We have noticed that a lot of our blog readers keep asking us using our contact form “Which is a better host: SiteGround or Hostgator“. Instead of giving you a short reply over email, our team compared both the web host and compiled this article i.e SiteGround Vs Hostgator. Hope you people will like it.
Comparing Siteground vs Hostgator is like comparing apple to apple because Siteground and Hostgator are two well-established names in the web hosting industry. When anyone thinks about highly reliable yet affordable web hosting providers, Siteground and Hostgator are the names that are likely to come into your mind. The real problem is, you can not go for both of them. At the end, you’ve to pick one. We have compared both web hosting companies on different parameters and published our finding in this comparison. Read this Siteground vs Hostgator comparison to find out which is a better host?
There are many business owners who tend to overlook selection of the right web host. Well, it is of paramount significance if you want to gain the desired traction online. For successful and result-oriented marketing endeavors, partnering with right service partner is pretty crucial. Partnering with the wrong web host can have serious magnitudes of influence on your business, some of which are as mentioned below:
- Business loss– You will miss out lucrative sales opportunity owing to recurring non-availability of the website. Your clienteles will no longer be able to access your website and, if you are running an online store, you will lose business due to weak host.
- Poor online traction– Poor SEO ranking won’t let you make most of the sales opportunity available in the market. Every business owner aspires to rank higher in the organic search engine so as to reach out prospective customers in best possible manner.
- Vulnerability– Security breaches and outbreaks can happen more often on your website if you have invested money on a bad web host. A reputable hosting company will back up your confidential data to a secure server against online threats.
To make your online journey more smooth and easy as well as help you pick up the right web hosting company, we present you with a detailed comparison between two most popular hosting companies – SiteGround Vs HostGator.
Brief Introduction: SiteGround vs Hostgator
HostGator
HostGator is a reputable and well-known name in web hosting industry. At present, it is serving more than 400,000 clients and has created more than 9 million domains so far. Since its humble inception in the market, in 2002, it’s been headquartered in Houston, Texas, United States. Later in 2012, Endurance International Group acquired Hostgator.
SiteGround
On the other hand, SiteGround was set up in 2004. The main philosophy of the service provider is to implement innovative and cutting-edge technology in servers and infrastructure. They offer customized plans for the renowned programs like Drupal, Magento, WordPress, etc., and unwavering support for the open-source software is making it, one of the most preferred choices for the developers. Presently, they are rendering services to more than 250,000 clients across the world.
Also Read: A2 Hosting vs. Hostgator vs. SiteGround
Before moving forward, let’s understand what does Uptime Report reveals about both service providers.
Siteground Vs Hostgator – Uptime Report
Possibly the most imperative attribute of any web host company’s solution is how much uptime it promises to offer to its customers. Well, network uptime can be defined as the time any website is functional and efficiently up and running. On the flipside, network downtime is the exact opposite of this. As a small-and-medium-sized business, you have to ensure that the web host you are cherry-picking promises to deliver exceptional uptime.
Hostgator’s Uptime
Hostgator promises to provide 99.9% uptime for its shared and reseller hosting plans. However, the plans associated with dedicated and VPS servers are covered with network guarantee in which the credit is prorated as per the downtime of the server. If the downtime is caused owing to your websites maintenance, like software or hardware update, or erroneous in the content of the website, no refund or credit will be provided.
To check the guaranteed 99.9% uptime by Hostgator, we’ve tracked a website hosted with them for a quarter. Below is the screenshot of the uptime results. In a period of 3 months, Hostgator gives a whopping 99.98% uptime, which is almost 100%. Although there were 35 small outages.
SiteGround’s Uptime
Whereas, Siteground even promises to offer their customer with 99.9% network uptime. If their servers would ever fail to provide the promised uptime, they offer 1-month free website hosting services. For every 0.01% of the loss of uptime below 99.9%, the company will offer you web hosting services free of cost for one more month. There is a condition in the free hosting provision the downtime faced by your website should not be forcefully induced due to configuration settings, hacker attacks, third-party application use, limit of your allocated resources reached to the maximum level, software or hardware component failure (due to emergency maintenance process completed within an hour), or any other similar situation.
To check the guaranteed 99.9% uptime by Siteground, we track a website’s uptime for 3 months which is hosted with SiteGround. During our test we’ve found that the site hosted with SiteGround was available 99.32% of the time. This was below of our expectation. During the period, the website also receives 89 outages. Check the screenshot below.
Winner: – Hostgator is a winner here. It not only offered 99.98% uptime but maintain its promise of delivering 99.9% uptime.
Siteground vs Hostgator – Hosting Speed Test
Undoubtedly, both the web hosts are good competitors and it becomes tough for anyone to make a choice between them. But as per our experiences and hosting speed tests, we will recommend SiteGround over HostGator. However, if your website doesn’t have heavy files, you can also go for HostGator. It will also give you the equivalent result.
To keep the servers up and running with excellent speed, both the web hosts have implemented different approaches. To speed up a load of static and dynamic content from different locations, SiteGround uses SSD hardware, NGINX web server, Geeky SuperCacher, free CDN, HTTP/2 enabled servers, and PHP7/HHVM. However, HostGator is able to provide excellent load time to its customers due to its cutting edge server hardware. It has more than 7000 servers at SoftLayer with fully redundant network secured with multiple service layers.
Hostgator Server Speed Test Results
SiteGround Server Speed Test Results
Server Response Time
Technically speaking, a server can be defined as a computer or device placed on a network that administers the network resources. Simply put, they act as a hard drive installed in your personal computer. The amount of time a web server takes to respond to the request of a browser is called server response time. It is also another parameter to analyze the speed of the web host.
In essence, we would say that web server is really a gigantic hard drive positioned in a secured location. The speed of each device brings about a huge impact the overall performance of your website.
Well, in the speed division both HostGator and SiteGround have implemented different line of attack in server systems.
HostGator, yet again, makes use of a large range of servers which work in congruence with each other to ensure equilibrium is maintained, and there is guaranteed constancy. This further enables it to keep up a strong server response time. Below is the screenshot of Hostgator server response time.
SiteGround, on the other hand, manages sudden influx in server loads simply by keeping the broad-spectrum loads a little lesser intentionally. This empowers them to cater for the upsurge in server loads that are typically encountered during the long weekends or on special seasonal campaigns. Below is the screenshot of Siteground server response time.
Now, the question is which among the two is better to go ahead with?
To figure this out, we tried to conduct a lot of server response assessments are conducted on the hosting companies’ websites and we found them extremely amazing.
We tested the websites of HostGator and Siteground and discovered:
HostGator has an average response time of 1.71s, whereas the server response time of SiteGround’s averages at 1.39s.
As always, the point of reference are not the ultimate word and most notably, as a client, you’ll be getting the basic level of the hosting package, not the dedicated server which will burn a hole in your pocket.
As online reviews of the customers and online tools, we would say that SiteGround is considered to be the best at diligently managing the high server loads with its line of attack and speedier than HostGator.
Also Read: Bluehost Vs Hostgator
Hosting plan pricing and features
Hostgator
HostGator offers three customizable plans for shared web hosting. These plans start from a minimum value of $3.96 a month, for which you can leverage all the benefits and quality that HostGator promises to offer to you.
Let’s have a quick run through different plans:
- Hatchling plan is an ideal solution for you provided you want to host a couple of websites at one place. This plan comes with shared SSL certificate as well.
- Baby plan is only fit for the websites that experience the little or moderate volume of web traffic. With this plan, you can stay rest assured as shared SSL certificate is integrated.
- A business plan is best for an expert or company that want to host multiple websites, and you will be offered with Free private SSL and IP along with free toll-free number.
Other than that, HostGator offers the following plans for high traffic websites:
- Regular plan of WordPress hosting starts from $14.95/month
- Reseller hosting plan starts from $74.95/month
- Cloud hosting plan starting at $5.82/month
- VPS hosting plan starting at $57.97/month
- Dedicated hosting plan starting at $174/month
Siteground:
Like HostGator, SiteGround even offers three web hosting plans that can be customized as per your growing business requirements. The service provider makes use of latest speed technologies optimized as per your needs. They offer SSD drives with all plans, use of latest technology like NGINX, HTTP/2, PHP7 and free CDN, and firewall security.
Other than that, Siteground offers the following plans for high traffic websites:
- Regular plan of WordPress and Joomla hosting starts from $3.95/month
- Reseller hosting plan starts from $42/credit
- Cloud hosting plan starting at $60.00/month
- Dedicated hosting plan starting at $229.00/month
Both companies offer almost similar features at same prices. So, you can go ahead with any of the service provider depending upon your varying business requirements. Your investment won’t go waste at all.
Also Read: A2 Hosting vs Godaddy vs Hostgator
Data Center Facilities
The partnership of HostGator with the world’s best data center, SoftLayer, which has made HostGator gained the trust of many of the customers. The super micro HostGator servers are equipped with powerful generators, fault, tolerant RAID disk arrays, fully redundant network with zero failure point, best UPS backups, HVAC units, and various power feeds. Plus, they remain under constant server monitoring for better speed and time optimization.
On the other hand, SiteGround has four data centers, which are established in Chicago, London, Amsterdam, and Singapore. Each data center has state-of-the-art infrastructure. This web host has chosen its data center location strategically to deliver faster processing and highly secure environment to its client. And top of that, it’s free CDN service offering 23 locations across the world increases accessibility and efficiency of the web page, the NGINX web server technology speed up a load of static content, and the Geeky SuperCacher helps in loading dynamic content.
Due to distinctively strong and efficient infrastructure of the SiteGround servers, undoubtedly, we can say that SiteGround can offer you a better web hosting services.
Siteground vs Hostgator – Customer Support
Both the web host companies provide telephone, web chat, ticket, and billing support services. To check the effectiveness of their services, we contacted them one by one. Here is the result.
To check the efficiency of the HostGator customer support team, I contacted them on Live Chat support. As I entered my details and query, they first tried to search the answer in their question banks, when they didn’t get an answer, their Live Chat support team took another more than 20 minutes to connect with me.
Hostgator’s Instant Customer Support Options
However, when I tried to contact Live Chat Support team of SiteGround, their response was excellent. One of their executives connected with me within few minutes. There was no diversion of my queries from one source to another. No matter how small my query was, their executive answered my query and proactively helped me to get proper solution for my query and confusions. Another thing which captured my attention was that to give a human touch to the conversation, they have added a personal profile picture and small brief about their technical details and work experience in the top right corner of the chat window.
SiteGround’s Instant Customer Support Options
If you always remain in a hurry and doesn’t like to wait for the answers for your technical, non-technical, billing, or other queries then without any second thought you should go to SiteGround. Their excellent customer support service will never let you down with their speedy and accurate response.
Also Read: Siteground Vs Godaddy Vs Inmotion Hosting
Final Ruling- Who is the Winner “Siteground or Hostgator”?
It was bit challenging to compare Siteground vs Hostgator. Both HostGator and SiteGround are among the top and renowned names in the web hosting industry today. Over years, both service providers have developed a strong market reputation and have a good customer base. These two services providers are known for the impressive range of services, attributes and plan & pricing, as well as unwavering customer support. They acquire cutting-edge and highly sophisticated the hardware components and the software applications to outshine competitors in the market.
You don’t need to worry about downtime at any point of time. These service providers have so far delivered outstanding hosting solutions which have helped them in gaining the confidence and loyalty of many customers. Among both the service providers, Siteground would be the winner as the service provider leaves no stone unturned to make your and your customers experience beyond set expectations.
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