BlueHost vs HostGator
BlueHost and HostGator are two well known web hosting companies. They’ve both been reviewed here at Clickfire and are both regarded as leaders in the web hosting industry. Each company received a 5 star rating in its respective review and both companies had far more pros than cons listed.
So which one is better? This little analysis will hopefully help answer that question.
Features
The features offered by the two companies are essentially the same. You can get a fully functional cPanel account with things like a site builder and Fantastico from either company. Both BlueHost and HostGator support Ruby on Rails and PHP5. You can get as many email and FTP accounts as you need and the way you manage them is pretty much the same. Each company has detailed plan pages that outline exactly what they do and don’t support.
BlueHost does not offer reseller or dedicated hosting. HostGator, on the other hand, has fairly extensive offerings for customers who require reseller or dedicated hosting accounts.
Guarantees
One thing that can be of concern is that BlueHost does not have any meaningful uptime guarantee. According to a sales representative I spoke to, all their uptime guarantee (99.9%) allows you to do is cancel and get a pro-rated refund. They won’t compensate you if the site is down. At HostGator, most of their plans have a 99.9% uptime guarantee. If they fail to meet it, you receive a refund for that month.
Both companies offer 30 day money back guarantees. The guarantees allow you to cancel at any time if you aren’t completely satisfied with your experience.
Pricing
HostGator’s pricing is pretty straight forward. Shared plans range from $6.95 per month (paid yearly) to $74.95 per month (can be paid monthly). Reseller hosting plans range from $24.95 per month to $99.95 per month. Dedicated servers are priced from $174.95 per month to upwards of $370 per month. None of HostGator’s plans have any setup fees.
To find pricing for BlueHost, you have to dig a little bit. It also takes a little bit of thinking to figure out what you’ll end up paying at the end of the day. BlueHost only offers one plan (a shared hosting plan). If you only want to pay 3 or 6 months in advance, you can expect to pay a $30.00 setup fee.
BlueHost’s one plan provides customers with 300 GB of disk space and 3,000 GB of bandwidth. None of HostGator’s shared plans offer that much space or bandwidth. The closest one, the Swamp plan, offers 200 GB of disk space and 2,000 GB of bandwidth (more than enough for anyone in my opinion) for $14.95 per month.
Assuming you stay with the companies for the following amounts of time, here is what you’ll pay (including setup fees, if they apply):
| How Long | HostGator | BlueHost |
| 1 Month | $14.95 | N/A |
| 3 Months | $44.85 | $89.85 |
| 6 Months | $89.70 | $113.7 |
| 12 Months | $179.40 | $95.40 |
| 24 Months | $358.80 | $166.80 |
As you can see, BlueHost gets much cheaper for the longer you signup and pre-pay. HostGator, on the other hand, doesn’t provide incentives for pre-paying. However, if you want to stay with your host for 6 months or less, HostGator is cheaper.
Customer Service
I called BlueHost’s sales department to ask if they had an uptime guarantee. The call was answered in about 30 seconds. The representative’s answers and tone didn’t give me a lot of confidence, but he managed to answer the question. A call to HostGator was answered within about 30 seconds as well. The representative seemed to be more knowledgeable and was more confident about his answers.
I sent emails to each company’s support department in the late evening on a Sunday. BlueHost doesn’t let you send a ticket in via email – you must use their web-based interface. The web-basted interface offers a lot of categories (which can be confusing) and forces you to look through a knowledge base before submitting a ticket.
I heard back from HostGator after 14 minutes. Their response was good and provided the information needed. I heard back from BlueHost about two and a half hours later. Their reply was helpful, but not as good as HostGator’s.
Both companies provide customer service 24 hours a day, 7 days a week to all of their customers over email and live chat. HostGator also offers support over live chat.
Extras
New BlueHost customers receive $75 in advertising credits from Google and Yahoo. HostGator does not offer an equivalent to this. BlueHost also includes a domain with certain purchases (when you pre-pay a year or two in advance). Not a huge perk, but it’s not a bad thing. Both hosts will help you move your sites over from other web hosts.
Bottomline
If it is between BlueHost and HostGator, you can’t make a bad choice. Both companies are well known and reputable companies that offer pretty much the same service for similar prices. Their customer service is consistent, effective, and easily available.
If it were my web site and my money, I think I’d go with HostGator. The company has always impressed me with their very straight forward, no hype attitude. I like that they offer more choices when it comes to plans and payment terms and I appreciate that flexibility.
The choice is yours, though. One of the great things about the web hosting industry is that there are lots of choices and lots of great companies to choose from.
–June 2007, Douglas Hanna
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December 4th, 2007
Important for anyone with international contacts!
One day, all of our email sent to our vendors in China stopped being received. After many hours of trying to pinpoint the problem, I discovered that Hostgator allows adult content (porn) websites. Apparently, The Chinese government blocks any servers that it knows has or once had adult content, thus there was no way for us to contact anybody in China via email. Hostgator told me there was nothing they could do. They said they don’t know what servers are being blocked and didn’t offer to try help further, hence now I’m out searching for another host.
Lesson - If you have Chinese partners, vendors, customers, stay away from Hostgator or you will always be a 404 error to them.
January 9th, 2008
HostGator actually does provide better pricing on their shared hosting if you are willing to prepay. Below is a list of the plans and prices :
Hatchling Plan
* $8.95 (monthly)
* $83.40 (12 months @ $6.95)
* $142.80 (24 months @ $5.95)
* $178.20 (36 months @ $4.95)
Baby Plan
* $9.95 (monthly)
* $214.80 (24 months @ $8.95)
* $282.20 (36 months @ $7.95)
Swamp Plan
* $14.95 (monthly)
* $334.80 (24 months @ $13.95)
* $466.20 (36 months @ $12.95)
Refer to hostgator.com/shared.shtml
February 11th, 2008
Hello i wanna say something about blue host.
I dunno how they behave to others customers but to me they lied a lot.
I had a web forum hosted by bluehost last year.
First of all they decreased resources allocation without informing me;
I got my forum suspended because an user shared on it porn material, and according they rules they suspended my account. I am not complain for this, it was my mistake, i asked sorry and they replied me that they found porn material thanks to an automatic program wich scan the conents of all customers to find rules infraction. so i transferred my web forum to another host company.
After 2 months i discovered in my forum an account with Administration permission. I checked the registration ip and i found it was from bluehost office!!!
This is the emails that i wrote with blue host (i censored personal informations for privacy law)
Email 1 by me:
On Wed, 15 Aug 2007 07:06:38 -0600, ****@****.com wrote:
Hello, i had an account on your webhost:
Main account: *****
domain name parked: *****.com
In my forum, at this url: *****.com which was hosted with
bluehost 2 months ago i have found a security infractions:
Username:* borkbork*
Joined: *29 Jun 2007*
borkbork registered from IP: *74.220.***.*** *
Host: ****.bluehost.com*
borkbork’s email address is: ***.****@gmail.com*
I have found this username with Administration permissions… need
explains please.
This email will be sent to: ****@bluehost.com
and to **.****@gmail.com
—————————————————————————-
Their reply:
****@bluehost.com wrotes:
Hello,
This would have been for testing purposes. One of our technicians would have created this user to test and perhaps resolve and issue that you had with the forum. You can simply delete this user information.
Please let me know if you have further questions.
Thanks,
**** ****
BlueHost.com
Support Team
****@bluehost.com
888.***.****
—————————————————————————-
My reply:
On Thu, 16 Aug 2007 10:34:43 -0600, ****@revoxlu3s.com wrote:
1) It could be a privacy violation, i should be informed about that
account, which has been for 2 mouths set as administrator user,
specially when my account has been transfered to another host company.
2) When my account has been suspended from bluehost company, for porn
material, they said me that an automatic program scan periodically the
server to find irregular contents and it found that content, but nobody
told me that one of bluehost technician made an account to browse the
board and so to find the irregular contents, i do not complain for it,
but bluehost lied about that account and it seems bluehost tried to hide it.
Anyway i am forced to inform all my friends that are still hosted with
bluehost about this behavior.
—————————————————————————-
Their reply:
If you inform your friends it will help us out becuase it is again the law for us to have any adult content or illegal content hosted on our servers. We are in the state of UTAH and it is against the law. So if you know any other bluehost customers that have this please inform them about it that will help us out alto and will help them from having there service interrupted. If your or them have any questions about this they can read or Terms of Service at ****.bluehost.com/****
Please contact us if you require any more assistance.
**** ****
Support Level 3
BlueHost.com
888.***.****
February 18th, 2008
[...] BlueHost vs HostGator [...]
August 31st, 2008
bluehost Sucks
they will cancel for no reason your website domain and hard to deal w/ guys there -very aggressive not so helpful people !!!!!!
November 4th, 2008
I like Hostgator. Fast, great uptime.
The ones in Utah (Bluehost and WestHost) have to abide by a no nudity law. I think I’ve said it before, but I don’t like that. Not because I want to post pornography or anything, I just don’t like that kind of censorship and the possibility of having my hosting totally shut off without warning just because one of their workers happens to think something I post on my site is considered nudity or something. The law also applies to sheer see through outer-wear and I’ve already been told that one of my pictures in my portrait gallery is against the rules.
This is all crazy IMHO especially when they have no problem with pictures of murders. Go figure.
January 11th, 2009
I have had very short experience with bluehost because I their server had uptime problems with for 4 days right after I signed up, I canceled my subscription and have not tried them after that. They might be a good host but I it doesn’t leave a good first impression if a host can’t solve server uptime problems in 4 days. I use Hostgator ever since for majority of my projects. I have 6 accounts with them, 4 shared and 2 dedicated and I’m very happy so far. I also recommend them to my clients because they can risk-free test their services if they use a hostgator coupon during the order process.
April 30th, 2009
In terms of customer support - I’ve been using Blue HOst for years on a variety of projects. Many times I’ve had to call customer support and 9 times out of 10 there support was tops (the other time is was above average). I’ve always found them to be knowledgeable and helpful.
With that said, I’m now looking for a reseller account and will have to look elsewhere besides Blue Host. As such, I’ll probably check out Host Gator. But I just did not want years of quality service to not get a good comment.
April 30th, 2009
Hmmm… after reading some of the comments about Host Gator allowing porn sites on their service I think I will NOT after all be checking them out.
May 13th, 2009
[...] I know I’ve already lost the pervs with this one, which is actually a great reason to start with the BlueHost dirt - or lack thereof. This is in direct contrast to HostGator which, as we noted previously (for more comparisons between the two, check out the post, BlueHost vs HostGator). [...]