Both Bluehost and HostGator are in the list of Top 10 web hosting in this year. We saw many cases that people narrowed down their hosting options to these two and then were confused with which one was better for their sites.
To answer this question, we would suggest to checkout Bluehost review and Hostgator Review first to know some background about these 2 companies. In this article, we will compare Bluehost and Hostgator from multiple dimensions to tell which one is right for you. And in general, we feel Bluehost (http://www.bluehost.com) offers better Shared Linux Hosting than Hostgator(http://www.hostgator.com) does.
Nothing could be more important than knowing whether you are the target customer of your service provider. If not, normally thing will go wrong.
Bluehost only offer one product, that’s shared Linux hosting. From this, we can see that they mainly target at individuals, web developers and small business. If you have a busy site or a complex web site which needs a lot of controls over the server, Bluehost is not the right choice for you.
Hostgator offer relatively complete product line, which includes shared hosting, VPS hosting, and dedicated server on both Linux and Windows platform. Hostgator have broader market targets than Bluehost, their service could be used by individual freelancer, all-size of business, and e-Commerce. Their customers could choose to upgrade the hosting package progressively based on the growth of their business online.
Bluehost build data centers by themselves. Now they have 3 data centers in Utah, each of them come with UPS power, diesel generators, and multiple 10 gigabit fiber connections to locations all over the world.
HostGator houses servers in four of Softlayer's Dallas, Texas-area world-class datacenters, which feature state of the art security, power, safety, and cooling systems.
It’s hard to say whose datacenter is better now as both of them offer their customers the best available infrastructure in the industry. But we feel Bluehost is in a better position when growing their business as they have more control on the data centers.
Great companies always have something in common, and customer support is definitely part of these.
The customer support system of Bluehost and Hostgator are very close. Both of them offer online knowledge base, email ticket system, Live Chat support, toll-free phone call support, and customer forum. Those are pretty much all you could expect from a web host. And their first line customer support engineers are very knowledgeable, who could handle most of your requests with only one contact.
We have used their hosting service (both Bluehost and Hostgator) for over 3 years, and there is only one time that our request was escalated to the 2nd level support.
Both companies are very innovative, but we do have a feeling that Hostgator is better at integrating the latest technology into their web servers, and Bluehost is more innovative in building something new.
One good example is that just couple months after PHP 5.3.x was released, Hostgator has already provided this to their customers, which most of web hosts don’t offer even till now.
For Bluehost, what surprise us is that they have invested a lot on optimizing Linux server from kernal. They have developed an application to monitor CPU and I/O usage of each account to avoid a single account consuming too many resources and slowing down the whole server.They also optimize server backup solution which could be 10x faster than R1soft or 30x faster than cpbackup in cPanel. All those are really amazing.
The only service we could compare between Bluehost and HostGator is shared Linux Hosting.
Bluehost shared hosting comes with free domain, unlimited disk space, monthly transfer and hosting unlimited domain in the account. And now, with special Bluehost $3.95 promotion, all its news customers could receive a 50% off, after which the price is $3.95/month only.
HostGator Baby Plan offers something close to Bluehost but without free domain. It will cost their customers $5.96/month even after using 25% off Hostgator coupon “Clue25PercentOff”, which is still higher than Bluehost.
Bluehost guarantee 30 days full money back and then prorated refund after it. Hostgator allow for 45 days money back period, after it, no refund will be allowed.
In general, Bluehost have higher price value than Hostgator.
Should we compare this? Both of them are private held, none of them have opened their revenue in last year. It's in-appropriate for us to do a lot of guess here. But below are something should be true:
So, which one is better for you? Bluehost offer one of the best Linux hosting solutions in the industry. If it can fit into your needs, then we would suggest considering them over Hostgator. Below are our recommendation for you based on what sites you want to host.
To know more about Bluehost, visit http://www.bluehost.com now and check out its $3.95/month deal.
To know more about Hostgator, visit http://www.hostgator.com now.
Each web hosting solution is designed for some purposes, it could be from blog web hosting, family site hosting to ebusiness web site hosting. In webhostingclue.com, we give out the Best Web Hosting Awards to those which have been the best solutions for the given categories.
Know more about How We Select the Hosting Award Winners.
