Technology

If you’re looking for hosting solutions under $30 a month, Hostinger and HostGator are two of the best web hosting companies that you might be considering. Both hosting providers offer services that are suitable for first time website owners wanting to host their first site but there are differences between them.

Hostinger vs HostGator: main similarities & differences

Hostinger and HostGator both offer web hosting in the form of shared hosting, WordPress hosting, and VPS hosting. The packages are also very similar. Both offer a free domain for the first year, high bandwidth allowances, SSL certificates, money-back guarantees, and website builders.

Both provide a CDN and have uptime guarantees of higher than 99%. There is very little to separate these two hosts.

Where they do differ is in email and backups. With Hostinger backups and email are free for the entire life of the hosting plan. With HostGator they become paid-for add-ons after the first year.

(Image credit: HostGator) Price comparison

Hostinger’s most basic plan comes in at only $2.49/mo for the first four years and then renews at $7.99 per month for the next four years. Should you not want to renew for four years it's $11.99/mo. In comparison, HostGator's cheapest plan is $2.75 for the first year and then $10.99/mo after. This makes Hostinger considerably cheaper of the span of 8 years.

Hostinger’s basic plan lets you host 25 websites, offers 25GB of SSD storage, weekly backups, and email. HostGator on the other hand supports 10 websites, 10 GB storage, and unmetered bandwidth.

Ease of use

HostGator use cPanel for the hosting panel. It has been the industry standard for a long time but price increases have pushed many web hosting providers to create their own in-house panel. We find cPanel to be a bit out-of-date now but there is a familiarity to it that many will like. Plus, as it's been around a while and used by so many there are tutorials all over the web.

When it comes to building a website HostGator have a website builder that we used and found to be uncomplicated and intuitive to use.

Hostinger use their own hPanel to manage the server. From there you can click through to manage websites or stay in the panel to monitor the site health and manage domains and emails. Hostinger have two website builder options. One is an AI website builder and the other is a drag-and-drop option.

(Image credit: Future) Performance

Shared hosting could potentially lead to instability, if the server is not managed well by the host. This is because multiple accounts share the same server. Too many sites or a few sites that take up too many resources can cause an overall slowdown of the entire server. HostGator safeguards their hosted sites’ performance by limiting how many clients each server hosts. As a result, HostGator’s sites perform well beyond expectations.

Hostinger’s high-performance solid-state drives alone make data load faster, resulting in an uptime guarantee of up to 99.9% and a relatively higher site loading speed, due in part to their servers being located in three continents. 

When we stress tested Hostinger's shared server we encountered rate limiting quite quickly. We still got the fair amount of performance for our site and it showed that Hostinger are good at managing websites that start to take more than a reasonable share.

Dedicated, VPS, WordPress hosting comparison

HostGator has one dedicated hosting plan. It starts at $141.19 a month and renews at $188.79 a month. For this you get 8 CPU cores, 32 GB DDR5 RAM, 1000 GB NVMe storage, unmetered bandwidth, and one dedicated IP.

Hostinger don't offer dedicated hosting but it does have four VPS plans. You can choose the location from a datacenter in the US, Brazil, France, Germany, Lithuania, or Germany.

Hostinger's VPS plans seem to offer much better value but HostGator's VPS plans come with semi-management. This means that they'll monitor the server and provide premium support. With Hostinger's VPS servers, you're more on your own.

Hostinger's plans are also more weighted towards RAM which can be handy for web applications that make frequent queries to large databases.

Website builder comparison

Hostinger’s in-house and widely known website builder, lets you publish a website within minutes with an easy and beginner-friendly interface. With the tool, building a website takes only three steps: choose an SEO-optimized template, drag & drop to edit, and pick a plan to publish.

HostGator’s website builder also offers the “build a website within minutes” feature. Unlike Hostinger, their website builder will require five (easy) steps to launch, which includes answering some questions, inserting your logo, adding your images, editing, and then launching the site. This website builder also allows drag-and-drop and has a simple and beginner-friendly interface.

HostGator and Hostinger’s website builders both offer non-complex website building, but since Hostinger's website builder is extremely easy to use, Hostinger takes this round easy.

Security

Neither HostGator nor Hostinger takes security and protection lightly. That’s why you’ll get a free SSL, regular backups, DDoS protection and server monitoring included in your plan with both companies. These backups are automated and while Hostinger lets you download and keep your backup files, HostGator wipes them out weekly.

When it comes to advanced security options, however, HostGator has additional security measures from add-ons that you can find on the cPanel. These features cost a little extra, though. Hostinger has some of these advanced features available without extra charges. 

Hostinger’s security features are hands down more enticing, with the free advanced security features sealing the deal.

Customer support

As mentioned earlier in this article, both Hostinger and HostGator will have their support team ready to assist you anytime anything goes wrong to keep your website up and running. That means having their team on standby 24/7.

Hostinger only has live chat and email agents available, which means having a live agent is the fastest way you can have someone to the rescue if something isn’t working, which isn’t half as bad, except when you find out that Hostinger has phone agents ready to talk you through troubleshooting steps, on top of live chat support. 

That said, we’d have to give it to Hostinger’s customer support team. 

Verdict

The comparison we’ve just made has hopefully shown how close the competition is between these two popular hosting providers, which should help if you're stumped and cannot make a decision. 

There’s not a lot of difference between these two hosting providers as both give great performance and offer their quality services in reasonably-priced plans. 

However, when you take into consideration how much cheaper and more practical Hostinger’s plans are, not to mention a free trial to use their website builder and free advanced security features, Hostinger does get a huge advantage over its toughest competitor, HostGator.

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