While browsing the deep blue waters of web hosting you may sometimes stumble upon larger sharks or alligators, sometimes it is even hard to see what makes one provider different from another and to really see the different pros and cons you need to make one. deep dive. Why are you like this? If it's still not obvious, I'll be talking about Bluehost and HostGator in this video. We'll see which one is better by comparing performance, support, pricing, and all that good stuff, so let's get going.
Choosing between HostGator and Bluehost is not really a great choice in a sense, of course, the price is only 20 cents apart, the resources you get are suspiciously similar to each other, Well ... if you've been following my channel you probably know that Bluehost and HostGator are actually owned by the same company Endurance International Group or EIG for short. And among web hosting enthusiasts, this company has a somewhat questionable reputation due to the unethical marketing tactics they employ at the moment, EIG owns over 60 Bluehost web hosting companies and HostGator is one or two of them.
And the general consensus is that EIG is a very profit-oriented company, cutting expenses, sacrificing low-performing projects, and channeling their resources toward the projects that will make the most money. But why am I talking about this and wasting my time? Well, I want you to understand that you are not choosing between 2 different companies, you are going to choose the same company, either way, you are choosing between two different products, which one is better? A basic 3-year plan with Bluehost will cost you $ 106, while HostGator is a bit cheaper at $ 102. Note that these prices are discounted with coupon codes if you want to use the exact same coupon codes that you can get using the links in the description. However, I want to be completely transparent here and let you know that if you make any purchases through the links in the description below, I will get a commission. These commissions are how I monetize my channel without accepting endorsement deals. And I know that it is incredibly difficult to trust a review in this way and this could influence your purchase decision, so I want to be honest about it.
I always do independent research and testing and try to provide accurate and unbiased information. So if you are making a purchase, consider getting a discount on the description. Moving on, even though the prices are pretty much the same, there are very slight differences in the features you get. For example, HostGator gives you unmetered storage, while Bluehost only gives you 50GB But storage is only different on paper because unmetered is not equal to unlimited, you will still be penalized if you load too much and in normal use cases, you will never be will get closer to using 50GB So Bluehost plans might as well say no meter. In my experience, the usual websites that most people have ranged from 1 to 5 GB in size, so 50 GB is not even close to being restrictive. And you get a free SSL certificate with both providers.
An SSL certificate gives you this lock along with your domain name that encrypts the connection between the user and the server. It's pretty much a must-have safety feature in 2020, so it's always a pleasure to have this added for free. And in terms of prices and the resources you get, I would say that both Bluehost and HostGator are practically identical, the only real difference is that Bluehost requires Don't waste time and jump right into the performance. To prove that I bought new plans from Bluehost and HostGator, I chose the middle options to get a good rough estimate of what to expect and did 3 tests. speed, stability, and stress. To be as fair as possible, I had to do some prep work first. I needed to create two identical websites and this is where the differences really started to show that Bluehost made the task of creating a WordPress website very easy, all I had to do was click on my sites, then go add sites and choosing WordPress after filling in all the details the Bluehost did everything else automatically. After a few tweaks, I'd say this is the site I was able to do in about 10 minutes. Moving on to HostGator, things weren't as smooth as the default installer they have in the control panel here, it's just not very useful.
Because even they know that their solution is very flawed. Fortunately, there is another solution by clicking on the Cpanel start button, it takes you to the quality Cpanel and once we scroll down, there is the Softaculous application installer. The first test I did was to use a tool called GTMetrix. This will show how fast my website loads. Please note that I have 2 identical websites so the only difference is the hosting platform.
But taken together, honestly, both results are just not in no time, as premium web hosting services like SiteGround are ready to load the same website in about 2 seconds, which is twice as fast, but understandable already. that SiteGround costs almost 3 times more. Both Bluehost and HostGator are literally relatively cheap web host providers that pack tons of features. So naturally, something has to give, and in this case that something goes well with the loading speed. But these are still acceptable results for a private website and that is the best budget hosting for small personal sites. Moving on, I have tested how stable Bluehost and HostGator are using a tool called Pingdom that allows me to monitor my site 24/7 and see exactly how long it was down.
I ran a new test for 7 days and again the performance here was almost identical. Bluehost was offline for just 1 minute for the entire week and HostGator showed no downtime. And finally, I sent 50 bots to both websites to simulate users. From before, we did all the tests without users on our site during a real-life scenario, it would even have some traffic. First, it was Bluehost. I ran the test for 5 minutes and even at max load Bluehost handled it just fine. There were no performance issues, what you need to pay attention to here is the blue line indicating response times, so as the green line, which is the virtual users being added, increases, the blue line does not skyrocket dramatically.
And then I repeated the same precise test with HostGator, the results were even better, not a huge difference, There are some unique advantages that both web hosting providers have that would influence your purchasing decision. So, I want to quickly run through them and see what happens. Bluehost offers automatic updates with every plan you simply buy. That means you don't need to go into WordPress and manually update the plugin themes, and therefore the WordPress version itself. This saves like I don't know, maybe around 10 minutes per website per month. Is this a big problem? Well, yes ... For me personally at least. Because if you only have 1 website this may seem like a trivial thing, 10 minutes a month, but imagine if you have 5 or 10 or 800 websites.
Yes, do the math. You also get a free website preparation tool, this tool remains in beta, but it is extremely useful for managing your site properly. A staging feature allows you to create a copy of your site, develop or change the features and content of that copy, and if everything works, you simply merge the live site with the staging site. Your users will not find themselves in a construction under construction or worse, a faulty mess as you fight and race to fix whatever is broken. You will have a separate website that you can simply work on and make changes to and once you are sure that everything is working fine you will simply merge the two websites seamlessly.
On the opposite side of the spectrum, we have HostGator which honestly doesn't offer anything great. So if you already have a project hosted elsewhere, HostGator engineers will move it to their hosting platform for free. At Bluehost, this is a paid feature. But you will be able to do website migrations easily and for free. I even have a tutorial on that that you can find here and besides this, HostGator really has nothing else to do. Okay, which one should you choose? Well ... they are practically the exact same product with 2 different names.
But it seems that HostGator is an abandoned project ... It only left to measure its days. In my opinion, Bluehost looks like an improved version of HostGator that has more features, a much better design, and more frequent updates.
No comments: