Hostinger or HostGator 2023: Which is Better
- Admin
- January 6, 2023
Hostinger or HostGator? These are two of the most popular web hosting providers on the internet today, but which one is better? Each provider has their own set of strengths and weaknesses and it’s up to you to decide which one will be better suited to your needs, whether that’s speed, reliability, cost, features, support or something else entirely.
We’ve created this guide to help you determine if Hostinger or HostGator would be a better fit for your business.
Let’s get started…
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Table of Contents
Hostinger or HostGator - Basic Info
Both Hostinger and HostGator are the best and affordable hosting providers that come with reliable plans and good performance results. When it comes to a budget web hosting plan then Hostinger is on the top of the list. HostGator is known for its unlimited hosting offerings.
Hostinger and HostGator have different types of web hosting such as Shared hosting, VPS hosting, WordPress hosting, and more. Which comes with affordable prices and great speed.
To better understand which one is better, I have prepared a comparison table including basic key features of both hosting providers. However, if you’d like to see a more detailed comparison between Hostinger and HostGator, just to the conclusion at the end.
Hostinger | HostGator | |
⭐ Rating | ||
💲Price Start | From $2.99/month | From $2.75/month |
🌐 Free Domain | Yes | Yes |
🏘️ Hosting Types |
|
|
🕹️ Control panel | hPanel control panel | Native dashboard +slightly customized cPanel integration |
💳 Payment Mode | Credit card, PayPal, CoinGate, Google Pay | Credit card, PayPal |
🚀 Speed | 511ms | 525ms |
🌎 Server locations | US, Brazil, Singapore, Netherlands, Lithuania, UK and Indonesia | US |
📑 Uptime guarantee | 99.9% | 99.9% |
🖥️ Monitored uptime | 100% | 99.99% |
🔐 Protection | Free SSL, server monitoring, weekly/daily backups, DDoS protection, 2-factor-authentication | Free SSL, server monitoring, automated backups, and DDoS protection |
🎧 Support | 24/7 live chat, email, and Knowledge base | 24/7 live chat, email, phone, tweet, knowledge base, and hostgator blog |
🌐 Website migration | WordPress, cPanel & WHM, and other control panel migrations | WordPress and cPanel & WHM website migration |
💸 Money-back guarantee | 30 days | 45 days |
🔗 Official Website |
Hostinger or HostGator - Price Comparison
Hostinger offers more affordable plans as compared to HostGator. Its plan starts at just $1.99/month. While HostGator cheapest shared hosting plan starts from $2.75/month.
The only difference between the two hosting providers is that Hostinger does not provide a free domain at a starting price of $1.99/month (shared hosting). If you want to take a free domain with web hosting then you’ve to go with its $2.75/month plan. But, in the case of HostGator, you can get a free domain in all plans.
Here is the list of web hosting types that are provided by Hostinger and HostGator.
Hosting Type | Hostinger (Price💰) | HostGator (Price💰) |
Shared Hosting |
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WordPress Hosting |
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VPS Hosting |
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Additionally, Hostinger also offers cloud hosting ($9.99/month), cPanel hosting ($2.59/month), Minecraft server hosting ($6.95/month), and cyberPanel hosting ($3.95/month). Apart from this, HostGator also includes dedicated hosting ($89.98/month), reseller hosting ($19.95/month), and Gator website builder ($3.84/month).
As you can see from the above price comparison list, both hosting providers offer many web-hosting plans. However, the most affordable and reliable hosting provider is Hostinger.
At the same time, both hosting providers give a few common features such as you will get a custom domain, an SSL certificate, email account, caching plugin with all Hostinger and HostGator web-hosting plans.
If you’re little bit worried about choosing the cheapest plans in both provider’s then here’s is the cheapest, affordable and awesome plans for a beginner or web developer to building a first new project:
- Hostinger (Premium Shared Hosting – $2.99/month) – You can host up to 100 websites and get 100GB SSD storage, including unlimited bandwidth, unlimited databases, and free email.
- HostGator (Premium Hatchling Hosting – $2.75/month) – Which provides you for only one website use, unlimited bandwidth & , free SSL & domain, one-click WordPress install and free WordPress/cPanel website transfer.
Top features comparison between Hostinger Most popular shared hosting and HostGator Hatchling hosting for personal and small business website hosting.
Features | Hostinger Most Popular Plan Perfect package for personal websites $2.99/mo | HostGator Hatchling Plan Perfect package for personal websites $2.75/mo |
Website | 100 Website | Single |
Storage | 100GB SSD | Unlimited |
Bandwidth | Unlimited | Unlimited |
Free Email | ✔️ | ✔️ |
Free Domain | ✔️ | ✔️ |
One-click WordPress Install | ✔️ | ✔️ |
Free SSL Certificate | ✔️ | ✔️ |
Money Back Guarantee | 30 days | 45 days |
Support | ✔️ | ✔️ |
FTP Account | Unlimited | Unlimited |
Compare this feature list, it might seem that HostGator is better with unlimited storage. But Hostinger is better with 100 website hosts. However, there is no more difference between these plans. Only price and storage are minor differences.
So, in this case HostGator is the winner(due to unlimited storage)!
Note: If you’re a beginner and want to build your personal website then go with HostGator and if you want to build a website for business then I highly recommend using Hostinger business shared hosting plan.
Hostinger provides you business shared hosting for small businesses which cost you $4.99/month. It allows you to host 100 websites including 200GB SSD storage, and 100000 monthly visitors.
According to Hostinger, its most popular plan is $2.99/month, and for a good reason. At this price, you can get to host 100 websites and the 100GB SSD storage. Also, you can get a free domain and SSL.
The best thing about Hostinger is that it gives you a 30-day money guarantee. If you’re not happy with the service or hosting then within this time you can get a full refund of the services. However, keep in mind that a domain name is non-refundable.
Just like Hostinger, HostGator also has the most popular plan is its baby plan at $3.50/month. For just $0.75/month more than Hatchling, you can get to host unlimited websites. At the same time, its renewal rates are much lower than with the business plan. Because of this, the baby plan is the official recommendation plan for HostGator.
One more thing, HostGator provides you a 45-days money back guarantee. Just be careful that a few elements such as domain name, are not refunded.
Hostinger or HostGator -User Interface
The interfaces of Hostinger and HostGator are simple and easy to use. Both hosting providers use different management systems. Hostinger provides you with a single native hPanel, while HostGator presents you with a classical native cPanel dashboard.
There are major differences between both hosting providers. The Hostinger makes the setup process extremely fast and easy. In one-click, you can install the WordPress setup wizard.
Here you can see the hPanel dashboard of hostinger:
Hostinger hPanel offers you a clean, organized, and user-friendly interface. You can access and manage everything from this dashboard such as WordPress install, plugin, SSL configuration, file manager, email accounts, FTP, databases, sub-domain, and many more.
The best thing about Hostinger dashboard interface is that beginners can easily understand and use every aspect of the account.
You can easily access your hPanel account by clicking here. You just need to enter your user email and password to access the hPanel dashboard.
If you’re curious to know more about the Hostinger management system, just visit the Hostinger blog.
On the other side, you’ve HostGator which provides you a native cPanel user interface.
Its cPanel is also simple and easy to use for everyone. All the advanced tools are available in one dashboard. You can access all tools such as email accounts, files manager, databases, security, and many more.
Here you can see the cPanel dashboard of HostGator:
HostGator provides you a Softaculous installer app to help you install WordPress or any other CMS. In one-click, you can install WordPress and make a beautiful website within minutes.
Well, if you compare both providers’ user interface dashboard then they are very simplistic and easy in terms of management. However, with its simple custom control panel and automatic setup wizard that practically holds your hands, Hostinger comes on the top in the list.
Hostinger vs. HostGator - Performance
It is difficult to choose which one has better performance because I found both Hostinger and HostGator deliver great performance. However, to pick a winner, I tested both hosting and found that Hostinger offered slightly good response time, better uptime and fast loading time speeds.
Speed Test Results
The most important performance indicator is speed. A faster website is good for user experience and it also helps your SEO rankings.
According to research, I found that 1 second delay in page load will get 11% less page views, and a 16% decrease in user satisfaction.
It is obvious when sites take more time to load, users will skip the web-page and go to visit other sites.
That’s why you should choose a web hosting provider that provides you better performance.
We decided to check both hosting providers’ performance by running our own tests. Let’s find out how well it performed.
Now, before I talk about the speed performance of HostGator and Hostinger, you must have knowledge about few terms, because to give your website a final score grading, website speed test tool measures exactly three things:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) – It is a core web vitals metric which measures when the largest content of the site becomes visible to users. The largest contentful paint measures when the main content of the page has finished rendering on the screen. According to Google, LCP time should not exceed 2.5s, as that is the maximum recommended time.
- Fully Loaded Time – It is the time taken by a site to load all elements on the site. So. that fully content will be visible to the readers. For the best user experience, this time should be under 2-3 seconds.
Total Blocking Time (TBT) – It measures the estimated total amount of time your browser is blocked when a site is benign loaded. Loading text, JavaScripts, images and everything else that your site contains.
Here’s how Hostinger site performed:
I used PageSpeed Insights to check the site performance. Here, you can see my site’s performance score is 99 which is Good. And the LCP time is 0.8s which is under the maximum recommended time by Google. Also, speed index is 0.8s which is great.
Here’s how HostGator site performed:
As you can see, the LCP here is 0.6s, whereas the speed index time is 2.4s. Both measurements are significantly below the undesired 2.5 and 3 seconds respectfully.
However, Hostinger speed performance is slightly better than HostGator, and the winner for this round is Hostinger.
Uptime Test Results
Uptime is a very essential part of web hosting, which measures your website availability. Sites with good uptime are considered dependable while bad uptime are inaccessible and unreliable.
Hostinger Uptime Test Result:
I’ve examined Hostinger uptime and In two months of examination, I found that Hostinger did not have a single outage, resulting in a perfect 100% uptime.
Overall result is excellent. However, Hostinger does give a standard 99.9% uptime guarantee.
Another remarkable thing to be noticed when I tested the uptime test for HostGator, I found that the site didn’t go down during the test. This has brought HostGator uptime to an impressive >99.99%.
For this uptime test, both hosts have excellent uptime test results. However, according to the result, Hostinger showed slightly better results overall.
Server Response Time
A response time is that time which shows how much time a site takes to connect with a web server and send data back to the end-user browser.
As we know that the content of the website significantly affects the page load time. For example, if your site contains more images, then it will increase the page load time.
This affects your server speed test results. We’ll examine both hosting providers how fast the server actually responds.
Hostinger Server Response Time Test Result:
Here you can see the response time test result of Hostinger. The server response time remained less than a second, which is great. In the United States, it was nearly 9ms.
Come to the HostGator, It also has excellent server response time. You can see that the server response time of HostGator is less than a second, which is excellent for SEO.
But the overall result shows, Hostinger has better server response time than HostGator hosting provider. So, again the winner is Hostinger.
Hostinger or HostGator - Security
Now, let’s talk about the website security for both hosting providers. It is very important for a site because to keep your site safe from hackers you will need to install a few things on your site.
Hostinger and HostGator comes with basic security features:
- Free SSL certificate
- DDoS protection
- Automatic backups
- Server-level security enhancements.
The best thing about Hostinger is that it provides you 2-factor authentication security for your site. This feature is not available in HostGator.
Apart from this, Hostinger comes with weekly backups with basic and premium plans. Daily backups are only available with its business plan. But, HostGator provides automatic backups for all plans.
There are minor difference between Hostinger and HostGator website security:
- With Hostinger, you can get 24/7 server monitoring backed by security modules like PHP open_basedir and mod_security. This is good enough to keep your site safe from hackers or common threats.
- HostGator provides you custom firewall security which helps you to keep your site safe from malicious and suspicious traffic off your website.
So, both hosting providers have different types of security features that can keep your site safe from the threats. Might have to pay for that security.
When it comes to safe HostGator hosting site from suspicious activity on the website then HostGator provides you best premium security:
SiteLock Security ($5.99/mo) – Automatic malware removal shield that protects your site and your customer from malicious attacks and bad guys. It comes with 3 different plans such as Essentials ($5.99/mo) , prevent ($14.99/mo), and prevent plus ($24.99/mo).
HostGator recommended security plan is “Prevent” which scans unlimited web pages and automatically removes the malware from your site. Also, you can get a weekly scan report. It also protects your site from DDoS protection.
So, when it comes to protecting a site from bad guys and malicious attacks then both hostinger providers are extremely good for security. However, it comes to use add-ons or free security plugins for Hostinger, both are providing good security features. Hence, the winner is tied.
Hostinger or HostGator - Customer Support
When it comes to customer support, Hostinger and HostGator have 24/7 live chat and knowledge bases support.
Additionally, Hostinger offers support via email, while HostGator agents provide support via phone call.
Now, let’s first talk about Hostinger customer support. I always go for the email option as I find it the quickest and most convenient way to contact Hostinger customer service.
Let me share one incident with you. A month ago, I faced some problems related to my website and the problem was created due to my SSL certificate. So, I contacted the Hostinger agent through email to fix my problem.
And, you’ll not believe, the agent resolved my problem within one hour. Even, he install free SSL into my site free of cost. So, my Hostinger customer support experience is good so far.
Hostinger agents have good technical knowledge and are very helpful. So, I would prefer whenever you want to contact the Hostinger team then go with email. Either you can go with live chat, that is also very supportive.
On the other hand, HostGator phone support is good. The agents of HostGator were also very talented and knowledgeable. They are always there for your help. Also, you can contact HostGator customer service via email.
The support members were also extremely friendly and helpful, which always provided solutions quickly.
Now, let’s talk about knowledge bases support. Both providers offer very well organized, informative and easy to navigate options.
Most common issues or error problems are described in its knowledge base article. Before contacting the support team, you can overview both providers’ informative articles.
Overall, the customer support of both hosting provider’s are externally good and very helpful. Although, I must say that the lack of email support with HostGator and phone for Hostinger.
HostGator and Hostinger - Pros & Cons
Hostinger Pros & Cons
PROS
- Reliable & cheapest plans
- Good Customer Support
- One-click WordPress Install
- Terrific uptime test result
- Optional Minecraft servers
- Includes the company’s own Zyro website builder
- 30-days money back guarantee
CONS
- Lacks phone support
- Renewal price is high
- Daily backups available only on business plan
- Not every plan has a Windows option
HostGator Pros & Cons
PROS
- Reliable Web Hosting
- Free Domain Name & SSL
- Free Business Email Address
- 1-click WordPress install
- Daily backups available for all hosting
- 45-Day Money Back Guarantee
CONS
- Higher monthly Pricing
- Aggressive Upselling
Hostinger or HostGator - Final Conclusion
It is all about Hostinger and HostGator hosting comparison. We’ve discussed minor and major differences between both hosting providers. Sometimes, Hostinger wins and sometimes both are tied. If you’re still confused about which is a better hosting provider then let me summarize and reach to the final conclusion.
Features | Conclusion | ||
Price | Hostinger has an affordable hosting plan which starts as low as $1.99/month. HostGator provides reliable hosting and its cheapest plan costs start from $2.75/month. | ||
Performance | There are minor differences between Hostinger and HostGator performance. Both have excellent speed, server response time and uptime test result. | ||
Customer Support | Hostinger does not provide phone support while HostGator provides phone support as well. Apart from this, both have 24/7 email, and chat support. | ||
Security | Both hosting providers have the best security features to prevent your site from bad guys and viruses. | ||
User Interface | Hostinger has a much easier user interface than HostGator. Hostinger provides you hPanel management dashboard while hostGator comes with cPanel user control dashboard. |
With cheaper prices, a more intuitive control panel, and friendly support Hostinger takes the overall win. It’s one of the best options for users who have limited budgets but want reliable hosting to establish their online presence.
However, if you’re looking for a host with pretty generous storage for a personal site, HostGator is an excellent option too.
Hostinger vs. HostGator FAQs
Both Hostinger and HostGator provide reliable and awesome web hosting plans. However, if you’re comparing the price, performance and security then Hostinger is a better choice for you. And, if you want a host with pretty generous storage for your personal site then HostGator is a better option for you.
HostGator offers better value for money than Hostinger. Hostinger web-hosting comes with a cheaper price but HostGator provides you with a reliable and affordable hosting package with unlimited storage, security, performance and better support than Hostinger.
Hostinger offers versatile web hosting with excellent customer service, uptime, as well as better speed performance. Its user interface is so simple and easy to use for everyone.
No, only HostGator uses cPanel for its website management control. Hostinger uses a native hPanel, which is pretty similar to cPanel.