Last Updated on
Ante Rados
The choice of a hosting provider is the first step in creating a website. For people who are not experienced with hosting, this can be the hardest step. After all, some hosting providers have hidden limitations, and they promise more than they deliver.
BlueHost and HostGator are two huge names in the hosting industry. They have a similar target market and similar offers, so the choice of BlueHost vs HostGator can be even harder than usual.
When you read this review, that choice should become much easier because I compared all they have to offer, including some things they won’t tell you upfront.
BlueHost and HostGator are tied in many aspects, but there are differences. BlueHost is better if you want a website that loads faster, but with HostGator, you get more free features and more reliable customer support, so I believe HostGator is a better choice overall.
HostGator vs BlueHost comparison
In this review, I compare HostGator and BlueHost side by side in several different categories. You can use the toggle to switch easily between the two.
Now let’s see, is BlueHost or HostGator better for your needs?
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BlueHost or HostGator ease of use
BlueHost
☆☆☆☆☆ 5/5
HostGator
☆☆☆☆☆ 5/5
Setup and management of your website with BlueHost are as easy as they get. You can manage your account, websites, and email addresses from one location – cPanel.
BlueHost’s cPanel has a modern design, and it is a bit cleaner and easier to get around than HostGator's. You can customize the layout of the cPanel, this option lets you access frequently used features more quickly.
BlueHost’s cPanel gives them a slight edge over HostGator, but you should not worry about ease of use with any of these two providers. When choosing between the two, your decision should be based on other factors.
HostGator’s signup, launch, and setup are all quick and easy. It is a hosting provider that is suitable for beginners.
Management of your account and website is also very simple. HostGator’s cPanel has easy to navigate graphical interface, which makes the management beginner-friendly.
With HostGator, even a complete beginner will feel comfortable doing everything alone. HostGator is one of the easiest to use hosting services out there, and if it weren’t for BlueHost’s cPanel, they would get equal scores in this category.
HostGator vs BlueHost hosting comparison
BlueHost
☆☆☆☆☆ 3.5/5
HostGator
☆☆☆☆☆ 4/5
Shared hosting is the most affordable hosting, and one of the two hosting options bloggers usually choose. Here is the detailed overview of what you get with BlueHost plans for shared hosting:
Basic: $7.99/month
- 1 website
- 1 domain included
- 5 parked domains
- 25 subdomains
Plus: $10.99/month
- Unlimited websites
- Unlimited domains, parked domains, and subdomains
- Spam Experts
Choice Plus: $14.99/month
- Unlimited websites
- Unlimited domains, parked domains, and subdomains
- Spam Experts
- Domain privacy and protection
- Site Backup
Pro: $23.99/month
- Unlimited websites
- Unlimited domains, parked domains, and subdomains
- Spam Experts
- Domain privacy and protection
- Site Backup
- Dedicated IP
All plans except the Basic come with 30 days free Office 365 Mailbox, but after those 30 days, you will have to pay the regular subscription. When you spend your first $25 on a new account, you also get $100 Microsoft advertising and $100 Google Ads credits.
All plans include free domain registration for 1 domain.
The good thing about BlueHost shared hosting is that all the plans come with SSD storage. This way, your website will load faster than on servers that use HDD for storage.
There isn’t much you get with upgrading past the Plus plan, so I recommend the Plus plan as BlueHost’s best buy plan.
HostGator has 3 shared hosting plans. Let’s see how they compare to BlueHost plans:
Hatchling Plan: $6.95/month
- 1 domain
- Free domain
Baby Plan: $9.95/month
- Unlimited domains
- Free domain
Business Plan: $14.95/month
- Unlimited domains
- Free dedicated IP
- Free SEO Tools
To kick off your website, all plans come with a $100 Google Ads and Bing Ads credits. For Bing ads credits, it is only important that you have an account no older than 30 days. For Google Ads, on the other hand, you have to spend $25 on a new account to become eligible for credits.
Each new or newly upgraded HostGator shared hosting account also receives a free website transfer. The transfer includes full cPanel transfer if your old host’s cPanel backup generator is active.
If you subscribe for a term of 1 year or longer, you will also get a free domain registration.
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Compare BlueHost vs HostGator WordPress hosting
BlueHost
☆☆☆☆☆ 3.5/5
HostGator
☆☆☆☆☆ 4/5
BlueHost has one less plan for WordPress hosting than for shared hosting. Here are three plans you can choose from:
Basic: $7.99/month
- 1 website
- 1 domain included
- 5 parked domains
- 25 subdomains
Plus: $10.99/month
- Unlimited websites
- Unlimited domains, parked domains, and subdomains
- Spam Experts
Choice Plus: $14.99/month
- Unlimited websites
- Unlimited domains, parked domains, and subdomains
- Spam Experts
- Domain privacy and protection
- Site Backup
Features in BlueHost WordPress plans are the same as those for shared hosting, so there isn’t much to add that I didn’t mention in the previous section of this review.
HostGator WordPress hosting plans are somewhat more expensive than their shared hosting plans. Feature-wise, they are almost the same as their shared hosting with one nice addition; you get email marketing included in all plans. Here is the overview of WordPress hosting plans:
Hatchling Plan: $9.95/month
- Single domain
- Email marketing included
Baby Plan: $15.95/month
- Unlimited domains
- Email marketing included
Business Plan: $22.95/month
- Unlimited domains
- Email marketing included
- Free dedicated IP
Both BlueHost and HostGator plans come with marketing credits under the same conditions that are present in their shared hosting plans. When choosing between the two, the only differences to watch out for are the price of the plans and the choice between included email marketing and free Office 365 Mailbox for one month.
BlueHost vs HostGator storage space and bandwidth limits
BlueHost
☆☆☆☆☆ 2/5
HostGator
☆☆☆☆☆ 2/5
All BlueHost plans come with SSD storage. Compared to HDD storage, data loads faster from SSD storage which, in turn, makes your website load faster.
Each plan, besides their cheapest WordPress and shared hosting plans, comes with unlimited storage and unmetered bandwidth. Their cheapest plans have a storage limit set to 50 GB.
Although I just said that bandwidth is unmetered, there is a caveat you should be wary of. There are hidden limits to bandwidth that aren’t defined. Their terms of the agreement state that “you should not utilize more resources than should be the case in the normal operation of a personal or small business website.” This clearly means that your data usage is measured, and that promise of unmetered bandwidth is a blatant lie. What exactly is considered “a normal operation” is left to BlueHost to determine.
I would always choose a host with clear conditions stated over a hosting provider that brags about unmetered and/or unlimited resources, while not providing them. Unfortunately, both hosting providers in this review share this drawback.
All HostGator plans come with “unmetered” bandwidth and “unlimited” storage. The problem with this is the same one I mentioned in the BlueHost part of the review.
It seems that they also fail to understand what the definition of unlimited is. If you read the terms of agreement, you will find a passage stating that HostGator may terminate access to the services, apply additional fees or remove or delete user content for excessive usage of resources.
I have trouble grasping what it means to exceed an amount defined in the dictionary as “not limited or restricted in terms of number, quantity or extent.” But whatever the meaning of that is, you can suffer from one of the previously mentioned consequences if you manage to exceed that amount.
When we compare these two providers, both of them provide you with limited unlimited data and bandwidth in most of their plans, and the only difference is that you get SSD storage with BlueHost, and HDD storage with HostGator.
HostGator or BlueHost website builder
BlueHost
☆☆☆☆☆ 5/5
HostGator
☆☆☆☆☆ 5/5
BlueHost doesn’t have its own website builder. They allow you to easily add Weebly builder to your website. Weebly is one of the best and most popular website builders out there.
Weebly is a drag and drop builder that uses a grid system. With a grid system, every element you place will snap in place and auto-align with other elements.
Gator website builder and Weebly are both great for building simple websites. The main difference is the grid system. With Weebly, you don’t have to worry about overlapping elements, and with Gator builder, you get more freedom in placing the elements.
Gator website builder is a beginner-friendly mobile responsive website builder. It comes with hundreds of templates, categorized into industries.
It is a drag and drop builder. This basically means that you pick an element, drag it and put it exactly where you want it. Building a website doesn’t get any simpler than that.
A small drawback of a drag and drop builder with complete freedom is that elements won’t automatically adjust to the rest of your website. You will have to manually resize and move some elements around to make space for the new elements you want to add to your website.
HostGator has excellent social media integration, but like most website builders, it isn’t suited for developing complex websites. It is a simple website builder designed with beginners in mind.
HostGator or BlueHost for SEO?
BlueHost
☆☆☆☆☆ 2/5
HostGator
☆☆☆☆☆ 4/5
SEO is the most important factor for your website to be found on search engines. BlueHost loves to upsell features you are likely to use, and SEO tools are one of those features.
To get access to SEO tools, you will have to pay an additional $71.40 per year. You don’t get much with their SEO tools. They give you the option to submit your sitemap to Yahoo!, Bing and Google. You also get personalized marketing reports and a keyword discovery tool, and that is about it.
I wouldn’t recommend BlueHost for SEO. The SEO tools you will have to pay for with BlueHost come included in the plans of many other hosting providers.
HostGator has two SEO Tools packages for you to choose from: SEO Start Plan and SEO Grow Plan.
SEO Start Plan is included in its Business Plan. It comes with search engine submission, a 50-page analysis, a weekly scan, 5 keyword ranking reports, 2 competitor analysis, a monthly email report, and a marketing report with 5 recommendations.
The Grow plan comes with everything from Start Plan and a few additions. You get 400-page analysis, daily scan, customized tasks by priority, 15 keyword ranking reports, 4 competitor analysis, proactive alerts and notifications and marketing reports with targeted recommendations.
The Start Plan will cost you $2.95/month (if you pick one of the hosting plans that don’t come with SEO tools included) and the Grow Plan will cost you $4.17/month.
HostGator or BlueHost domain costs
BlueHost
☆☆☆☆☆ 4/5
HostGator
☆☆☆☆☆ 4/5
For some domains, BlueHost is the cheaper option, while HostGator is the cheaper option for others. Here are the prices for most common domain extensions:
- .com: $11.99/year
- .net: $12.99/year
- .org: $8.99/year
- .site: $2.99/year
- .online: $4.99/year
- .us: $8.99/year
This how much some of the most common domains will cost you with HostGator:
- .com: $12.95/year
- .net: $12.95/year
- .org: $12.95/year
- .site: $0.95/year
- .online: $1.95/year
- .us: $5.95/year
HostGator versus BlueHost security
BlueHost
☆☆☆☆☆ 4/5
HostGator
☆☆☆☆☆ 4.5/5
Starting with BlueHost’s Plus plan, you will get Spam Experts with your subscription. This is a service that offers anti-spam email filtering and archiving.
With the Choice Plus plan and Pro plan, you get two additional security options.
The first one takes care of your personal information with the domain privacy protection feature. With this feature, BlueHost replaces your personal contact information with generic BlueHost contact information.
The second one is a site backup with CodeGuard Basic. It provides you with automatic backups that can be scheduled to take place on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.
HostGator takes care of spam with SpamAssassin, so unlike BlueHost, you won’t be locked out of a feature that deals with spam in the cheapest plan.
HostGator lets you use automated weekly backups with all their plans. There is also an option to make a manual backup if backups on a weekly basis aren’t enough for you.
With both BlueHost and HostGator, you get SSL certificates, password protected directories and an option to blacklist IP addresses. Security-wise, the main difference between the two hosting providers is that you get automated backups and a spam filter in all HostGator plans. You will have to upgrade to more expensive plans to get access to those with BlueHost.
HostGator vs BlueHost customer support
BlueHost
☆☆☆☆☆ 4/5
HostGator
☆☆☆☆☆ 5/5
BlueHost has 24/7 live chat, phone and email customer support. There are mixed reviews about customer support by BlueHost users.
Those who managed to reach the support were satisfied with the service and gave it top ratings. However, there are also users who reported they were unable to reach the support after multiple calls.
HostGator has friendly and knowledgeable support you can access 24/7 via phone, live chat and email.
The reviews HostGator's support got from the users are top-notch, so HostGator wins in this category.
BlueHost versus HostGator speed, uptime and reliability
BlueHost
☆☆☆☆☆ 4/5
HostGator
☆☆☆☆☆ 2/5
Both hosting providers have almost constant uptime, but BlueHost is performing much better when it comes to speed. The easiest way to show you this is to give you some data, so you can compare the data yourself. Here is the average uptime and average speed (response time) for BlueHost based on Pingdom’s data:
April 2020
Uptime: 99.99%
Response time: 525 ms
March 2020
Uptime: 99.98%
Response time: 584 ms
February 2020
Uptime: 100%
Response time: 421 ms
January 2020
Uptime: 100%
Response time: 404 ms
December 2019
Uptime: 100%
Response time: 566 ms
November 2019
Uptime: 100%
Response time: 365 ms
October 2019
Uptime: 99.96%
Response time: 478 ms
September 2019
Uptime: 99.99%
Response time: 385 ms
August 2019
Uptime: 99.99%
Response time: 351 ms
July 2019
Uptime: 100%
Response time: 386 ms
June 2019
Uptime: 99.98%
Response time: 415 ms
May 2019
Uptime: 100%
Response time: 384 ms
Here is the data for how HostGator performed over the last 12 months:
April 2020
Uptime: 99.52%
Response time: 1410 ms
March 2020
Uptime: 99.99%
Response time: 893 ms
February 2020
Uptime: 99.99%
Response time: 1552 ms
January 2020
Uptime: 99.97%
Response time: 2189 ms
December 2019
Uptime: 99.89%
Response time: 1640 ms
November 2019
Uptime: 100%
Response time: 1378 ms
October 2019
Uptime: 100%
Response time: 1423 ms
September 2019
Uptime: 100%
Response time: 1328 ms
August 2019
Uptime: 99.99%
Response time: 1494 ms
July 2019
Uptime: 100%
Response time: 1763 ms
June 2019
Uptime: 99.99%
Response time: 1331 ms
May 2019
Uptime: 99.95%
Response time: 931 ms
HostGator vs BlueHost pricing comparison
BlueHost
☆☆☆☆☆ 4/5
HostGator
☆☆☆☆☆ 4/5
Bluehost prices for shared hosting range from $7.99/month to $23.99/month, and for WordPress hosting from $7.99/month to $14.99/month.
BlueHost also offers other types of web hosting: for VPS hosting you will pay $29.99/month - $119.99/month and a dedicated server will cost you $149.99/month - $249.99/month.
Finally, if you want to become a reseller, you will pay between $18.99/month and $42.49/month, depending on a plan you choose.
We already went over shared and WordPress hosting for HostGator. The prices range $6.95/month - $14.95/month for shared and $9.95/month - $22.95/month for WordPress hosting.
HostGator prices for other types of hosting are: $9.23/month - $17.95/month for Cloud hosting, $79.5/month - $149.95/month for VPS hosting and $189.99/month - $289/month for dedicated hosting.
Reseller hosting with HostGator will cost you $29.95/month - $59.95/month.
BlueHost versus HostGator extra features
BlueHost
☆☆☆☆☆ 3/5
HostGator
☆☆☆☆☆ 3.5/5
BlueHost doesn’t have many features included in their plans that I haven’t already mentioned. There is a domain manager that lets you track, update, transfer and purchase all your domains from one place.
I already mentioned that BlueHost is known for upselling, so there are some extra features you can subscribe to.
Premium SSL Certificates will cost you $49.99 per year. For $59.88 per month, you can get Office 365 and for $23.88 per domain per year, you can get malware scanner SiteLock.
With HostGator, you get a free website, domain, MYSQL, and script transfer. Usually, I wouldn’t give this any special attention because this is something you expect from all hosting providers. However, BlueHost doesn’t offer anything similar.
You get complete eCommerce functionality with the Gator website builder that is included in all plans. This means that you can create an online store even with their cheapest plan.
Neither HostGator nor BlueHost has an abundance of extra features, but with HostGator, you get some good features for free.
BlueHost vs HostGator conclusion
The winner is HostGator!
While neither BlueHost’s or HostGator’s offers seem upfront, HostGator has less upselling after you subscribe to one of their plans. They also have a more reliable support team and offer free SEO tools in some of their plans.
BlueHost versus HostGator final score
FAQs
Are HostGator and BlueHost the same company?
Is BlueHost better than HostGator?
How do I switch from HostGator to BlueHost?
Is BlueHost or HostGator better for beginners?
Both BlueHost and HostGator are very beginner-friendly oriented. BlueHost has a cPannel that is slightly easier to get around. As a beginner, you will find out that they are more or less equally easy to use, so you should base your choice on other factors.
Does HostGator or BlueHost have a better website builder?
HostGator has the Gator site builder, a drag and drop builder with complete freedom in what and where you will place elements. BlueHost doesn’t have its own website builder; you can easily add Weebly website builder, also a drag and drop builder that utilizes a grid system.
The choice is whether you want to build a website with complete freedom or with help of a grid system.