Noor is a well-known webhosting blogger and industry analyst. Since 2006, he has tested a wide variety of web hosting services and posted the results on his popular blog, InlineHostBlogger.com. For each review, he extensively tests each web hosting company personally, or with his hand-picked team of technicians.
Going with the first company you see isn’t always a wise choice, which is why you should research a variety of web hosting companies to see which one can provide you with better service for what you want and need for your specific website.
This HostGator vs GoDaddy review will assist you in selecting between these two web hosting companies so that you choose the best one for your needs.
After using both the HostGator and the GoDaddy for a few months, we compared the two web hosting across eight categories on a 100-point scale. Based on our test, HostGator is now the one to beat in web hosting industry. Here’s why.
HostGator and GoDaddy both promise a high uptime of 99.99% each month.
HostGator uses Linux x86 CentOS 6 64-bit operating systems, while its servers run on Dual Xeon E5520 2.26 GHz Quad Core processors.
GoDaddy provides customers the choice of choosing between Linux and Windows OS before signing up. And their servers run on Intel Core i7 processors.
Recently, there have been many outages regarding the uptime of GoDaddy, which has caused many customers to become outraged and drop their service. I personally feel that they are still an excellent domain registrar, but don’t provide great quality when it comes to web hosting services.
1. HostGator Vs GoDaddy – Uptime Report (15 Points)
My team kept track of uptimes for both HostGator and GoDaddy for the last seven months using real time uptime tracking powered by Host-tracker
The result was a 99.99% uptime for HostGator and a below average uptime of <98% for GoDaddy.
Uptime of Sites Hosted on HostGator
Uptime of Sites Hosted on GoDaddy
To have a more precise understanding of HostGator’s uptime, we started tracking uptime of our personal blog hosted under HostGator and Godaddy
Here are the results…
HostGator performed exceptionally well, and scored an uptime of 99.99% or greater throughout the entire period of our testing, whereas Godaddy disappointed us with a downtime of more than 1 hour.
HostGator Uptime Report
HostGator scored an uptime of 99.98% for one month with just 10 minutes of downtime.
GoDaddy Uptime Report (May- June 2014)
GoDaddy scored an uptime of 99.75% with donwtime of 2 hour for a month.
Winner: HostGator – Both of my uptime tests show that HostGator scores consistent uptime of 99.99% throughout our testing period of one year.
2. HostGator Vs GoDaddy – Server Response time(15 Points)
We tested load time and server response time of websites hosted on HostGator and GoDaddy using Load Impact App.
Here are some of the steps taken to ensure that all tests were as fair as possible.
Each site has a WordPress 4 installation running on it, and features the same theme, the same number of images, page size, content and requests.
All the plugins and catching systems were disabled
The test was conducted several times and the best results are displayed here.
The host servers we tested are located in Chicago, IL, and Provo, UT, while the servers we used were located in Dallas, TX, and Ashburn, VA, respectively.
The Green Line indicates the number of visitors and blue line represent the adjacent response time as the traffic increase. The traffic was steadily increased from 1 to 50 visitors and the response time was noted.
Response time of sites hosted on HostGator
HostGator response time was around 400ms until it reached 75 concurrent visitors, after that load time started jumping too high.
HostGator’s server performance seems to be solid, healthy and consistent. Only problem is that we don’t want to see a graph with lots of ups and down, flat lines are great for a hosting company. HostGator returned one the fastest response time of 400ms during this test.
Although, they were able to maintain this response time only until 75 concurrent visitors, which is not bad considering this webisite was hosted on a shared hosting server.
Response time of sites hosted on GoDaddy
Godaddy recorded a response time of 1.2s, which is 3* HostGator’s response time.
GoDaddy started at an average server response time of 1.2s, but once the traffic passed 46 concurrent visitors, it started slowing down heavily and eventually the website stopped responding.
The server become completely unresponsive and the rejection list was very high. Moreover, the final result has high number of failed attempt. GoDaddy fared well for lower traffic and completely fell apart once the traffic hit 46 mark.
Winner: HostGator – HostGator website loaded with an average response time of 400 ms compared to GoDaddy which have an average over 1200ms.
3. HostGator vs Bluehost – Website Speed test(15 Points)
We conducted two test for understanding the speed of both these web hosting.
First test …
This tests use the concept of TTFB or Time to First Byte, it refers to how quickly the host’s server sends the first byte of data when responding to a request send by the browser of your visitor . This will determine the quality and speed of hosting servers.
Here are the result..
HostGator TTFB was recorded at 0.377s. Anything under 0.4s is exceptional, and only few hosting companies manages to score that high. The load time of entire website is 1.5sGoDaddy TTFB was recorder at 0.732s, almost double that of HostGator’s. Moreover, the entire website was loaded in 4.0s, which is 3* HostGator’s load time.
Second test …
We performed a speed test from New York, Amsterdam and Melbourne to study their website speed from different continents.
For a better understanding, I have selected couple of website Hosted under HostGator and GoDaddy for testing their speed.
Note:-Bothweb pages are exactly same, i.e. they have same page size, design, request and images.
3.1 Speed of sites hosted on HostGator
HostGator showed great performace in Europe and USA, loaded a bit slower in Australia.
Testing Location
Test 1
Test 2
Test 3
New York
1.0
0.85
0.7
Amsterdam
1.6
1.5
1.5
Melbourne
2.2
1.71
2.0
3.2 Speed of sites hosted on GoDaddy
Godaddy load time is 2* higher than HostGator from all the tested locations.
Testing Location
Test 1
Test 2
Test 3
New York
3.3
3.4
3.0
Amsterdam
2.7
2.1
1.9
Melbourne
6.3
5.0
4.5
Winner: HostGator –Its very clear from these tests that HostGator servers are very fast and reliable.
Prices, Plans and Features (5 Points)
HostGator and GoDaddy are very much alike when it comes to their plans and prices. HostGator has three plans: Hatchling, Baby and Business.
GoDaddy features similar plans to HostGator, naming them: Economy, Deluxe and Unlimited. The Economy plan features a single domain and 100GB disk space; the other two plans come with unlimited disk space and domains.
The graph below shows the prices, and features of both company’s plans:
Are you having trouble choosing between SiteGround and Bluehost because you haven’t found any unbiased reviews that you can actually understand?
Choosing the right hosting service is a nerve-wracking experience because hosting can make or break your website. You have to spend hours upon hours doing research, trying to understand what sounds like gibberish and then comparing all these companies.
I’ve done all the legwork for you and you’ll find a comprehensive SiteGround vs Bluehost hosting comparison below, along with many other hosting reviews and comparisons, including HostGator vs Bluehost and HostGator vs SiteGround.
Bluehost was founded in 2003, whereas SiteGround made its entry into hosting in 2004.
If you are too busy to read this entire review, here's an infographic that covers the main points.
Bluehost vs SiteGround – Performance, Reliability, Speed test and Security
SiteGround web hosting developed some highly innovative approaches and ideas such as their own SuperCacher, latest PHP releases and SSD Drives(Bluehost recently started using SSD drives).
SSD drives are more expensive, but have proven to be faster and more reliable than HDD drives. SiteGround and Bluehost uses Apache + NGINX web server technology, running NGINX for static files and Apache for dynamic ones. This is a popular formula used by top web hosting companies. They use NGINX reverse proxy caching solution in front of Apache to give your visitors a fast website.
SiteGround has already released PHP 7.2 RC. The latest PHP version is 2 x faster and requires less server resource to deliver your website to the same number of visitors. Conversely, Bluehost has not yet provided their customers with access to PHP 7.2 and are still running PHP 7.0.
The number of request/sec processed in the latest version of PHP is always higher than the previous versions.
Over the last 2 years, most sites are moving rapidly towards HTTPS due to free certificate By Lets Encrypt and Google openly promoting HTTPS site.
However, one main issue with people moving towards HTTPS site has been the slight increase in load time as a result. This was addressed by SiteGround using the latest TCP 1.3 and OCSP stapling method.
All the shared and cloud account gets the benefit of TLS 1.3 and OCSP stapling feature. These 2 features improve the speed of encrypted connections.
Bluehost is much slower across the board in terms of updates and new features, which sets them pretty far behind SiteGround on the cutting-edge technology front.
This score has steadily increased over the past three years, proving that SiteGround constantly strives to improve the quality of the services they offer.
Client Satisfaction survey for SiteGround from 2014 – 2017
Look at this video to understand how SiteGround is able to secure our websites from all hackers and other security threats.
1. SiteGround vs Bluehost Security – SiteGround is safer against multiple web threats and malware.
SiteGround has recently developed an anti-bot AI that protects their customers from brute-force attacks.
The new bot prevention system has delivered amazing results as it blocks as many as 2 million attacks across their servers. Not only does the AI system protect customer websites, but it also frees up server resources that can now be used by customers.
The AI system monitors all SiteGround’s servers simultaneously and analyzes the data. Based on the results, it takes automatic action to stop malicious bots. Some of the flags the AI watches include:
Failed Logins
How many simultaneous connects are present to different URLs
DDoS weaknesses that are already known in different apps
A constantly updating list of blacklisted user agents
When the AI determines that an IP is malicious, it blocks it and issues a challenge via a Captcha page. If the “puzzle” is solved, meaning that it’s actually a human and not a malicious bot, the address is whitelisted. And the AI learns from these situations so that it can reduce the level of false positives that occur.
Thus, SiteGround’s new security system is much more efficient at protecting customer websites.
Bluehost relies on Cloudflare to protect its customers from DDoS attacks. They also offer other security features, such as spam protection, password-protected directories, and an option to blacklist certain IPs.
SiteGround wins by a long-shot because they’ve developed their own AI to thwart brute-force attacks and aren’t relying on a third party to protect their customers.
2. Bluehost Vs SiteGround Uptime Test – Which Hosting Offers Better Uptime?
Uptime is the amount of time your website is up and running to your visitors. There are many chances that your website might be not available to your visitors as a result of hardware failure, server maintenance, power shutdown, etc., by your web hosting company. That’s why this test is very important as less uptime can bring a lot of loss to your business through loss of credibility, lost sales, Google rank loss, etc,.
Both Bluehost and SiteGround promises 99.99% uptime guarantees. However, practice shows that Bluehost has significant and consistent issues with downtime, leading to an average uptime of less than 98% per month.
SiteGround, on the other hand, does not exhibit any major problems with downtime. In fact, over the past year, their average uptime exceeded 99.99%. This proves that their servers are highly reliable and some of the best in the industry.
We used Host Tracker to monitor approximately 150 Bluehost and SiteGround websites to determine a more accurate figure for their uptime.
The world of web hosting companies has polarised into a few US-based companies like HostGator, Bluehost, and SiteGround. More specifically, its either HostGator Vs Bluehost or SiteGround Vs Bluehost or SiteGround Vs HostGator at the top of the tree for most used and trusted web hosting companies.
In this article, we’ll be conducting an extensive Bluehost Vs HostGator comparison, which should help you choose the better hosting company for your particular needs.
While both these hosts offer great performance, we will be looking at the differences between them and which one is better for your needs.
As webmasters, choosing a highly reliable web hosting company that fits into all our requirements has been the most difficult task. There are so many web hosting companies on the market that finding the right one can sometimes be overwhelming.
I have already compared Bluehost Vs HostGator and HostGator vs SiteGround in another post, but this specific post adds in DreamHost and compares it to the previous two. HostGator and Bluehost are two of the most highly-rated web hosting companies on the web and are often featured in top review posts across the Internet.
All three are great choices to go with, but each one provides something different from the other, and this review of HostGator vs Bluehost vs DreamHost will help make your selection process much easier.
In this post, I’ll compare performance (which includes uptime and speed), pricing plans and features, customer support, and control panels.
It wasn’t easy comparing the performance of these three high-quality web hosting companies because they all provided adequate performance tests that are better than a number of others out there.
Creating a website with a poor web hosting company is like building a house on quicksand. Eventually, you are going to have structural problems. Because your web hosting company is so important, this review will compare two of the most popular: SiteGround Vs HostGator.
HostGator is a large web hosting and domain company with over 9 million domains and more than 400,000 clients using their service. Based in Houston, they have grown rapidly since their inception in 2002. They were acquired by Endurance International Group in 2012.
SiteGround was established in 2004 and now has 140 employees. They are strong supporters of open-source software and have custom hosting plans for WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Magento, and other popular programs. Currently, they host over 250,000 clients worldwide.
SiteGround and HostGator – Live review by current user
Lets start with live user review of SiteGround and HostGator by current users, posted by them in twitter. Tweets about @siteground support
As seen from the twitter feed, SiteGround has a very high customer satisfaction compared to HostGator.
SiteGround Vs HostGator-Uptime Report
As you can guess from the name, uptime is a critical measurement of web hosting companies. It is the total amount of time the company’s servers are up, operational and effectively serving websites for their clients.
SiteGround states they have a guarantee to be up 99.9% of the time. This guarantee applies across the board, no matter which plans you have. Much of their strength is in their custom programming, like a detection system they built which “sniffs out” potential downtime problems and automatically corrects them.
Similarly, HostGator guarantees to deliver 99.9% uptime. You get this guarantee whether you purchase the smallest intro plan, use the reseller plan or utilize their most complex dedicated server technology. A separate guarantee offers additional coverage for Network clients.
Let’s look at the raw numbers:
• The average 6-month uptime for SiteGround during our study (tested for 10 sites based in different parts of the globe): 99.99%. This means your website could potentially be off-line for just over four hours over six months of service. • The average 6-month uptime for HostGator tested for 10 sites based all over the planet: also 99.99%. Like SiteGround, your site could potentially be offline for around four hours over 6 months.
But consider this: SiteGround was online with no downtime for 100 percent of the time during long periods of our study. This is unusual for any web host and a good testimonial for SiteGround.
Further, we are tracking uptime of a test website using Pingdom and here are the results.
Here are the test website used and the results.
For SiteGround- inlinehostblogger.com
For HostGator – hg-inlinehosting.com
From the above test result, we can conclude that SiteGround has a better uptime compared to HostGator.
We have a unique interactive graph here that lets you enter different data points to see various results for each hosting service. This graph tracks real-time uptime of around 150 websites hosted under these hosting companies.
SiteGround had good quality speed results based on a unique quality of many open-source projects: They respond well to good caching systems. Knowing this, SiteGround built the SuperCacher, a custom-made cache process that keeps things moving fast. On the other hand, HostGator focused on employing more equipment and server layers to allow faster speeds and better service.
TTFB or Time to First Byte refers to how quickly the host’s server sends the first byte of data when responding to a request. This is an important metric because it allows us to test the speed and quality of the servers independent of front-end issues.
So here are the results for SiteGround and HostGator w.r.t TTFB.
TTFB of this test website hosted at HostGator was recorded as 0.37s, which is an excellent TTFB for any website.SiteGround’s TTFB was even better at 0.3s.
Take a look at these stats:
• The average speed of a website hosted on SiteGround (Optimized 10 sites): 1.1 seconds. • The average speed of a website hosted on HostGator (Optimized 10 sites): 1.25 seconds.
HostGator looses to SiteGround on pure speed. SiteGround has made significant investments like VPS servers that use Supermicro Server Chassis, Dual AMD Opteron CPUs, SuperCacher, and RAID 10 Disk Arrays. To get a custom look at different speed scenarios, I have conducted a speed test for 2 similar sites hosted on SiteGround and HostGator from different continents. To make it appealing, two websites used are similar in size, content, requests, and attachments.
Speed Of Sites Hosted On SiteGround
Testing Location
Test 1
Test 2
Test 3
New York
0.9
0.7
0.65
Amsterdam
1.3
1.2
1.2
Melbourne
2.4
2.5
2.4
Speed Of Sites Hosted On HostGator
Testing Location
Test 1
Test 2
Test 3
New York
1.0
0.85
0.7
Amsterdam
1.6
1.5
1.5
Melbourne
2.2
1.71
2.0
As expected, SiteGround loaded faster in USA and Netherlands whereas HostGator tops in Australia. This is mainly due to the availability of servers for SiteGround in Netherlands and USA region. And also, their inability to have data centre in Australia, where HostGator manages to have a data centre.
Here’s a why website hosted on SiteGround is faster than HostGator.
In essence, a web server is really a big hard drive in an off-site, secure location. The speed of each machine will make a big impact on how fast your site is. SiteGround, who put customer support and satisfaction above all, purposefully keep server loads low. That means they have room to allow for surges and seasonal increases, like during holidays and near the end of the year.
HostGator has an impressive battery of server arrays, which work instantly to balance loads and keep server response high.
These are the hard numbers:
• The average server response time for SiteGround over our 6 months study (10 Optimized sites): 650 ms. • The average server response time for HostGator for the same time period (same 10 Optimized sites): 750 ms.
We used the Load Impact app to send up to 100 concurrent visitors and test the load time of the website. The Green Line indicates the number of visitors and blue line represent the adjacent response time as the traffic increase.
Here are some of the steps taken to ensure that all tests were fair as possible.
Each site is a WordPress site of Installation 4 with the same theme installed and the same number of images, pages size, content, and request.
All the plugins and catching system was disabled
The test was conducted several times and the best results are displayed here.
Server location of both these hosting companieswase located on Ashburn, VA, and Portland, Oregon.
Response time of SiteGround
SiteGround response time was recorder at 0.5ms for upto 100 concurrent visitors.
SiteGround clocked a response time of 0.5s throughout the test, the blue line ( which indicate response time) remained flat for upto 100 concurrent visitors. This means, number of visitors and their multiple requests didnt have much impact on the response time of SiteGround servers.
Siteground servers were stable and performed with high quality even when there was heavy load applied on the servers.
Response time of HostGator
HostGator response time was clocked at 0.4ms until 40 concurrent visitors.
HostGator clocked a response time of 0.4ms until the traffic reached 50. After that, response time started varying heavily and finally, server stopped responding at 75 concurrent visitors. However, handling 50 concurrent visistors at a response time of 0.4ms is a good benchmark for a shared hosting server.
Here's an another test on the response time of HostGator and SiteGround
Recently, another test was conducted on a smaller test website from a different location, and the result was similar.
Response time of SiteGround – 90ms
Response time of HostGator – 120ms
This concludes the superiority of SiteGround’s server over HostGator with a 1.5x faster performance.
★ Winner SiteGround. Again, SiteGround gains an edge over HostGator.
HostGator Vs SiteGround – Control Panel
Control Panel is where you manage all the backend part of your website. This is where you make major design changes, coding changes to your website. The ease and flexibility in using the control panel play a huge role in successful and speedily development of your website.
Both these hosting use Cpanel as their control panel, except some design and feature changes, most of the functionalities are the same.
#HostGator vs SiteGround – Free migration (Transfer)
If you are someone new or someone with limited web development knowledge, it will be a tedious task for you to transfer your existing website from your current hosting to the newly chosen one.
Here’s how SitGround’s transfer works. They got our very heavy test website transferred in less than 24 hour.
Similarly, HostGator offers the same service free of cost. I didnt get a chance to personally test HostGator transfer service, I will update this post once I do it in near future.
Here are some more details on the free transfer service of HostGator.
Price, Plans and Features
SiteGround has a wide variety of hosting service plans for everyone from individuals to large organizations. They are especially suited to open-source projects like the popular ecommerce platform Magento.
HostGator also has a number of plans, from low cost starter plans to full VPS hosting and dedicated servers.
SiteGround early on niched themselves in the world of open-source software with customized plans tailored around specific packages like Joomla and Drupal. Their server response time is on par with competitors, although not at the top of the industry. Rather, they have concentrated on superior customer satisfaction.
Hostgator has increased investment in their infrastructure including more enterprise-class servers, 24-hour monitoring and stronger UPS backup capability. Their partnership with SoftLayer, a cloud computing provider, has given them increased capability and speed to service customers.
Customer Support
SiteGround offers telephone support in addition to chat and an email-oriented ticket system. The ticket system boasts a “first reply” within ten minutes, while live chat and telephone support are almost instantaneous.
HostGator has beefed up support to deal with their strong growth in the last few years. They have built an entire support portal on their site with quick access to live chat (Still has longer waiting time compared to SiteGround), ticket submission or billing management. There is also a customer forum with lots of quality content built up over years of service.
SiteGround Support Waiting Time – 0 Minute (Instant)
HostGator Support Waiting time – 0 Minute (Instant)
★ Winner SiteGround. Both Web hosting companies have a fast, knowledgable and friendly support team to help on problems associated with our website.
We’ve taken a good look at the features and benefits of two of the most prominent web hosting services on the Internet. No other site looks as closely as we do at customer support, uptime, site speed and overall performance.
That said, my recommendation is to go with SiteGround. Their considerable client base allows them to continue to invest heavily in increasingly complex server technology like DDR3 ECC Ram and customized hardware specs. The end result is their servers are faster, have better uptime and make fewer errors. For that reason, I can easily recommend SiteGround as the home for your next web hosting.
