HostGator vs Bluehost. Which one is better?

Suppose you are looking for a good web hosting company that can host a site according to your requirements. That is why we decided that a comparison of some leading hosting sites will help readers make a reasoned choice. One such comparison would be HostGator vs. Bluehost.

Noor B is a well-known web hosting blogger and analyst. Since 2006, he has tested a variety of web hosting services and published the results in his popular blog: InlineHostBlogger.com . To create each review, he personally or with the help of a team of specialists carefully checks every web hosting company.

What are we talking about?

HostGator and Bluehost are among the ten best web hosting sites of today. Although both companies have a good reputation, yet their differences are manifested in the provision and quality of services offered on these platforms.

Below is a comparative description of hosting and a number of different services provided by these companies.
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Comparison of Bluehost and HostGator includes:

• Bluehost and HostGator performance
• Availability report
• Site loading speed
• Price, plans and features
• Control Panel
• Quality support

Performance

Hostgator in the protection of user data provides several levels of network security, and also has modern data centers with redundant capacity. Hostgator, like Bluehost, uses AMD Opteron 6000 processors and DDR3 ECC RAM.
Several tests were conducted to determine the performance of these companies and the following results were obtained.

HostGator and Bluehost Availability Report

Both HostGator and Bluehost guarantee uptime (site availability time) close to 99.9%. With the help of HostTreker , a popular tool for tracking website accessibility from different parts of the world, we are now tracking the uptime of several hosting companies. For this purpose, about 150 sites were monitored. I bring uptime of the website hosted under HostGator and Bluehost over the past few months.

Uptime of hosted on HostGator



Uptime of sites Hosted on Bluehost



During our test, HostGator showed a very high result with uptime of 99.99%, and Bluehost, on the contrary, disappointed with regular drops, which reduced their uptime to 99.7% (results are shown at the time of testing).
For a deeper understanding, we traced the uninterrupted operation of a personal blog hosted on Hostgator. During the trial period (one year), Hostgator showed an amazing uptime of 99.99%.

Look at the uptime of a personal blog, which is hosted under Hostgator:

The HostGator uptime report for March-April 2015 was very impressive, only a minute of inactivity throughout the entire period.

And here you can see several alerts about downtime during a random period of time from our partner uptime tracking HostTreker for Bluehost:

The website hosted by Bluehost could fall down several times a day. Hostgator only occasionally allowed single drops.

Winner: HostGator. Based on the results of the two uptime tests, it can be concluded that HostGator was the best, showing itself exceptionally well with a rate of 99.99%.

HostGator and Bluehost: server response time

How fast the server responds is largely dependent on the quality of the servers of the web hosting company.
We tested the load time and server response time from websites hosted on Bluehost and Hostgator using the Load Impact App .

The green line shows the number of visitors, and the blue lines - the adjacent response time, when traffic increases.

Hostgator server response time

Server Location: Portland, Oregon, USA
Hosting server hosting: Charlotte, North Carolina, USA
Maximum response time: 3.2 seconds
Minimum response time: 258.07 milliseconds (minimum among all tested web hosting sites).

Hostgator responded with faster response times than any other hosting. They were very consistent and with good response time, as the traffic was increased from 1 to 50.

Bluehost server response time

Server Location: Ashburn, Virginia, USA
Hosting server hosting: Provo, Utah, USA
Maximum Response Time: 8.2 seconds
Minimum response time: 915.53 milliseconds

Bluehost performance was low. Reaction time increased with increased traffic. Even with lower traffic with ten users, the response time began to fluctuate from 1000 ms to 3500 ms. As soon as the parallel traffic was increased to 20, the response time approached the maximum threshold - 10.61 seconds. So, their performance was very unstable, with high temporal jumps from one second or more.

As can be seen in the graph, Bluehost was very inconsistent. As soon as the number of simultaneous users approached 25, the response time began to vary with a large scale.

Winner: Hostgator. In this test, it leads as it loads more server response time more consistently.

Speed ​​test HostGator and Bluehost sites

When choosing a web host, speed is an important factor.

In particular, an assessment was made of their behavior when processing a regular web page. Both services were evaluated for processing pages of the same size, design, requirements and image components.
The website hosted by Hostgator was loaded in less than one second, and Bluehost spent 1.3 seconds to load the same page.

Winner: Hostgator. Web sites under Hostgator are loaded 30-35% faster than sites on Bluehost.

Control Test Bluehost and Hostgator.

For each web site, I identified a set of 30 Internet sites hosted on different web servers. In total, 825 requests were sent for each node in order to evaluate the effectiveness of their server.

You can see from the above result that the high performance of Hostgator dominates in most fields. There is no doubt that the web pages associated with Hostgator, show greater speed and reliability compared to hosting Bluehost.

Winner: Hostgator. - sites running on Hostgator servers, much faster.

Which control panel is better?

HostGator and Bluehost use a control panel called cPanel, which contains about 50 ready-to-use scripts, such as WordPress and Joomla. It is a big plus for non-professionals who want to create a new site.
Winners: Hostgator and Bluehost. Well built control panel that provides simplicity and good access.

Price, tariff plans and features

This section was edited during translation, since since the original publication the companies managed to slightly change the billing policy, which influenced the conclusions.

Hostgator previously offered quality hosting at a price of $ 3.96 / month. At the moment, the service has risen in price and costs from $ 5.56 / month, and this is subject to a three-year subscription, and the minimum tariff with a monthly payment is $ 8.76 / month. There are three plans, namely Hatchling, Baby and Business Plan. The first plan supports only one domain, and the other two plans offer an unlimited number of domains.

Bluehost hosting tariffs previously started from $ 4.95 / month. The service package includes features such as: unlimited traffic and one free domain registration for one year. Now the service costs from $ 5.99 / month, there is also a promotional price of $ 3.95 / month (the price for the first period of use).

Winner: Bluehost. Both provide their services at an affordable price. Nevertheless, we see that the market has put everything in its place: better (as a result of the above tests) Hostgator raised the price more than twice, while Bluehost went for a softer price increase, using stocks to lure customers.

Customer support

Hostgator provides a high level of interaction with customers, thanks to Live-chat, which operates 24/7/365, subscription systems, as well as the availability of a free phone for US residents. In the past, the company has been criticized because of the long wait on the line, but recent large investments in their support team have solved this problem. Now their waiting time does not exceed one minute.

Bluehost has high-quality and very detailed video tutorials, as well as an online chat, whose team responds very quickly. However, their subscription sales system requires many improvements. For example, a customer may wait more than one day to get an initial response from technical support. Handling a complex issue turned out to be a serious challenge for the technical support team.

Winner: Hostgator. An experienced customer support team that provides fast response and better customer service.

Hostgator vs Bluehost: my final verdict

Our review shows that both hosting - quality. However, we recommend choosing Hostgator. Yet, website performance is of utmost importance. If your hosting does not return web pages with sufficient speed, then the quality of other services you provide no longer matters. The company's investment in advanced technologies is easy to see in their data centers, which have several levels of fault tolerance. At the moment, Bluehost wins only due to a lower price.

Why should your choice be in favor of Hostgator?

Uptime 99.99%.
High speed website for traffic from all over the world.
Using cPanel - the most popular control panel in the world.
Plans for all requirements in a significant amount.
Highly responsive 24/7 customer support recall.
45-day money back guarantee without any hidden items.
It can protect your site from hackers, malware and viruses.

Based on the results of the tests listed above, we can confidently recommend web hosting company Hostgator to you.