostGator has the following extra features:

• Better performance with Opteron 6000 series CPU combined with DDR3 ECC RAM
• Support of multiple languages including Ruby on Rails, PHP, Python, and Perl.
• HostGator has only one database: MySQL
• Unlimited FTP and email accounts.
• $100 in free advertising credits.

HostMonster has the following extra features:

• Instant provisioning is enabled, so if you plan to go for VPS hosting or Dedicated hosting, they promise instant provisioning of their servers. That’s important if you want to get your site online in minutes. You won’t have to go through the stress of lengthy verification processes with HostMonster.
• Unfortunately, HostMonster doesn’t offer monthly hosting.
• You have access to developer features such as FTP access, SSH access, MySQL databases, custom Cron jobs, and CGI-Bin.
• All hosting plans come with a limit of 1000 total database tables, 3GB total database size, and 200,000 inodes.
• The host offers hotlink protection, Secure Shell (SSH) access, AllowOverride .htaccess support, Server Side Includes (SSI)
• Dual Quad Processor Performance servers

Major Differences between HostGator and HostMonster

• HostGator has a forty-five-day money-back guarantee while HostMonster only has a thirty-day money-back guarantee.
• HostGator has a managed WordPress hosting plan, while HostMonster does not.
• HostGator has way better uptime than HostMonster
• HostGator has a money-back guarantee, while HostMonster doesn’t have one
• HostGator is definitely more popular than HostMonster.

HostMonster vs. HostGator: Our Winner

We thought that this would be somewhat difficult because both hosts are alike in so many ways, but the fact that HostMonster only won in one category tells us otherwise. The gator in this 90s flick definitely served (served because of server, you get it?) the monster is behind on a plate. HostGator vs. HostMonster? The gator wins this one convincingly.

On the surface, it looks like a contest between a big burly man with great muscles, and a quick, skillful fighter. So basically, it’s Thanos Vs Spiderman all over again. HostGator is a popular Web-host with a lot of plans, and a lot of domains— over eight million of them. So you could say that HostGator packs a lot of muscle. A2 Hosting, on the other hand, could only dream of HostGator’s numbers. However, A2 hosting is known for incredible speed— making it into the top three of most “fastest” reviews online. However, asides speed and customer strength, let’s look at how both Web-hosts stack up on other parts of hosting.

Overview

HostGator was found way back in 2002, so it’s pretty old, although there are far older Web-hosts. The headquarters of the company is at Houston and their data-centers are located at Provo, Utah. In the first ten years of providing hosting service, HostGator built up a name and was known for its reliable service. The company was consequently acquired by EIG (Endurance  International Group), the conglomerate that owns basically half of the Web-hosts on the internet. While some say that this has reduced the quality of hosting that HostGator provides, we say that we have to check it out first to form an opinion, so that’s what we’ll do.

A2 hosting has started operations since 2001, so they are pretty old. Unlike HostGator, though, it has kept a relatively low profile. Like we said earlier, recently A2 hosting has invested in new technology and has now carved a niche for itself. With great customer care and developer-friendly plans, speed isn’t the only thing that A2 hosting is good at. Regardless, though, does A2 hosting measure up to the giant HostGator?

Popularity

Very few hosting providers are popular than HostGator— that’s how well known the Web-host is. And even though A2 hosting started in 2001, it still isn’t quite as popular as HostGator.

But does popularity matter, in the real sense? Personally, we’d prefer to make use of a small company that provides reliable and quick service, instead of the more popular ones that tend to have subpar customer support.

But you might want to go with the crowd. We just wouldn’t recommend it.

Performance

This is the crux of any hosting comparison and is one of the things to look out for in a prospective Web-host. You want to know how well their servers perform and how reliable they are. We are going to be measuring the speed and uptime of both Web-hosts to see exactly how they deliver.

Speed

A few milliseconds might make no difference to you, but those milliseconds add up and add your website’s SEO visibility. Slower websites don’t rank high on google searches, and it is obvious how low SEO could impact sales and conversion rates. So it is very important to make use of a fast Web-host— your bottom line at the end of the year might just depend on it.

We set to work by purchasing a basic HostGator plan. We tested response speeds consecutively and reached an average TTFB (Time To the first Byte) of 765ms. It’s lower than a second, quite alright, but is lower than almost half of the Web-hosts we’ve reviewed. In fact, an average response time of 765ms is probably next to average in our books. Full load speed was even slower, with our site often taking more than a second to reach full strength. Basically, if speed is your thing (and it should be), HostGator isn’t the best for you. However, HostGator has a far faster hosting option in HostGator cloud (a different plan from their shared hosting packages). The average speed for the cloud service was 432ms and we were really impressed. Load speed was really low too.

We also bought a basic A2 hosting plan and went to work testing it. A2 shared hosting plans generally get faster higher up, but since we bought the cheapest plan that we could find, we weren’t really sure that we would get to see the amazing speed that A2 hosting is known for. We were very wrong. Our dummy website delivered an average response time of 331ms. This isn’t only fast but it is super fast. A2 says that their turbo plans provide 20× better speed, but we think that that is quite impossible— we can’t imagine speeds 20× faster than the speed we got on our basic plan. The average load speed we measured was even more impressive, at 391ms. The word instantaneous comes to mind.

VERDICT; Even putting HostGator cloud service into consideration, HostGator doesn’t quite seem to catch up. A2 is really fast, and that’s that about that.

Uptime

The best speed is nothing without great uptime, just as the way acceleration is as important as direction.

We already had our dummy website set up, so we went to work with Pingdom and looked at uptime statistics. We recorded 99.99% uptime with HostGator, which was fair and the highest percentage any Web-host can guarantee. That isn’t all, though. We also like to look at whether a Web-host has an uptime guarantee or not. An uptime guarantee means that customers are entitled to some level of compensation if uptime gets worse than a certain level. This helps to hold Web-hosts to their word and allows customers to be compensated for subpar service. HostGator has a 99.9% uptime guarantee. This means that if HostGator’s uptime gets lower than 99.9%, customers are entitled to one month of credit. Don’t get your hopes up, though, we think it is very unlikely that such a situation would ever arise— HostGator’s uptime is just too good.

We’d really like to say A2 hosting backs up their great speed with impeccable uptime, but that would be wrong. A2 hosting often has long periods of downtime, with servers down for 4 hours in June 2018. During our testing period, it performed passably well, with an uptime of 99.96%. Even at that, it is still behind the industry-leading hosts such as HostGator or BlueHost. Like HostGator, A2 hosting also has a 99.9% uptime guarantee. There are two conditions where this guarantee doesn’t apply though;

• During scheduled maintenance
• When outages are because of circumstances that A2 hosting cannot control.

Customers are entitled to downtime compensation when downtime experienced is more than 0.1% of an entire month. The compensation gotten is service credit that is equal to 5% of the amount paid for that month. If downtime is higher than 0.1%, customers receive 5% credit for each hour that downtime is further experienced. To receive downtime compensation, your claim must be verified by A2 customer service.

VERDICT; HostGator has better uptime, while A2 hosting has better speed. Just as we expected, no surprise there.

Ease of Use

No one wants to rack their brains trying to figure out the easiest thing about a Web-host. Not beginners, not regular users, and not advanced users. Everyone, presumably, wants a level of ease guaranteed when controlling their website. Let’s see how easy these Web-hosts make managing domain names.

HostGator makes use of cPanel, so its user interface is pretty simple to use. cPanel isn’t only great because it is simple to use, it’s also great because it is the standard interface used by most Web-hosts. This means that new users will not have to get used to a different interface. The interface has direct access to most of the features that customers would need like billing, domain name management, plan details, and tech support. There is access to the Mojo marketplace, one-click installations support and access to Google analytics.

All plans come with free SSL certificates from Let’s Encrypt, so that’s one less upsell that customers have to pay for.  Plans also come with $100 worth of ad credits. New websites will find this invaluable. HostGator also has a proprietary website builder called Gator by HostGator (an apt name, perhaps), which is one of the best website builders we’ve reviewed. Gator by HostGator also has eCommerce support so new users don’t have to bother about setting up payment pathways, and all other technical stuff. There are also advanced features for advanced users to PHP, MySQL, and SSH. For users moving over from another Web-host, HostGator offers a single site free transfer service. This makes it easier for users changing Web-hosts to set up their accounts easily, without wedging a hole in their pocket.

Since not all Web-hosts have free site migrations, we were pretty impressed with HostGator. The user experience was sleek and easy, and we rarely had any reason to rack our heads to discover the use of something. We don’t think there are any webmasters who would find using HostGator difficult.

A2’s hosting backend looks, to us, somewhat outdated and could probably take some lessons from HostGator on being intuitive. They make use of cPanel too, and as typical of cPanel, it is really to use. A2 Hosting is very compatible with all content management systems. It has one-click installations so apps like WordPress, Joomla, Magneto, and Drupal can be installed with one click. There are also some special features that come with higher-tier plans like the A2 Optimized WordPress plugin that comes with Turbo plans. A2 hosting has a proprietary website builder called Sitebuilder (we are not entirely sure whether this simplicity is a stroke of genius or whether it shows an alarming lack of imagination). If you’re looking to customize your website yourself without having to know a single HTML tag, then A2 hosting features have got you. However, this service isn’t rendered for free. You have to pay to make use of A2 hosting’s Sitebuilder.  A2 hosting plans are also compatible with Cloudflare CDN. So speed will never ever be a problem with A2 hosting.

A2 Hosting is also known for packing, in its plans, developer-friendly tools that offer admin-level access to webmasters. You have access to multiple versions of MySQL, PostgreSQL, Python, and ASP.NET.

A2 hosting also offers free Site migration.

VERDICT; It really comes down to personal experience, and having bought the plans of both Web-hosts, we can say that we have experienced both. HostGator impressed us with a clean interface and intuitive backend. A2’s backend, though, was cluttered and somewhat unappealing. HostGator takes this us for us.

Money-Back Policy

We’ve all been there. We’ve all bought something that we wished we hadn’t. We’ve all that feeling of regret. We’ve all wished that there was something to be done— some way of getting a refund. And above all, we’ve all wished that something like that never happens to us again.

Money-back policies are a lifesaver, and generally, it’s the longer the better. The industry standard for Web-hosts is 30 days, but HostGator does one better— or fifteen ones better, with a 45-day money-back policy. It isn’t much, but it’s honest work. We are usually impressed by anything above average, and a 45-day money-back policy is truly impressive.

What is more impressive that a 45-day money-back policy, though? 50 days? 60 days? Double 45 days and round up at 95 days? 100 days? 200?

Wrong.

A2 hosting has an impressive “anytime” money-back policy. So even if you pay for a three-year plan in advance and after a year get pissed off by the type of performance you’re getting, you can request for a refund and get prorated refunds. That is, you get a refund equal to the remaining term of your plan. As usual, there are non-refundable payments like payments made for “free additional services” like domain names, etc.

VERDICT; A2 hosting blows HostGator straight out of the water with its “anytime money-back” policy. A2 hosting takes this one for us.

Customer Support

Customer support is one of the most important things to look at when considering choosing a Web-host. This is because, no matter how great you are at web hosting, or how bad you are, or how simple your needs may be, the chances of you needing the help of support is very high. When the day comes, as it is more than likely that it will, you won’t want to be advised by people who are even less qualified than you are. You’d want to be able to access support quickly, and more importantly, you’d want to access support that can actually help you.

HostGator offers 24/7 phone, chat and email support. Most people prefer making use of the live chat channel, so we decided to check that out first. On our first few tries, we got connected to a live rep in a relatively short period of time. However, and this did not happen very often, we were sometimes forced to wait for more than twenty minutes before getting a hold of a live rep. It got dicier when we actually got talking to the reps we contacted. Some were quite knowledgeable and answered our questions well, while some had to take their time. For us, it was more like a gamble; you could be lucky to connect to a customer rep who can solve your problem effectively, and you may be unlucky as well. There is really no method to the Russian roulette that is HostGator’s customer support.

A2 hosting offers everything from a phone to a Skype to a  live chat to a ticketing platform and they are all available 24/7. There is also a very instructive and easy to understand knowledge base that ensures that users rarely have the need to speak to an actual live rep. There is a search function on the knowledge base that allows you to search for solutions to difficulties easily. A2 hosting calls their customer support the “Gurus crew”, and we were really interested in seeing how efficient this group of gurus would be. To a large extent, we weren’t disappointed. As we did with Hostgator, we tried contacting their live chat platform first and got connected with a live rep in less than five minutes. Unlike with Hostgator, this time was pretty stable. Once we got a hold of the live reps, we asked them questions and they were friendly, and very knowledgeable too. The story was the same on the other channels we tried. In fact, we only see one room for improvement in A2 hosting’s customer support and that is wait-time. Asides that, we don’t have the tiniest criticism. Our experience was almost perfect.

VERDICT; As a rule, we try not to depend too much on customer support. This is because so many Web-hosts do not see customer support as an area to invest in. It was refreshing to see A2 hosting take a different path, though. A2 hosting wins this one.

Security

All Web-hosts take security seriously— presumably. The only difference is if you’re forced to pay for extra security features and whatnot. What of backups? Are they regular and free? In the case of a hack or a virus attack, what measures are in place to help or protect the customer from further attacks? A Web-host with great security, in the end, will save you a lot of money and even if you never get attacked by hackers or viruses, it is comforting that whatever happens, your website is in safe hands. All Web-hosts provide the bare minimum security,  but the best go above and beyond. Let’s see how above and beyond these two Web-hosts are willing to go.

HostGator provides free SSL certificates from Let’s Encrypt on all plans, so that’s one less thing customers have to worry about. There is Codeguard basic too, for extra security, but that only comes free with higher-tier plans. Folks on basic plans have to pay $2 for access to this security feature. It comes with 1GB daily backups for a maximum of five websites. The feature also acts like a malware scanner. HostGator also allows customers to add Sitelock monitoring to their sites. This service works by looking for potential breaches and reporting on then so that they can be fixed quickly. They also offer the services of the Spam assassin feature on email plans to allow users to secure their emails from spams and suspicious-looking emails. HostGator is secure from DDoS attacks via UDP flood. There’s also an extensive firewall put in place to secure their servers from various kinds of attacks. So, in the case of heavy flooding, HostGator’s servers are protected. On HostGator’s website, they say they use additional “confidential methods” to protect their servers. Whether that is just a marketing tactic, we wouldn’t know. But seeing that, in recent times, HostGator hasn’t experienced massive security breaches, they must be doing something right.

A2 hosting has HackScan, a virus scanning service that scans for viruses 24 hours a day. There also have scalable data centers, which means that your servers are protected in case of DDoS attacks. Free SSL certificates from Let’s Encrypt are also provided on basic plans so that’s one extra layer of protection that users don’t have to pay for. A2 Hosting customers also receive free KernelCare, a feature that automatically runs rebootless Kernel updates daily. There’s also an optimized plug-in for WordPress that auto-hardens websites and prevents hacks. The plug-in comes with a unique WordPress login URL, reCAPTCHA and automatic WordPress updates. Other aspects of A2 hosting’s security include a firewall, brute-defense force, and virus scanning. A2 hosting also provides automatic backups, and you can also backup your data offsite with the addition of a plug-in to your site. This service, though, isn’t free.

VERDICT; A2 hosting provides free automatic backups, and that is really all we need to know. They win this one for us.

Pricing

We don’t know about you, but whenever we want to buy something, the first questions (or one of the first questions we ask, at any rate) is whether we can afford it. Or whether it is worth the $ signs we are forking out for it. And most times, if the answer to those kinda questions is negative, we end up not purchasing that product.

It doesn’t change with Web-hosting plans. You don’t just want to overpay for a service that isn’t worth it. You want to pay exactly the price that the value offered is worth— and more importantly, perhaps, you don’t want to pay more for a service that another provider is offering for less. So let’s see which Web-host gives the most value for the lowest price

To make it easier to compare, we’re going to be looking at only the shared hosting plans that they have to offer.

HostGator, like most Web-hosts, has three shared hosting plans. These are the Hatchling Plan, the Baby Plan, and the Business plan.  The Hatchling plan comes with the following features

• A single domain,
• One-click installations,
• Unlimited disk space,
• Unlimited email accounts,
• Unmetered bandwidth and subdomains,
• A free SSL certificate

The plan costs $2.75 per month (with a 60% discount) However, this price is only available if you’re paying three years in advance. If you’re paying for lower than three years, you have to pay the regular price which is $10.95. After the first three years, you can renew the plan at $6.95 per month. This means that you’re looking at a honeymoon period of three years. After that, you’re on your own. You should perhaps consider whether or not you can afford the renewal fee before purchasing a plan, if not you’ll be forced to pay through your nose or move to another Web-host after three years.

The second plan is the Baby plan and it comes with the following features

• Unlimited domains, a free domain
• All the features of the Hatchling plan.

It costs a discount fee of $3.95 per month. However, the same conditions as with the Hatchling plan applies. The real monthly fee is $11.95 and renewals cost $9.95, as well.

The next is the Business plan and it comes with all the features of the Baby plan plus a free dedicated IP and free SEO tools. The plan costs $5.95 per month, but renewal costs $14.95 per month. If you plan on paying per month, you best be ready to fork out $16.95 per month.

Apart from their shared hosting plans, which doesn’t really perform that amazingly, HostGator has another branch of plans called HostGator cloud hosting. We’ve gone through tonnes of review and checked out the plan ourselves, and there’s one thing that’s certain; the cloud hosting plans are way better than the shared hosting plans. The plans have the same names as the shared hosting plans but are more expensive and according to HostGator, come with times four the resources and are twice as fast as the shared hosting plans.

The Hatchling plan comes with;

• a single domain
• 2GB memory
• 2 core CPU
• free SSL certificate
• and free domain

The plan costs $4.95 per month (renews at $8.95 per month).

The Baby plan comes with the following features

• Unlimited domains
• 4 GB memory
• 4 core CPU
• free SSL certificate
• free domain

The plan costs $6.57 per month and renews at  $11.95 per month

The last plan, which is the Business plan comes with the following features

• Unlimited domains
• 6 GB memory
• 6 core CPU
• Free SSL certificate
• Free upgrade to positive SSL
• Free Dedicated IP
• Free SEO Tools
• Free Domain included

The plan costs $9.95 per month and renews at $17.95.

Generally, the cloud hosting plans have exactly the same problem as the shared hosting plans. The initial fees are cheap enough, but renewal fees are oftentimes two of the initial fees. While this is a common problem with Web-hosting plans, we won’t cease to list it as a con. This is because we’ve reviewed Web-hosts that do not need to pull this “marketing tactic”.

A2 hosting has three levels of shared hosting plans. They are the Lite, Swift, And Turbo plans. The Lite plan is the cheapest plan and costs $2.96 (renewal costs $7.99). The plan comes with the following features;

• 1 website
• Unlimited storage
• 25 Email accounts
• Free and Easy site migration
• Free SSL certificate

The second plan, which is the lite plan, costs $3.70 monthly (renewal costs $9.99). The plan comes with the following features;

• Unlimited websites
• Unlimited Email accounts
• Free and automatic backups
• And all the features of the Lite plan.

The highest shared hosting plan is the Turbo plan and it costs $7.03 monthly and $18.99 upon renewal. The plan comes with the following features;

• Turbo speed (up to 20× faster than regular servers)
• all the features of Lite and Swift plans.

The same complaints we had about HostGator is visible here as well. We have a piece of advice though; bloggers/small business owners who cannot afford the renewal fees should stay far away.

VERDICT; Comparing prices is perhaps one of the most difficult aspects of writing articles like this. On a whole, though, we believe that A2 hosting had a better deal for us. However, if you want superior performance and are willing to pay a little bit more, you should probably opt for the HostGator Cloud hosting plan.

Extra Features

All Web-hosts (or most— some are utterly ordinary) have that extra feature that makes them stand out. Let us see if these Web-hosts have any interesting extra features.

For HostGator, we could find the following;

• Better performance with Opteron 6000 series CPU combined with DDR3 ECC RAM
• Support of multiple languages including Ruby on Rails, PHP, Python, and Perl.
• Access to Google analytics and Mojo marketplace
• HostGator has only one database— MySQL
• Unlimited FTP and email accounts.
• $100 in free advertising credits

For A2 hosting, we could find the following;

• A2 Hosting is very interested in maintaining a sustainable environment. In fact, their headquarters in Michigan is Ann Arbor, a place reputed to have 50,000 trees and 150 parks. A2 hosting has also partnered with Carbonfund.org to battle global warming and help develop renewable energy and support reforestation. They also run a program called “future serve” that helps to offset emissions from their servers.
• A2 hosting has Windows-based servers
• All shared hosting plans are limited to 35 concurrent HTTP plans— we aren’t sure if this will be enough for everyone
• Built-in server-side caching.
• A2 hosting has great developer options; with users having access to Apache 2.4 FTP/SFTP access to your server environment, PERL 5.10 Node.js, MySQL 5.6 databases, PHP (5.x and 7.x) Python (2.6, 2.7, and 3.2), PostgreSQL 9.6, and Free SSH access.
• A2 hosting offers free Cloudflare CDN on all plans
• A2 hosting has multiple data centers around the world

VERDICT; A2 hosting’s crop of extra features are definitely more impressive than HostGator’s. They win this one for us.

MAJOR DIFFERENCES

Just to recap, let’s go over the major differences between HostGator and A2 hosting.

• A2 Hosting is faster than HostGator— although, HostGator’s cloud hosting option has similar speeds to A2 hosting
• A2 hosting has better customer support
• A2 hosting has a better money-back guarantee period
• A2 hosting has “green” hosting initiative, HostGator doesn’t
• Hostgator has a more reliable uptime than A2 hosting

A2 Hosting vs. HostGator – Our Pick

It’s been as tough a matchup as any, with both sides being simultaneously amazing and ordinary with regards to performance. However, A2 hosting took a comfortable lead in customer support, money-back guarantees, and security. Unfortunately for HostGator, being easy to use isn’t the only requirement of a Web-host, so they lose this duel for us. However, we think it was so dicey that it could really have gone either way.

So, HostGator Vs A2 hosting? The gator isn’t fast enough.

HostGator vs. Wix is on the menu today, and we’ll be checking out the two hosting companies to find out exactly which host does it for us.

How? Easy, we bought plans on the two platforms, and we ran a lot of performance tests, so we are going to show you (not tell) which host actually comes out on top.

But first, let’s look at an overview of both companies.

HostGator vs. Wix Overview

Regardless of what people may think, HostGator isn’t actually a company of alligators who host people. Instead, HostGator is a hosting company that was founded in 2002 by Brent Oxely. Since then, the company has grown to be one of the biggest names in hosting worldwide.

In June 2012, HostGator was acquired by EIG, a web company that owns about half of all the hosts we’ve reviewed (companies like Bluehost are under EIG as well).

Wix is also a hosting company that was founded four years later in 2006 by Avishai Abrahami, Nadav Abrahami, and Giora Kaplan. The company has become really popular, with millions of users over 120 countries.

While HostGator focuses on specialized hosting solutions, like providing VPS hosting and WordPress hosting, Wix is more of a do it yourself host.

The main focus of Wix is to allow people to create their site however they wish without the stylistic encumbrance of content management systems. To aid this, the host offers a drag and drop website builder with HTML5 functions, a lot of ready-made templates, and loads of features for free.

HostGator, on the other hand, does a bit of everything. If you’d like to build your site on a content management system, you can do that with HostGator as they offer one-click installations for popular systems like WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal. If you’d also like to build your website from scratch, you can do that on any of their plans.

Now, let’s get to the main comparison. Generally, we like to start off with our performance tests, but since we had to build our site using the Wix site builder, we’re going to start off with the ease of use. That will give you a rough idea of the differences in the quality and capacity of the two hosting companies.

Ease Of Use Comparison

What use is a host that is difficult to use?

Sign-up Process

We had an easy sign-up process with HostGator. We only had to click through two or three pages of forms to get to checkout. Like a lot of hosting providers, HostGator offers a lot of upsells, but we knew what we wanted so it was easy for us to navigate through and pay.

Although not as easy as HostGator’s process, Wix’s sign-up process was also not tedious. Like HostGator, there were also attempts to sell us services that we wouldn’t eventually need, but that’s common to most hosting companies so we wouldn’t be bothered about that.

Interface

Like most EIG hosts, HostGator makes use of cPanel. We’ve used a lot of control panels, and while some hosts prefer to reinvent the wheel (DreamHost is a great example), we’ve discovered that 9 out of 10 times, cPanel is the right choice. In fact, the only times that custom interfaces have done it for us is with managed hosting specialists like LiquidWeb and Flywheel.

(You can check out our DreamHost vs. HostGator comparison here).

Wix doesn’t offer cPanel, but with good reason. Wix’s control panel is optimised for web services, and as such doesn’t offer many tools for web administration.

Which control panel would we rather use? Well, we’ve used both, and we’d take HostGator’s cPanel anytime, any day (and twice on Sundays).

Free Site Migration

We believe that all hosting plans should come with at least a free single site migration service. It’s just the proper thing to do. Not all hosts agree with us, though. GoDaddy, for example, charges about 100 dollars to help you migrate a site to their servers.

HostGator, on the other hand, runs a free site transfer service. This means that HostGator helps you transfer your site for free at least once depending on the plan that you’ve signed up for. However, this free offer is only active for thirty days from sign-up. Users must also note that free transfers are offered on an “as is” basis. This means that there will be no updates on-site configuration and website content and data will be transferred as they are.

As Wix is a website development platform, they don’t offer a site migration service. You cannot transfer a cPanel based site to Wix. The best you can do is to recreate the structure of your WordPress/CMS site on Wix, and manually transfer the content unto the Wix based site.

That is certainly more work than what HostGator offers.

Free Domains

It is now common practice among hosting providers to offer a free domain to users signing up on a new plan.

Unlike hosts like SiteGround, HostGator and Wix offer a free domain for every new sign-up – given that the user pays for an annual plan.

You can check out our SiteGround vs. HostGator comparison to see exactly how both hosts stack up.

Backups

The internet is a scary place, and no matter how secure you think your site is, it can still get hacked or attacked by malware. That’s why it’s important that you have backups – and the host that makes that task easier for you is most certainly easy to use.

Wix doesn’t offer automatic backups. Instead, they offer the next best thing. You can generate backups on Wix whenever you want – and it is absolutely free.

HostGator’s backup policy is a tad bit more complex. Backup runs once a week on a random day and HostGator makes sure not to keep mirrored or redundant backups. This means that only one backup is available at any given moment.

Users must note that HostGator provides backups as a courtesy. This means that they are not guaranteed so they may or may not be available.

Generally speaking, it’s better to purchase a separate Backup service like Codeguard if your hosting provider doesn’t offer guaranteed backups.

Staging Environment

Staging environments are great for beginners. Except you want to be a cowboy developer – this is the name that we give to developers who develop without a staging site, it is important to have a site where you can test out changes before transferring these changes to your live site.

Wix has a “Sandbox” environment where you can create a staging site (which is a clone of your live site) and make necessary changes on it before you move those changes to your live site.

HostGator also comes with a staging environment where you can test out your changes. This environment comes on all hosting plans.

Website Builder Comparison

Since Wix is primarily a website builder, this is the crux of this article. We’ll be comparing the Wix site builder to Gator by HostGator, which is the spectacular name of HostGator’s site builder.

Creating The Website With Wix

Wix offers two primary ways to build a site. The first is a Do It Yourself mode where you’ll be able to create your site to whatever specifications you want. You are started off with a template, and with the very intuitive drag and drop editor, you’ll be able to add anything that you want to customize your site.

Wix has hundreds of templates for you to choose from, so users rarely have problems because they are spoilt for choice (at least we were). The Wix Editor app gives you control over almost all aspects of your site. This includes the background, apps, store, blog and bookings. With the editor, you can enable or disable any feature that you think would be useful for your site.

The second way is to let Wix’s ADI fix a website for you. How does this work? Easy, really. You answer a few basic questions about the structure of your site, and the system generates a generic website for you.

The system does it by choosing a unique combination of billions of features that you’ve previously selected. So your final site looks exactly like what you’d want but still remains very unique. Unlike with similar site builders, the Wix ADI doesn’t ask you to choose a theme. Instead, you are asked to choose a general style.

After this, your website is designed and the work is left to you. You can easily edit the website and add your content and pictures yourself.

An interesting feature of the Wix site builder is that it comes with an “onboarding support checklist”. If you don’t know how to edit a site, the checklist walks you through the important parts of your site and even shows you a quick tutorial.

An important feature of the Wix site builder is that it gives you access to advanced features – this is something that a lot of other site builders lack.

So if you’re a developer and would like to dig through the code of your website, Wix offers you control through advanced features like full control through Wix Code API and JavaScript. Asides that, you also have access to advanced features like:

• Creating custom forms, quizzes and so on
• You can also create custom interactions. For example, you can set your site to act in a certain manner when customers make certain actions.
• You can separate your content from your site so that you can add images and text easily.

Creating The Website Gator By HostGator

Gator by HostGator is the name of HostGator’s website builder, and like most website builders, it is simple and meant for people with little technical expertise.

Creating a website with HostGator is simple. Immediately you sign up, you must choose a template (or theme?). This is simply because all templates are categorised into industries.

Like Wix, HostGator gives you templates to choose from when building a site. However, unlike Wix, the templates of HostGator are basic and not as expansive as Wix’s. Even though HostGator’s themes are arranged by industries like business, beauty, music and entertainment, they still aren’t quite as expansive as the templates that Wix offers.

To build your website, you are given a drag and drop editor. It works a bit like creating a PowerPoint presentation. The Wix Editor makes use of the same system.

Like Wix, Gator by HostGator also comes with an onboarding tutorial, so in that respect, both sites are fairly similar.

It is important to add that, unlike other site builders, Gator by HostGator gives editors complete control over the eventual look of their site. You can resize, change fonts and switch colors without any headaches whatsoever. You can even add videos, blog posts and social media posts easily. As far as creating a website goes, Gator by HostGator is up there with one of the easiest to use.

However, there’s one thing that we noticed with the Gator. Unlike with Wix, images don’t automatically adjust when you add a new feature to your website. This means that before adding a new feature, you need to do a bit of space management, if not you’ll be stuck in an endless loop of resizing pictures.

HostGator is very mobile responsive, and you don’t have to design a different site for mobile. The sites created can fit any size of the screen easily.

The same can be said of Wix. All sites created with Wix are mobile responsive by default. There is even a Switch Editor view button that lets you see how your website would look on a mobile phone.

Performance Comparison

We created two sites using the Gator site builder and the Wix site builder. We ran tests on them for four months, and we have some interesting results.

Uptime

Using Pingdom, we monitored uptime on HostGator and Wix for four months. Here are our results.

Wix had an average uptime of 99.96% which isn’t spectacular but certainly isn’t bad. HostGator has a superior uptime of 99.98%.

Uptime Guarantee

Uptime is fickle, and it’s great to have an uptime guarantee for times when uptime gets actually terrible.

HostGator has a 99.9% uptime guarantee. This means that you are entitled to a month of credit if your website is up for less than that period of time. Wix also offers a 99.9% uptime guarantee and reimburses users based on downtime experienced.

Speed

Data centers are important to speed and HostGator has two of them. One in Houston, Texas, and the other in Provo, Utah.

Unlike HostGator, Wix had data centers in America and Europe.

Let’s get to our speed performance results. Here are our TTFB (Time To First Byte) speed results.

HostGator was the much faster host, blowing us away with an average response time of 668ms. Wix proved to be slower, coming in with an 801ms response time.

Page load speed figures reflected the difference in speed. HostGator consistently loaded completely under a second (around 800ms) while Wix took longer than a second to load many times.

Load Impact Test

To check out if our speed figures were wrong, we tried using load impact. We sent up to a hundred virtual users to our respective sites and found out something rather interesting.

HostGator is a much more stable host than Wix. Even at a hundred virtual users, our site with HostGator still managed to report stable speed. That was certainly not the case with Wix.

HostGator vs. Wix: Customer Support and Reliability

If you’re a beginner, you should probably pay a lot of attention to the customer support department of your prospective hosting provider. Why? Hosting plans can become really technical at times, and you will need easy solutions when you run into problems. Only quality customer support can provide that.

We tried to measure the quality of customer support that both hosts offer and we found really interesting things.

Customer Support Channel

Wix and HostGator offer roughly the same sort of customer support. They both have phone and email support channels. Wix doesn’t have a live chat system while HostGator has one.

It’s important to note that Wix offers support is Portuguese, Italian, and Spanish.

Customer Support Test

While testing customer support, there are two things that we paid close attention to. The first is wait time – that is, the period of time it took for a live rep to get to us. The second is the quality of support.

For HostGator, wait time was particularly long, as we often had to wait for over five minutes before we connected to support staff. We found that tedious. After connecting to support staff on the live chat channel, we found the representatives who spoke to us to be friendly.

However, they had very little help for us when we came with problems and questions that were above basic ones. Too many times we were given links to videos and tutorials that did little to solve our problems. Phone chat was more of the same, and more often than not we put down the phone feeling a bit disappointed.

We had to wait for over ten minutes before we got someone to talk to us on the phone. Even at that, the support wasn’t great. Like with HostGator, we continually got advice that was of no help, and even though support staff was cordial enough, they were often unhelpful.

Since Wix’s support is not available 24/7 (only available from 5:00 am and 5:00 pm PST) users can often get stranded. That’s another negative.

Simply put, interacting with HostGator’s customer support was tedious. But certainly not as tedious as what we continually had to pass through with Wix.

Ticketing Support

Thankfully, the ticketing support of both hosts was a huge improvement. We got our tickets back in 24 hours, and our problems/questions were always comprehensively attended to.

Knowledge Base

Wix and HostGator maintain a really up to date knowledge base. The knowledge bases are so filled with articles and tutorials that they almost excuse the subpar live support that is on offer.

Customer Support Winner HostGator: Let’s get this right. The support infrastructure of Wix and HostGator needs overhauling. Customers often have to wait for a while before live reps attend to them, and even when that is done, quality is more often than not missing.

Money-Back Guarantee

Wix offers an incredibly low 14 days money-back guarantee. This 14 days money-back guarantee doesn’t apply to renewal plans. In addition to that, if you’ve received a free domain, Wix will deduct about $15 from your refund. Add-ons paid for at checkout are non-refundable.

HostGator has a way longer 45 days money-back guarantee. Like with Wix, this guarantee doesn’t apply to renewal payments, and if you’ve received a free service (like a free domain, for example), it will be deducted from your plan.

Security Comparison

HostGator vs. Wix: Plans and Pricing

No matter how great a service is, it must come at the right price, if not, it’s basically a waste. Let’s look at the deals offered by Wix and HostGator to see which host offers the better deal.

We’ll be comparing Wix premium plans to HostGator’s three shared hosting plans.

Basic Plan comparison

HostGator’s basic plan is the Hatchling plan and it comes with a single domain, free transfers, unlimited bandwidth and disk space, a free SSL certificate and a free domain. The plan costs $2.75 for an initial three years plan and renews at a normal rate of $6.95 per month.

This plan is great because it has unmetered bandwidth and disk space. However, unmetered doesn’t mean unlimited. It only means that you are only allowed to use as much bandwidth and disk space as HostGator deems “normal” for a small Hatchling website. Once you exceed that threshold, you will be informed and may be charged accordingly. All in all, an initial payment of $2.75 is quite cheap. However, when one looks it in the context of the renewal price, it takes on a whole different look. It is a decent deal, but certainly not the best.

Wix’s cheapest plan is the Connect Domain which, on Wix’s website, has the endearing “most basic” title.

The plan comes with 1GB of bandwidth, 500mb of storage, a free SSL certificate, and costs $4.50 per month.

It is important to note that Wix doesn’t have a limit on sites that can be created on a single account. You can create an unlimited amount of sites on the same account on any Wix plan. However, since the Most basic plan only comes with 500mb of storage, you most likely will only be able to create a single site.

How good is this deal? It is certainly more expensive than the HostGator plan, and cannot be justified since HostGator has better performance. The Hatchling plan is definitely more value for money.

Medium Tier Plan

The Medium tier plan is the Baby plan and it comes with unlimited domains, unmetered bandwidth, a free SSL certificate, and a free domain. The plan costs $3.95 for an initial 3 year period and costs $9.95 for renewal.

This plan is sort of tricky because it comes with unlimited domains and unmetered bandwidth. This means that you’re never quite sure of how many domains you can host before you run out of “legally allowed” bandwidth and disk space. In our experience hosting more than two blogs or sites with a lot of traffic may result in considerable downtime.

On face value, the plan is really good. Unlimited domains for $3.95? A good deal for sure.

Wix’s medium-tier plan is the Combo plan and it comes with 3GB of storage, 2GB of bandwidth, a free domain, and no Wix ads. The plan costs a grand total of $8.50 per month – which is really a lot, no matter how you look at it.

The Baby plan may be a baby plan, but it is certainly bossing this Combo plan left, right and centre.

Top Tier plan comparison

The VIP and Unlimited plan are the top tier plans of Wix. The Unlimited plan is the most popular plan and comes with unlimited bandwidth, 10GB of storage, no Wix Ads, a free domain for a year, Visitor analytics and Site booster. For all this, customers are expected to pay $12.50 per month. It is not a bad deal, as it comes with unlimited bandwidth. However, 10GB of storage means that you can only host four to five sites at maximum capacity. In any case, $12.50 is too much to pay.

HostGator’s top plan is the Business plan and it comes with all the features of the Baby plan plus free dedicated IP, free SEO tools, and a free upgrade to positive SSL. The plan costs $5.95 per month for an initial three-year deal and costs $14.95 for renewal.

This deal isn’t terrible, but for a plan that isn’t very different from the Baby plan (the free dedicated IP address is the only important difference here), it costs a lot more. If you have no great need for the additional features of the Business plan, I’d advise you to go with the Baby plan. It packs more value for money.

The VIP plan of Wix comes with unlimited bandwidth, 20GB of storage, a free domain for a year, two video hours, social media logo files, VIP support, priority response professional logo and all other features of the Unlimited plan. The plan costs $24.50 per month. The VIP plan is definitely not worth it. It is a bad deal that no one would recommend.

HostGator vs. Wix: Major Differences

• Wix doesn’t offer content management hosting, VPS hosting or Dedicated server hosting like HostGator
• HostGator’s performance stats (in terms of uptime and speed) are much better than Wix’s
• Wix has a fourteen days guarantee while HostGator has a forty-five days guarantee
• HostGator has 24/7 support on all plans, while Wix doesn’t
• HostGator has live chat support, Wix doesn’t
• HostGator makes use of cPanel, Wix doesn’t

HostGator vs. Wix: Our Pick

InMotion vs. DreamHost? Well, you’re at the right place. Today, we’ll be looking at these two hosting companies to find out exactly which host is the best for you.

How would we be doing this? Well, we did the only logical thing: we bought plans from both hosts, and we compared our experience based on important metrics like speed, uptime, pricing and customer support. Don’t worry, we won’t just be relying on first-hand knowledge for this comparison – we’ve also done a ton of research, so you know whatever information you get is correct.

At the end of our comparison, we’ll give a final verdict on which host we think offers a better deal. You may choose to agree or disagree with us, but the important thing is that you’ll have the proper information to come to an informed decision on the host to go with.

Overview

InMotion isn’t your regular hosting company. The company is employee-operated and was founded way back in 2001. Today, the company has grown from humble beginnings to have over 300,000 domains hosted on its servers.

DreamHost, on the hand, is more like the regular hosting company. Founded in 1996 by Dallas Bethune, Josh Jones, Michael Rodriguez and Sage Weil, the company has grown to become one of the biggest names in hosting today. The company is now owned by New Dreams Network and has over 400,000 customers.

In terms of business model, DreamHost and InMotion aren’t that different. The two companies offer Shared hosting services at really cheap prices and target small businesses and blogs.

That is certainly not all though.

InMotion vs. DreamHost: Popularity

In terms of popularity, neither of these hosts are very popular. However, if we had to choose one host that has something resembling a household name, we would go with DreamHost in a heartbeat. With over 400,000 customers, DreamHost is certainly more popular than InMotion.

In terms of performance, we’ve discovered that popular hosting providers often have a great marketing strategy and not necessarily great value for money. So we do not care about popularity, and you shouldn’t either.

InMotion vs. DreamHost: Performance

This is one of the most important metrics that should be used to measure hosting company. We’ll be measuring performance using speed and uptime.

Speed

Speed is such a fickle metric because so many things affect the eventual load speed and response times that your site experiences. However, of these many factors, two stand out. Their CDN and the spread of the data centres

CDN

CDN means Content Delivery Network and they help your site achieve faster load and response time using proxy servers and cached versions of your site. Unfortunately, InMotion doesn’t come with CDN included. However, if you want CDN, InMotion has a handy article on how to add Cloudflare to your site.

DreamHost comes with CDN included, however, you’ll have to configure it yourself through the cPanel.

Data Centres

The more spread out the data centres of a host, the quicker the content of your site will be able to reach visitors. Therefore companies with data centres that spread across continents are nine out of ten times faster than hosts that don’t have.

While InMotion doesn’t have data centres outside America, they manage to have redundant and climate-controlled centres on both the east and west coast. It is the same for DreamHost as well – their data centres are only located within the United States. We could not find the locations of all DreamHost’s data centres, but we do know that they have one in Virginia and another in California.

Now that we are done with the preliminaries, let’s get to our speed test.

Speed Test

The first thing we tested for was TTFB. This measure just how responsive a site is. To test this, we tested speed from multiple locations around the globe.  Afterwards, we collated our results and calculated an average. This gives you a rough idea of just how fast your site will be.

A total aggregate of our tests showed InMotion far ahead of DreamHost with a 379ms average response time while DreamHost came in with a decent response time of 490ms.

Page Load Speed Test

Page load speed had a far more telling difference, with InMotion coming in with 710ms average load speed and DreamHost getting a 968ms average page load speed. As you can see, DreamHost is much slower in places like Mumbai and Bangladesh, and that is something that you have to take into consideration when choosing a host. Which region does the core of your customers/readers reside and how well does your potential host perform in that region?

Load Impact Test

Asides our speed test, we also tried to check how well the hosts would perform under high traffic. We sent about a hundred virtual users to our sites on the servers of both hosts and discovered that InMotion was far more stable during high traffic than DreamHost.

(Graph showing InMotion performing better than DreamHost).

Uptime

Uptime is important because you don’t purchase a hosting plan because you want your site up some of the time, you do so because you want it up all of the time.

We ran an uptime test using Pingdom on DreamHost and InMotion and here are our results. Our test was over a four-month period.

October wasn’t a great month for InMotion as our site was down for 0.9% of the time. Overall, DreamHost managed to score a better uptime than InMotion with a 99.99% uptime over our testing period. InMotion managed an average 99.96% uptime – decent but not fantastic.

Uptime Guarantee

Uptime is notorious for being particularly fickle. Look at InMotion’s September performance for example. A 99.99% uptime is impressive, but the very next month, it got as bad as 99.91%. The next month it managed to bounce back to 99.97%.

What’s the point? Any host can suddenly come down with a terrible downtime. If that happens, what are your options?

DreamHost has an impressive 100% uptime guarantee. For each hour of downtime that you get, you will receive a day of free hosting. InMotion’s 99.9% uptime guarantee isn’t that bad as well. If uptime gets lower than this, InMotion will reimburse you with a free month of hosting.

InMotion vs. DreamHost: Ease Of Use

The best hosts are easy to use. They offer loads of freebies and have really intuitive interfaces. Let’s see how easy to use DreamHost and InMotion are.

Sign In Process

Signing in and paying for our DreamHost account was long and complicated. We’ve signed up for many hosting services and DreamHost had one of the hardest processes we’ve ever gone through. Sign-up should certainly be easier.  Asides the long sign-up process, we were offered a lot of add-ons (many of which were unnecessary) at checkout.

It was the same with InMotion – the sign-up process was long and before we had access to our account we had to go through a lengthy verification process.

Interface

We’ve used a lot of interfaces. Some are terrible, some are good, some are great and some are rather uninspiring. But for the most part, the best interfaces we’ve used have been based on cPanel. That’s why, as a rule, we prefer either cPanel or Plesk based interfaces.

InMotion uses cPanel, which is great. While their version of cPanel isn’t as heavily customised as Bluehost, it still offered us an easy and intuitive experience. (You can check out our Bluehost vs. InMotion comparison if you want). DreamHost, on the other hand, makes use of an inbuilt control panel that can be great to use if you’re new to hosting but can be a nightmare if you’re not.

One example of the frustration that can come with DreamHost’s panel is this; The interface doesn’t offer an automated way to import .tar.gz files. This means that if you’re migrating your cPanel site from another provider to DreamHost, you’ll have to do it manually through MySQL and FTP.

Take it from us, that’s a process you don’t want to go through.

Free Domains

Today, almost all hosting providers offer free domains upon sign-up. This is because most hosting companies double as domain registration companies. What of InMotion and DreamHost, do they offer free domains on sign-up?

Yes, the two hosts offer new users a free domain for a year upon registration. You must note that although the free domain is, free, a fee equivalent to the price of a year’s domain registration would be deducted if you decide to cancel your plan and ask for a refund.

Site Migration

This is a service that we believe that all hosts should offer. InMotion agrees too and offers a free site migration service.

InMotion Site Migration

InMotion will migrate accounts that have 3 or fewer databases and/or websites for free. If your account has more than that number of databases and/or websites, you can still migrate your site. The only problem is that you will be charged $10 per item transferred. This is a pretty good deal, and Flywheel is the only host that we can think of that offers a better deal. You can check out our Flywheel vs. InMotion comparison here if you’d like.

DreamHost Site Migration

DreamHost doesn’t offer such free services (which is particularly difficult because they don’t have cPanel so you go through a lot more stress trying to migrate your site.). To transfer a site to DreamHost, you’ll be charged $99. However, you should note that WordPress site transfers to DreamPress (that is DreamHost’s WordPress management platform) are free of charge.

Apps Integration, Marketplace and one-click installation.

Here is where DreamHost and InMotion are mostly similar. The two platforms offer one-click installation for popular apps like WordPress, Joomla and Drupal. InMotion even gives you the option, at checkout, to have your favourite app installed before you get access to your cPanel. That’s pretty neat.

There is a marketplace where you can purchase plug-ins, themes, templates and even professional services to optimize your site how you deem fit on both hosts.

Website Builders

If you don’t plan on using WordPress or other content management systems and would like to create your own site, you should be interested in the website builders offered by the companies we’re comparing.

DreamHost website Builder

Unlike other hosts (like Bluehost, for example) who make use of third party site builders like Weebly,  DreamHost has an inbuilt website builder called the Remixer. One cool thing about the Remixer is that it is free for the first fourteen days so you know exactly what you’re getting into.

We tried the Remixer out and while it doesn’t look like most website builders (for example, it doesn’t have drag and drop functionality), it is still pretty decent. However, people who like having a lot of control over the final look of their site may have problems with the builder because users have very limited controls. For example, you cannot add background images, shadows or animations through the editor. Additionally, you cannot resize or reorder photos.

We understand that this makes things easier for the inexperienced user, but it also makes things difficult for the experienced user.

InMotion website Builder

Like DreamHost, InMotion has a website creator called BoldGrid (also called Website Creator). The app has two versions, the free one, and of course the paid one.. For the paid option, you’ll have to pay about $15 per month (if you’re paying annually) or $20 per month if you’re paying per month.

So what is the difference between the paid and free versions? Well, the free option can only support a single site while the paid option can support unlimited websites. It’s also important to note that websites created with the paid option will not display BoldGrid branding.

We used BoldGrid and we didn’t have a lot of complaints. It’s great for inexperienced and experienced users and it is based on WordPress so it is quite reliable. Importantly, BoldGrid offers a staging plug-in where you can check out your site, experiment, check out settings and so much more without it affecting the live version of the site.

So which website builder would we choose between the Remixer and BoldGrid if we absolutely had to choose one? We’d go with BoldGrid, no doubt.

Staging Environments

Staging environments are great things, as they can help you develop your site better and smarter.

InMotion has the capability to have multiple servers where you can develop a test site before taking it live. Users can easily create a staging site using the Softaculous installer on their cPanel on all hosting plans. Additionally, you can use the staging plug-in from BoldGrid to create a staging site if you’re developing a site on WordPress.

DreamHost comes with already installed staging sites on all shared hosting plans except the Starter plan. All Managed WordPress Hosting plans come with a staging site.

InMotion vs. DreamHost: Money-back Guarantee

One thing about a lot of hosting companies is their tendency to use low prices to trap you into paying for a long term plan.

This means that you get to pay a lot of money upfront. However, what if something comes up and you have to cancel your plan? What if you’re not happy with the service being rendered? What happens to your money then?

DreamHost has one of the longest money-back guarantees that we’ve ever seen, with a 97-day money-back period. InMotion also has an incredible money-back guarantee period, with a 90-day money-back guarantee.

Limitations

The refund that you get after the cancellation of your plan does not include services that are not connected to basic hosting services. For example, any add-ons that you purchase during checkout are non-refundable. Additionally, about $15 will be deducted from your refund if you’ve received a free domain. You will be free to continue to use the domain for the remainder of the registration period (which is usually a year).

InMotion vs. DreamHost: Customer Service Support

Quality of customer support is very important, especially if you’re inexperienced. You want customer support staff that are easy to reach and that will answer your questions easily. You certainly don’t want to start hunting around the internet looking for solutions that could easily be gotten from customer support.

Customer Support Channels

InMotion and DreamHost have roughly the same customer support channels. The two hosts have a live chat channel and a ticketing system, while InMotion is the only one with a phone support system. All channels are open 24/7,  except for DreamHost’s live chat channel.

Customer Support Test

To check out the availability and efficiency of the customer support staff of InMotion and DreamHost we tried to connect to the support staff of each host several times throughout our uptime testing period (that’s four months).

InMotion Customer Service Support

We tried to connect to an InMotion live representative many times and we never had to wait for more than two minutes before we had a live rep to speak to. If you have experience with a lot of hosting companies, you’ll know that an average wait time of 2 minutes is quite rare.

InMotion doesn’t only have a great wait time. They also have amazing support. All our answers were answered promptly and we were never transferred to another rep or given a link to a knowledge base article – something that doesn’t happen often.  It was more of the same with phone support and all our tickets were returned promptly within 24 hours.

DreamHost Customer Service Support

DreamHost customer support was disappointing, to say the least. The first thing that we noticed was that customer service (at least on the live chat channel) wasn’t 24/7. There were times we connected and got this message.

(show screenshot of chat with bot saying that the sales team is only available from Monday to Friday, 8-4 pm PT).

However, when we did connect to live support (wait time was an average of 5+ minutes), we were often left on hold. While the reps that we spoke to were friendly enough, our questions were left unanswered too often.  The ticketing channel proved to be more effective, though, as tickets were returned in 24 hours.

Knowledgebase

DreamHost and InMotion both have great knowledgebases where you can find tutorials and articles on almost any issue that concerns hosting. That will prove to be a great help to DreamHost customers if live reps aren’t able to solve their problems.

InMotion vs. DreamHost: Security

Putting anything online, especially a website, puts you at risk of getting your information in the wrong hands. We’ll be looking at how these hosts protect the interests of their customers – if they do at all.

SSL Certificate

In recent times, thanks to companies like Let’s Encrypt, hosts have been able to offer free SSL certificates to customers. However, not all hosts do this. A good example is GoDaddy – and we have a great article on how well GoDaddy compares to DreamHost.

Unlike GoDaddy, both InMotion and DreamHost offer free SSL certificates on all hosting plans.

Backups

What if something happens to your site? What happens then? Is there a backup policy that protects your website?

Here is where DreamHost shines. There’s a one-click backup option on their cPanel that allows customers to control their backups and control how and when they back up their files.

InMotion has an exclusive Backup manager plug-in that allows users to create an automated backup system for themselves. You can also restore your site through this plug-in.

Both options are absolutely free.

Site Security

DreamHost Security

For site security, DreamHost makes use of Modsecurity, which is a web application firewall that works by blocking malicious HTTP requests. Some of the attacks that Modsecurity blocks are Cross-site scripting, Remote executioner, Remote file inclusion, Brute force attempts, and SQL injection-based attacks. Importantly, this security cover is free. A lot of other hosts would much rather sell it to you as an add-on.

InMotion Security

InMotion makes use of Corero, an anti-DDoS system to protect its servers from DDOS attacks. Corero protects InMotion servers using a proprietary Smartwall Threat Defense System. It is quite a sophisticated system, and customers can rest easy assured that they have the best protection guarding their site.

InMotion vs. DreamHost: Pricing

This is about value for money, that is why very cheap hosts like Namecheap (the clue is in the name) have lost this section to far more expensive options like WP Engine or SiteGround.

You can check out our Namecheap vs. SiteGround comparison to see exactly how this went down.

Shared Hosting Comparison

We’ll be comparing the shared hosting plans of both hosts. DreamHost has two tiers of shared hosting plans which are the Shared Starter and Shared Unlimited plans. InMotion has three tiers of shared hosting plans which are the Launch, Power and Pro plans.

Basic Plan Comparison: Shared Starter vs. Launch plan

DreamHost’s basic plan is the Shared Starter plan and it comes with one website, a free domain, unlimited traffic (DreamHost, unlike other hosts, doesn’t track bandwidth or traffic, so users are free to expand as much as possible), free WordPress site builder, pre-installed WordPress, and free SSL certificate. The plan only costs $2.59 per month (this price only applies to three-year plans. Monthly/renewal plans cost $4.95 per month).

At $2.59 per month, we weren’t expecting so much. But the fact that the plan comes with unlimited traffic is a huge bonus. However, if you look at it through the fact that the renewal fee is $4.95, it doesn’t look so much as a bonus anymore – but that takes nothing away from the quality of the deal. As far as starting deals go, DreamHost’s Shared Starter plan is decent.

InMotion’s basic shared hosting plan is the Launch plan and it comes with a free domain, two websites, unlimited disk space and bandwidth, a free SSL certificate, 6 parked domains, 25 subdomains and unlimited emails. The plan costs $3.99 per month if you’re paying for two years in advance and $7.99 when you choose to renew your plan.

This plan is tricky because it comes with two websites and unlimited disk space and traffic, therefore it completely leaves the Shared Starter plan from DreamHost in the dust. At $3.99 this plan represents great value for money. Even at $7.99, it still costs less than double the renewal price of the Shared Starter plan. It is the better deal of the lot.

High Tier Hosting comparison; Shared Unlimited vs. Power and Pro Plans

Here we’ll be comparing two of InMotion’s hosting plans to DreamHost’s Shared Unlimited plan. That’s because the Power and The Pro plans – these are InMotion’s plans, come with multiple websites, unlimited disk space and unlimited bandwidth and that is what constitutes a top tier plan in the books of most hosting providers.

The Power plan, from InMotion, comes with all the features of the Launch plan (which are a free domain, unlimited disk space and bandwidth, and a free SSL certificate) plus a capacity for six websites. It also comes with 2× the performance of the Launch plan. The plan costs $5.99 per month for an initial two-year deal and renewal costs $9.99 per month.

At this price, the Power plan looks like a very decent deal, even if the renewal fee jumps more than 70% from the original price.

The Shared Unlimited plan of DreamHost comes with all the features of the basic DreamHost plan (which is the Shared Starter package) plus unlimited websites and unlimited emails. It costs $5.95 per month for a one-time annual fee and it costs $10.95 for renewals.

At a renewal price of $10.95 and with unlimited websites, the Shared Unlimited plan blows the Power plan away. But does it blow the Pro plan of InMotion away?

The Pro plan comes with all the features of the Launch plan (which are a free domain, unlimited disk space and bandwidth, and a free SSL certificate) plus unlimited websites, 4× the performance of the Launch plan, Pro-level support, and a security suite (these are security add-ons). The Pro plan is way more expensive than the Shared Unlimited plan though and costs just about  $13.99 if you’re paying for the first two years upfront. The renewal price is $15.99.

The Pro plan, in the face of the Shared Unlimited plan with similar specs, cannot justify its price. It would be wise to go for the Shared Unlimited plan over the Pro plan. However, InMotion’s Power plan looks like the better option if you don’t plan on hosting more than six sites. Overall, InMotion’s shared hosting plans offer better value than DreamHost’s plans.

WordPress Hosting Plan comparison

DreamHost has three WordPress plans and they are the DreamPress, DreamPress Plus and DreamPress Pro plans. InMotion also has three plans and they are the WP-1000S, WP-2000S and WP-3000S plans.

Basic Plan comparison.

The DreamPress plan comes with a single WordPress site, 30 GB SSD storage, a free domain included unmetered bandwidth and capacity for a hundred thousand visitors per month. The plan costs $16.95 annually and costs $19.75 upon renewal.

Compared to this, the WP-1000S plan comes with a free domain, a single website, 40GB SSD storage, unlimited email accounts and the BoldGrid website builder. The plan costs $4.99 ($7.99 for renewal).

The basic plans of both hosts can only be compared on the basis of how many websites that they allow as they are far apart in capacity and price. Regardless, the DreamPress plan should be coming with more than one site for $16.95.

Medium Hosting Plan Comparison

The WP-2000S plan comes with two websites, a single domain, 80GB of SSD storage, unlimited email accounts, an included staging environment, BoldGrid, and it is suitable for fifty thousand monthly visitors. The plan costs $7.99 and renews at $10.99.

Compared to that, the DreamPress Plus plan comes with a single WordPress site, a capacity for three hundred thousand visitors, 60GB of storage, an included free domain and unmetered bandwidth. The plan costs $24.95 for the first annual payment and renews at $29.95 per month.

Although the DreamPress Plus plan triples the capacity of the DreamPress plan, it still comes with only one website. At $24.95, customers should be getting more than a single website. Even the  WP-2000S plan comes with more than one website.

High Tier Plan Comparison

The DreamPress Pro plan comes with a single WordPress site + staging site, 120 GB of SSD storage, over a million visits per month, free domain, and unmetered bandwidth. The plan costs $71.95 per month for the first annual plan and costs $79.95 per month for renewal.

At this point, it’s safe to say that the DreamPress plans aren’t for bloggers or developers who want to develop multiple websites. It is for the biggest WordPress sites that are only focused on making content. Even at that, the $71.95 plan remains a tough sell.

The WP-3000S plan comes with 3 websites, is suitable for about 120,000 visits per month, a free domain and all the other features of the WP-2000S plans. This plan costs $10.99 for the first annual payment and costs $13.99 upon renewal.

Interestingly, in terms of the capacity of visits, the WP-3000S is the only plan that compares with DreamHost’s Managed WordPress cheapest plan which is the DreamPress plan. Importantly, the WP-3000S plan costs less than the DreamPress plan despite having three websites and even more capacity for visitors. That should tell you a thing or two about the value offered by InMotion and DreamHost.

InMotion vs. DreamHost: Major Differences

• DreamHost has better uptime than InMotion
• InMotion is faster than DreamHost
• DreamHost has a 97-day money-back policy while InMotion has a 90-day money-back policy.
• InMotion offers free site migration while DreamHost doesn’t
• InMotion makes use of green data centres, while DreamHost doesn’t
• InMotion uses cPanel, while DreamHost doesn’t

InMotion vs. DreamHost? InMotion for sure.

SiteGround vs. Cloudways? This is the comparison to see which is the web’s most powerful VPS host.

Both web hosts will be tested for speed, Uptime, pricing, and features and only one will come out on top. It is not an overstatement to say that SiteGround is regarded as one of the best providers when it comes to web hosting. And many people will agree. They have amazing speed, arguably the best uptime, and security multiplex. Will SiteGround worm its way to the top with its impeccable customer service and reasonable pricing? Or will Cloudways win the day with its much specific approach to VPS hosting?

SiteGround offers shared, WordPress and most hosting types. Cloudways is concerned with providing that best cloud services. They equip PHP developers and novices with the best-managed services for app development. They are in collaboration with many other hosting companies like DigitalOcean, a sister company. At the end of this comparison is the answer to the question lingering on your mind; which web host will be perfect for me? But we won’t only tell you which is suitable for your needs. As is our duty, we will let you know which web host is better. Without further ado, let’s get down to it.

SiteGround vs. Cloudways: A Complete Overview

Cloudways was established in 2009, with the intention of providing great hosting services for app developers. SiteGround, founded in 2004, provides all-round services, at great plans, for beginners and creatives alike. SiteGround is based in Sofia, Bulgaria, while Cloudways operates from the island of Malta in Europe. Cloudways was established by Uzair Gadit, Pere Hospital, and Aaqib Gadit. They also have offices in Spain and Dubai. They have 30+ staff members who manage 25,000+ web apps hosted on 12,000+ servers used by 8,000 users from 43 countries.

SiteGround’s army of skilled personnel caters to around 1.5 million domains used by hundreds of thousands of customers worldwide. SiteGround is WordPress’ official website, Cloudways makes the dreams of beginner-level developers everywhere come true.  They do this without sacrificing convenience for control through their managed cloud hosting. When a lot of web hosts were going through an evolution in 2011, Cloudways also re-branded to Cloudways 2.0. A more advanced and more lean company determined to please people more. While some web hosts like DigitalOcean focus on assisting developers and programmers, others like SiteGround treat their customers with baby gloves. Cloudways, in the style of the dialectics, decided to build a middle ground. By catering to professional and advanced developers, and also grooming and simplifying hosting for beginners.

SiteGround made a big impression on the web hosting industry by providing unmatched all-round services out of the gate.  You want speed? SiteGround has it. Uptime, security and unlimited features?  Check. They also have their extra advantage of placing the convenience of their customers above all else. Cloudways’ operation is in two separate phases. First is their futuristic platform for PHP developers. It provides all the needed features for PHP developers to develop, build and deploy their containerized applications.  Second is their ability to create an integral web of cloud services while simultaneously allowing you to manage and control them with ease, from a single console. SiteGround has data centers in 3 states while Cloudways has in 6.

SiteGround vs. Cloudways comparison. Which deserves to sit with the league of extraordinary web hosts? Let’s find out.

Popularity Comparison

Cloudways is popular among developers, but, perhaps not generally popular enough. Since it was only searched on Google a total of 1,256 times last month.  To put this in perspective, SiteGround is searched on Google on an average of 24,000 times. Someone is either recommending SiteGround to people or their publicity team is not slacking off. Either way, they are way more popular.  Riding on the back of the WordPress stamp is also an additional advantage.  SiteGround is the official website of WordPress, a website script used by over 60,000 site owners.  At this rate, we will wake up one morning, and SiteGround would have become a household name. Being a household name does not equal being the best web host in the market though. The best of the best web host is determined by another test.  The test of performance.

Verdict: When popularity is the contest, I don’t think Cloudways should be in the same ring as SiteGround. SiteGround firmly plants its flag undoubtedly in the hosting ground.

Performance

Ladies, gentlemen, let’s get started. Shall we?

Speed

You probably know how fast Sonic is, but do you know how fast your website host is? Fast websites help developers get their works done in a blink of an eye.

We set up speed tests for Both SiteGround and Cloudways and the results are in. Let’s see which of the two web hosts is slow, and would, in turn, make your website or app deployment slow and of course, which one is faster. Slow sites and customers are like sieve and water. No matter how many times your website shows up in the search result, the traffic will not be converted optimally for revenue.

Pingdom

SiteGround and Cloudways were tested for speed three times and the average was taken. It should excite you to know that both performed optimally in the speed and response tests. SiteGround had an average response time of 348 seconds while Cloudways had an average of 228. The good news is; this will make your site SEO-optimized by making it show up on the first page during searches. This won’t necessarily make that million-dollar customer shop with you though. What will do that? Thanks for asking. It’s the load speed. SiteGround is, by no means, slow.  We thought it could have a chance of winning in load speed even if it had a slightly slower response time.  We thought wrong.  A site hosted by SiteGround, on average, loaded in 1.5 seconds. The same site loaded on Cloudways had a load speed of 745ms. This means SiteGround is fast (definitely one of the fastest), but Cloudways is faster. Aaaand furious!

Bitcacha

Since both web hosts have different servers in various datacenter locations all over the world, we decided to test the speed of each from different locations. Will Cloudways take its flash speed to London? Or will what happened in Los Angeles stay in Los Angeles?

LOCATION           SITEGROUND RESULT                    DIGITALOCEAN RESULT

New York.                           1.7S                                                    1.1S

Sydney                                 2.2S                                            1.3S

Los Angeles                        1.5S                                            745ms

London                                 1.7S                                                     1.5S

Singapore                            6.3S                                                     4.8S

Amsterdam                        3.2S                                                     2.2S

Vancouver                 2.4S                                              1.9S

New Delhi                           2.0S                                                     1.8S

San Francisco           1.6S                                               1.7S

Frankfurt.                   4.5S                                                         1.6S.

As evident in the table above, Cloudways soars high up into the cloud (pun intended) in terms of speed. It is easily faster than 95% of the sites we have reviewed. SiteGround has been the champion of web hosts in terms of speed. That is, until today. It posed great speed especially in 5 states where it performed below 2 seconds for a full-speed load. Cloudways performed better in the other 5 test sites, especially in locations where SiteGround does not have servers. It would be a tie, if not that Cloudways performed excellently in the cities it won. Both SiteGround and Cloudways may be in the 98th percentile in terms of speed, but there are kind of even among kings. Today, Cloudways is the speed king we appoint.

Load Impact

You know that feeling when you and your friends test your new website, and it works pretty fast?  Well, wait until it handles load almost as fast before you get excited. Because it just might not. We tested both web hosts, to see how they would perform under heavy workload and pressure, and now we know which performs best. We sent increasing packets of traffic to sites hosted on both, and this is what we noticed.

When we sent the first ten users to open at once, SiteGround, of course, remained stable.  We continued to increase the packet until it got to 100. SiteGround’s loading speed may have spiked at 50 users and 80 users, but it quickly adjusted and accommodated the increasing traffic. Even up till 100. Cloudways, on the other hand, remained consistent in speed load throughout.

Both web hosts performed well in terms of heavy load handling but one is slightly better.

Cloudways vs. SiteGround: Datacenters and Locations

SiteGround has 5 servers in datacenter locations spread across 3 continents: Chicago, London, Amsterdam, Milan, and Singapore. They also have access to all of CloudFlare’s datacenters.

Both web hosts have the world covered in datacenters. Cloudways has datacenters located in London, San Francisco, Singapore, New York, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Toronto, Seattle, Los Angeles, Chicago. But, the thing is, they didn’t need to set up these servers. Why? Cloudways currently supports five cloud providers; Amazon Web Services (AWS), DigitalOcean, Google Compute Engine (GCE), Linode, and Vultr. Depending on the cloud provider of your choice, you can host your website in datacenters owned by these cloud service providers located in the U.S., Europe, Asia, or South America. In addition, Cloudways uses the StackPath CDN, a global network of 45 datacenters worldwide. Now, we don’t know why, but you may still want more.  In that case, you can install CloudFlare CDN. Yes, the same CDN project adopted by SiteGround. CloudFlare CDN has a far-reaching tentacle of 152 datacenters all over the world. If you have ever heard of the phrase “there is strength in number”, CloudFlare validates this with its lighting fast speed. But, you may need to install it yourself.

Speed Optimization Accesories

Cloudways customers should be happy because they can install Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates through the user interface for free. Of course, SiteGround also gives out free SSL certificates for added speed.  Cloudways also allows you to better protect yourself by getting and installing your own certificates on your sites.

Cloudways also has ThunderStack. A speed mechanism that serves as the foundation of Cloudways platform and all its inclusive web services.  ThunderStack allows software infrastructure to be rooted in Nginx and Apache web servers, MySQL, MariaDB, PHP 7, and several kinds of caching. All applications, therefore, utilize the hyper-fast ThunderStack. They also use Debian Linux 8, optimized for Linux-based hosting, as their operating system. You can be sure of it, Cloudways generates lightning and thunder speed.

Content Delivery Network

SiteGround has covered a lot of ground by partnering with CloudFlare to provide CDN for its customers but Cloudways is not lagging behind in CDN acquisition. Cloudways has its own in-house Cloudways CDN to speed up its customer’s works. This is an amazing achievement, in and of its own,  because creating a CDN system is like getting fire from the gods. Both hosts provide a boost in services with their SSD storage technology.  Saving and retrieving of data has never been faster.

WordPress sites hosted on Cloudways load faster, thanks to Cloudways’ proprietary VMAN technology, which utilizes Varnish, Memcached, Apache, and Nginx to increase site speed. SiteGround also has optimization for WordPress sites using Nginx and caching technology.

Verdict: “Slow and steady wins the race” is a popular saying, but it’s not a phrase you would want associated with your website. There is a web host that stands apart in the cloud of web hosting service providers. It’s called Cloudways.

Uptime

24/7/7 2018 Uptime for Each Month:

MONTH.   SITEGROUND UPTIME         CLOUDWAYS UPTIME

August –                100%                                    100%

September –         100%                                     99.98%

October –               100%                                    100%

November –          99.98%                                  99.98%

December –          100%                                      100%

24/7/7 2019 Uptime for Each Month:

January –               99.98%                                 99.98%

February —             100%                                    100%

March —                  99.99%                                99.99%

April —                    100%                                    100%

May —                     99.99%                                 100%

June —                   100%                                     100%

July —                     100%                                     100%

SiteGround has an average uptime of 99.995% and that slightly (quickly negligently) edges out Cloudways’ 99.994%. Most of the web hosts we test are usually at least 0.05% less than SiteGround in uptime.  That Cloudways keeps your website awake, for virtually the same time as SiteGround, is something that we find surprising. And exciting!

From the results, one thing is clear.  Both web hosts are like a law student before a bar exam. They will keep your website awake without blinking.

Cloudways’ and SiteGround’s 99.9% uptime guarantee compensates users if annual uptime drops from 99.9%. But you won’t be needing it.

Verdict: your website having an extended downtime is a dangerous thing.  In the blink of an eye, you could lose your biggest customer. Luckily, with SiteGround and Cloudways, you won’t need to blink to find out. However, our winner for this round of the contest is SiteGround.

Uptime Winner SiteGround: Your website having an extended downtime is a dangerous thing.  In the blink of an eye, you could lose your biggest customer. Luckily, with SiteGround and Cloudways, you won’t need to blink to find out. However, our winner for this round of the contest is SiteGround.

Security

Both web hosts provide SSD for maximum security. SiteGround has Bot protection that crawls your site for threats, and Cloudways has platform-level firewalls on every server as well as continuous monitoring. We also strongly recommend Cloudways’ two-factor authentication as an alternative. API keys based on OAuth restricts access to the Cloudways’ API.

Get ready for SiteGround’s signature multiple layers defense system that lets you sleep like a baby in his mother’s arms.

Unlike the walls of Troy, if you use SiteGround, even the greatest Trojan horse cannot penetrate your impregnable defense. SiteGround isolates corrupted websites completely, keeping you safe. Both web hosts have optimized WAF (Web Application Firewall) for all your CMSs like Magento, WordPress, and Joomla. WAF protects your website from 99% of all unauthorized login attempts. SiteGround also uses cPanel, which has login security features like IP blacklisting, SpamAssassin, firewall and more. It’s said that you can never be too safe, and you are better safe than sorry.  Well,  SiteGround will never give you a reason to be sorry.  SiteGround, in a proactive attempt, also protects you using SG Site Scanner. Offered by Sucuri.net extension, SiteGround Site Scanner scans the publicly available link of your website to detect malicious activities. That’s right, keep calm. You are safe, even on the outside.

SiteGround vs. Cloudways: Backups and Restores

SiteGround’s hosting has automated backups and so does Cloudways. SiteGround’s backups are kept for no more than 30 days. They do not keep your files beyond that, so we advise you to backup somewhere else. Website owners can demand for backup five times on higher plans like GoGeek. This attempt to improve their backup and restore features is limited by a single caveat; you have to pay an extra fee on low-level plans like Startup and GrowBig hosting plans to request for on-demand backup.

Cloudways gives you the chance to set up automatic backups of your cloud server images. You can preset this so that the server backs itself up at intervals.  The interval can be every day, two days, three days or more. The maximum backup frequency though is for a week. For instant backup, unlike in SiteGround, you don’t have to request.  You can easily back up your site or project anytime.

Verdict: With SiteGround, you will be safe from hackers too, assuming you don’t reveal your password to an irresistible lady at the bar. If you, however, prefer backup and restore, Cloudways is better for you. So pure security or advanced backup options?  To be or not to be. It’s a tie.

Ease of Use for SiteGround compared to Cloudways

We want to clearly state that both web hosts are great examples of web hosts with beginner-friendly features and set up. SiteGround caters to everyone with its ridiculously low price and cPanel. Cloudways was created to fill the void left by DigitalOcean, a hosting provider that could care less about beginners.

Is it easy to set up an account and get started?

SiteGround can get you started on any hosting plan.  Cloudways makes use of DigitalOcean services through their partnership. Unlike DigitalOcean though, Cloudways is fully managed for you. This is why they handle the server setup and maintenance on your selected provider (I.e. DigitalOcean, AWS, Google, Amazon, etc.) for a very small pay-per-use extra fees.  They also walk you through their console setup and application deployment very fast. We have noticed that their console set up is even faster than DigitalOcean’s droplets setup.

Do they offer a free domain to make life easier when registering to launch a website?

On Cloudways, you have to purchase domain before they help you link it to your web applications. You can subsequently add domains and subdomains.  SiteGround offers affordable domain registrations for both the most popular TLDs and ccTLDs! Domain prices for SiteGround starts from $15.95. Both web hosts provide free DNS management, but SiteGround offers free ID protection options, free domain theft protection, etc.

Do they have a website builder that assists you in easily launching your website?

In the website building department, Cloudways assist, but not as much as SiteGround.  SiteGround comes with Weebly, which is just perfect for web building.  SiteGround’s cPanel allows you to quickly build websites with its dozen or so 1-click installers and drag-and-drop tools. Installers website scripts like WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal will probably get easier with the advancement in techniques. For now, it doesn’t get more convenient than this. The resident Cloudways custom server management application is Click&Go Cloud console and it lives up to its name. With its cutting-edge tools, it allows you to configure basic settings, monitor server resources, etc. Click&Go supports and assists in managing web applications e.g. WordPress, Joomla, Drupal Magento, Prestashop, and WooCommerce, etc. It also allows you to adjust server resources to fit traffic requirements at any time.

Do they offer channel? Do they offer 1 click WordPress installs?

Once again, cPanel comes to SiteGround’s rescue. This time with the Softaculous 1-click installer. SiteGround has advanced and easy to use one-click installers of its own. Applications that come with SiteGround’s cPanelz like Magento, can also be installed on Cloudways with a single click. You can even install DigitalOcean WordPress with a single click. With Cloudways, you can deploy a new site for your server through one click. Server backup? One-click. With one click to create them all, they really are determined to make your life a whole lot easier.

Migrations

For first-timers, Cloudways allows a free site migration to its cloud platform for the first time. Any additional migrations will attract a fee depending on the website app type. SiteGround isn’t much better in this case. You have one free site migration for their two higher plans. Any additional migration on these two plans or on the basic StartUp plan incurs a fee of $30.

Website Staging

Do you like to preview your works before live production?  Well, you are in luck because both web hosts have just the right things for that. Cloudways grants you staging feature for all websites to be tested. Benevolent, yes, we know. SiteGround’s staging feature is available for WordPress websites. Both websites allow you to create a copy of your live site on a separate, staging environment with a single click. You can test new codes, designs and create website love copies with a single click. SiteGround even creates a backup of your site just before pushing your changes to live production. In the real world, there are no do-overs. But now, you can correct WordPress mistakes with SiteGround.

Exclusive Convenience Features

Both web hosts have Git-support for a more hands-on approach. If you need additional infrastructure from one of Cloudways’ third-party services, it’s a features buffet.  You can use as many as you can afford from one account.

Verdict: Cloudways may be for beginners, but it’s for beginner-level developers.  SiteGround is for everyone, even those hearing about web hosting for the first time. SiteGround wins.

Cloudways vs. SiteGround: Customer Support and Reliability

Both SiteGround and Cloudways allow phone, email, and chat, as a means to contact customer service. SiteGround also offers the ticket support system. Getting much-needed help has never been easier. This is only normal since SiteGround is reported to have a more rigorous recruitment and training process which enables their customer care to solve your problems faster than you can scream help!

Proactive Support

I have personally experienced situations where SiteGround goes out of the way to comment on the complaints of clients even without even being tagged. This proactive attitude to support makes them unmatched in customer satisfaction, and brand protection support, in the global hosting ground. And this proactive nature even extends to problems that were caused by no fault of theirs, or those covered in their terms and conditions.

Knowledgebase

Answers to billing, sales, or technical queries are available on both hosts’ support pages. knowledgebase also includes hundreds of tutorials, articles and answered FAQs that will make your hosting experience way walk in the park. SiteGround also seems to pay more attention to details, like making tutorials easier to find, and arranging their knowledgebase, so that it becomes extremely easy to navigate for beginners.

Verdict: Both web hosts offer solid support. If web hosts are judged by how supportive they are, SiteGround is easily the best.

Plans & Pricing

Cloudways does not offer shared or reseller hosting.

Shared Hosting

SiteGround shared hosting prices:

The StartUp plan: $3.95 per month, can host one website. It can handle up to 10,000 unique visits per month, and it comes with Essential database and Email offers.

Essential database:

DB Size: 500 MB || DB Table Size: 250 MB || DB Queries: Up to 10% of Server Resources.

Essential Email offers:

Mailbox Size: 2000 MB || Email Sends per Hour: 400 || Recipients per Email: 40 || Attachment Size: 50 MB || Emails Received per Minute: 20 || Undelivered Mail Retry Time: 11 Hrs.

The GrowBig plan: $5.95 per month and can host multiple websites. It also comes with a free SSL Wildcard for 1 year, all 3-levels of the SuperCacher, and staging environments for both WordPress and Joomla. It comes with premium database and Email offers.

Premium database:

DB Size: 750 MB || DB Table Size: 250 MB || DB Queries: Up to 10% of Server Resources.

Premium Email offers:

Mailbox Size: 4000 MB || Email Sends per Hour: 400 || Recipients per Email: 40 || Attachment Size: 50 MB || Emails Received per Minute: 20 || Undelivered Mail Retry Time: 11 Hrs.

Their GoGeek plan: $11.95 per month and can host unlimited websites. It has 30GB of space for up to 100,000 visits per month. Enjoy priority support, PCI compliance, and one-click Git repo creation. It comes with geeky database and Email offers.

Geeky database:

DB Size: 1000 MB || DB Table Size: 500 MB || DB Queries: Up to 30% of Server Resources. ||

Geeky Email offers:

Mailbox Size: 6000 MB || Email Sends per Hour: 800 || Recipients per Email: 80 || Attachment Size: 50 MB || Emails Received per Minute: 20 || Undelivered Mail Retry Time: 11 Hrs.

It should be noted that all SiteGround shared hosting plans have 24/7 client support, free CloudFlare CDN, free Let’s Encrypt SSL, free daily backups and restore.

PHP Users

SiteGround offers multiple PHP versions at a cheap cost of $1. Their unique server setup that allows each customer to choose among multiple versions of PHP to use for their account. This allows customers to use multiple applications on a single account, even if they require different PHP versions. Multiple gallery and PHP libraries, PHP encoders are supported e.g. GD library, ImageMagick, CURL, Zlib, Zend Optimizer, ionCube, SourceGuardian, Mod_rewrite, .htaccess, Smarty Templates, php.ini.

Cloudways is a whole ball game on its own in PHP services, seeing as its one of its primary purposes. It supports all forms of PHP and provides all the necessary features needed to develop PHP apps. They have PHP-7 ready servers and allow the containerized deployment of PHP and PHP CMS apps.

WordPress Hosting.

Both web hosts support WordPress hosting. Honestly, who doesn’t?  SiteGround helps you install WordPress, and automatically updates it, together with all its plugins regularly. You can get WordPress on Cloudways console, through the DigitalOcean WordPress one-click installer.

Cloud/VPS Hosting

Apart from PHP, cloud/VPS hosting is another of Cloudways’ areas of expertise. Affordable, pay-as-you-go pricing: the pricing is also cheap barely above what SiteGround charges. Cloudways uses a post billing system. The money you pay in the first week of every month is for services you used in the month before. Talk about an unusual and appreciated money-back-guarantee policy.  You can pay via Paypal, MasterCard, Visa, and American Express.

Below are the most popular Cloudways hosting plans:

DO1GB             DO2GB                 DO4GB

Disk Space               25GB          50GB                    80GB

Bandwidth.         1TB                      2TB                    4TB

Price                  $10 / mo  $22 / mo              $42 / mo

In the control panel on your console, you can check your resource usage and bill anytime. It also provides an estimate of how much you’ll need to pay on your next invoice.

This table compares Cloudways’ pricing to other popular cloud hosts.

Cloudways.  LiquidWeb    Hostwinds DigitalOcean Vultr

vCPU Cores                       2.                             2.                            2.                            2.            2

RAM.                                     4 GB.                     2 GB.                     4 GB.     4 GB.    4 GB

Storage                                    80 GB                         40GB.           75GB        80GB                  80GB

Bandwidth.                         1 TB                  10 TB                   2 TB                    4 GB       3 GB

Price.                         $42.00                      $59.00.           $18.99   $20.00   $20.00

Before server configuration on Cloudways, you will be asked to choose from 5(majorly) service cloud/web service providers on the Cloudways console. A cloud provider basically offers access to datacenters and cloud-based servers for hosting websites. Imagine your PlayStation, that’s Cloudways. These other providers are the games you play on it. We don’t think it’ll be as fun as “Last of Us” though.

Since Cloudways is a console-based platform that integrates other web service providers. We felt we should tell you about these other cloud providers since you will be paying them, if you use their services too.

• Amazon Web Services, Google Compute Engine, Kyup, Linode.
• HostWinds: Pretty much like Cloudways, but they accept bitcoins.
• DigitalOcean:  in partnership with Cloudways for years now, they share a lot of similarities, although it is geared towards advanced developers more.  It’s also cheaper.
• Vultr: offers root access, which Cloudways does not.

SiteGround has four cloud hosting plans with increasing price and sophistication: Entry, Business, Business Plus, and Super power. All of them provide 5 TB of monthly data transfer, and even the basic Entry plan is very powerful, as seen below:

• The Entry plan comes with 24GB CPU Cores, 40GB RAM at $80.00 disk price.
• The business plan comes with 36GB CPU Cores, 60GB RAM at $120.00 disk price.
• The Business Plus plan comes with 48GB CPU Cores, 80GB RAM at $1600.00 disk price.
• The Super Power plan comes with 810GB CPU Cores, 120GB RAM at $240.00 disk price.

Reseller Hosting

There is a complicated credit and discount reseller hosting system on SiteGround. Cloudways has an affiliate program that allows you to earn by partially replacing reseller. With either of their two warning structures: “Slab” or “Hybrid,” you can earn more than $5,000 a month. Cloudways will provide you with banners for your website, affiliate links, exclusive deals for promotion, and seasonal campaigns. They even help you learn about this program through resource guides and handlers.

As a tech or website design freelancer, blogger or design agent, you should make use of the affiliate program which comes in two structures:

THE “HYBRID” COMMISSION STRUCTURE

For 1- 5 customers, you earn an initial fee of $30 with a 7% recurring rate and you eat $164 month. This, of course, increases, as your customers increase:

6 –  20   $30         7%          $642

21 – 45  $30            7%       $1,445

46 – 80  $30            7%       $2,568

Dedicated Server Hosting

SiteGround can accommodate two types of website owners that demand high-end hosting: dedicated and custom-built server users. They have three plans for them: Entry, Power, Super Power and enterprise hosting (where you basically contact them and tell them all that you need). Entry, Power and Super Power all have 10TB of bandwidth per month and run on Xeon processors. Cloudways does not offer shared hosting but you can use DigitalOcean’s dedicated hosting plans from your console.

eCommerce Hosting

Cloudways supports e-commerce and Magento. SiteGroubd supports woo-commerce and other CMS.

Scalability

With Cloudways’ pay-as-you-go system, the sky is the starting point for small businesses with the potential to grow.

Hidden Fees

Cloudways may ask you to pay for every feature you point to, but at least they are transparent about this. SiteGround has no such virtue.

SiteGround’s Domain prices start from $15.95 but you can try their shared hosting plan for just a month. When you choose to sign up for a month, SiteGround will require you to pay a setup fee of $14.95. They also charge $30 for subsequent site migrations after the first.

Extra Features

Cloudways offers the following as extras:

• Vertical scaling of servers.
• Staging area for testing websites.
• Support for Multiple PHP versions.
• Free Cloud CDN and HTTPS support.
• Git integration for instant deployment.
• One-click stop for applications and servers.
• Folder-like structure for managing multiple projects.
• It allows you to start, share and work on projects with individuals and teams.
• Limited applications supported: Cloudways dream come true if you’re hosting a common CMS (like a WordPress site), but if you’re creating a custom app in Python, JavaScript, Ruby, etc., you won’t enjoy Cloudways at all.

SitGround offers:

• Free Cloudflare CDN.
• Free FTP, and SFTP.
• Unlimited sub and packed domains.
• Av free WordPress Migration Plugin.
• SiteGround has the Weebly Site builder.
• SiteGround has HTTP2 /enabled servers.
• SiteGround is optimized for WordPress and Joomla.
• Unlimited number of MySQL & PostgreSQL databases.
• Transfer of site to other SiteGround clients.
• White-Label hosting and client management for higher plans.

SiteGround supports Mod_perl, Plexum, HTMLDoc, PDFLib, MS SQL or ColdFusion.

SiteGround’s 99.9% uptime guarantee compensates users with one free month of hosting if annual uptime drops from 99.9%. But you won’t need it.

It offers free and easy installation of a shopping cart of your choice, such as Magento, osCommerce, PrestaShop and more.

On your account, you can also use multiple galleries and PHP libraries, PHP encoders and other technologies like GD library, ImageMagick, CURL, Zlib, Zend Optimizer, ionCube, SourceGuardian, Mod_rewrite, .htaccess, Smarty Templates, php.ini.

Many more technologies supported.

They sponsor and send employees to hosting events like Word Camp.

Cloudways offer:

• A 30-day free trial is available.
• Host unlimited sites.
• Automatic site backups.
• Pay-as-you-go pricing system.
• WordPress is easy to get started with.
• You get a 10-in1 deal with the various other cloud hosting providers in Cloudways’ console.
• You can pay via Paypal, MasterCard, Visa, and American Express.

Recap:

Monthly Price:

Cloudways starts from $10.00 per month, SiteGround starts from $3.95 per month.

Unlimited Data Transfer:

Cloudways: No (From 1TB). SiteGround: Yes.

Unlimited Data Storage:

Cloudways: No (From 20GB). SiteGround: No (10GB – 30GB).

Unlimited Emails:

Cloudways: No. SiteGround: Yes.

Host Multiple Domains:

Cloudways: Yes. SiteGround: Yes (Except on StartUp plan).

Hosting Controlpanel / Interface:

Cloudways: Interface. SiteGround: cPanel.

Server Uptime Guarantee:

Cloudways: 99.994%. SiteGround: 99.995%

Money-Back Guarantee:

Cloudways: 3 Days Free Trial. SiteGround: 30 Days.

Dedicated Hosting Available:

Cloudways: No (only Cloud available). SiteGround: Yes.

SiteGround vs. Cloudways: Our Pick

This obviously seems like an unfair fight.  With SiteGround being an all-rounder and Cloudways burying its head in the VPS cloud, it may be hard to find a clear winner. Not to mention, both of them aggressively compete in every category. Cloudways has superior speed, SiteGround edges out in Uptime. Cloudways has better VPS, but SiteGround has a host of other plans. Cloudways has multilayered security, Cloudways has the ultimate backup and restore feature. While SiteGround is more expensive in the VPS hosting category that both web hosts share, customers have the chance of going for cheaper plans like those of shared hosting.

SiteGround’s customer support and reliability, as well as their ease of use for beginners, end up winning them this contest. We can only hope that their support keeps it up. SiteGround vs. Cloudways? The ground remains more solid.

We’ll be looking at SiteGround vs. Liquid Web today. If you’ve ever wondered which of the two hosts is the best for you, well you’re at the right place.

SiteGround and Liquid Web will be going head to head, and we’ll be finding out which hosting company offers the best deal and why.

How will we be doing this? Easy. We bought hosting plans on both platforms and did a tonne of research, so we’ll be comparing them on the basis of our performance tests, customer support test and a whole lot of other important metrics.

But first, an overview.

Liquid Web vs. SiteGround Overview

SiteGround was founded in Sophia, Bulgaria in 2004. The company is pretty big as well, employing over 500 people and hosting over two million domains worldwide. Unlike many other hosting companies, SiteGround is a privately owned company.

Liquid Web is not as big as SiteGround as the company only has about 32,000 customers. Founded in 1997, Liquid Web deals with managed hosting solutions, while SiteGround basically sells all sorts of hosting – from shared hosting to dedicated server hosting.

What this also means that Liquid Web’s plans are significantly more expensive than SiteGround’s shared hosting plans – and this is saying a lot because SiteGround plans are one of the most expensive shared hosting options on the market.

With over two million domains, SiteGround is certainly the most popular host of the two. However, that means ridiculously little in terms of performance and quality. The most popular hosts have, sometimes, put in shocking performances.

What You Should Know when comparing Liquid Web and SiteGround

SiteGround and Liquid Web aren’t very similar when it comes to the services that they provide. For example, SiteGround is well known for its Shared Hosting which, even if quite expensive, is popular because it comes with top performance. Even when compared with other tops hosts like Bluehost, SiteGround manages to stand its ground. This is clearly seen in our SiteGround vs. Bluehost comparison.

On the other hand, FlyWheel does not even offer that kind of service. The most affordable FLyWheel plan Tiny starts at $13.00 per month and it’s a Managed WordPress Hosting Plan.

As such, we’ll be comparing only the basic plans that SiteGround and Liquid Web have in common, which is the managed WordPress hosting tier plans and Cloud hosting plans. Our performance tests were done on managed WordPress hosting plans, and our opinion on the speed and uptime of SiteGround and Liquid Web is only valid in the context of managed WordPress hosting.

Performance Comparison

We’ll be checking outperformance using our speed and uptime tests.

Uptime

To test uptime on the two hosts, we did the only logical thing. We bought plans on SiteGround and Liquid Web, and then used Pingdom to test uptime for a four-month period. Here are the results we got over those four months.

Over our testing period, Liquid Web recorded amazing uptime with a perfect 100% score. That’s impressive to say the least. SiteGround was also impressive with a 99.99% uptime, but Liquid Web is the host with the clearly better uptime here.

Uptime Guarantee

Uptime can be fickle, and many hosts are usually one faulty server away from offering hours and hours of downtime. If this happens (as it often does), what guarantees do you have?

SiteGround has a 99.9% uptime guarantee. That means that for every percent of uptime below 99.9%, users will be entitled to a month of free hosting.

Liquid Web has a much better uptime guarantee at 100%. This means that for every hour of downtime experienced by users (as recorded by Liquid Web’s service logs), users are entitled to credit for 10 times (1,000%) the actual amount of downtime. So that means if your site is down for 1 hour, you receive credit of up to ten hours.

There are limitations to these uptime guarantees though. One of such limitations is that downtime from scheduled maintenances (this includes software and hardware maintenance) are not to be compensated. In addition to this, downtime from malicious attacks is not liable to be compensated as well. While SiteGround and Liquid Web will do all they can to stop the attack and restore your site, they cannot guarantee that you won’t experience a period of downtime during the process.

Speed

Before we go to our speed tests, we’ll take a look at factors that affect speed like CDN and spread of data centers. Hopefully, that should put our eventual speed results in context.

CDN

Content Delivery Networks are a connection of proxy servers all over the world that keep a cached version of your site. This makes it easier for your site to load quicker and have better response times, and as such, they make your site faster. Not all hosting plans come with free CDN.

All SiteGround’s plans come with Cloudflare CDN. You can easily activate it from your cPanel, and it is free. Liquid Web also runs a similar system. They offer free Cloudflare CDN that can easily be activated from the control panel.

However, for Liquid Web, there are other paid options like the Akamai CDN that can be used for bandwidth and storage.

Data Centers

Faster hosts are the ones with widespread data centers, as that makes it easier for content to get around quicker – according to conventional knowledge, that is.

Liquid Web has three main data centers which are on both the east and west coast of the United States and in central Europe.

(graphic showing data centers in Amsterdam, Phoenix Arizona, and Lansing Michigan).

SiteGround, on the other hand, has a better spread, with six data centers located on three continents.

(Show SiteGround data centers in Iowa, Chicago, London, Amsterdam, Singapore, and Eenshaven)

Speed Test

To run our speed test, we made an average of recorded speed from random locations around the globe. Here’s a look at our results:

On average, SiteGround managed the quickest response time which was 252ms. Seeing that most of the hosting providers that we’ve reviewed only managed about a 500ms average uptime, SiteGround’s speed is really impressive. Liquid Web did quite good as well, scoring an average of 261ms – which is also really fast.

SiteGround’s page load speed was quite impressive as well, with an average page load speed of 600ms. Liquid Web’s average page load speed was also around the same range.

Load Impact Test

We also tried to check what would happen if there was a traffic surge, so we sent virtual users (up to a hundred) to our site to see how well they could handle traffic surges.

The test clearly shows us that both hosts are able to maintain stable speed at high traffic, but Liquid Web is certainly the more reliable host.

SiteGround vs. Liquid Web for Ease Of Use

The best hosts make the job of hosting a website easier for users. Things like the sign-up process, free site transfers, and the user interface need to be looked at if you want to know just how easy to use your prospective hosting plan would be.

Sign-Up process

SiteGround has a very easy sign-up process. In fact, we only needed to click through a page of forms before getting to the checkout, where we paid and got access to our account. We’ve not reviewed many hosts with a better and easier sign-up process.

The sign-up process for Liquid Web was not as easy as with SiteGround, but it wasn’t terrible as we only had to click through about three pages of forms before checking out. While we signed up for the GrowBig plan with SiteGround, we had to sign up for the managed WordPress hosting Spark plan of Liquid Web (it costs about $19 for a site).

Free Site Migration

We believe that all hosting plans should come with at least one free site migration. Some hosts agree, and some do not. Let’s see what SiteGround and Liquid Web think.

Liquid Web has an amazing free site migration policy. They offer free migration of multiple sites on all plans.

SiteGround also offers a free migration service, however, it is only valid for one site and is only available on GrowBig plans or higher.

Interface

We’ve used a lot of interfaces from the highly customized version of cPanel that Bluehost offers, to the peculiar (for lack of a better word) custom panel of DreamHost, and we can say that interfaces based on cPanel are the best. If you’d bloke to know how well Bluehost’s interface compares to the interface of other hosts, you can check out our Bluehost vs. DreamHost comparison.

Liquid Web makes use of different control panels and your control panel depends on the sort of plan you’re on. The Managed WordPress hosting plan (the plan that we bought) came with a custom control panel. Other plans though, like the cloud hosting and dedicated hosting plans, come with a choice of using either Plesk or cPanel/WHM.

The custom control panel that we used on our Spark plan was actually pretty decent, and we can only compare it to the custom panel of Flywheel in terms of functionality. It was really that good.

SiteGround makes use of a very functional and easy to use version of cPanel. We had no problems using our site with their interface as it was a very smooth experience.

Free Domains

Most hosts provide free domains with all plans. However, hosting companies who do that also double as domain registration companies. SiteGround is not a domain registration company, neither is Liquid Web, so neither of them offer free domains when you sign up. If you want to buy a domain, you can buy it during checkout, but it is certainly not free.

Website Builder

Like we’ve explained earlier, Liquid Web doesn’t offer the regular hosting service so they don’t have a site builder – nor do they need one.

SiteGround, on the other hand, offers a free Weebly site builder is great if you plan on creating less than six pages. If you want to create more, you’ll have to subscribe to the Weebly Pro plan.

We’ve used the Weebly site builder, and as site builders go, it is up there with the very best.

Staging Environments

For people new to hosting, staging environments can be the difference between hours of needless downtime and smooth operation. Staging environments allow you to test changes you might want to make on your live site on a dummy site. That way, you have no need to make needless experiments on your website.

This is one issue that not a lot of hosting companies agree on. Some companies offer staging environments “en suite” with all plans, while some offer it on only top plans. Let’s see what SiteGround and Liquid Web think about staging environments.

Liquid Web allows you to create a staging environment on your managed WordPress plan quite easily (we know because we created one ourselves and it was an easy 4-5 steps process). You simply click on the Manage Site option, then click on staging and then click copy live site to staging. Once that’s done, all you need to do is to click the staging domain link to open the staging site. Importantly, this can be done on all of Liquid Web plans.

As easy as can be, right?

SiteGround isn’t quite as malleable as Liquid Web (which makes sense because Liquid Web has liquid in its name and SiteGround has ground so…), so they don’t offer staging sites on all plans. In fact, only the GoGeek plan, which is the top tier plan that costs about $14, comes with staging sites.

On the GoGeek plan (which we suppose is not exclusively for geeks, even though the name states otherwise?), you can easily create a staging site by clicking on the staging icon that is under the Software and Service option. After that, you just need to click on the create staging copy icon to create your staging site.

SiteGround vs. Liquid Web: Customer Support

To test support quality, we decided to contact the customer support staff multiple times over our testing period to ask questions.

To measure quality, we looked at wait time (time that elapsed between when we initiated contact and when we got a representative to talk to us) and quality of support (how helpful the information or help that was finally rendered proved to be).

Customer Support Channel

Liquid Web and SiteGround have identical customer support channels with phone support, live chat support and email/ticketing support available 24/7.

Customer Service Test

Liquid Web says that they have the ‘most helpful humans in hosting’. And we were eager to check that out. To a great extent, they aren’t wrong.

When we tried to connect to a live representative through their live chat platform, we experienced less than a minute of wait time on all occasions. That’s amazing because most hosts that we’ve reviewed (Especially Bluehost and HostGator) always manage to make us wait an average of five minutes before allowing us to connect to a live chat representative.

Connecting to a live representative from SiteGround was easy – we never had cause to wait for more than one minute before a live rep spoke to us. Impressively, sometimes we never even had to wait at all.

Additionally, there’s something so human-like about SiteGround’s live chat platform. When we connected to a live rep, there was always a tab that showed his/her name, hobbies, picture and a short bio. It made us connect more.

Aside from the aesthetics of the live chat, the live representative that we spoke to were friendly, knowledgeable and super helpful, although we didn’t really need their help.

Phone Support and Email/Ticketing Support

Phone support was more of the same. Wait time was very short, about a minute or thereabouts and the quality of support rendered was top notch. Importantly, we were never put on hold or advised to go read an article – these are things that one often encounters when one contacts the customer support of a lot of hosting.

Our tickets/Emails were replied quickly (most times under ten hours) and the replies were usually comprehensive solutions to our problems.

Knowledgebase

The knowledgebases of SiteGround and Liquid Web are stock full of helpful articles and tutorials that can help you solve the most basic problems that you encounter.

In terms of quality, we found nothing to differentiate one host from the other. Both SiteGround and Liquid Web had very high-quality articles and tutorials.

Money-back Guarantee

Many hosting companies have the annoying habit of locking new users in with rock bottom prices that only span two or three years. After this period, they immediately jack up the prices, leaving customers in uncomfortable situations.

That’s why it is important to choose a host with an agreeable money-back guarantee period so that you aren’t locked into a long and useless contract.

SiteGround has a standard thirty days money-back guarantee for shared hosting plans, while they have a shorter fifteen-day money-back guarantee for cloud hosting plans.

Customers must note that this money-back guarantee is only applicable to the hosting fees paid. Other add-ons gotten at checkout are non-refundable.

Liquid Web, on the other hand, offers absolutely no refunds. And, in a weird convoluted way, this makes sense. This is because Liquid Web allows you to pay on a month by month or year by year basis, without drawing you in with extremely low prices that get jacked up after two years or three.

Security Comparison

The internet is a scary place and you deserve a host that takes things like backups, SSL certificates and site security seriously.

SSL certificate

Companies like Let’s Encrypt have made it easier for sites to get free SSL certificates, however not all hosts offer them.

SiteGround and Liquid Web are two of the many hosts who offer a free SSL certificate on all plans. All of their plans come pre-installed with SSL certificates from Let’s Encrypt.

Backup Policy

If you’re putting a website up, you’re putting a lot of things at risk. That’s why it’s important that you back up your most important files because even the most secure systems can be hacked. If or when that happens, you need to be sure that your site is safe and can be restored at a moment’s notice.

Now, since Liquid Web is a managed hosting solutions provider, we were not very surprised to find out that the host offers free daily backups on all hosting plans.

SiteGround also offers backups on hosting plans. The host keeps backups of customers for up to thirty days. Backups of Shared and Cloud hosting plans are kept for a period of up to thirty and seven days accordingly. If you have the SiteGround backup service enabled on your account, you can easily restore backups yourself from cPanel at no extra charge.

Site Security

Liquid Web offers both paid and free security options. The Web protection provides malware and remediation service. It costs about $20 per month. In addition to this, Liquid Web has a Cloudflare Web Application Firewall that is managed by Cloudflare and helps you stay one step ahead of attacks from malware by updating new security rules automatically.

Asides that, Liquid Web has strong DDoS protection that monitors your site in real-time and shields you from disruption of service attacks.

SiteGround also had a robust security system. The host offers a proprietary security app called the SG scanner. The SG scanner is powered by Sucuri and is a malware detection application and early warning system that prevents attacks on your website.

The SG scanner also checks authoritative blacklist sites to check if your site has been blacklisted. If it has been, it automatically notifies you by mail. However, we would only advise that you activate the SG scanner on GrowBig plans or higher. The SG scanner costs $19.80 per year ($1.65 monthly).

When it comes to firewalls, SiteGround has that covered with ModSecurity which is an open-source web application firewall. Additionally, SiteGround makes sure that security rules are updated every week. This protects users from common malware and attacks.

SiteGround vs. Liquid Web: Plans and Pricing

No matter how good a service provider is, it must be at the right price for it to be a viable offer. We’ll compare the quality and price of the Managed WordPress hosting plans of SiteGround and Liquid Web to see exactly which host offers the best deal.

WordPress hosting

SiteGround has three WordPress hosting plans which are the StartUp, GrowBig, and GoGeek plans. Liquid Web has double that number, with six plans. The plans are the Spark (the plan that we bought for this comparison), Marker, and Builder packages.

Basic Plan comparison

SiteGround’s StartUp plan is the basic plan which comes with a single website, 10 GB of space, ten thousand monthly visits, unmetered traffic, free daily backups, and free emails. The StartUp plan costs about $3.95 per month ($11.95 for renewal).

Liquid Web’s comparable plan is the Spark plan. The plan comes with a single site, 15 GB of storage, 2 terabytes of bandwidth, and unlimited email accounts. It costs just about $19 per month – a huge difference from the StartUp plan by SiteGround.

The main thing to look at in hosting plans is the number of websites allowed, and in this criteria, the StartUp and Spark plan are quite similar. Asides this, the plans have a difference of just 5GB in disk space. So, in theory, this Spark plan should and the StartUp plans should cost about the same thing – unfortunately, they don’t.

The Spark plan is way more expensive and we simply cannot see a reason for that. SiteGround’s StartUp plan is way cheaper and has comparable specs – so, to us, SiteGround offers the better deal.

Medium Plan Comparison

Here, the GrowBig plan of SiteGround will be going against the Marker plan of Liquid Web.

The GrowBig plan costs only about $5.95 per month (renewal after a two year period costs $19.95). The plan comes with unlimited websites, 20GB of webspace, and capacity for 100,000 visitors per month. This is in addition to all the basic features of the StartUp plan.

The Marker plan is quite expensive, at $79 per month. To put that in context, SiteGround’s most expensive plan (the GoGeek plan) isn’t as expensive as the Marker plan. The Marker plan has really impressive specs as it comes with up to five sites, 40GB of storage, 3 TB of bandwidth, and unlimited email accounts.

It is easy to think that because the GrowBig plan has unlimited sites, it is better than the Marker. However, that’s not true. With only 20GB of webspace, the GrowBig plan may not be able to even host 5 huge sites successfully.

The Marker plan, on the other hand, comes with double that storage and that’s something to consider when weighing the value of both packages.

We certainly think the Marker plan from Liquid Web has better specs than the GrowBig plan, but we absolutely do not think that it is worth $79 per month. For this reason, the GrowBig plan wins this comparison.

Top Tier plan comparison

The top tier plans are the GoGeek plan of SiteGround – which costs $11.95 per month (renewal costs $34.95) and the Builder plan of Liquid Web.

The GoGeek plan comes with unlimited sites, 30GB of storage, capacity for a hundred thousand visits per month, and premium WordPress features like free WP transfer, WordPress SuperCacher, advanced and on-demand backups, and 1-click WordPress staging.

At $11.95 per month, this is a pretty decent service.

The Builder plan costs $149 per month and comes with 25 sites, a hundred GB of storage, five terabytes of bandwidth, and unlimited emails.

On the whole, one thing is clear; Liquid Web and SiteGround have different customers in mind in terms of managed WordPress hosting. In terms of quality, both deals are actually really great. The GoGeek plan is great for customers who have multiple small sites that they control, while the Builder plan is great for customers or developers with much more sites who would like a premium managed hosting experience.

However, we simply can’t see why the Builder plan, at $149, wouldn’t at least come with unlimited diskspace or websites. The GoGeek plan is cheaper, and in our opinion, worth what its asking.

Cloud hosting plan comparison

The managed WordPress hosting plan was a bit skewed because SiteGround plans were way cheaper than Liquid Web and as such packed way lower performance.

So to offset that, we’ll be comparing the Cloud hosting plans of both hosts as they have way more comparable plans.

Liquid Web has four cloud VPS hosting plans and they are the 2GB, 4GB, 6GB and 8GB plans. SiteGround also has only four cloud hosting plans and they are the Entry, Business, Business Plus and Super Power plans.

The plans have some disparity in terms of price, but they pack roughly the same quality so they ought to give us a rough idea of the quality of deals on offer by both hosts.

Entry Plan vs. 2GB plan

The entry plan of SiteGround comes with 2 CPU cores, 40GB of SSD space, 5 Terabytes of Data Transfer, 4GB of memory and costs $80 per month.

The 2GB plan of Liquid Web comes with 2 virtual CPUs, 40 GB of SSD space, and 10 Terabytes of Data Transfer. It comes with free 100GB of backups. At $29 per month, this is an amazing deal and is the cheaper option – even with virtual CPUs.

Business plan vs. 4 GB Ram plan

The 4GB ram plan of Liquid Web comes with 4 virtual CPUs, a 100GB of SSD disk space, 10 Terabytes of bandwidth, and a hundred gigabytes of backup. The plan costs $49 per month.

The Business plan of SiteGround comes with 3 CPU cores, 6 GB memory, 60 GB SSD webspace, and 5 Terabytes of data transfer. The plan costs $120 per month.

Business Plus plan vs. 6 GB plan

The Business plan of SiteGround comes with 4 CPU cores, 8 GB of memory, 80GB of SSD storage, and 5 terabytes of data transfer. The plan costs $160 per month.

The 6 GB plan of Liquid Web comes with 8 virtual CPU, comes with 150 GB of SSD storage, and ten terabytes of bandwidth. It also comes with 100 GB of backups. The plan costs $69 per month.

It’s really telling that Liquid Web’s plan comes with 70GB more storage than a plan that costs double.

16 GB plan vs. Super Power plan

The Super Power plan of SiteGround comes with 8 CPU cores, 10GB of memory, 5 terabytes of data transfer, and 120 GB of SSD storage. The plan costs a whopping $240 per month. For only 120 GB of storage, this might be a tad bit high and not very reflective of the value of the plan.

The 16 GB plan of Liquid Web comes with 8 virtual CPUs, 200 GB of SSD storage and ten terabytes of bandwidth. The plan also comes with a 100GB of backup and costs only about $129 per month.

It’s obvious that Liquid Web’s 16 GB plan has more value for money than the Super Power plan.

Pricing Winner – Draw: This was a difficult section, as in most cases Liquid Web and SiteGround offer radically different plans, values and prices. However, in terms of quality and price, neither host goes extremely above board.

While there are a few plans (like the Super Power plan from SiteGround and the Builder plan from Liquid Web) that we think are way too expensive, on a whole, SiteGround and Liquid Web offer reasonable prices.

SiteGround vs. Liquid Web: Major Differences

• The first major difference between both hosts is that they offer very different services. SiteGround offers a wider range of services, while Liquid Web only offers managed hosting plans that are made for big businesses, not small businesses and/or individuals.
• Another major difference is that SiteGround offers standard money-back guarantees while Liquid Web does not
• Liquid Web has better security Infrastructure than SiteGround
• Liquid Web offers hosting on Linux and Windows while SiteGround only offers Linux based hosting.

SiteGround vs. Liquid Web: Our Pick

HostGator vs 1and1 has got to be, in recent times, one of the most like for like matchups we’ve seen. It’s like comparing the giant of two continents. HostGator is one of the biggest names in Web-hosting in America, and 1and1 is the largest one in Europe, with over 20 million domains under its control. On the other hand, HostGator has over 10 million domains under its control. So maybe they aren’t that similar.

Or are they? Both are owned by some of the biggest internet conglomerates on the planet. HostGator is owned by EIG, a company that owns almost half of the Web-hosts that we’ve reviewed, and 1and1 is owned by United Internet, a company that has been around since 1988. The company also owns Mail.com, which is probably the biggest mail service on the internet. But does all these have a bearing on the actual performance of 1and1 or HostGator? Let’s find out.

1and1 vs. HostGator Overview

HostGator, as one of the most powerful host (in the US, anyway), offers a lot of web hosting services. These services include VPS, shared, dedicated and WordPress hosting. It also comes with its own proprietary website builder called Gator by HostGator (A bit obvious, but also a stroke of genius, we think).

With a longer than normal money-back guarantee, decent security and superb uptime, HostGator is pretty reliable. This is probably why, despite being acquired by EIG, a company notorious for making Web-hosts a shadow of themselves, HostGator is still popular amongst small business owners and bloggers. 

Like HostGator, 1and1 provides services from the ground up. Be it advanced level hosting services or shared hosting plans for beginners, it is unlikely that any group of webmasters would not find a viable plan with 1and1. Recently, in 2018 (whether or not 2018 is recent is relative), we got the news that 1and1 expanded by buying Profitbricks which was an enterprise cloud solution. If anything, we expected this expansion to mean even more stellar performance stats from 1and1. Will we be disappointed? Let’s find out. 

Popularity

This is usually the more irrelevant aspect of the hosting and we literally just write about it to state the obvious. However, we won’t be stating the obvious for this section, because the answer to this question is probably not really obvious – especially if you’re reading from America. Hostgator is a supremely popular Web-host… in America, and perhaps, Provo, Utah. 1and1 is much more popular everywhere else. And that is that about that. 

Performance Comparison

One of the most important things to consider when choosing a host for your website is performance. How reliable are the services you’ll be paying for? How quick? Since the primary job description of a hosting provider is to keep your website online and accessible, you should be able to measure how well these services are rendered. Obviously, the best service is the one that handles these tasks better than others. Let’s see how well both perform on uptime and page load speed. 

Speed

What difference can a few milliseconds make? A LOT, according to google. Faster websites generally rank high on search engine inquiries, and that means a higher conversion rate for businesses and higher traffic for blogs. So speed does matter. 

To test the speed of HostGator, we did what we do best – we bought a basic plan (sorry if it sounds like we’re being a tad cheap), built a dummy website, filled it with basic content and tested response time. On average, HostGator had a response time of 765ms, which was quite high for us, especially as we’ve seen response times consistently lower than 500ms.

In short, if speed is your thing, as it should be, HostGator isn’t the greatest choice for you. The page load speed was even lower, around 1280ms. However, if you’re determined to use HostGator, you can make use of their cloud hosting option which is two times faster and has four times the resources of their shared hosting plan – according to HostGator, at least. 

So, compared to HostGator, how fast is 1and1? Well, we set up a website and tested the response time, and we measured an amazing average of 276ms. This isn’t only higher than HostGator’s response time by far, it is also significantly higher than the industry average.

If speed is something that you’re particular about, then 1and1 should be at least near the top of your list of prospective choices. Full-page load speed wasn’t up to a second either, with most of our page requests loading around 800ms. We think it’s unlikely that users would have a problem with the speed that 1&1 provides. 

VERDICT; 1&1 most certainly blows HostGator out of the water in terms of speed. It’s almost like comparing a Hyundai to a Ferrari. 

Uptime

Page load speed can only be measured if there is a page to load – there can only be a journey if there is a destination to reach. So it is important to know how reliable a prospective Web-host is in accomplishing the most basic of tasks – keeping the website accessible.

Of course, no provider can claim to have your website online 100% of the time. There are too many variables that interfere with this, however, any hosting service can be judged on how close to 100% their service really is. It would be needless, at this point, to start explaining how vital it is to businesses and blogs that their website is constantly reachable. 

Since we already have a HostGator plan (specifically bought to be tested for this review), we went to work. Over our testing period, which was a little over two months (not long enough to get an accurate picture, but just the exact length to get a preliminary idea of what to expect), HostGator had an impressive uptime of 99.99%.

Like we earlier said, it is almost impossible for any provider to promise 100% uptime, and the closest is usually 99.99%. So HostGator has most definitely hit the mark squarely here, and we don’t think that it gets much better than this.

When analyzing uptime, we don’t like to look at the data of the results alone. We also like to know whether the provider in question has an uptime guarantee or a compensation policy for customers when they experience uptime below a certain point. We were impressed to discover that HostGator has a 99.9% uptime, which means that if uptime gets worse than 99.9%, users are entitled to a free month of credit. So not only do you get great uptime, but HostGator also provides a safety net in case uptime gets terrible. 

Using the same methods we made use of when testing HostGator, we arrived at a slightly less impressive uptime of 99.98% for 1and1. So basically, 1and1 has amazing speed, and very nearly almost perfect uptime. So in terms of performance, we have to say that it is very near impossible to have a problem with them.

We are so used to seeing hosting providers sacrifice speed for uptime or vice versa that it is a genuine sight to see them deliver on both counts, exceptionally. (Well, just almost exceptionally). 1and1 even does better than HostGator on account of an uptime guarantee, with a guarantee of 99.99%. 

VERDICT; We recorded a 99.99% uptime for HostGator, and they have a 99.9% uptime guarantee while we recorded a 99.98% uptime for 1&1 and they have a 99.99% uptime guarantee. So, on one hand, HostGator has better uptime than 1&1 and on the other hand, 1&1 has a better uptime guarantee. So which do we go for? We’d rather have great uptime than the best uptime guarantee there is, so HostGator takes this one for us. But it’s a close margin, though. 

Ease of Use

We’ve met a lot of webmasters and website owners. We’ve never met one who told us that they “enjoyed the challenge” of handling a difficult user interface or backend. So we can say, on some authority, that no one likes the stress of navigating a difficult interface or handling a backend with unnecessary complexities. In fact, in all cases, it is the easier the better. Asides that, some hosting providers are more helpful than others. 

HostGator Beginner Friendliness

HostGator makes use of cPanel, the standard industry interface, for all its plans. However, HostGator’s version is heavily customized to make it easier for beginners to use. We noticed that Hostgator’s customized version of cPanel is far easier to use than many other brands of cPanel that we’ve seen.

Upon logging in, the user is presented with most of the options they’d need to run their website. There’s also a clear path to the knowledge base on the first page of the panel. There’s a search panel for users to pull up tutorials or articles that would help answer difficult questions. Failing that, there’s a support tab that lets them contact support directly. 

HostGator also has a “wizard-like” feature that allows you to make a request and then recommends a package that users can add to their plan to accomplish their goal.

Gator by HostGator

There’s also a website builder, developed by HostGator itself, appropriately called “Gator by HostGator”. It’s a free website builder that comes with all of HostGator’s plans and comes with drag and drop functionality so that even beginners can get their websites up and running in no time. The builder comes with a full image library, so if you want full customization, you’re covered.

HostGator Professional Email

Hostgator also has an email marketing feature that is free to use for the first three months. The feature also has tools for people interested in building their email list. Like most other Web-hosts, HostGator has one-click installations of a lot of applications, so users don’t need to fret over installing their favorite apps.

HostGator Marketing Freebies

Hostgator also has freebies for new users like a gift $100 advertising credit (however, this only becomes yours when you spend $25 on actual advertising). Additionally, all of HostGator’s plans come equipped with a free SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt. It might not be much, seeing as Let’s Encrypt provides these certificates for free, but there are some Web-hosts who don’t make it available so this should be applauded, to a certain extent.

Website Transfer to HostGator

Hostgator also solves one of the most frustrating questions that users can have, which is the question of site transfers, easily. Users can migrate their site, absolutely free of charge, with less than minimum downtime. However, if you want to get this done, you have the first thirty days to get in touch and have it done. A single site transfer might not be the greatest thing in the world but when you consider that it isn’t a service that a lot of Web-hosts offer, it actually begins to sound nice. Users also get Google analytics straight out of the gate and can start work without having to set it up. That helps them track the progress of their work easily. 

We ran into very few problems (none at all, in fact) while using HostGator. It was an easy experience for us and not one that we think a lot of Web-hosts can beat. But can 1&1 surprise us? Why not let’s find out. 

1and1 Beginner Friendliness

First off, 1and1 does not make use of a cPanel. This means that they have their own dashboard customized entirely to their specifications. 

We found it rather difficult to carry out the easiest tasks and had to Google or speak to a customer rep to figure out the basic controls of the dashboard. It wasn’t an experience that we enjoyed very much and we don’t think people would feel very encouraged to switch from a control panel that they understand to one that they cannot quite wrap their heads around.

1and1 Scalability

1and1 offers easily scalable performance, though. This means that whenever your server is under a lot of stress, its easy for your server performance to be increased with just a few clicks. 1and1 also makes use of HTTP/2 protocol, the so-called “future protocol”. This protocol optimizes the web and allows for quicker load times (No wonder 1and1 is so fast), and makes it easier for pages to be displayed.

In any case, only about 20-25% of the websites on the internet offer HTTP/2 but the number is increasing every day. 1and1 also offers some freebies like free SSL certificates with shared hosting plans and a free domain name too (for the first term, at least).

1and1 Marketing Freebies

In order to get the word about your website out there quicker, 1and1 has a Google Ads management lesson that helps you with writing ads, location-specific targeting, and keyword research. This ensures that your ads never get stale or old. There’s also a rankingCoach tool that gives your website full coverage on SEO through videos and tutorials. In no time, if you make judicious use of these features, your business should be on the first page of a search engine inquiry. 

1and1 Website Builder

For users looking to build their first website, they can look into MyWebsite Builder, a turnkey that gives you access to the tools needed to build a proper website. The builder comes with a lot of templates so you don’t have to build anything from scratch. All you need to do is to add your text, as simple as something that is extremely simple.

To customize your website further, there’s the award-winning Drag-and-Drop interface. You can also add widgets to further customize your website to your taste. It isn’t a free service, though, and it comes at $4.99 per month. As usual with Web-hosts, 1and1 also offers access to a lot of popular apps like Drupal and Joomla, and they can be installed in one click.

However, for users looking to set up a virtual market, 1and1 provides a website builder especially for that function called the… drumroll… Ecommerce website builder. The builder is very similar to the first Website builder that we spoke about earlier, the only difference is that it comes with features peculiar to E-commerce website building. 

1and1 for Small Businesses

1&1, to round it up, has something different for small businesses, startups in particular. It’s called a Startup guide that contains exactly what you would imagine that a startup guide would contain- articles on how to start a limited liability company, and how to create a work schedule using eXcel. 

Asides from the initial difficulty of navigating the user interface, 1and1 IONOS actually provides a lot of help for new users. But do they compare to HostGator?

VERDICT; For many webmasters, the lack of a cPanel can be a deal-breaker, and for all the features of 1&1 IONOS, we just couldn’t look past it. For us, HostGator takes this round, and easily too. 

Money-back Guarantee

What if, after purchasing a hosting plan, you feel like you’ve been terribly shortchanged. What happens then? Do you have to stay with the provider for the whole term that you’ve paid for?

Most Hosting companies have a period called a guarantee period. This is the period where you can check out the performance of your service and decide whether it is the right fit for what you want. If it is not you can cancel your plan and get your money back – as long as this is done within the grace period.

The industry standard is 30-days, but we’ve seen a lot of providers go beyond 30-days. We’ve even seen one go as far as 97-days. Amazing, right? HostGator goes above the standard too, promising a 45-day money-back guarantee. Of course, like with most services, this isn’t a cut and dried issue. Refunds don’t cover additional services like free domain names. If you’ve received any of such services, the price will be deducted from the total amount you paid. 

1and1 IONOS, on the other hand, is more comfortable towing the industry line, as they provide only a 30-day money-back guarantee. However, this guarantee is not applicable to their premium products and the same conditions as with HostGator apply. 

VERDICT; This as simple as any duel to decide. The service with the longer money-back guarantee period wins, and that provider was HostGator. 

Customer Support

One of the pillars of a good host is great customer support. Controlling a website, or numerous websites, is technical work and a day might come (most certainly will) when you’ll need the help of an expert. When that day comes, we can assure you that you would hate for your fate to be in the hands of half-trained support that can’t even be reached. Let’s see how well the customer support of 1and1 and HostGator perform in terms of customer support reliability. 

HostGator’s Support

HostGator has chat, phone and email channels open 24/7. That’s a good sign, but again, that’s what most of HostGator Alternatives have. So we tried to contact a live rep because that’s the channel that most people love using to solve their problems. We had varying degrees of wait time, ranging from 35 seconds to 35 minutes.

When we spoke to the customer reps that we connected with, we tried asking some difficult questions, and while they were generally friendly and courteous, almost half of them didn’t have the answers to the questions we asked on the spot and had to take up to ten minutes to confirm. We wouldn’t say that it was a fantastic experience and we wouldn’t say it was terrible either. We’ve seen much worse, and we’ve seen a lot better. 

1and1 Support

Like HostGator or BlueHost (or most big players in the hosting industry), 1and1 has three main customer support channels. They are the live chat, phone, and email support channels and they are open 24/7. 1and1 also has a lot of articles and tutorials that answer the most basic questions.

For more complex issues, you’ll have to speak to them directly. So we tried the chat channel, and we were reasonably impressed with the wait time which was about 2 minutes on average. The longest period we had to wait was about 5 minutes.

Unfortunately, though, we were not impressed with much else. We tried asking difficult technical questions and most often than not we were transferred to another agent. This happened consistently.

The closest we got to a coherent answer was a link to an article available on the knowledge base which, surprise surprise, did not answer our questions in the least. The experience was more or less the same as the phone channel too. Although to be fair, we had some success with the email channel and our emails were always replied under 24 hours.

VERDICT; Sometimes we got lucky with HostGator and actually connected with someone who sounded like they knew exactly what they were doing. It isn’t the same with 1&1 IONOS, though. We were almost never lucky and it never sounded like we were going to get reliable help. HostGator wins this one for us. 

Security

While a lot of the responsibility of security rests on the shoulders of the end-user, the customer can only do so much to protect the servers their Information is on. The responsibility of this rests squarely on the shoulders of the hosting provider. So let’s see how far both these Web hosts go to protect your website.

HostGator’s Security

Asides from the fact that all plans get a free SSL certificate, HostGator also provides extra security features. For example, you can add Sitelock to your website with just a few clicks. This service is a malware scanner that runs through the website daily, looking for breaches and reporting on them instantly. They also provide Spam Assassin, a tool that, like the name implies, assassinates spam.

So if you have an email account connected to your website, you’re covered from suspicious emails. Unfortunately, though, HostGator doesn’t provide automatic backups. But a tool is recommended to users which is the Codeguard automatic backup tool. It isn’t free and costs about 2$ per month. It isn’t bad value for money as it comes with 1GB automatic daily backup storage for about five websites. The plan also allows for three restores per month. The tool is scalable too so users can upgrade to 5Gb space backups and so forth. 

To us, it seems like HostGator has got the basics covered, but we didn’t like that they did not have automatic backups for free. 

1and1’s Security

Like HostGator, 1and1 provides a free SSL certificate on all plans. 1and1 also provides anti-DDoS protection that prevents attacks on servers and stops malicious third-party users from attacking servers. The higher-tier plans also get SiteLock, a tool that acts as a malware scanner and protector.

Website pages are protected from bugs, threats, viruses, and vulnerabilities with this tool. 1and1 doesn’t slack in the backup area, as users have great backup and restore options in the unlikely case that they lose their website to virus or something of the sort. There’s also a defense against brute force attacks (we know because we tried and we rather unsuccessful). 

VERDICT; Overall, we were more impressed with HostGator’s security infrastructure. They take this one for us. 

Pricing and Plans Comparison

To some people on a budget, this is the most important metric to consider. However, rather than looking for the lowest price, we’ll be looking at the BEST price. Trust us, there’s a difference. 

HostGator’s Plans

HostGator has 3 shared hosting plans. These are the Hatchling Plan, the Baby Plan, and the Business plan. 

The Hatchling plan is the base plan and it comes with:

• One domain
• One-click installations
• Unmetered bandwidth and subdomains,
• Unlimited disk space
• Unlimited email accounts,  
• Free SSL certificate

All these come at a price of $2.75 per month. This price only for customers paying 36 months in advance, though. Other customers have to pay something around the region of $10.95. If after the initial three-year term, you’d like to renew the plan, you’d be asked to pay only $6.75. 

The Baby plan costs $3.95 per month and comes with:

The plan comes with unlimited domains, one-click installs, free SSL certificate, unmetered bandwidth, and an included a free domain.

The Business plan costs $5.95 per month and comes with:

• Unlimited Domains
• One-click installs
• Free SSL certificate
• Free dedicated IP
• Free SEO tools
• And a free included Domain. 

Do HostGator’s Plans pack a lot of value? Ordinarily, yes. But when we consider their subpar performance, we get less impressed. However, this isn’t the worse “value per dollar” that we’ve seen. It is not the best either. 

1and1 Plans

1&1 has three shared hosting plans and they are the Essential, Business and Expert Plan.

• The Essential plan comes with 1 Website hosting, 10GB storage, 10 email accounts, and 10 databases. 
• The Business plan is priced at a flat rate of $8 per month and comes with hosting for five websites, 25 databases and email accounts, and 100 GB storage.
• The next plan is the expert plan, and, as the name implies, it is for experts and can host about 50 websites. It comes with 500Gb storage, 500 databases, and  500 emails. 

So is there something missing? How about the renewals? Yup. It stays the same. And this is something we love to see— clean pricing, with no hidden schemes and whatnot. In terms of value, 1&1 might not have the badge of so many unlimited plans, but they have just enough that it really stops to matter.  

VERDICT; Both Web-hosts have fairly cheap plans, but we loved the straightforward pricing of 1&1. They take this one for us.

Extra Features

Do any of these Web-hosts have interesting extra features? Let’s see

We could find the following extra features for HostGator:

• Better performance with Opteron 6000 series CPU combined with DDR3 ECC RAM
• HostGator has only one database – MySQL
• Unlimited FTP and email accounts. 
• Support of multiple languages including Ruby on Rails, PHP, Python, and Perl. 
• $100 in free advertising credits.
• Access to Google analytics and Mojo marketplace.

Impressive? Let’s see what 1&1 has to offer us.

We could find the following for 1&1 IONOS:

• 1&1 IONOS has a proprietary backend interface separate from cPanel or Plesk.
• 1&1 IONOS makes use of the HTTP/2 protocol 
• 1&1 IONOS offers several cloud services
• 1&1 IONOS assigns consultants to new users; these consultants are point men that users can turn to for questions, whenever the need arises. 
• 1&1 IONOS offers the services of two website builders

VERDICT; HostGator’s extra features we’re more impressive for us, they win this round. 

Major Differences

Just to recap, let’s look at the differences between these two Web-hosts

• 1&1 is faster than HostGator
• HostGator has a longer money-back guarantee period
• HostGator has a better customer support
• HostGator has cPanel, while 1&1 doesn’t
• HostGator’s pricing hike after renewal, 1&1 prices don’t.

HostGator vs. 1and1: Our Pick

Performance stats mean a lot, and 1&1 IONOS absolutely held its own in that respect. However, it went downhill from there before the Web-host found itself with great prices, and most importantly, no phony renewal schemes. The three most important things to judge a Web-host with, to us, are performance, customer service, and price. 1&1 carried the day in two of these, so they emerge worthy winners. 

So, HostGator Vs 1&1 IONOS? 1&1 comes out number one in this one.

I like clear-cut winners as much as the next person, but when it comes to Bluehost vs. Heroku, it would be silly for me to pick one for you. Why? Because, although you can technically host websites with both Bluehost and Heroku, the two companies specialize in very different things. The first strives to provide a straightforward hosting plan that all people can use to run a website, while the second focuses on app creation and hosting, which is an entirely different kettle of fish.

As I was saying, you can theoretically use Heroku to host a static website, but you have no incentive to do so. In this respect, Bluehost is a much better service. It’s affordable, it comes with a free domain, and it’s one of the most beginner-friendly hosting providers out there. It doesn’t exactly offer the fastest website speed, but it’s well above the market average both in terms of page loading time and uptime.

Update January 2020: Black Friday Promo available now, check out this promo page, and get the special promo price of $2.65/month! At the moment (2 Jan) this is the best discount you can find, make sure to take advantage of it before registering!

Meanwhile, if you ask me whether Bluehost or Heroku is the better choice to host an app, I would definitely go with the second. You can use Bluehost’s AppMachine to create and publish an app on the Internet, but this feature is only suitable for lightweight apps at best.

Heroku, on the other hand, allows you to create and publish a small app for free. They have an unmatched list of integrations, support a wide range of languages, and offer to do the heavy lifting for you in terms of updates and maintenance. Furthermore, if you eventually decide to scale your app, Heroku gives you options. You have to pay for them, of course, but they are easy to implement and can effectively keep up with the growth of your app.

Bluehost vs. Heroku Conclusion

The bottom line is that settling the Heroku vs Bluehost dispute is all about what you need. If you want to create and host and app, we recommend the former. Otherwise, Bluehost is the better choice.

If you want to decide the Bluehost vs. A2 Hosting match-up, you’re in for a sweet, sumptuous ride. It’s like trying to choose between the softest chocolate chip cookie and the perfect apple pie; in a sense, it’s bittersweet because both are just that good. You might spend hours on end balancing out features, details, and drawbacks before you come up with a clear winner.

In the competition between Bluehost and A2 Hosting, the first comes out strong with a free domain name and SSL certificate, while the second is considered to be one of the best platforms for picky developers. The two services keep improving their offer to the point where it’s become tortuous to say for certain which is better.

Yet, we’ve taken it upon ourselves to sample both and deliver our delectable experience in what follows. Don’t worry: we’ll also include the shortcomings. We are, after all, very fussy about our delicacies.

Bluehost vs. A2 Hosting: A Complete Overview

Bluehost is a somewhat old company, founded in 2003. The company is based in Provo, Utah, and has its main data centers in the same place. Bluehost is a pretty large company too, hosting over two million websites on its servers. Before the success of Bluehost, founder Matt Heaton had tried his hands on creating two other hosts starting from 1996 before he settled on Bluehost in 2003. Bluehost offers a wide range of services— from Dedicated hosting and VPS hosting to Shared hosting. However, we are only going to review Bluehost shared hosting plans. In 2010, Bluehost was acquired by EIG, adding them to a plethora of hosts owned by the conglomerate.

A2 Hosting was conceived far back in 2001 by Bryan Muthig and compared to Bluehost has endured pretty low publicity while delivering great speed and decent performance in other areas as well. As we mentioned in our A2 Hosting review, they are also known for having great customer support and loads of great, high-tech features like SSDs on all plans and loads of beneficial features like free site migration, unlimited data transfer and a lot more. Impressively, A2 Hosting rarely discriminates in regards to plan level. Higher plans maybe get higher storage and capacity, but the basic features are available for even basic plans. Another important thing that you should perhaps know about A2 Hosting is that it’s one of the few independently owned Bluehost alternatives, and this is a big deal (or not, depending on whether you love big corporations or not) in an industry where most hosts are owned by Endurance International Group (EIG), a telecommunication giant.

The Bluehost Chocolate Chip

Newcomers to the world of hosting who are still unsure whether to go with Bluehost or A2 Hosting might find the first option to be more alluring. Bluehost has recently overhauled its UI (user interface), which makes it incredibly easy to navigate (see more about this in our Bluehost review Article). If you have basic computer operating skills, all it takes is an afternoon on Bluehost to be able to launch your very own website.

For WordPress hosting, in particular, Bluehost is one of the industry leaders in terms of affordability and value for your purchase. A free domain name, SSL certificate, unlimited e-mails, and marketing credits are all features that sweeten the whole.

Even if the popular blogging platform has its own hosting service, Bluehost vs. WordPress is a debate that is often won by the former. We’ll readily admit that they’re also one of our favorites, despite the fact that their starter packages tend to fall off by comparison with A2 Hosting when it comes to high volumes of traffic.

The A2 Hosting Apple Pie

In terms of data transfer, A2 Hosting is one of the first organizations to have offered high-speed SSDs, which are now a staple of their services and can enable your pages to be loaded faster. On average, you can expect your website to be anywhere from 10 to 20 times more responsive than the industry average if properly set-up and maintained.

Although slightly more expensive for the starter pack, A2 Hosting’s proposal includes their recently introduced Turbo Servers package, which is to say that you will share your server with fewer clients than usual. In turn, this will give you more physical memory and a range of pre-configured caching options. It might seem like developer gibberish, but these are the tools that ultimately lead to above-standard performance.

You don’t get a free domain with A2 Hosting like in the case of Bluehost, but you do benefit from free site transfer, as well as the possibility to host unlimited websites.

Popularity Comparison

Full disclosure; we couldn’t care less about how popular a web-host is. But we always like to make the clarification so that some smart fellow wouldn’t say, hey but this host is more popular, what’s up with that? Popularity levels have more to do with advertising and marketing tactics than with actual hosting proficiency. So, which Web-host is more popular? Bluehost, without a doubt. A2 Hosting doesn’t even come close in terms of websites hosted or reach. Now that we are done with that, it’s time to move on to one of the most important criteria of choosing a host for your site; performance. 

Performance

When you purchase a hosting plan, you have some certain expectations. You want your website to be accessible, and quickly too. The best hosts deliver on this promise better than others— some are more reliable and faster than others. Let’s look at uptime, for instance. 

Uptime

In order to get the most accurate review, we purchased a basic Bluehost plan (most of the data in this review is from our experience using the host), created a website using Weebly and set up our testing tools to test for uptime. Over our testing period, we recorded about 99.99% uptime. Which is just about the best that a host can promise. Of course, we all want our sites up for 100% of the time, but that isn’t possible. Scheduled updates, random server failures and a lot of other things make that ideal rather impossible. In that case, a 99.99% uptime is quite applaudable. We do not only like to test for uptime, but we also like to check whether a host has an uptime guarantee. Unfortunately, Bluehost doesn’t offer an uptime guarantee. As you probably know, this means that even uptime gets bad, you can only hope it gets better. Users cannot request any compensation. This isn’t especially encouraging, seeing as a lot of other Web-hosts offer an uptime guarantee. 

We also tested A2 Hosting’s Uptime

We also bought a basic A2 Hosting plan (most of the data in this review is from our experience using the host), set up a dummy account, filled it with content and set to work testing. Over our testing period, we recorded a decent, but not amazing, uptime of 99.96%, similar to the averages of other well-known hosts such as Hostgator or BlueHost. Over the course of a year, that’s an almost negligible 3 and a half hours. If you run an online store, you may lose some money if your website is down 3+ hours a year, but it certainly wouldn’t be that big of a bother. To make things better (somewhat), A2 Hosting offers an uptime guarantee. A2 has a 99.9% uptime guarantee, which means that  If downtime is higher than 0.1%, customers receive 5% credit for each hour that downtime is further experienced. However, this uptime isn’t valid on two conditions;

During scheduled maintenance

When outages are because of circumstances that A2 Hosting cannot control.

VERDICT; While A2 Hosting uptime is negligible, Bluehost’s trumps it by a lot (0.03% is a lot in terms of uptime). A2 tries to cover its blushes by offering an uptime guarantee, but we aren’t just buying it. We prefer great uptime to a great uptime guarantee, and Bluehost has a better uptime. Bluehost wins this one for us. 

Speed

Did you know that Amazon would lose up to 160 million dollars a year if the website got any slower? Now you do. Did you know that 40% of people would stop visiting a site if they experienced problems with speed? Speed matters to visitors and they should to hosts and webmasters too— in fact, they do. 

Bluehost Speed Tests

We measured the average response time of 461ms on our Bluehost website and we were quite surprised. We certainly did not expect that Bluehost would perform above average in regards to speed. However, that is exactly what happened. To make sure that we did not record phantom speeds, we sent about a hundred virtual users to the site to see whether the servers would perform worse during a traffic spike. That didn’t happen, as Bluehost continued to deliver really stable speeds around 400ms. It was impressive, especially as it isn’t something that we expected. 

(Our speed test takes into consideration speeds from various locations around the world. Actual speeds within the US are much lower)

A2 Hosting Speed Tests

We were sort of excited to carry out our A2 Hosting speed test. Why? A lot, and we mean a lot, of reviews place A2 Hosting at the top of the totem regarding speed. So we fired up our site and calculated the average speed of our testing period. We got an astounding response time of 331ms, which is amazing because response speed within the US is around 50-70ms. The average was brought down because we took other locations outside the US into consideration. This isn’t just fast, it is super fast and we don’t think we’ve reviewed a faster host. A2’s speed absolutely blows everyone out of the market. Like Bluehost, we tried to test whether the speed we saw could hold up doing traffic spikes, and we were glad to not see a dip in speed. Whether with low traffic or high traffic, A2 Hosting is super fast. 

 It even gets more impressive when you take into consideration the fact that we didn’t test speed using the signature turbo plan. We recorded these speeds on our basic plan, and A2 Hosting claims that the turbo plan is even faster— 20 times faster than the normal servers. Talk about a weird flex. 

VERDICT; Bluehost provides decent speed, but decent is nothing compared to extraordinary. We don’t think that there are many hosts that would beat A2 Hosting in the speed department. It appears that the hype is real and A2 really is that fast. They win this round for us, and convincingly too. 

Ease of Use for Bluehost compared to A2 Hosting

There is a reason why people prefer automatic cars to manual ones, tractors to hoes, air conditioning to a hand fan, and riding in a car to hiking (most of the time, at least). That reason is ease— no one likes difficulties, and it is the same with hosting. The simple truth is that the easier a hosting experience, the better the host. And that’s that. 

First, let’s talk about the user interface. Bluehost makes use of cPanel, the standard user interface for hosting. This means two things; a) users migrating from other hosts (who are most likely to be using cPanel) will find it easier to understand and use, and b) cPanel is great for beginners or less advanced users so they can get most of their tasks done without trouble. Some of the useful features of Bluehost’s cPanel are;

 MySites; It allows users to control multiple websites via a single account 

The Marketplace feature; It gives users access to a digital marketplace where tonnes of things like add-ons, themes, and even professional services can be bought seamlessly. 

Domain manager aptly called Domains; This is a tool that allows users to manage the registration status of domains, discover and register new domains, set up redirection, and update information. 

Users who want more advanced settings can find them grouped neatly together under the advanced option. Bluehost provides one-click installation support for most popular apps like Joomla, Magneto, Drupal and WordPress. Bluehost also has a special customer service called Blue flash that provides instant advice on WordPress. Whatever help is needed— be it advice on plug-ins, themes or/and templates, Blue Flash is provided absolutely free and on all plans to guide customers. If you’d like to build a website, Bluehost provides the services of the Weebly website builder absolutely free of charge. Weebly has drag and drop functionality so that you can get your website on the way without writing a single line of code. To top a wonderful performance up, Bluehost offers free SSL certificates on all plans. 

There is one thing that we noticed, though. Bluehost doesn’t offer a free site transfer and users have to pay a one time fee of $149.99 to transfer five websites, 20 email accounts and any other file or database that you might want to be moved. We are not entirely sure this is the greatest deal for people moving from other Web-hosts. There are a lot of Web-hosts with more or less the same profile as Bluehost offering free site transfers. It would be easier to transfer to one of those hosts.

Like Bluehost, A2 has a cPanel interface and it’s great for all the same reasons. However, it isn’t as heavily customized as Bluehost’s, so we think that beginners would prefer Bluehost’s interface. Experienced users, however, should have no problems with navigating A2’s interface. In addition, we wouldn’t give A2 Hosting top marks for space management— the interface is needlessly cluttered with so much information. 

Asides that, almost everything regarding use is satisfactory. There is one-click installation support for a lot of apps, including Joomla and WordPress. A2 Hosting also has special tools like the A2 Optimized WordPress plugin that optimizes WordPress. However, this tool is only available on higher-tier plans. Unlike Bluehost, A2 Hosting doesn’t make use of a third-party website builder. The host has a proprietary website builder called Sitebuilder. No, we are not kidding. A2 Hosting spent years developing a website builder and called it Sitebuilder. Goes to show that truth can be stranger than fiction. A2’s Sitebuilder has drag and drop functionality, and while it might not be the greatest Sitebuilder we’ve seen, it’s still pretty decent. Unfortunately, Sitebuilder isn’t free and costs anything from $2.76 to $8.88. Lastly, A2 Hosting provides free SSL certificates from Let’s encrypt on all plans. In addition to that, A2 Hosting allows users to migrate anything one free website on a shared hosting plan. This is a sweet deal, especially as Bluehost doesn’t offer it.

VERDICT; Overall, Bluehost was easier to use for us. However, we were let down in some key areas which include the fact that there is no free site migration offered. A2 Hosting, in the end, gave us more problems than Bluehost, even though they are negligible in the long run. 

Money-Back Guarantee Policy

We absolutely love money-back guarantees, and generally speaking, it is the longer the better for us. They are important because they show exactly how much a provider trusts the goods/services being sold and they allow users to check for themselves whether the service/goods purchased were what was advertised. The industry standard for money-back guarantees is 30-days, and we are of the opinion that thirty days is simply not enough to test run a hosting service. 

Bluehost has an average money-back guarantee of thirty days. That is, if you purchase an annual plan (a plan of a year or more), you get thirty days to set up your website, monitor performance stats and decided whether or not you’d like to continue with Bluehost for the long haul. Bluehost’s money-back guarantee is pretty straightforward and doesn’t involve any shenanigans as we saw with GoDaddy. However, refunds can only be made on the condition that the fee for free services received like free domains is deducted. In the case of free domain, a fee of $15.99 will be deducted. Bluehost claims that this must be done because of the special nature of domain costs.

A2 Hosting, on the other hand, has two kinds of money-back guarantee. They have the first one, like Bluehost’s, that lasts for thirty months and has roughly the same conditions. However, here is where A2 Hosting blows us away. If you decide to cancel your hosting plan after the first thirty days, the fee for the days of hosting you’ve used will be deducted from your original fee and the rest will be refunded to you. People talk a lot about considering the risks associated with buying a hosting plan, but A2 destroys this argument easily. Purchasing an A2 Hosting plan comes with little or no risk attached, and this anytime money-back policy is something we’d like all hosts to implement. 

VERDICT; The answer is easy for us, and it should be for you too. A2 Hosting wins this round completely. It’s not even a contest. 

A2 Hosting vs. Bluehost: Customer Support and Reliability

If we were to mention the top three things that are important to us (and should be important to you too) when considering moving to a new host or purchasing a hosting plan from a Web-host, customer support and reliability would make the list a hundred out of a hundred times. Customer support reliability is so important, whether you’re a beginner or the most advanced webmaster. The chances of you running in to a problem or something that you need clarification on, especially if you have more complex hosting needs, is almost 100 percent. And when that time comes, it’s important to have customer support that is 1) easily and quickly accessible and 2) helpful. 

Bluehost offers three channels for contacting tech support and these channels are the live chat, phone, and ticketing channels all available 24/7 and on all plans. Like most hosts that we’ve reviewed, Bluehost also maintains a pretty stacked up databases that have everything from articles explaining the simple parts of hosting to one’s guiding users through the multiple technical processes needed to run a website.

Since the live chat channel is the most commonly used channel, (and we suspect that it is the most effective tool), we decided to try that out first. Bluehost is a pretty large corporation, so we didn’t have especially high hopes for their customer support. We are always wary of the customer support of pretty large companies because they usually have too many customers to attend to and the support rep to customer ratio is often unbelievable. So we tried to connect to a customer rep, knowing that we might have to wait for a while because it is what it is. Impressively, although we still ended up waiting for about an average of five minutes thereabouts when we tried to connect to a live rep, it really wasn’t as bad as we originally anticipated. The live reps that we spoke to were friendly and courteous enough, however, only about half of the people we asked questions looked like they had in-depth knowledge about what we were asking. The rest had to delay before replying us (we believe this is because they were confirming answers to our questions). Perhaps Bluehost hasn’t yet finished training the reps that were less than impressive? We wouldn’t know. Bluehost’s customer service won’t get top marks for customer reliability— but that doesn’t mean they have the worst support we’ve seen. We’ve seen far worse, and in fact, Bluehost is quite above average in our opinion. 

A2 Hosting offers more customer support channels than Bluehost, with a phone, live chat, ticketing, and even Skype customer support service. Like Bluehost offers, there’s also a robust knowledge base if you’d prefer not to speak A2 Hosting also has a nice (We think? We aren’t entirely sure, to be honest) name for their customer support service. They are called the “Gurus Crew”, which has a nice ring to it and would be appropriate if the entire customer service department wore turbans, mediated, and drank spiritual tea in the Himalayas. But, presumably, they don’t, so it ends up being what it is. 

Moving on. 

We contacted the live chat support as we did with Bluehost, and we experienced considerably lower wait times on an average than we did with Bluehost. The reps, or members of the Guru crew, that we spoke to were friendly, knowledgeable (as a guru should be), and answered all our questions in less than a minute. It does appear that you don’t have to drink spiritual tea and live in the Himalayas to be a guru. Overall, it was an easy experience. We were able to connect to a rep quickly, and our problems were solved quickly too. It rarely ever gets better than this. 

VERDICT; Did we have any serious problems with either host? No. But we have to choose a winner. While Bluehost’s customer support is more than able to help you through tiny, uncomplicated problems, we aren’t sure that a lot of the customer reps will be much help if you run into bigger issues that need expert advice. On the other hand, we feel the non-tea drinking (presumably) men and women at the guru crew will be more than capable. A2 Hosting takes this one for us.

Security

A website holds a lot of information, and in some cases, that information can be dangerous if in the wrong hands. It can also be very painful if users lose data and files because of malware. That is why, in order to protect your investment (a website, no matter which way you look at it, is an investment), you must pay attention to the security infrastructure of a host before purchasing a plan. Thankfully, most Web-hosts offer some level of security. The major differences are often in how much they are worth, and whether they are free or not. 

Bluehost Security Features

Bluehost covers the basic by offering a free SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt. The host also offers a special security tool called Sitelock that scans for malware 24 hours a day, seven days a week and immediately reports once any danger is spotted. However, this isn’t a free service and users may have to pay within the range of $2.69 to $41.99 per month. Bluehost also has the Codeguard basic, a tool for automatically backing up data. Codeguard isn’t free either and costs $2.95 (lowest renewal price) to $23.95 (highest renewal price). There are other security features like Spam Experts, a tool that filters your mail and saves you for spam and suspicious emails. There is also access to the Domain privacy feature that helps keep your private information off public WHOIS listings. Unfortunately, all these features, while they might be free for the first term, come with a renewal price. There is indeed no free lunch. However, most of these features, like Codeguard basic for instance, are offered for free on higher-tier plans. Bluehost provides courtesy backups on lower plans too, but we would advise users to either purchase Codeguard basic or find another way to be responsible for their own backups. This is because courtesy backups simply mean that Bluehost does the backup as a favor to the user, and it is not guaranteed. 

Bluehost has decent security options, but most of them are not available to basic plans and are only available as add-ons. Not good enough, we’re afraid. 

A2 Hosting Security Features

A2 Hosting has HackScan, a virus scanning service that scans for viruses 24 hours a day. There is also a defense against DDOS attacks. A2 Hosting provides free SSL certificates on all plans, and KernelCare, a feature that automatically runs rebootless Kernel updates daily. A2 Hosting also offers optimized plug-in for WordPress that auto-hardens websites and prevents hacks. This plug-in comes with a unique WordPress login URL, reCAPTCHA and automatic WordPress updates. This keeps websites safe from hackers and malware simultaneously. A2 Hosting also has a firewall, brute-defense force, and virus scanning features to keep websites safe. In addition to all these, A2 Hosting also offers automatic backups. Unfortunately, this service isn’t free and you are charged a fee. 

VERDICT; The security of both Web-hosts did little to impress us if we are being fair, and it looks a lot like a case of we couldn’t really care either way. We don’t like draws, but this looks like one so we are going to call it one. 

Plans & Pricing

Of course, there is always the temptation to take the one-dimensional route and simply choose the cheapest hosting plan and be done with it. Instead, though, we are going to take a more nuanced path and will be judging the shared hosting plans on whether the value offered is worth the price quoted. We’ll also be looking at the industry as a whole and look at the prices other hosts are quoting for the same or similar service— then we’ll decide if a deal is worth or, or whether you can get a better deal elsewhere. 

A2 Hosting has three levels of shared hosting plans. They are the Lite, Swift, And Turbo plans. The Lite plan is the cheapest plan and costs $2.96 (renewal costs $7.99). The plan comes with the following features;

• 1 website

• Unlimited storage

• 25 Email accounts

• Free and Easy site migration

• Free SSL certificate

The second plan, which is the lite plan, costs $3.70 monthly (renewal costs $9.99). The plan comes with the following features;

• Unlimited websites

• Unlimited Email accounts

• Free and automatic backups

• And all the features of the Lite plan. 

The highest shared hosting plan is the Turbo plan and it costs $7.03 monthly and $18.99 upon renewal. The plan comes with the following features;

• Turbo speed (up to 20× faster than regular servers) 

• all the features of Lite and Swift plans. 

Our first complaint is one we have for many Web-hosts in the market, and while it may seem like it is impossible to achieve, we’d really like for Web-hosts to adopt a transparent pricing scheme. It really isn’t that difficult, as we’ve seen Web-hosts who don’t increase their price by 100-200% percent after the first term. 

So let’s move on to Bluehost.

Bluehost offers four Shared hosting plans. Most Web-hosts just offer three, but we like how Bluehost leaves a lot of room for scalability. The three plans are the Basic plan, Plus plan, and the Pro plan.

The Basic plan comes with;

• 1 website

• 5 parked domains

• 25 subdomains. 

• 50GB of storage

• Unmetered bandwidth

• Free SSL certificate

• 1 free domain

• The plan costs $2.75 (renewal costs $7.99 per month).

The Plus plan comes with all the features of the basic plan plus;

• Unlimited websites

• $200 marketing offer

• Spam experts.

• Unlimited storage

• Unlimited domains

• Unlimited subdomains

• Unlimited parked domains

The plan costs $5.45 per month (normally $10.99).

The Choice-plus plan comes with all the features of the Plus plan plus;

• Domain Privacy and protection

• 1 office 365 mailbox – free 30 days and Codeguard basic site backup. 

The plan is the same price as the Plus plan but renewal costs $14.99

The Pro plan is the most expensive shared hosting plan offered by Bluehost. The plan costs $13.95 per month (renewal is $23.99 per month) and it comes with all the features of the Choice-Plus plan with a dedicated IP address and high performance. Does this mean that previous plans have low performance? No. Apparently, previous plans have standard performance. According to Bluehost, high performance means that Pro servers allow for a 300,000 file count and are deployed with fewer users per server than the standard shared hosting servers.  Therefore each user gets more resources allocated than with normal lower their hosting plans.  

We have only one problem with Bluehost, though, and it is the same one we had with A2 Hosting. Renewal fees are hiked up to the high heavens after the first term. We think that there should be a better way— at least we’ve seen hosts come up with a better way, and still offer competitive pricing. 

VERDICT; We thought A2 Hosting was pricey, but compared to Bluehost, A2 Hosting is even approaching dirt cheap territory. A2 Hosting wins this one, not because we think they offer the best deal that we could get, but because the host offers great value than Bluehost and is overall cheaper.

Extra Features

We simply cannot wait to find out the juicy features that both Web-hosts have. Will they have any feature that’ll tip the scales? 

Let’s check out A2 Hosting first.

• A2 Hosting has Windows-based servers. Accounts using these servers come with a Plesk interface instead of cPanel.

• A2 Hosting offers free Cloudflare CDN on all plan

• All shared hosting plans are limited to 35 concurrent HTTP plans— we aren’t sure if this will be enough for everyone

• Built-in server-side caching.

• A2 Hosting has great developer options; with users having access to Apache 2.4 FTP/SFTP access to your server environment, PERL 5.10 Node.js, MySQL 5.6 databases, PHP (5.x and 7.x) Python (2.6, 2.7, and 3.2), PostgreSQL 9.6, and Free SSH access. 

• A2 Hosting has multiple data centers around the world

• A2 Hosting is rather interested in sustaining the environment, that’s why the host has taken extra care to make sure that they eliminate their carbon footprint. To this end, A2 Hosting has launched a lot of projects, among them the FutureServe” green hosting initiative which tries to eliminate the harmful effects of emissions from their servers. 

What about Bluehost?

• Bluehost offers hotlink protection to protect your data.

• Bluehost offers CDN access

• Bluehost is an officially recommended web host by WordPress. Only two other Web-hosts share this status

• In case you need to manage your domains through them, Bluehost has a domain manager

• One-click installations for over 100+ apps from MOJO

• Bluehost offers the services of website builders like Drupal and Weebly.

• $200 Marketing offers 

• Bluehost has both MySQL and PostgreSQL databases and you can use either phpMyAdmin, Remote MySQL, or phpPgAdmin to manage your databases. 

• The Blue flash feature is a special customer care feature that allows you access to experts dedicated to helping you get your WordPress website up and running.

• Bluehost supports the use of Perl modules, Cron jobs, PHP PEAR packages, and Apache handlers.

• Automatic WordPress Plugin and Theme updates. 

VERDICT; The standout feature for us was A2 Hosting’s green initiatives, and the second was Bluehost’s Blue flash feature. While we applaud A2 Hosting for their efforts on the environment, we do not see how this affects hosting experience directly. On the other hand, we do see how Blue flash affects hosting experience, so Bluehost takes this round for us. 

Major Differences between A2 Hosting and Bluehost

• Just to recap, let’s confirm the major differences between both Web-hosts
• A2 Hosting is way faster than Bluehost.
• Bluehost has a thirty days guarantee, while A2 Hosting has an anytime guarantee. 
• A2 Hosting provides free site migrations, while Bluehost doesn’t
• A2 Hosting has data centers all over the world. Bluehost? Not so much.

Bluehost vs. A2 Hosting – Our Pick

Our long ride is finally over, so let’s look at the scoreboard. A2 Hosting is faster while Bluehost is more reliable. A2 Hosting has a better money-back guarantee (not even a contest) and has better customer support. Bluehost is easier to use and both hosts drew the security section. A2 Hosting offers a better price deal and Bluehost has the more exciting feature. It was a hard and tough fight but Bluehost wins this one for us. 

Bluehost vs. A2 Hosting? A2 Hosting takes this one. 

GoDaddy vs. Enom is not a very spectacular contest. In a fight, neither of the two domain registrars would achieve a resounding victory. Instead, one would slowly grind down the other in what would probably become the most tiresome match-up in the industry. But, hey, if you’re trying to choose the best service out there, you have to give them all a fair chance, right?

GoDaddy and Enom started out as domain registrars at roughly the same time. Since then, GoDaddy Inc. has become one of the largest web service companies in the world and currently holds an enormous share of the market in terms of domain purchases. Meanwhile, Enom has also developed nicely, but, at present, the number of domains they sell is minimal when compared to GoDaddy.

Because they generally sell the same stuff, it’s kinda difficult to come up with a winner. But, as we always do, we managed to find a way.

GoDaddy vs. Enom Registrar Overview

Both companies started off at around the same time, with Enom getting started in 1997 and GoDaddy later in the same year (for the full story on how GoDaddy started, feel free to check our GoDaddy review). They also started with the same products as well, with both Enom and GoDaddy starting off as domain registrars and web hosting companies.

Twenty years later, both GoDaddy and Enom have managed to go really far. But one has managed to go farther than the other, and with over 17 million reported customers, GoDaddy is by far the more popular company. Why? Consistent advertising, for the most part.

It wasn’t always that way though. In 2006, Enom brought out Bulkregister, a major competitor and became the second-largest domain registrar in the world. In 2014, the host’s parent company, Rightside, split off from their parent company, Demand Media and began to work as an independent entity.

GoDaddy vs. Enom Hosting Overview

As a web host, GoDaddy is also incredibly popular. However, this is partly due to the fact that there are almost no hosts that offer to host as cheap as GoDaddy’s. They keep the price low, and the demand high. Adam Smith would probably host his website, if he had one, with GoDaddy (click here for the reference of this joke).

Enom’s business model is a somewhat curious one. In exchange for advertising Dreamhost’s VPS and cloud computing services, Enom acts as the permanent domain registrar for all of Dreamhost’s customers.

GoDaddy vs. Enom: What to Look Forward To

The first thing you should take note of before choosing a domain registrar is whether they are ICANN- accredited registrars. This organization acts as the regulator of the industry and makes sure that domain registrars such as GoDaddy and Enom, but also others, are playing by the rules.

Generally, this is much better than buying a domain name from a third-party reseller as they are usually not ICANN- accredited. Secondly, if you’d want to get a country-specific domain name, you need to first check local domain registrar prices. Registering with well known global registrars such as GoDaddy or Google Domains and taking advantage of their on-going promos can save you a few bucks in the end.

The third thing to do is what you’re presumably doing right now – do your research. Since most companies offer the same goods, the important thing you need to take note of is the price. Many registrars have special discounts that take quite a great percentage off the first-time price, so you need to look for that as well.

If you’re going to be launching your site after acquiring your domain name, you should probably think of purchasing your hosting plan and your domain plan from the same company. Hosting your site with the same provider as you registered your domain name with makes things a lot easier (Not all registrars also offer hosting services, GoDaddy and NetworkSolutions are some of the registrars who do that and make your life overall better because of it). You also need to think of additional services you may need like SSL certificates, and if your provider offers these services with special discounts.

Things to remember when deciding between Enom and GoDaddy:

• Both GoDaddy and Enom are ICANN registered, so you’re covered on that.
• GoDaddy provides a free domain name if you purchase an annual plan. Importantly,Enom doesn’t.
• While Enom can match GoDaddy when it comes to TLD extensions and generic extensions, Enom only has a handful of country-specific TLDs. Compared to GoDaddy, Enom easily takes the second position.

Domain Pricing

As we said, pricing is an important metric to consider when choosing between Enom and GoDaddy. You don’t want to be buying something of the same value at a higher price, do you?

We’ll be looking at the price lists of both companies for .com, .xyz, .co, .org, .net and .club domains.

Clearly, GoDaddy’s domain prices are way cheaper than Enom’s. The choice here is astonishingly easy.

Both companies don’t only sell domains. There are also additional services like WHOIS privacy (a feature that keeps your details off public WHOIS listing), SSL certificates, Shared Hosting, and website builder tools.

Shared Hosting Pricing

Enom’s hosting is not exactly what we would call cheap. In fact, compared to GoDaddy’s, it is downright luxurious. GoDaddy has four tiers of Shared Hosting plans, compared to Enom with only has three. GoDaddy’s plans are the Economy, Deluxe, Ultimate, and Maximum plans. Enom’s three plans are the Starter, Advanced and Power plans.

Low-Tier Hosting Plan Compared

Enom’s starter plan comes with 1 domain, 20GB of space, 200 GB of bandwidth and costs $5.96. GoDaddy’s basic plan, the Economy plan, comes with one website, 100GB of storage, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited emails, and one free domain. The plan just costs about $2.99 and around seven dollars to renew. Not only does Enom cost more, but generally provides less value as well.

Medium-Tier Hosting Plan Compared

The Advanced plan comes with 40 GB of storage, 400 GB of bandwidth, one domain and costs $9.76. GoDaddy’s Deluxe plan comes with all the features of the Economy plan and has the added advantage of unlimited websites, storage, and subdomains. It costs $4.99 (and $10.99 to renew). Again, GoDaddy’s plan completely floors Enom’s plan. Is it starting to look like a farce? Yes.

High-End Hosting Plan Compared

The Power plan which is Enom’s highest Shared Hosting plan comes with not very much power, ironically. It only has one domain, a hundred gigabytes of disk space, a terabyte of bandwidth and costs $19.68. To compare, GoDaddy’s Ultimate plan costs just about $5.99 (The renewal fee is $16.99). The plan comes with all the features of the Deluxe plan plus a free SSL certificate, double the processing power of the Deluxe plan and unlimited databases.

Ultimate Hosting Plan Compared

GoDaddy’s most expensive plan is the Ultimate plan and it comes with all the features of the High-End plan but doubles the processing power and memory. It also doubles the maximum website traffic limit and includes a free SSL certificate for the full term. It costs 12.99 for an initial purchase and $24.99 upon renewal. Again, this plan packs more power than Enom’s most expensive plan, even though it has comparable pricing.

GoDaddy vs. Enom: Customer Support

Whether managing your domains or hosting, you’ll almost certainly need customer support, especially if you’re a rookie. We did some testing, and we can tell you the host that we’d rather speak to if we’re in a fix.

Customer Support Channels

The first thing that we consider when testing live chat for both GoDaddy and Enom is how long we have to wait in line before getting in touch with a support representative on their end. For GoDaddy, we consistently had to wait for over ten minutes to get connected to a live rep. Ten minutes is a pretty long time if your website is down and you need urgent help. What’s more, the live reps that we spoke to were not of much help. While a few were able to answer our questions, an overwhelming majority were not able to give us satisfactory answers.

As bad as we thought GoDaddy’s customer support was, Enom’s managed to be worse.

First off, on an average, we found connecting to Enom’s live reps to be more of a headache than connecting to GoDaddy’s. Plainly put, it took longer. The quality of live support was even worse as all the reps that we spoke to sounded impatient and were not even able to answer anything asides basic questions.

For phone support, it was more of the same. GoDaddy had long wait times, Enom had longer wait times, and both did not have great support. However, the ticketing system for both was great.

Enom vs. GoDaddy: Our Winner

All in all, when you look closely at the match-up between Enom vs. GoDaddy, GoDaddy is just slightly more advantageous than Enom across the board. Granted, they have received all manners of complaints from customers lately, but, provided that they will address their problems, they will most certainly continue to be a better choice. Why? It’s simple. They give you more features and they do so for less money. Win-win… not for Enom, unfortunately, but for you.

HostGator Vs Namecheap, which company offers the best hosting service? Your best mate would probably say either of the two. And then when you ask them why they chose either one, they would probably say something along the lines of “It’s really cheap, durrrh” (concerning Namecheap) or “Gators are like, super cool, man” (concerning HostGator). When you ask us, though, we give you an actual in-depth review of both Web-hosts, buy their plans and test their performance, talk to their customer care, research about their tech, and show you (not tell) why one is better than the other.

So, which Web-host is the best?

Let’s show you.

Overview

HostGator is one of the oldest Web-hosts, founded way back in 2002, and one of the most popular Web-hosts on the planet. They are based in Houston, and most of their servers are based in Provo, Utah, and Houston. The Web-host also hosts around 10 million websites on their servers, making it one of the biggest Web-hosts on the planet.  Offering services like VPS, dedicated and shared server hosting, HostGator has a lot of plans. A while ago, HostGator was bought by Endurance International Group, a conglomerate that owns almost half of the Web-hosting industry. HostGator’s reputation suffered a bit when its Provo datacenter experienced massive outages after the purchase by EIG. But since then, they’ve started performing at the level of a top Web-host.

Namecheap was founded in 2000 by Richard Kirkendall and since that time they’ve managed to rack up more than two million customers. It gets better for Namecheap though. As a domain registrar, they have over seven million domain names under their control. It appears, to us, that Namecheap has managed to build a name for itself in domain registration. As the name implies, Namecheap’s main selling point is inexpensive plans, but does this mean that they deliver on performance? Let’s find out.

Popularity

Namecheap and HostGator are pretty big Web-hosts, with both hosting more than a million websites, so In a way, this is the battle of titans of web-hosting. Regardless, we think that HostGator has a bigger name than Namecheap.

But does it matter? Not in the least.

Performance

The primary way of judging a Web-host is via performance. How well does the service deliver on its promise of keeping your website accessible? How quickly, on an average, can they deliver that promise? No doubt, the better Web-host delivers on its promise better than the other.

We’ll be measuring the performance of both Web-hosts using uptime and speed.

May the best host win.

Uptime

Like we said earlier, we got on the HostGator website, paid for a plan, set up our account, and went to work testing uptime. Over our testing period, we experienced 99.99% percent uptime, which is as great as any Web-host can promise anyone. So on account of uptime, HostGator is doing pretty well. Most reviewers end uptime analysis here, but not us. We also like to see whether Web-hosts have an uptime guarantee policy. This just makes sure that if ever uptime with a Web-host gets terrible, users have a claim at some compensation. HostGator is pretty impressive here too, giving a 99.9% uptime guarantee. What’s the best part? If ever you experience an uptime lower than 99.9%, you are entitled to one month of credit on your account. By far, this is one of the best uptime packages we’ve ever reviewed. Almost impeccable uptime plus a great uptime guarantee is almost impossible to beat.

Using the same method we used for HostGator, we checked out Namecheap’s uptime. Over our testing period, Namecheap averaged an uptime of 99.94%, which might sound like amazing numbers on a report card, but translates to about 6 hours of downtime each year. It’s not quite the worst thing in the world, but when compared to HostGator, Namecheap may have to take several seats.  We wanted to know whether Namecheap has a great guarantee that can make up for their server performance. Namecheap provides an uptime guarantee of 99.9% and users are eligible for a free day of hosting for each hour of downtime after uptime drops below 99.9%. While this is good news, it doesn’t really do much to reassure us that websites won’t experience reoccurring downtime.

VERDICT; HostGator obviously has better uptime than Namecheap and is consequently the more reliable Web-host.

Speed

While it is important that your website is up an OVERWHELMING majority of the time, it is also important that the servers that your website runs on respond quickly to queries. A fast Web-host can be the difference between a high conversion rate and a low one. Faster websites appear higher on search engine queries than slower ones. If your website, for example, doesn’t rank high on search engine queries, you stand a chance of losing a lot of customers to a competitor.

Let’s see how HostGator and Namecheap perform in regards to page speed.

HostGator, even with great uptime, has questionable page speed. Over our testing period, we recorded an average speed of 765ms, which is just a bit above average. Were we impressed? It is difficult to be impressed by something like that. As expected, full load speed was even slower, with our dummy website taking more than a second to load most times. This is very dangerous because 40% of visitors will leave a site if it takes too long to load. Usually, the limit is 2 seconds and, although not regularly, we saw our page take more than two seconds to load. So if speed is a necessity for you (and it should be), HostGator hasn’t really got you covered.

Over our testing period, Namecheap averaged a page speed of 708ms, pretty much sat squarely in the average zone. We’ve seen worse, yes, but we’ve seen much better. While the TTFB (Time To First Byte) wasn’t disappointing most of the time, there were also periods where it was decidedly terrible. Thankfully, our dummy website loaded in a little under a second and we rarely had to wait up to two seconds to view our website either

VERDICT; Both Web-hosts are decidedly average with respect to speed, but we have to choose a winner. Namecheap might have had the worse uptime, but they have servers that are definitely faster than HostGator. They take this one for us.

Ease of Use

Let’s face it, web-hosting is a pretty technical (we don’t want to use words like difficult)  thing to grasp. So technical that some people would rather have an IT guy to set up their account rather than do it themselves. But there are people, especially small business owners, who don’t have that luxury. For these set of people, and for even advanced users, it is important that the backend interface is simple and efficient. Sounds easy right? Not really.

Let’s look at how great the experience of managing a website is with these two Web-hosts.

The first thing to talk about would be the signup process of HostGator. While the sign-up itself was a breeze and our payment was cleared as quickly as possible, it took over thirty minutes for the services paid for to be available to us. Whatever the problem is, it doesn’t look good. While it is unlikely to be a sticking point, it’s one aspect of the service that we didn’t appreciate.

HostGator’s user interface is pretty great, with most things, like billing, domain name management, plan details, and support usually a click away most times. The interface is not cluttered and quite efficient. Users manage their site through the standard cPanel. This means that users crossing over from other Web-hosts don’t need to go through a process of getting used to a new interface. Because of cPanel’s structure, you cannot change the theme of the interface, but you can customize the layout to an extent.

All of HostGator’s plans come with Google analytics, MOJO marketplace, and one-click installations. The Marketplace, if used well, can add a lot of quality to your website. This means that users get to install whatever apps they want, whenever they want, and easily too. There is also the vanish server caching which comes pre-installed and delivers really great speed. Google Analytics is also immediately ready to use— this means no setup or anything. To make the work of users even easier, all plans come with a free Let’s Encrypt SSL certificate. For a new website, visibility is probably one of the most important things to get right. To this effect, HostGator offers $100 ad credits for the first $25 of ad credits spent. Coupled with great SEO practices, these ad credits can take a website from the dark corners of the internet to the first page on a Google search.

For users transferring from a previous Web-host, HostGator offers a single free site transfer— which is one more than most Web-hosts offer. To make the deal sweeter, HostGator includes a free cPanel transfer plan as well so if you have a large site with multiple subdomains, HostGator has got you covered. For newbies with no websites, HostGator has a website builder called Gator by HostGator (very captain obvious-y, that). It is one of the best proprietary website builders that we’ve seen and is tailor-made for beginners. It comes with a free domain name, so all you need to do is to purchase a plan and get on with building your website. Gator by HostGator also comes with an eCommerce plan so even newbies can set up a fully functioning online store without worrying about plugins, payment gateways and all of that technical stuff.

Advanced users also have access to advanced Programming and Databases – PHP, MySQL, SSH access and more.

All in all, using HostGator is super easy, barely an inconvenience.

We don’t pay Web-hosts with Bitcoin— mostly because most Web-hosts do not accept it. That’s where Namecheap is different, though. You can pay via bitcoin if you want to. We found that to be pretty neat and innovative.

Namecheap’s user interface is clean, uncluttered and unsurprisingly efficient at displaying a tonne of information. Other Web-hosts like A2 could probably learn a thing or two from Namecheap’s space management. From the interface, you get access to everything worth getting access to— billing information, domain management and hosting management. Namecheap makes use of cPanel too, so if you’re moving over from another Web-host you do not have to worry about getting used to another site management interface. It’s easy to use and, if you ever run out of ideas or get stuck, there are a lot of tutorials available to help you through.

Namecheap also offers free site migration. That’s great news if you’re moving from another Web-host to Namecheap. The steps are easy and actually require only the minimum involvement on your path. You only need to provide access to the cPanel of the site you want to be migrated. While there’s no promise that your website won’t experience downtime, there’s a promise that even if your site does experience downtime, it won’t exceed fifteen minutes. It gets even better. If your site experiences downtime longer than 15 minutes, you get a period of hosting equal to your initial purchase free. EVEN THOUGH, we think that it is very unlikely that Namecheap botches up your website migration in such a mega way, it’s good to know that they are so confident in their ability.

Namecheap started business as a domain registrar and has built up a reputation of being a pretty amazing one too, so if you want a domain registered, there is hardly a better choice. Namecheap has no inbuilt cache, but the cPanel interface has easy to use support for Cloudflare caching. Namecheap makes things easier for businesses by offering direct access to an online-based advertising service called Business promoter which runs ads for you when you feed it information. There’s also access, to people on shared plans, to Softaculous, a feature that allows users to install software that upgrades website features and functionality.

VERDICT; We used both Web-hosts and take it from us when we say that HostGator is easier to use than Namecheap. They win this one for us.

Money-Back Policy

False advertising is one of the banes of modern-day capitalism. Too often we purchase something and discover that it isn’t quite what we thought it’d be, but by then it’s too late. Our money is gone, and we’ve been handed a dud. Thankfully, money-back policies ensure that this doesn’t happen often.

Even Web-hosts have different money-back policies, and it goes without saying that the Web-host with the longer testing period is the better Web-host in this regard. So which Web-host gives a longer period of testing?

Namecheap offers the basic, industry-standard 30-days money-back policy. This means that you get a thirty days period to try out your Web-hosting service and decide whether it is for you or not.

HostGator, on the other hand, adds fifteen days to Namecheap’s thirty days and provides a significantly longer 45 days money back policy.

Are there any hidden fees? Just the basic ones— your refunds don’t cover any service received for free, for example, if you received a free domain name from both Web-hosts, a fee of $15 or thereabouts will be deducted.

VERDICT; Forty-five is longer than thirty. This is pretty much as straightforward as it can get— HostGator takes this one for us.

Customer Support

If there’s one thing you should test carefully before picking a Web-host, it the quality of their Tech-support. All kinds of issues can come up during hosting, and you need to be sure that you can count on the Tech-support of your Web-host to help you solve problems quickly and efficiently.

You can contact HostGator’s customer support through phone, live chat, and email channels. We tried connecting to their live chat channel a few times and got confused. Why? The first few times we tried to get a hold of live rep, we were connected in about a minute or two, but on one occasion we were forced to wait for 35 minutes. So, it’s not impossible to get a hold of HostGator’s live rep, but depending on luck and whether or not the force is with you, you might be forced to wait for more than an hour. The reps we connected to were just as erratic— all were really friendly, but only a few seemed to be really knowledgeable. When we asked them the same kind of questions, only a few were able to give us answers on the spot. We had to wait for as long as fifteen minutes for others to give us an answer. Generally, HostGator’s customer support gave us the feeling of gambling; the chances of getting reliable support is about fifty-fifty.

We’d read and heard a lot of really interesting things about Namecheap’s customer support. But we decided to try it out for ourselves and see if things were really as people said they were.

To a large extent, they were.

They have a live chat and ticketing channel with a great knowledge base but no phone support (we weren’t really disappointed by that as we don’t really appreciate phone support in the first place). There’s also a really smooth FAQ section that answers most of the questions that beginners would have. So we decided to reach out to a live rep through their live chat channel. While wait time was relatively stable under ten minutes, the live reps we spoke weren’t exactly helpful. When we asked questions, we were either sent links to articles or were quoted some paragraphs from the service agreement. Half the time, we were transferred to another customer service rep who seemed to be just as clueless as the first customer service rep. All in all, Namecheap’s customer support is relatively easy to contact, but getting them to help you is something else entirely.

VERDICT; We are usually wary of the customer support structure of large companies, and most of the time we are right to be. This is another case in point. Both HostGator and Namecheap are pretty big Web-hosts, and they offer pretty uninspiring customer support. Who is surprised? Not us, that’s for sure. No matter how long HostGator’s customer support wait time can be, though, we found more assistance talking to them than with talking to Namecheap’s customer support. HostGator, again, takes this one.

Security

An important thing to consider when choosing a Web-host is the level of security provided. How secure is the information hosted on their servers? Do they provide backups? Do users have to pay extra?

Well, HostGator only offers free SSL certificates. The other security features provided for having to be bought separately at checkout. HostGator provides CodeGuard Automatic Backups and the price for this feature starts at $2 per month and it comes with 1GB automatic daily backups for a maximum of five websites, databases and files. There is also a limit to restores too, with only three restores allowed per month. The tool also acts as a malware scanner and protects websites from hackers and viruses. HostGator is protected from DDOS attacks via “flood” and there’s an extensive firewall put in place to protect servers from different kinds of attacks. If heavy flooding is experienced, HostGator’s servers have network level flood protection. HostGator also provides Sitelock security. Sitelock scans the website of users, discovers malware or viruses and alerts users. However, this service is not free and starts from $1.94 per month.

HostGator has pretty basic security features, but most of them have to be purchased separately and only come free with higher-tier plans. The real work of security has to be done at the end of the user. Actions like using a safe password, updating all installed applications, ensuring that you scan your account regularly and installing only safe plugins can help users protect their servers further.

Namecheap offers free backups. These backups are done twice a week and only the higher tier plans have access to free daily backups. However, seeing that most Web-hosts do not even offer free backups at all, bi-weekly guaranteed backups are quite respectable.  In the event that your website gets attacked and all your data is lost, Namecheap can attempt to recover all your lost files for a fee of $15.  All Namecheap plans come with free SSL certificates so the minimum level of protection is offered free of charge. If you want to add additional certificates to your site, you can add them through cPanel. There’s a two-factor authentication feature available to users, and WhoIsGuard privacy protection, free of charge. Namecheap also has a VPN service that keeps the location of users safe on public Wi-Fi networks. There is also a brute attack mechanism that makes sure brute attacks can’t be used to gain access to a website. After two or three trials of a wrong password, users are forced to verify their identity using reCAPTCHA. This basically makes it impossible for a brute attack to be successfully carried out. There’s an extra level of protection called the Leech protect feature that allows users to set the limit on logins. The feature also allows users to detect any unusual activities on password-restricted areas of your account.

VERDICT; Both Web-hosts have pretty decent security infrastructure— not really great, but certainly not bad either. In addition, the fact that neither Web-host has been involved in large breaches of security in recent times tells us that whatever they’re doing, it’s working. This is a tie for us, as both Web-hosts are great but not outstanding.

HostGator vs. Namecheap – Pricing

Even terrible service can be forgiven if you’re paying exactly what it’s worth. It is important to get the best deal, and that’s why the pricing structure of web-hosting plans is important. We believe that there is always an optimum deal— the perfect marriage between price and value, and we are always on the lookout for such deals because, while they might be rare, they do exist (You can check out HostGator vs Bluehost’s pricing comparison, for example). Let’s see how close either of these two Web-hosts get to this perfect marriage of value and price. To make it easier, and more relevant to you, we’ll only be looking at shared hosting plans because they are more popular and a better yardstick for price behavior on other plans.

HostGator has three shared hosting plans and they are the Hatchling Plan, the Baby Plan, and the Business plan. The Hatchling plan comes with a single domain, one-click installations, unlimited disk space, unlimited email accounts, unmetered bandwidth and subdomains,  and a free SSL certificate all at a  price of $2.75 per month. However, this price is only available if you’re paying 36 months in advance. If you’re paying for lower, you have to pay the regular price which is $10.95. So, basically, the plan is great value for the first three years. After that, though, you might wish you hadn’t bought the plan.

The second plan is the Baby plan and it comes with unlimited domains, and a free domain plus all the features of the Hatchling plan. It costs a promotional price of $3.95 per month but the same conditions as the Hatchling plan applies and the normal price per month is $11.95. Renewals cost $9.95, as well. The business plan comes with all the features of the Baby plus a free dedicated IP and free SEO tools. The plan costs $5.95 per month, but renewal costs $14.95 per month.

HostGator’s introductory prices are really enticing but with renewal, the prices quoted give us pause. After enjoying great prices for three years, how annoying would it be to start paying the real cost of a Web-hosting plan? Great deal, but it could be better.

Namecheap is supposed, like the name implies, to be really cheap. Let’s see if they live up to their name.

Namecheap has three shared hosting plans and they are the Stellar, Stellar Plus and Stellar business plans. The Stellar plan provides for three websites, 20GB SSD and unmetered bandwidth at $1.44 per month (normally $2.88 per month). The Stellar plus plan comes with unmetered SSDs, unlimited websites, and auto backup. The plan costs an introductory price of $2.44 and renews at $4.88. The last plan is the Stellar Business plan and it costs $3.88 per month and comes with unlimited websites auto backup and cloud storage. Renewal of the plan costs $7.88

VERDICT; Without a doubt, Namecheap’s plan costs less and in some cases, especially with their basic plan, packs more value. The quality of the hosting experience itself may be suspect, but you really cannot fault the pricing structure of Namecheap— by far one of the best we’ve ever reviewed.

Extra Features

There are so many aspects of hosting— so many that some don’t even have the right subheadings to cover them. Let’s see how many extra features these Web hosts have and how useful they are (yes, some extra features can be quite utterly useless).

HostGator has several extra features like;

• Better performance with Opteron 6000 series CPU combined with DDR3 ECC RAM
• Support of multiple languages including Ruby on Rails, PHP, Python, and Perl.
• HostGator has only one database— MySQL
• Unlimited FTP and email accounts.
• $100 in free advertising credits
• Access to Google analytics and Mojo marketplace
• Generally, HostGator has a nice crop of extra features, but nothing really stands out for us.

Namecheap also has some really cool extra features like;

• Better performance with Dell M1000 Blade server technology
• Namecheap plans can be paid for using Bitcoin
• Access to marketplace
• Namecheap has an auto backup tool
• free website domain on all plans
• multiple websites on the cheapest plans

VERDICT; This can be somewhat subjective, but we feel that Namecheap’s extra features are more useful, overall, to the running of your website so they win this one again

Major Differences

Let’s have a quick recap. What are the major differences between HostGator and Namecheap?

• Namecheap is cheaper (no one is surprised) than HostGator
• HostGator has a 45-day money-back guarantee, while Namecheap has a 30-days money-back guarantee
• HostGator has better performance than Namecheap
• Namecheap allows payments in Bitcoin, HostGator doesn’t

Namecheap vs. HostGator – Our Pick

This article has been considerably longer than the reply that your mate would have given you had you asked them, which Web-host is better? HostGator or Namecheap?

It has also been less funny too, but the price of information can be quite steep.

So to our answer. HostGator has everything important— except for the lowest prices. But quality comes at a cost, and that is what HostGator represents— quality. (At least when put side by side Namecheap).

So, HostGator Vs Namecheap?

Gators are like really cool, man.

GoDaddy vs. Weebly is a comparison that pops up a lot in Google searches. I wouldn’t have it any other way: these two companies offer affordable hosting options and can help businesses achieve an online presence very quickly. Mind you, neither of them provides a premium service, but both GoDaddy and Weebly are ideal for starter websites and beginners.

So which should you go for, then? Does it even make sense to compare them if they are so similar to one another? Well, yes. As it turns out, one of these services may actually be slightly better for you than the other. It’s not that the difference between them in terms of performance is anything to write home about, but they each have their own strong suit, which may or may not be to your advantage.

If you want to choose GoDaddy or Weebly to better suit your specific needs, the head-to-head comparison is what counts the most.

This comparison will be based mostly on the website building capabilities of both web solutions. Which means Weebly will be going up against GoDaddy’s website building platform called GoCentral Website Builder instead of the GoDaddy as a web host. A good website builder is expected to offer the best features as well as smooth design experience to build your desired website or online store. At the end of the day, your website should come out fully-functional, responsive and gorgeous.

If a stress-free website builder is what you are after, Weebly is for you. If you are just getting started with all these hosting business, you really need a site builder that allows you to develop with room for mistake. GoDaddy is your plug. Like we always do, we have considered their strengths and weaknesses based on our metrics, and we have analyzed our findings below.

Weebly vs. GoDaddy Overview

As far as web hosts go, we haven’t seen any that is as old as GoDaddy which was established in 1997. Ten years later, in 2007, Weebly was founded. It has helped people with zero website building knowledge to build websites they could only dream of a few years before. GoDaddy, primarily a domain registrar, could as well be called a web-host, while Weebly is, more specifically, called a Site builder.

GoDaddy is a publicly-traded company owned by a private investment group. Their customers benefit from the host being the who’s who of the hosting industry. Their customers are also concerned that their upsells will only get worse.

Weebly is a private company that was recently purchased by Square, a privately-owned payment company. This has been a cause of excitement and worry. Some customers are excited at the prospect of things getting cheaper while others are concerned that Square could refuse to improve the web builder if it ceases to make money, like in the case of Blogger & Google.

Unlike Weebly, GoDaddy is known for its notorious Superbowl adverts (GoDaddy girls), but the recent change in the status quo has promised to erase the stigma. The web hosting juggernaut was considered a Fortune 100 “Best Company to Work for” in 2012. Not bad for a small business venture that was founded in Baltimore, Maryland. GoDaddy also owns Media Temple and the affordable Host Europe Group.

Although they employ slightly different mechanisms, both web hosts help everyday people with little site developing knowledge. Where GoDaddy is a juggernaut that helps anyone, mainly beginners, to accomplish their complete web hosting needs, Weebly is a platform for entrepreneurs with little to no coding knowledge.

Popularity Comparison

Don’t judge a website builder capabilities through popularity. But if you like to compare numbers and see which is bigger, we got you covered. GoDaddy has around 2 million Facebook fans and more than 300,000 twitter followers while Weebly only has 300,000+ facebook followers and 110,000+ followers on twitter.

As the biggest domain registrar in the world, GoDaddy maintains 77 million domains. Weebly’s 40 million+ creative customers may be a lot, but GoDaddy has 77 million domains, 13 million customers, and operates 15% of all websites online.

Weebly is believed to have hundreds of employees. GoDaddy has 8,000 employees working round-the-clock to satisfy their customers. Research shows that 1 out of 5 websites in the United States is hosted on GoDaddy. The company also offers Windows and Linux dual hosting offerings while Weebly professionals do your hosting for you. We have noticed that GoDaddy seems to be searched on Google more than Weebly (way more). But whatever you do, do not let your decision be influenced by popularity.

Performance Comparison

In a world of meritocracy, all things should be selected based on performance.

Speed and Uptime are the two major metrics of performance. Weebly or GoDaddy? We set up demo websites to see which of the two keeps your website online 24/7 and which has better speed.

Speed

Our speed test isn’t three parts. Response time, full-page speed load, and load impact test. Weebly is strictly a website builder, not a web host or domain registrar, so it is not responsible for the speed of the websites it hosts.

However, the scripts that it uses to build its websites is also a big factor in site speed determination. GoDaddy, on the other hand, provides hosting services. To make this fair, we manually migrated a Weebly website to GoDaddy. This way, we can test the speed of the Weebly websites on GoDaddy servers, by comparing it with the speed of websites built with GoCentral site builder.

Response Time

Through our demo sites, we generated a response time of 452 for the Weebly site. The GoDaddy demo site is slightly slower with 518ms. As seen with Squarespace and Wix, sites built with independent site builders like Weebly tend to respond fast. The page load speed is another matter entirely.

Page Load Speed

We randomly picked three Weebly templates to test for speed while simultaneously firing up our GoDaddy subscription:

The demo website hosted on GoDaddy has average speed of 589ms, while the Weebly website posted an average speed well above a second. From the speed results, it’s clear that GoDaddy Website is faster.

It’s clear that Weebly has faster response time, but what’s the point of response time if the page takes forever to fully load? GoDaddy is not the fastest web host we have reviewed, but it is faster than 70% of most web hosts. It still trails below web hosts like SiteGround and WpEngine though.

Load Impact Test

Our test showed that GoDaddy’s speed jumped a couple of times when it gets high traffic. The website we tested on Weebly did not show such a sign. We were able to deduce that this is as a result of the e-commerce focus of Weebly websites compared to the multipurpose GoDaddy.

Uptime

We were disappointed with Weebly speed results, so we decided to check out their uptime, with optimism. Unfortunately, this didn’t do anything to alleviate our disappointment:

GoDaddy has an uptime guarantee of 99.9% and it comfortably performs above its guarantee. This means that if uptime drops below 99.9%, you get about 5% credit of the monthly hosting fee. Weebly boasts of no such guarantee as it’s not responsible for the uptime of websites it builds.

Design and Appearance

So far, it has been one defeat after another for Weebly, but that’s about to change.

Weebly comes with 100+ themes (pre-formatted into about 35 templates) for your business and e-commerce websites. GoDaddy, on the other hand, has three times as much as Weebly. Clocking in at 300+ Website Builder templates, 100+ Jimdo templates, and 300+ WordPress themes.

Have you heard the phrase: two heads are better than one?  Well, 300 templates do not make superior design and sadly, GoDaddy proves it. All of Weebly’s themes are responsive and optimized for mobile view. GoDaddy’s themes are also responsive on mobile but not as seamlessly as Weebly’s. Weebly also supports hundreds of applications and their Integrations. Conversely, GoDaddy only integrates with about 20+ apps.

Both site builder allows you to pick any of the templates, but Weebly’s templates are better structured with stylistic and professional looks. We can attest to it that, although not on the level of Wix or Squarespace, there’s something that gets you excited after building a website with Weebly.

One of the reasons that GoDaddy is faster than Weebly overall in website creation is the selection of templates. Weebly requires you to scroll through each category to find the right template for you, as opposed to searching for your category. Although this lets you see the theme before selection. This advantage is lost on mobile or tablet mode, as you won’t be able to preview what each template looks.

Aesthetic Appeal

You must have seen beautiful websites over the years. Chances are, you don’t know how to go about it. We set to help you make the right choice if aesthetic is really important to you.

GoDaddy creates an active website for you. That’s it. But their functionality is not accompanied by aesthetic allure. At least, not on the level of Weebly. Although, with GoDaddy, you can get external plugins and third party widgets to beautify your website more.

All of Weebly’s 35+ diverse templates are unique, different and beautiful in their own ways. With GoDaddy, this isn’t the case. About 10 templates may look alike, and for those that do not look alike, there isn’t much difference in aesthetic. We didn’t try all the 300+ templates, but there are complaints that some of the templates are replicas of previous templates, only different in color palette.

On the website template spectrum, if Squarespace and Wix are on the best quality templates end of the spectrum, Weebly should be close to them, but GoDaddy’s GoCentral would be below average.

Most site builders allow you to change fonts and colors, personalize texts and insert pictures into special places through their toolbars. For Weebly, the customization goes way beyond that of GoDaddy. Weebly allows video inclusion, the addition of sections and maps, amongst many others. GoDaddy also allows the creation of sections but it has predetermined color, typography and layouts. This would be fine if these templates are actually drop-dead beautiful, and of diverse variety. GoCentral also does not make use of drag-and-drop options.

GoDaddy uses a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) format.

Templates

Both GoDaddy and Weebly have diverse website templates of personal, business or e-commerce categories. Like we mentioned earlier, the site you build using either Weebly or GoDaddy is optimized for mobile. However, since you can not preview the template if you choose to build using mobile (on GoDaddy), and you can not specifically build your site with mobile in mind, GoDaddy’s responsiveness is not as smooth as that of Weebly. But web hosts basically try to fit your mobile design into a mobile mode.

You just have to hope that there will be no glitch. Most times, there isn’t, but Weebly generally succeeds in this area than GoDaddy. Both site builders allow you to see a preview of your site on mobile though, so maybe it won’t be too late before you can make changes.

Ease of Use and Friendliness

Both web hosts have an easy-to-see toolbar. Weebly uses true drag and drop interface, and GoDaddy uses WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) platform.

Weebly’s pre-formatted editing page makes the site building a breeze. GoCentral ADI ensures the shortest seconds between your first click and full website activation. Both services automatically optimize websites into a mobile-friendly interface.

With Weebly, you only need your name and email address. After sign up, you are asked to choose between an e-commerce store or a normal website. The next step is to choose between various categories of website templates or store templates. After this, all need is to pick your preferred team and begin editing.

You can choose between three domain options when signing up for Weebly:

• A subdomain (which will be your only option if you are using their free plan
• New domain
• Connect your existing domain with your Weebly account

After the domain selection, you utilize drag-and-drop, matching, switch and replace options to customize your preferred website. Publishing is the final step, and just like that, your stunning website is ready.

To put it into perspective, setting up a website with GoDaddy’s GoCentral website builder is like signing up for a Facebook or Twitter account. Simple, fast, but limited. Compared to Weebly, there aren’t as many options or features as you would want.

Customization and Design Flexibility

You’ve seen their designs and templates, but which is more flexible? Which gives you more control?

Weebly provides 35 beautiful, mobile-responsive templates, which can be customized easily. GoCentral has an ADI function that helps you create websites using a questionnaire process if you sacrifice a little more control. One thing we are sure of is that the site builder that lets you build websites in seconds has not been created. Neither has the builder that lets you build your best site on the first trial. So when we say Weebly needs some getting used to, it’s not really a disadvantage.

GoDaddy selects all the nuanced elements of your website creation for you. It does this based on your choice of website type (personal or business).

Weebly allows you to change text, add and replace images, add sections, customize fonts, include videos, maps and many more with zero website design knowledge. GoDaddy also lets you some modifications like font and color scheme change, text personalization and picture insertion. But overall, there is a restriction in customization and it employs the pre-population of websites more than Weebly does.

Everything from the website editor and the SEO optimization (questionnaire-based) is optimized for convenience. With Weebly, although you may not need coding knowledge, you would adapt faster if you are used to visual and graphical software like Picasa or Photoshop.

Onboarding

If, for instance, you were to sign up for both GoDaddy and Weebly. You place two laptops with both site builders side by side, and you decide you will only proceed with the one that impresses you first. That stage of decision making is called onboarding.

Weebly also employs checklists, email, info buttons, and pop-up notifications to guide you from start to finish. Even if you abandon your site-building for some days, their emails would convince you to return to the building.

After you get on board, we can then start talking about your everyday experience using the builder. Between the aesthetic appeal, non-intrusive reminders and the control you are given, Weebly is better with onboarding.

Technical Features and Complete Toolbox

There are very few web services providers that provide advanced features for their customers on the lowest plan. GoDaddy sadly is not among them (not even in their top-tier plans), but Weebly had tons of features. Weebly also has so many more advanced apps than GoDaddy.

This is understandable since GoDaddy is after your convenience and would not want you to be crowded with apps, features, and Integrations. GoDaddy does offer a simple Facebook creation feature to create posts with its two most expensive plans, something that Weebly does not offer.

Weebly offers its Lead Capture function to all pricing tiers, which allows you to get subscribers for your newsletters and email marketing campaigns. The GoCentral site builder creates secure URLs and renderable HTML. Abundant technical features are not exactly the strong suits of Website builders. This is why we were impressed by Weebly’s outstandingly professional features.

Weebly’s “Weebly Promote”, assists the user to create email campaigns. It helps with email copies, templates as well as scheduled broadcast. There is a free trial, with a subsequent $10 per month charge. However, the Weebly Promote email marketing suite is only available on the tiers 3 and 4 plans. GoDaddy also supports its tiers 3 and 4 users with simple email marketing tools.

Technical Features

If “clean URLs”, “editable metadata”, “page-level redirects” etc. are not in your dictionary, then you may not bother about this aspect. But if you make use of them, then you really should be concerned about this category. Weebly has tons of functional blogging, marketing, and social media Integrations and features. But, the icing on the cake is its mall-sized app center.

Even when compared with Wix and Squarespace, Weebly has the highest number of apps in its market, GoDaddy’s GoCentral does not even have an app market. For every feature that Weebly has, GoDaddy either does not have an answer, or its answer is a lesser version to that of Weebly. The addition of many front-end tools is much appreciated. Professionals can employ them in the automatic creation of permalinks and neat HTML. Weebly also allows CSS and HTML editing.

Marketing Features and App Integrations

Site builder often supports hundreds of one-click installation third-party apps. You can find various apps for marketing, e-commerce, social media, to boost your site’s performance. These apps are not always free, and some can be expensive.

Weebly offers 150+ app Integrations while GoDaddy only offers a few.  GoDaddy integrates with Bitium but lacks many other apps like API, Box, Dropbox, Facebook, Google Drive, Mailchimp, Salesforce Sales Cloud, Twitter, Zapier. Although Weebly also lacks API, Box, Google Drive, Dropbox, and Zapier, it has many others. Some of the 100+ apps that Weebly integrates with are Bitium, Facebook, Mailchimp, Twitter.

Search Engine Optimization

After creating your website, you need it to have heavy traffic like a Jumia mall on Black Friday. That’s where marketing your website comes in, and SEO is one of the most effective ways to accomplish this. You may have heard the saying “Google likes Weebly.” Unlike the major complaint with Wix, Weebly has taken major steps to make sure your site ranks high on Google through its many features and SEO apps.

GoDaddy’s GoCentral offers basic SEO assistance in its own way, through access to keyword and topic suggestion tool, SEO checklists, as well as ranking reports. But the unavailability of SEO apps and their Integrations needs to be rectified. Weebly has Meta keywords and SEO description. It is also optimized for Google Analytics through its use of Footer code and Header code. You should know though, if you sign up for GoDaddy’s tier 1 plan, you are on your own with marketing, as it has no SEO features. Weebly, on the other hand, has SEO tools on all its plans.

E-commerce Features: Weebly provides a simple platform to start a new website/ eCommerce store and integrated marketing to create a successful online business. GoDaddy also has some pretty cool e-commerce deals. We will discuss the prices as well as suitable e-commerce plans for both web hosts later under the pricing part of this comparison.

Security

As is the case with any independent site builder, Weebly also provides a level of security. GoCentral, on the other hand, is protected by the web hosting arm of GoDaddy. Weebly comes fully installed in many top web hosts like SiteGround and BlueHost. These web hosts provide added security, but you’ll have to subscribe to their plans.

GoDaddy offers free 24/7 security monitoring and DDoS protection all plans, but only high-end plans come with SSL certificate and malware removal. In addition, it also provides shared SSL certificates (private SSL for higher-end plans) and basically lets you control how people access your content, so you can protect yourself better. GoDaddy also has SpamAssassin and BoxTrapper to filer emails. If there are not enough, GoDaddy allows you to use third-party plugins for your security. Anything to make you feel secure.

Backups and Restores

GoDaddy allows the creation of multiple backup versions of the website. GoDaddy’s backup and restore does not come for free on shared hosting. They charge a monthly fee. Daily backup and restore are, however, free on WordPress, VPS, and dedicated plans. You can’t expect backup options with Weebly since its strictly a website builder. You will have to check with your web host.

Weebly vs. GoDaddy Plans and Pricing

You’ve seen what both web hosts have to offer, but at what cost? The free plan makes it look like Weebly has the market cornered in value for money, not to mention its plans are available. GoDaddy has no free plan, but they have a free trial period and all their plans are reasonable. Excluding GoDaddy’s trial period and Weebly’s free plan, GoDaddy and Weebly have 4 plans to choose from.

Weebly’s starter plan, for personal websites, is $8 per month, followed by the Pro plan for groups and organizations, for $12 per month, the Business plan for small businesses and stores for $25 a month, and the Performance plan for big e-commerce sites, which costs $38 per month. GoDaddy’s Personal plan is $5.99 per month, while its Business plan is $9.99 per month, followed by its Business Plus plan at $14.99 per month and finally, its Online Store plan which costs $29.99 per month.

With Weebly’s smallest plan, you can sell a maximum of 10 products, 25 products on its Pro plan and there is no cap for the number of products you can sell on its 2 highest plans. As is the tradition with many site builders, if you opt for their small plans, you are charged a percentage of your transaction fee when you accept payments. This is also the same with Weebly and GoDaddy, but this can stop if you opt for higher plans.

These high-end plans allow you to sell digital products, and you are supported with the full force of Weebly’s advanced eCommerce features. These features include but are not limited to inventory management, shipping and tax calculator, coupons and SSL certificate for security. GoDaddy has an SSL certificate, PayPal integration and donation capabilities starting from its Business plan.

Weebly’s biggest plan, Performance Plan, comes with gift cards, real-time shipping rates, customizable automatic recovery emails to customers. GoDaddy’s expensive online store plan also has great features like a built-in shopping cart, credit card payment system, and product configuration, as well as automatic abandoned cart recovery email and text notifications for new orders.

Weebly vs. GoDaddy Customer Support and Reliability

Weebly provides email, live chat, a help center, and phone support, but unfortunately, it can not boast of a 24/7 support. GoDaddy has chat support and all the other kinds of support available 24/7/356. When we talked to GoDaddy’s support, we were not happy. It took close to 30 minutes for us to get through. We asked technical questions and it did seem like the guy on the other end was a human and not a bot. And he knew what he was saying. But we figured customers would be too frustrated by the time someone comes along to solve their problems.

Knowledgebase

Both web hosts have an expansive knowledge of tutorial videos and articles, but a wise man once said: “Knowledge is always a riddle until it finds a body to inhabit.” Well, we still don’t want to have to solve the riddle of the sphinx to find the knowledge. That’s why a good web host has to have accessible and properly arranged knowledgebase.

GoDaddy does not have an easily accessible or a properly arranged web host for beginners. Weebly has a small but comprehensive and detailed knowledgebase as well as forums for its customers.

Major Differences

• GoDaddy offers an integrated domain name and complete security.
• GoDaddy has the benefit of convenience and fast site creation speed by anyone with no prior knowledge of site creation.
• GoDaddy does not have a free plan, unlike Weebly. The basic “Personal” plan lacks essential features like SSL, SEO, PayPal integration, etc.
• Weebly’s smallest premium is a bit expensive even when compared with other special site builders like Wix.
• Weebly is also set to benefit majorly from its deal with the e-commerce company Square.

Weebly vs. GoDaddy: Our Winner

There really is no question as to who has the more attractive templates and the most customization abilities. Weebly wins the template battle in a landslide, despite GoDaddy’s overall larger number of templates. Pricing comparison is tough because the tier bases differ. Weebly tiers are based on technical and eCommerce features. GoDaddy’s tier is more focused on service upgrades e.g. Speed Optimization.

GoDaddy wins this comparison for us. Why?  Well, you can get everything that Weebly offers by signing up for much faster web hosts like SiteGround and Bluehost with better uptime. These web hosts also offer other topnotch services. It just feels like a waste of money to sign up for Weebly alone, when there is that option.

GoDaddy vs. Rackspace is a dispute that can only be settled once you have a good idea of the kind of host your website needs. Are you looking for an affordable and quick solution to create and publish a website? Or does your project require greater customization, better security features, and premium performance?

Both GoDaddy and Rackspace are excellent services, but they are designed for different purposes. That being said, you might have a negative experience with either of them if you do not make your choice according to your specific needs. After all, you don’t want to pay exorbitant fees if your website doesn’t have high storage, security, and performance requirements. At the same time, you also don’t want to be stuck with a hosting plan that cannot meet the demands of your website because this can cost your business sorely.

That’s why you need to know exactly what each of these hosting providers brings to the table before you go for either GoDaddy or Rackspace. Then, you can consider whether GoDaddy’s standard plan is enough for you or whether you need to take it further with Rackspace.

At the end of the review, we’ll be giving our final verdict on the host that we think is generally the best choice. However, you don’t have to come to the same conclusion as we do. You can decide your own winner, and importantly, you’ll have all the necessary data to do so.

Rackspace vs. GoDaddy: Overview

Founded in 1997 by Bob Parsons, GoDaddy is the biggest domain registrar on the planet. We would have said the universe, but it’s likely that aliens may have entered into the domain registration business. In any case, GoDaddy is also one of the largest web hosts on the internet, with over ten million websites. For more information about GoDaddy history feel free to read our GoDaddy review.

Rackspace began as Cymitar Network systems and was founded in the same year as GoDaddy by Richard Yoo, Pat Condon, Morris Miller, and Graham Weston. In 1998, the company took on the name Rackspace with Richard Yoo installed as CEO. The company went on to go public ten years later.

In terms of size, GoDaddy is certainly bigger. That isn’t the only difference between Rackspace and GoDaddy, though. The business model is also markedly different, with Rackspace targeting high-end users who want managed, dedicated, and cloud hosting solutions. GoDaddy, on the other hand, primarily targets customers who need Shared Hosting solutions. As a result of this, Rackspace’s plans tend to be generally more expensive than GoDaddy’s plans.

When it comes to time brand awareness, both hosts have carved a niche for themselves in the hosting market. Rackspace, for one, is one of the leading providers of managed and expertise hosting, while GoDaddy provides cheap web hosting on Shared servers. The fact that they are targetting a different customer-base is the main reason why Rackspace was not included in our list of the best GoDaddy alternatives.

GoDaddy Popularity vs. Rackspace Popularity

If you don’t have any foreknowledge about what you’re going into, it is easy to get lost in the maze of the internet, with questionable sites throwing you names here and there. It is even easier to go with the host that you think is the most popular because you assume that if a lot of people like them, they must be good.

That’s a great assumption, but the only problem with it is that it is wrong. In fact, many of the less popular hosts we’ve reviewed always have better performance than the more popular ones.

However, if you still think that it’s better to go with the most popular host, then you should go with GoDaddy. They are the more popular host by far.

So if popularity isn’t important, what then is?

Performance Comparison

We’ll be measuring the performance of both hosts using two very important metrics. The first is speed, and the second is uptime.

Uptime

To test the uptime of both hosts, we did the only logical thing. We bought hosting plans from both and put our tools to work.

Now, this was pretty tricky because when testing uptime we usually just buy a Shared Hosting plan. But Rackspace doesn’t have Shared Hosting plans, so we bought a Cloud Hosting plan, which was considerably more expensive than GoDaddy’s Shared Hosting counterpart. And if you know anything about hosting, you’d know that cloud-based solutions usually score great marks in performance. Here’s the result of our uptime test over four months.

We often say that no host can maintain a 100% uptime over a sustained period, but it does seem that Rackspace can do that over four months. As the test shows, GoDaddy has an average uptime of 99.99% while Rackspace has perfect uptime.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise, though. We purchased a cloud hosting solution that is normally known for next to zero uptime, and Rackspace can do this, they claim, because of advanced redundancy technology. This ensures that when or if a particular network or provider fails, their system immediately scans for a replacement, eliminating any threat of downtime.

Uptime Guarantee

Even though both hosts have great uptime, we still would like to check whether they have great uptime guarantees. GoDaddy offers a 99.9% uptime guarantee, which sounds great till you learn about the compensation you’re entitled to if your uptime gets lower than 99.9%.

Basically, you’re entitled to a whole of 5% off your monthly hosting fee. So if your monthly hosting fee is, let’s say, $10, you’re entitled to 50 cents if you experience 0.2% downtime. To make matters better, only GoDaddy can determine whether or not your site experienced downtime.

Generally, we feel that GoDaddy’s uptime guarantee is… an uptime guarantee. Rackspace, on the other hand, offers a 100% uptime guarantee. That is, for every 30minutes of downtime experienced, Rackspace will apply a 5% credit of your monthly fee on your next purchase.

Speed

Before we talk about speed, let’s talk about speed optimization.

CDN

Content delivery networks save a cached version of your site on servers around the world. That makes it easier for visitors to access your site quicker. GoDaddy comes with CDN installed, but users will have to configure it through cPanel. Rackspace also comes in with an inbuilt CDN as well.

Datacenters and TTFB

GoDaddy has global datacenters, while Rackspace operates 14 data centers in 12 regions.

(picture of all GoDaddy’s and Rackspace’s datacenters here)

Some think that speed, especially when it’s close margins like a second or two, is a vanity metric. Well, studies have shown that a delay of one second can reduce your conversion rate by about 7%. That’s a lot, especially if you’re someone who depends on your website to sell or generate sales. We tested the response time of both hosts from different locations and repeatedly. To make our tests fair, we disabled all speed optimization plugins.

Our speed test was overwhelmingly clear about one fact; Rackspace is way faster than GoDaddy. Again, that was sort of expected. Cloud hosting platforms are generally faster than Shared hosting servers. It is just what it is, we suppose.

Load Impact speed

The gap between Rackspace and GoDaddy speed-wise might be a lot, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have to test for stability during traffic hikes. Our test went exactly the way you would think. Rackspace maintained far more stable speed levels than GoDaddy.

GoDaddy vs. Rackspace for Ease of Use and Friendliness

The best hosts are easy to use. Creating and maintaining a website is certainly a very technical job, and the best hosts give you as much help as possible. We’ll be looking at exactly how easy it is to use both hosts and the extras that they offer users.

User Interface

When it comes to user interfaces, we believe that the best answer is cPanel or Plesk. GoDaddy agrees emphatically with us, and as such, cPanel is installed on all GoDaddy’s Shared Hosting plans. It’s also a pretty clean version too, as we had no problems navigating through.

Rackspace doesn’t offer cPanel or Plesk but has an inbuilt control panel called, wait for it, the Rackspace intelligence dashboard user interface. Which, if we are being honest, sounds about as creative as something not really creative. What about the functionality of the interface? Surprisingly, it was quite simple and intuitive, if you know what you’re doing.

The average user would have a lot of problems understanding the interface. If we had to choose between a regular cPanel and a whole new layout, we would obviously go with the cPanel without thinking twice.

Sign-up process

The sign-up process for GoDaddy and Rackspace was relatively easy. However, for Rackspace, we had to generate a quote. That is, we were not given a price list. We filled a form, and a representative contacted us. Then we told them about our website needs and was given a quote. Importantly, it’s easy for a novice to get lost and confused on Rackspace’s website. We were often overloaded with information on products that we didn’t care or want to know about.

Free Site Migration

It’s our strong belief that any host worth anything should offer at least a single site free migration to new users. However, it is the strong belief of GoDaddy and Rackspace to ignore us and do the exact opposite of that.

Neither host offers free site migration. What both offer, though, are articles on how you can migrate your site yourself if you are so badly in need of one. While we weren’t able to get a quote on Rackspace’s paid migration service (or even if they had one), we were able to get some answers in GoDaddy’s migration service. Basically, it costs $99.99 to migrate to a single site. That’s decidedly expensive.

Website Builder

GoDaddy has an inbuilt website building tool called GoCentral. As far as website builders go, GoCentral is probably the best we’ve used for beginners. With only the answers to a few basic questions, GoCentral can design a workable website for you within minutes.

One drawback is that, because it is so easy to use, GoCentral has limited functionality in designing e-commerce sites and limited flexibility in designing regular sites. Rackspace, on the other hand, expects you to create your own website and upload it.

While this may seem crude to some people, it certainly will not seem all that difficult to Rackspace’s target market. It’ll do you good to remember that Rackspace is for large businesses with complex needs and a deep pocket.

Staging environments

For the newbie, there is hardly a feature more useful than a staging environment. These environments allow you to make changes to a copy of your website that is not live. That way, you can review decisions by seeing how your settings affect your site. Thus, if you make mistakes (which you will if you’re a beginner), you don’t have to pay dearly for it.

GoDaddy has staging environments installed in all managed WordPress hosting plans except the basic plan, and Rackspace doesn’t have staging environments at all. However, you can also create a staging environment yourself on a subdomain or by using a plugin.

Money-back Guarantee Policy

Generally speaking, the longer a money-back guarantee, the better. Long guarantees allow you to fully test the performance of the plan you’ve bought and let you get a refund if the performance hasn’t been quite up to scratch.

While GoDaddy offers the standard 30-day money-back guarantee, Rackspace doesn’t seem to be into such shenanigans. Although, their general agreement terms infer that in extreme cases where they have been some infringement on your rights, you could get a refund. Asides that, though, once you purchase a Rackspace plan, there’s no turning back.

Limitations

Well, you can’t have limitations when you don’t have a money-back guarantee in the first place, can you? We combed through GoDaddy’s user agreement and we discovered this actual gem: “If a Hosting Service has already been performed, then it is non-refundable (if not yet performed, eligible for a refund within 30 days of the date of the transaction)”.

Which is just as confusing as you think it is. Additionally, if you’ve received a free service like a free domain, the fee (about $15 dollars) will be deducted from your refund. If you’d like to check out a host with a really exceptional money-back guarantee, you should go through our GoDaddy vs. Dreamhost comparison.

GoDaddy vs. Rackspace: Customer Support and Reliability

Even the most experienced web users still occasionally run into problems that require the advice of customer support. When (it is often not a matter of if) a user runs into such problems, it is important that customer support is easy to reach, and that the support offered is helpful.

Customs Support Channels

While customer support isn’t the easiest thing to test because of a plethora of reasons, one being that it can be a subjective judgment, we tried to make our test as empirical as possible.

Rackspace, on the surface, looks like they would have great customer support. Apparently, they have a “Fanatical Support” system that has customer satisfaction as a priority. Additionally, they have over two thousand professionals, many of whom work in the customer support department. That way, you’re always speaking to an expert who can help you.

So, we tried to test this assumption, and for the most part, we were not disappointed. Wait time was often under two minutes, and the live reps we contacted sounded and answered our questions like they knew a lot about what they were talking about.

Unfortunately, this wasn’t quite the case with GoDaddy. First off, response time was unbearably long, and on some occasions, we could have filled up a basket with water during the period that we had to wait for. When we did connect, we were not blown away by the quality of support we spoke to. While all the reps that attended to us were cordial enough, too often, we had to be put on hold for pretty basic questions to be answered.

Phone support was much more of the same, with the only difference being that GoDaddy didn’t allow us to wait as much.

To be fair to GoDaddy, though, ticketing support was stellar. We got our tickets back within 24 hours and all queries were comprehensively answered. If great customer support is what you’re looking for, you can check out our SiteGround vs. GoDaddy comparison, where you can see how SiteGround took support to the next level.

Knowledge Base

Rackspace has an extensive knowledge base called “How-to”. Here, you have access to a lot of “how-to” articles and video tutorials as well. There’s also an open cloud community where you can connect to other users just like you. GoDaddy also operates an extensive knowledge base where you can get information/tutorials on basic procedures as well.

Security Infrastructure

The internet is an amazing place, but if you’ve ever been the victim of a hack or a malware attack, you’ll know that it can also be a pretty unsafe place. While most of the responsibility of keeping your site safe rests in your hands, your host also has a big role to play. That’s why it is important to know that the security of your host is in the right place.

Backup Policy

While most hosts offer a backup tool that helps you backup your site for a few extra dollars per month, there are some who have custom backup policies that are great if you don’t have a few extra dollars per month.

For GoDaddy, it is pretty simple. GoDaddy runs free daily backups on all WordPress hosting sites, but for other sites, you’ll have to purchase the GoDaddy Website backup tool. The website backup tool starts at $1.99 per month. As far as backup tools go, that is pretty cheap.

Rackspace, unlike GoDaddy, doesn’t run automatic backups of any kind. Users are advised to make their own backup arrangements. They do offer a paid cloud backup tool that allows users to set up their own backups, though.

Firewall service and DDoS protection

GoDaddy has a Web Application Firewall that protects against SQL injection and cross-site scripting based attacks. Rackspace, on the other hand, has a managed firewall service that allows customers to manage the security of their sites in real-time.

That is, Rackspace customers can change permit rules or view destination IP addresses in real-time. Of course, only users with a high level of technical ability can actually make good use of this feature. Rackspace also makes sure that your site is safe by initiating server-level anti-DDoS protection.

Security Solutions

Most hosts make use of SiteLock, a third party advanced warning and malware scanning prevention system for site protection. However, GoDaddy has an inbuilt tool that does that same thing.

The tool is called Website Security which, as we know, is a great example of intuitive naming. Website Security is a paid service and works more or less like SiteLock. Rackspace’s security infrastructure, though, is based on four pillars.

The first is breach detection, which means that Rackspace offers a team that monitors and manages your IT environment 24/7, searching for failures in infrastructure using analytics and advanced technology. The second is minimizing breach window, which also means that Rackspace’s security team closes down malware breaches before the problem gets out of hand.

The third is threat remediation response which means that Rackspace acts on anomalous events immediately. Of course, actions are based on pre-approved conditions. The last pillar is the reduction of TCO, which means that by turning to an MSSP with the experience and resources to detect threats quickly, your site’s integrity is maintained while reducing your cost.

VPS Pricing and Plans Comparison

This is perhaps the most difficult comparison here. Rackspace doesn’t have a regular hosting pricing structure. First off, in order to get any meaningful idea about the amount you are supposed to pay, you’ll first have to sign up to Rackspace to get a “free quote”.

This is markedly different from GoDaddy where you have an idea of the plans that suit your needs, and you only have to pay to have access to them. In any case, we’ll be looking only at GoDaddy’s VPS plans. We’ll also only be looking at Rackspace’s Cloud VPS plans.

Basic Plan

GoDaddy’s basic VPS plan is the Launch plan and it comes with 40GB storage, 2 GB storage, 1 CPU core and costs $29.99 per month. Unlike GoDaddy, Rackspace doesn’t have a fancy name for its plans. The 1GB ram plan, which is obviously the lowest Rackspace Cloud VPS plan, comes with 20GB space and 1 CPU core.

Importantly, bandwidth is paid differently and the first 10 TB of data costs $0.12 per GB. Also, price is calculated per region and the VPS plan covers the most important locations like the US, Europe, Asia, and Australia. The US region plan costs about $313 per month (we are assuming that you use 2 terabytes of bandwidth).

As the sky is far from the ground, so is the way Rackspace’s prices are far from GoDaddy’s. Of course, the question is, is the difference in performance that important?

Medium Range Plan

Rackspace’s 2GB Ram plan comes with 40GB storage, unlimited domains, and two CPU cores. The plan costs $336.72 (US region). However, that isn’t Rackspace’s only medium-range plan, as there’s a 5GB ram plan that comes with 80GB, 4GB ram, four CPU cores, and unlimited domains. The US region price for this plan is $333.44.

GoDaddy has two medium-range VPS plans. The first is the Enhance plan and it comes with 60GB storage, 4GB ram, 2 CPU cores, and costs $44.99 per month. The second medium-range plan is the Grow plan and it comes with 150GB storage, 6GB of Ram, 3 CPU cores and costs $59.99 per month.

High Range Plan

Rackspace’s highest cloud VPS hosting plan comes with 160 GB worth of disk space, 8GB of ram, 8 cores, and unlimited domains. The US region price for the plan is $426.88.

While 160GB of space is a lot, GoDaddy manages to do better and even at a lower price. GoDaddy’s Expand plan comes with 200GB of space, 8GB of memory ram, 4 CPU cores and costs $74.99.

Basically, what this has managed to show us is that Rackspace is only for fellows with extremely deep pockets.

Extra Features

Rackspace has the following extra features:

• The expertise and knowledge of over three thousand engineers trained in all things Windows, Linux, and VMWare;
• Provides access to Google Cloud, Microsoft Cloud, and OpenStack Cloud;
• Government Cloud-based Solutions (The host offers FedRAMP, FISMA, NIST, and DFARS-compliant cloud portfolio management)
• Co-location services – this means that if you have existing hardware, you can have it set up in one of Rackspace’s data centers and allow the team to manage your physical servers.

GoDaddy has the following extra features:

• Access to over 125 apps with one-click installs. This includes the more popular applications like WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal.
• GoDaddy offers a free domain name for the first term for every created website.
• An extensive knowledgebase ensures that you do not have a lot of reasons to contact live support.
• All hosting plans have access to a free website builder.
• GoDaddy helps new websites to reach a larger audience with $100 worth ad credits for every $25 spent. The credits also include $50 in Bing and Facebook ads.

Major Differences Between GoDaddy and Rackspace

Well, there are a lot of differences between both hosts. This is like asking of the major differences between Paris Hilton and the Eiffel tower: yes, both have been in Paris, both are connected to Paris, but they are entirely two different things.

• GoDaddy offers a money-back guarantee, while Rackspace doesn’t;
• GoDaddy offers Shared Hosting solutions, while Rackspace doesn’t;
• GoDaddy offers managed WordPress hosting, while Rackspace doesn’t;
• Rackspace is primarily a cloud-based hosting platform, GoDaddy is not;
• Rackspace is more expensive than GoDaddy;
• GoDaddy comes with cPanel installed, while Rackspace doesn’t;
• GoDaddy has a staging environment, Rackspace doesn’t;
• Rackspace has a way better uptime than GoDaddy;
• Rackspace has better customer support than GoDaddy;

Rackspace vs. GoDaddy: Our Pick

There are a lot of things not to like about Rackspace. It’s expensive, it’s difficult to use, and the host simply doesn’t care about refund policies. But when it comes down to performance and customer support, Rackspace takes GoDaddy to the racks. At that point, it stops being a contest.

However, it is important to know that both hosts target different markets. If you’re looking to set up a basic website, then GoDaddy is the best host for you. However, if you’re looking for something more, with better security, performance and customer support, and you have the budget to afford Rackspace, then Rackspace has the best solution for you.

Bluehost Vs FastComet? We’ve got you covered. Right off the bat, we have to say that both web hosts are really great choices— and that is why this in-depth and unbiased review is important for you to make your choice.

Both web hosts will be going head to head and we’ll tell you all the important statistics and information you to know to make the right choice. And at the end of this review, we’ll tell you our expert opinion on the better web host. You don’t have to agree with us, but since you’re rational and our verdict will be based on data, it is very likely that you’ll see reason.

Bluehost vs. FastComet: Overview & General Info

If you’re looking for a new web host for your website, Bluehost is one of the names that you must necessarily have heard. In fact, it is very possible that Bluehost is the most popular web host on the planet. Do they justify their popularity with quality? We’ll find out soon enough

The company was founded in 1996, and that makes them something of a dinosaur in the industry. They have over 2 million subscribers— numbers that most web hosts would kill to have. They are also officially recommended by WordPress, which is a big deal by any measure. Bluehost is known for being the beginners’ dream because of its simple to understand customized cPanel user interface, and they offer quite decent performance too.

Compared to Bluehost, FastComet is a smaller company with only 45, 000 customers spread across 83 countries. With headquarters in San Fransisco, FastComet has servers in eight locations like London, Amsterdam, Singapore, Chicago, and Tokyo. The general principle is that the closer you are to a server, the faster the connection. Since FastComet has servers in so many different locations, we expect their average speed to be something. FastComet is also privately owned— in the world of hosting, this is pretty rare. This is because most of the companies in the industry are owned by the big conglomerate EIG.

Basically, this comparison looks like that of an underdog against a pit bull.

But don’t let that let you jump into conclusions. Raw data and unbiased analysis can reveal some pretty interesting facts. Who knows, we might be in for a shock.

Can a relatively unknown web host stand up to a giant of the web hosting industry? We’ll find out soon enough.

Popularity

There are few vanity metrics— in fact, there is only one vanity metric in this review. And this is it.

While popularity might be a pointer to the value, it is a metric that can easily be manipulated. We’ve reviewed little known web hosts with far more quality than the more popular web hosts, and it isn’t quite a rare occurrence as you might imagine. Regardless, Bluehost blows FastComet out of the water in terms of popularity. With over 2 million customers all over the world, there are very few web hosts capable of holding a candle to Bluehost in terms of popularity (Read more about this in our exclusive Bluehost review).

Performance Comparison

This deals with the core of what you’re getting when you purchase a web host’s plan. There are two primary ways to measure a web host’s performance and they are speed and uptime. Let’s see how these web hosts perform.

Speed

The simple fact is that no one wants to waste a longer time than necessary doing anything. Even a second delay can be vital. If Amazon’s server slowed down by one second, they stand to lose over one hundred and sixty billion dollars per year. This is the same for small businesses. In addition, a fast website has better SEO ranking than a slower one. So if you want to retain visitors on your site, and you want to have greater visibility, you had better pay attention to the speed of your web host.

Google’s optimal speed (TTFB) is 200ms, but the industry average is somewhere around 800ms. Although we cannot blame Google for taking a Utopian outlook towards speed, we have chosen to be more realistic. We created a dummy site to test Bluehost speed and discovered that they don’t think speed is a vanity metric— response time of 461mms is comfortably above the average. While we wouldn’t name Bluehost a speedster, we can’t deny that they’re actually quite fast. We understand that many web hosts who post remarkable initial speeds tend to slow down with an influx of visitors. That wasn’t the story with Bluehost, though. The average speed didn’t experience any drastic change with even up to 100 visitors visiting the site at a time. Given that a lot of web hosts have the problem of providing optimal speed with optimal load-bearing capacity, we were quite impressed.

Before testing FastComet’s speed, we were quite certain that it would be much faster than Bluehost. The signs were there; free Cloudflare CDN, data centers in different parts of the world, an infographic on their website that shows FastComet to have an average speed of 395mms

(here show infographic on FastComet’s website)

and the word “Fast” fixed at the front of the word “comet”. Pro-tip: comets are generally very fast.  FastComet is a disappointing exception to that rule, though, as we recorded an astonishingly low response time of 881mms. That is almost double the time it takes for Bluehost to respond. To make it even worse, FastComet gets even slower with higher traffic. A proper comedy of errors, that.

We honestly thought that this would be some sort of contest. It appears that the pit bull is going to drive the underdog out of the ring before it even begins. Bluehost, obviously, is the winner for us.

Uptime

The primary task of a web host is to keep your website accessible. If a web host can’t be trusted to perform that task regularly, you have no business patronizing them.

With an uptime of 99.99%, we really can’t see how Bluehost can be beaten on account of their uptime. However, they do not have an uptime guarantee, and that was a bummer. Without an uptime guarantee, you can only trust that Bluehost will continue doing a great job in keeping your website reachable. If they don’t do a good job, though, you’d have no means to get compensation. Your hands would be effectively tied. We didn’t like this at all.

On FastComet’s website, you cannot miss an infographic that compares FastComet with popular web hosts and ensures you that FastComet is the best overall.

(here, show the infographic from FastComet’s website)

As a rule, regardless of the speed incident, we do not have a habit of taking too seriously official statistics. We make sure to do our own testing ourselves. FastComet has great uptime, slightly behind Bluehost’s at 99.98%. A lot of web hosts talk about having 99.99% uptime, but only a few even consistently maintain anything near that number. FastComet hasn’t done badly by itself in this department. Unlike Bluehost, FastComet has an uptime guarantee, and that is something that guarantees an edge. “We apply a 10% credit of your monthly fee for each hour of network downtime, up to 100% of your monthly fee for the affected service,” says FastComet’s website.

A web host with a decent uptime and an uptime guarantee is always going to be a tough contender, but a 99.99% uptime isn’t something that can just be wished away. We wish that Bluehost had an uptime guarantee, but even if they don’t, based on the data alone, they have better uptime than FastComet.

Ease of Use

Even advanced users do not like needless complexities— and advanced users do not make up the bulk of website owners. People want an easy to use the website, and very few people (if at all) find any form of satisfaction in spending valuable time figuring out how to make use of a control panel. In essence, everyone wants ease, and the web host that can provide the greatest level of ease is a good one.

Bluehost is, for the lack of a better word, legendary In ease of use, especially for beginners. Bluehost makes use of cPanel, the most common and easiest to use backend interface. However, Bluehost’s cPanel has even undergone more customization to make it really simple for beginners to grasp. Bluehost’s sign up process is also extremely easy. Two pages of forms were all it took to set up an account. If you don’t have a lot of experience with building a website, Bluehost offers Weebly, a third party website builder that allows you to build your website with little or no contact with codes. Installation of apps isn’t a hassle either— Bluehost offers access to the Mojo marketplace where there are over a hundred apps ready for one-click installations. These include apps like WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla. If you’re into eCommerce, Bluehost has also got you covered with access to 100+ website themes and templates. You also don’t need to worry about whether Bluehost’s servers are compatible with your shopping cart as Bluehost supports over 8 popular eCommerce software. Free SSL certificates and almost $200 of ad money are also some of the things that make it easier for people to use Bluehost.

Bluehost has most of the features that would make the task of running a website easier for anyone— whether veteran or amateur. Not a lot of web hosts can say that.

Like most of the big hosts as HostGator or Bluehost, FastComet has a cPanel user interface. This ensures that most users won’t find themselves lost on their backend. If you choose to host your website with FastComet’s servers, you’ll get 450+ one-click installations, 20+ framework development tools and step by step instructions on creating your website. Additionally, if you choose to move your domain over to FastComet, it is absolutely free (free site migration. Bluehost charges $149.99 for this, but more on that later), and what’s more, you get one year of domain registration free of charge. FastComet also offers a wild array of developer tools for website owners who have the desire and knowledge of using them. Symphony, WP-CLI, bash, Drush, Laravel, and Genesis are just some of the developer tools that FastComet offers. A free SSL certificate, an SEO suite, a free chat client, and $75 worth of ad money ensures that new subscribers have very little to ask for.

This can seem to be a subjective metric, and it might be difficult to come to a conclusion. The truth is that both web hosts are quite simple to use and understand. However, we’ve used both web hosts and we had fewer problems with Bluehost than we had with FastComet. Therefore, for us, Bluehost takes the day.

Money-back Policy

Bluehost has the standard thirty days money back policy. This isn’t remarkable, as a thirty-day money-back policy reflects the industry average. Most web hosts have at least a thirty days window for refunds and very few don’t have at all. We do not think that 30 days is enough time for users to fully test a web host and see whether they are the one for them. Forty-five days, on the other hand, might just do it. FastComet has a money-back policy that extends to 45 days, and we’re glad for it.

However, Bluehost doesn’t pay refunds on domain names. So a fee of $15.99 will be deducted from your refund. The same applies to FastComet and other Bluehost alternatives.

FastComet vs. Bluehost: Customer Support and Reliability

The best web hosts have quick and personal tech support capable of solving problems and answering questions as quick as possible. Unfortunately, no one has near enough information to undertake a statistics based review of both web hosts. However, we’ll base our judgment on personal experience and reviews from trusted sources.

Bluehost claims to have 24/7 across different channels. They have a live chat, phone, and email channel. They also have an extensive knowledgebase if you’d much rather solve your problems yourself without the help of a live representative. From our personal experience, Bluehost’s customer support was helpful, friendly and seemed to know exactly what she was doing. That isn’t something you can say for a lot of customer support reps. Bluehost’s Blue flash feature allows you access to WordPress experts to help you with all aspects with setting up your account. Problems, like installing the right plugins and selecting an appropriate theme, are easily solved by expert advice and guidance. What’s more, it comes free with all hosting plans.

Because of their size, perhaps, FastComet is able to deliver fast and personal support the likes of which we’ve rarely encountered. We were particularly impressed with their live chat section. On most web hosts you’ll have to wait for minutes before you are attended to, and even then, replies are slow and seem mechanical. But this isn’t applicable to FastComet. In their live chat section, there’s an image of the person you’re chatting with, and they reach out to you before you even ask a question. What is more, you are replied within seconds.

A while back, when we made use of FastComet’s phone support, we found it to be a matter of chance to get a hold of live rep. Thankfully, they’ve cleaned up their act and now we experience the same personal and helpful support that we experienced on their live chat channel.

Basically, if we were to rate the quality of FastComet’s support, we would give them 99%. They were that good.

While we understand that it may be a bit difficult to compare customer service support, we have to come to a conclusion. Which web host has the best customer service? Bluehost and FastComet impressed us— personally, though, we loved FastComet’s customer support infrastructure. They take this round for us.

Security

We assume that most web hosts have security measures in place to protect their servers. However, first-hand experience has taught us that some are far more effective than others. Asides that, some web hosts are even cheaper to secure than others. For example, a web host that offers free and automatic backups is superior to one that doesn’t.

Bluehost might be one of the cheapest hosting options on the market, but if you looked at their security infrastructure, you wouldn’t notice. Most of the security options they provide are a given by default and this includes free SSL certificates from Let’s Encrypt. A domain privacy feature that keeps your personal information off public internet logs is also provided for free on all plans. This is important because it stops hackers from using your information in phishing schemes. Bluehost also has Sitelock, which helps protect users against malware attacks.

Bluehost offers the protection of Codeguard which, apart from helping against external attacks, helps provide daily backups so that you can easily restore your site even if it does get hacked. Bluehost also offers Postini, a security tool from Google. This provides spam protection for your email so that you are protected from suspicious-looking emails. All in all, Bluehost has a very sound security infrastructure.

FastComet doesn’t joke with security either. An advanced isolation software through CageFs and Cloud Linux makes sure that if a site I infected, it stays within that site. That is, it is impossible for malware to spread through sites. BitNinja stops DDoS and XSS attacks too. The company also has a Web Application Firewall (WAF) that is optimized for Joomla, Magneto, and WordPress. It blocks about 99% of all unauthorized attempted access to hosted sites. As a last layer of protection, FastComet has a specially dedicated team of software/malware experts working around the clock to ensure that attacks are contained and repelled within the span of a few minutes. Before we forget, FastComet also offers Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates at no extra charge.

Overall, we discovered no major glitches with both web hosts, and it comes down to who impressed us the most. Personally, we feel that Bluehost has a more comprehensive security cover than FastComet, so they win this round.

Pricing Comparison

This is one of the most important metrics to consider when choosing a web host. Many people make the mistake of simply choosing the cheapest plan and then getting on with it. That is nothing but pure pedestrian analysis. The most important thing to consider when analyzing the different pricing modules of web hosts is if the value offered is proportional for the price tag. The second most important thing is to consider how much a particular plan will cost in the long run.

Bluehost has a lot of plans, but we will be considering their shared hosting plans because that’s the most common type of hosting. They have four plans which are Basic, Plus, Choice-plus and the Pro plans.

The Basic plan costs $2.75 (renewal costs $7.99 per month) and comes with

• 1 website
• 50GB of storage
• Unmetered bandwidth
• free SSL certificate
• 1 domain
• 5 parked domains
• 25 subdomains.

The Plus plan costs $5.45 per month (normally $10.99) and comes with these perks and all the other features of the basic plan:

• Unlimited websites
• Unlimited storage
• Unlimited domains
• Unlimited subdomains
• Unlimited parked domains
• $200 marketing offer
• Spam experts.

The Choice-plus plan is the same price as the Plus plan but costs $14.99 upon renewal. It comes with all the features of the Plus plan plus Domain Privacy and protection, 1 office 365 mailbox – free 30 days and Codeguard basic site backup. The Pro plan is the Apex shared hosting plan that Bluehost offers. It costs $13.95 per month (normally $23.99 per month) and comes with all the features of the Choice-Plus plan with a dedicated IP address and high performance. According to Bluehost, high performance means that Pro servers allow for 300,000 file count and are deployed with fewer users per server than standard shared servers, allowing for greater compute resource availability per user.

All Bluehost shared hosting plans come with a domain manager, resource protection, and scalability. The resource protection feature means that websites using excessive resources are temporarily relocated to isolated systems. This removes the risk of low performance because of huge traffic.

There is one snag, though. And depending on your hosting needs, it can turn out to be a very big one; Bluehost doesn’t offer by month payments. This means that you can only pay for more than a month.

FastComet has three shared hosting plans and they are the Fastcloud, Fastcloud Plus, Fastcloud extra plans. Apparently, FastComet gives discounts on initial purchases (as much as 70% off). If we face it, it is the pretty much the standard pricing tactic of the industry to give low initial prices and then jack renewal process up by almost 200%.

The Fastcloud plan costs only about $2.95 per month (with 70% off, the normal price is $9.95 per month). You get free domain registration, one website, 150GB SSD space, unmetered traffic, 2 CPU cores available, 2GB ram, one free website transfer, unlimited parked domains, and unlimited Subdomains.

The Fastcloud plus plan is $5.95 with 60% off (it costs $14.95 normally). It comes with multiple websites, free website transfer, free domain transfer, 25GB SSD space, 3GB ram, and 4 CPU cores.

Fast cloud extra is FastComet’s most expensive plan and it comes at $9.95 with 50% off. The normal price is $19.95 per month. The plan comes with multiple websites, free website transfer, free domain transfer, 35GB SSD space, 6GB ram available, 6 CPU cores available, and three free website transfers. FastComet does offer a monthly payment option— but like we’ve seen many times, there is a string attached. You have to pay a setup fee of $19.95 fo access that option. Seems like money must be made one way or the other.

Both web hosts have a really competitive pricing model, with their highest plans going for $19.95 and $23.99. However, we are a bit concerned that FastComet doesn’t have unlimited disk space. Scratch that, we aren’t just a bit concerned, we are a lot concerned. We understood the 15GB for the lowest plan part, but 35GB for the highest plan? Atrocious, to say the very least. On the other hand, we have to consider that FastComet guarantees free automatic and regular backup with every plan. That’s a service that Bluehost doesn’t guarantee.

This was close, but Bluehost edges it for us. We simply could not ignore the unlimited features that were on offer. Just to be clear, though. Both Web hosts give insane value for the price, and you probably wouldn’t have a dent in your wallet if you went for either.

Extra Features

There are web hosts that have that extra thing that just might tip the scales in their favor. Sometimes it could be that they are very environmentally friendly, or maybe they have a policy of sending treats to customers during holidays. Despite popular opinion, extra features aren’t always good. They can be bad too. The point is, we cannot ignore potential extra features, and we have to dissect them thoroughly too. They could literally make or break a web host.

• Bluehost has a tone of extra features. Let’s start with the good ones
• In case you need to manage your domains through them, Bluehost has a domain manager
• One-click installations for over 100+ apps from MOJO
• Bluehost has CDN access
• Bluehost is an officially recommended web host by WordPress
• Bluehost doesn’t make use of SSD’s for shared hosting servers, and if you know your tech, that might eventually translate into some speed problems.
• Bluehost offers hotlink protection to protect your data
• Bluehost supports the use of PHP PEAR packages, Perl modules, Cron jobs, and Apache handlers.
• Bluehost supports both MySQL and PostgreSQL databases and you can use either phpMyAdmin, Remote MySQL, or phpPgAdmin to manage your databases.
• Bluehost offers the services of website builders like Drupal and Weebly
• Unfortunately, here’s a bad extra— site migrations aren’t free with Bluehost. It is important to note that FastComet offers free site migration on up to three sites on their plans. However, you can pay a one time fee of $149.99 to migrate five websites and up to 20 email accounts.

Let us look at the extras that FastComet has on offer

• FastComet offers up to three free website migrations across all its shared hosting plans. Bluehost doesn’t
• FastComet offers an SEO suite, a free chat client, and $75 worth of ad money with new plans
• FastComet offers free and regular backups— Bluehost doesn’t
• FastComet makes use of SSD drives across all hosting plans. These are much safer and faster than regular hard drives.
• Access to more 150 popular open-source apps
• We don’t know if this is entirely an extra, but FastComet’s terms and conditions contain a spooky paragraph. “We cannot and do not guarantee the accuracy or completeness of any information, including prices, product images, specifications, availability, and services. We reserve the right to change or update information and to correct errors, inaccuracies, or omissions at any time without prior notice.” Basically, everything on their website may be wrong. That’s sketchy, to say the least.

Major Differences between Bluehost and FastComet

Just to recap, let’s look at the major differences between these two web hosts

• FastComet offers free site migration, while Bluehost doesn’t
• FastComet offers regular backups, while Bluehost doesn’t guarantee it
• FastComet has a forty-five days refund policy, while Bluehost has a thirty days refund policy
• Bluehost doesn’t have a monthly payment option, while FastComet does. You’d have to pay for it, though.
• Bluehost is officially recommended by WordPress, FastComet isn’t.
• FastComet has fewer upsells than Bluehost.
• Bluehost posts better uptime than FastComet and is faster

Bluehost vs. FastComet – Our Pick

This was certainly a tough duel. Both web hosts excelled in some areas, and in some others, there were keen contests of strength. But we have to announce a winner and give our verdict. FastComet impressed us with an almost nonexistent wait time in their chat rooms, and the longer than standard money-back policy. Ultimately, though, Bluehost surprised us and won us over with great performance and great pricing.

Bluehost Vs FastComet? Only one winner, and it isn’t a comet.