While surfing the deep blue waters of web hosting
sometimes you might stumble across some larger sharks or alligators
it's sometimes even hard to see what makes one provider different from
another and to really see the different pros and
cons you need to do a deep dive. Why are you like this...
If it's not yet obvious I'm gonna be talking about Bluehost and HostGator in
this video. We're gonna see which one's better
compared the performance, support, pricing and all of that good stuff
so let's roll.
Choosing between HostGator and Bluehost isn't really even much of a choice
in a sense of course the pricing is just 20 cents apart
the resources you get are suspiciously similar to each other
and even the support panel is almost identical
why is that? Well... if you've been following my channel you would probably
know that Bluehost and HostGator are actually owned by the same company
Endurance International Group or EIG for short. And amongst web hosting
enthusiasts this company has got somewhat of the
questionable reputation due to less than ethical marketing
tactics that they employ by this point, EIG owns more than 60 web
hosting companies Bluehost and HostGator being one of them
or two of them. And the general consensus is
that EIG is a very profit driven company they cut
corners they sacrifice underperforming projects
and they funnel their resources into the projects that will make them the most
money. But why am I even talking about this and
wasting your time? Well I want for you to understand that
you're not choosing between 2 different companies you're gonna choose
the same company either way you're choosing between two different
products so which one's better?
A 3-year basic plan with Bluehost will cost you
$106, while HostGator comes in just a little bit
cheaper $102. Keep in mind, that these prices are discounted with coupon codes
if you want to use the same exact coupon codes you can get them by 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 down below i'll get a commission.
These commissions are how I monetize my channel without accepting sponsorship
deals. And I know that it's incredibly hard to
trust a review this way and this could influence your buying
decision that's why I want to be upfront about it it.
I always do independent testing, research and try to provide accurate and unbiased
information. So, if you're making a purchase consider
grabbing a discount in the description. Moving on even though the prices are
virtually the same there are very slight differences in the
features you're getting. For example, HostGator gives you
unmetered storage while Bluehost only gives you 50GBs
But the storage is only different on paper
because unmetered does not equal unlimited
they will still penalize you if you upload too much and in
normal use cases you'll never gonna come close to using 50 GBs
So, the Bluehost plans might as well just say unmetered as well.
in my experience, regular websites that most people have
will vary anywhere from 1 to 5 GBs in size
so 50GB is not even close to being restrictive.
And you do get an SSL certificate for free with both providers.
An SSL certificate gives you this lock next to your domain name
encrypting the connection between the user and the server. It's pretty much a
mandatory security feature in 2020 so it's always a pleasure to have this
added in for free. And in terms of pricing and the
resources that you get I would say that both Bluehost and
HostGator are pretty much identical the only true difference is
that bluehost requires you to commit for a minimum of 1 year
While HostGator allows you to buy monthly plans
Let's not waste any time and jump straight into the performance
To test that I bought myself new Bluehost and HostGator plans I went with
the middle options to get a nice ballpark estimate of what you can expect
and I 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 Bluehost made the task of creating a
WordPress website very easy all I had to do was click my sites then
go to add sites and choose WordPress after filling out
all of the details the Bluehost did everything else
automatically. After some tinkering around here's the site I was able to
make in around 10 minutes I would say. Moving over to HostGator, things weren't
as buttery smooth the default installer that they have on
the dashboard right here just isn't very useful. I just couldn't
get it to work properly and I think I know why... See these packages
right here? Yeah, HostGator is actually offering to
install WordPress for you by paying $100 while you're on the automatic
installer screen. Keep in mind, that I just installed
WordPress for free in 3minutes with Bluehost. To me
this feels like a last ditch effort to squeeze
some money out of you. Because even they know that their solution
is glitchy as all hell. Thankfully there's another solution
by clicking the launch cpanel button you get taken to the standard cpanel
and once we scroll all the way down there's the Softaculous apps installer.
This is a third-party solution not developed by HostGator and it works
just fine. I was able to install WordPress quite easily using this
solution. And then created an identical website to
my Bluehost one. The very first test I did was using a
tool called a GTMetrix. This will show how fast my website loads.
Keep in mind, that I have 2 identical websites
so the only difference is the hosting platform.
In a surprising turn of events HostGator was actually faster than Bluehost.
HostGator loaded my website in 3.9 seconds while Bluehost
scored a 4.3 seconds. But in all honesty both of these results just aren't very
fast more premium web hosting services like SiteGround are able to load the
exact same website in around 2 seconds which is
twice as fast but it's understandable as SiteGround
almost cost 3 times more. Both Bluehost and HostGator
are actually relatively cheap web hosting providers that pack
a lot of features. So, naturally something has to give
and in this case that something is well loading speed.
But these are still acceptable results for a personal website
and that's what cheap hosting is best for small
personal sites. Moving on I've tested out how stable both Bluehost
and HostGator are using a tool called Pingdom it allows me to monitor my site
24/7 and see exactly how long it was down.
I've run a fresh new test for 7 days and again
the performance here was almost identical.
Bluehost was offline for just 1 minute during the whole week
and HostGator displayed no downtime whatsoever.
And finally I've sent 50 bots to both websites
to simulate users. Since before we did all of the testing with no users on our
site in a real life scenario you would
actually have some traffic. First up was Bluehost I ran the test for
5 minutes and even at maximum load Bluehost handled it well. There were no
performance issues, what you should pay attention to here is
the blue line that's the response times so as the green line which is the
virtual users being added increases the blue line doesn't spike up
dramatically. And then I repeated the exact same test
with HostGator, the results were even better not a big
difference but both web hosting plans seem to have plenty of resources to
handle stress without sacrificing speed or stability.
There are some unique advantages that both of these web hosting providers have
that could influence your buying decision. So, I want to quickly go over
them and see what's up. Bluehost offers auto updates
with every single plan that you buy. That means you do not have to go into
WordPress and manually update plugins themes and the WordPress version itself.
This saves like I don't know maybe around 10 minutes per
website per month. Is this a big deal? Well yeah... For me
personally at least. Because if you just have 1 website
this might seem like a trivial thing 10 minutes per month but imagine if you
have 5 or 10 or 800 websites.
Yeah, you do the math. You also get a free website staging
tool this tool is still in beta but it's extremely useful
to manage your site properly. A staging feature allows you to create a copy of
your site develop or change features and content
on that copy and if everything works you just merge
the live site with the staging one. Your users won't run into an under
construction or even worse a glitchy mess while you scrambling and running
around to fix everything that's broken. You'll have a
separate website that you can work on and make changes
and once you're sure everything's working fine you can just merge the 2
websites seamlessly. On the other side of the
spectrum we have HostGator which honestly doesn't really
offer anything extra special. The only notable
advantage it has over Bluehost is that it offers completely free site
migrations. So, if you already have a project hosted somewhere else
HostGator engineers will move it to their hosting platform for free.
On Bluehost this is a paid feature. But you can easily
do website migrations yourself and for free.
I even have a tutorial on that that you can find right here
and besides of this one thing HostGator doesn't really have anything else going
on with it.
Okay so, which one should you choose? Well...
virtually they're exactly the same product under 2 different names.
But HostGator feels like it's an abandoned project...
Just left there to live out its days. In my opinion,
Bluehost feels like an upgraded version of HostGator
having more features, a better design, and more frequent updates.
If I had to guess since both companies belong to EIG
I think they just saw that Bluehost makes more money for them and they
funneled resources into Bluehost more than HostGator. So, if you're
choosing between Bluehost or HostGator in 2020.
I would recommend Bluehost you'll just have less problems overall.
But if you're looking for an alternative to both of them, which is an independent
company i recommend you check out Hostinger it's
in the similar price range i hope you found this video helpful if
you're planning to make any purchases please consider using the links down
below and support the channel. But for now, I hope you have a great day
and g ood luck making your websites.