SiteGround Vs HostGator: Short & Simple Comparison, 1 Winner!

If you wish to learn more, scroll down for a more thorough breakdown of the two hosts.

SiteGround Vs HostGator Thorough Comparison

Before we start the war between these two, let’s talk about what they actually are and what they do.

Both SiteGround and HostGator are hosting companies, but there is a slight difference in the domain they work in.

HostGator is owned by EIG Group and which also owns other hosting companies like Bluehost, JustHost, and so on. Due to their advertising tactics and poor hosting support, they are now getting a bad name in the hosting industry. Click here to read our full review of HostGator.

Though they are not the worst hosting provider, you don’t get value for money hosting.

On the other hand, SiteGround is one of the last remaining independent hosting providers and haven’t been bought by any company like EIG, which is a good thing.

SiteGround provides incredible hosting services and is loved by its customers for quality hosting services.

SiteGround may have been founded come after HostGator, but it’s equally successful and is used by more than 250,000 customers globally.

Why Look for a Good Hosting Company?

The web host is a company that offers the necessary services to view the website. Servers are used to host the websites.

The hosting company will even help you get a domain if you don’t already have one.

Even though many businesses may not attach great importance to a hosting company, it is crucial to choose the correct web host for your marketing strategies if you want digital success.

Selecting the wrong web host can have serious implications on your business, which can include the following:

• There can be a drop in sales if your website repeatedly goes offline due to a lousy web host. You will lose customers because they won’t be able to get access to your website anymore. This is not good if you are running an online business of some sort.
• Your website’s SEO will be affected if it keeps going offline. Not only will you lose your customers, but you will also lose your ranking, which is important if you want potential clients to contact you.
• If you have invested in a bad web host, you have opened yourself up to security breaches and threats. In the case of an attack, a decent web host company will back up your files to a secure system.

SiteGround Vs HostGator: What Are the Hosting Plans Offered?

So, what hosting plans do these two companies provide? Let’s see.

SiteGround offers various hosting plans like StartUp, GrowBig and GoGeek. Its sharing hosting plans offer 30 GB of space and a strategic plan for up to 100,000 visits per month.

SiteGround’s main domain is WordPress. It also offers a 1-click installer, full management, and automatic updates with additional features for different plans.

HostGator, on the other hand, offers Baby, Hatchling and Business plans.

The plan you choose will depend on what you want to get out of the service.

All plans give unlimited processing power, unlimited drive space, and unlimited emails. You can also install a content management system or use its WordPress hosting plan.

Features

HostGator and SiteGround are feature-rich companies, but they target different audiences. For those in need of quick, easy, and affordable hosting, HostGator is the answer.

Meanwhile, SiteGround is recommended for anyone who is serious about online business and needs powerful hosting with top-notch support.

HostGator offers “unlimited space, sub-domains and unlimited user accounts” (It’s not really unlimited though). The claimed uptime is extremely good at 99.99 percent, which means less than one day of downtime per year. Thought the real uptime is not what they claim according to our tests.

Meanwhile, SiteGround offers 99.98 percent of uptime.

The only drawback is that SiteGround offers only 10 gigabytes of disk space.

Oddly, with their plans, neither of them offers free domains, and that is not a cost that you can dodge. Remember that you will likely spend another $10 or so just to get a domain.

Both come with a site builder (a website builder with drag-and-drop features), which is usable but hardly the best. They also provide one-click WordPress installation, making it easy to set it up, regardless of the client’s skill.

Despite its market stature, the layout of HostGator is strangely buggy, but it is completely functional.

SiteGround has a far more amazing appearance than HostGator, providing a fully programmable ‘Enterprise’ plan for customers wanting a service based on their needs.

The monthly budgets for such plans range high, so for most customers, it’s not particularly useful, but for those who need that extra oomph, this can be worth it.

SiteGround has much more advanced integration with non-WordPress web content systems, providing support for sites such as Magento and Joomla.

In the end, the comparison shows that SiteGround has stronger and more useful features than HostGator, especially compared to hosting.

SiteGround works best with WordPress as well as non-WordPress content management systems.

Loading Speeds

For a web host, speed is of utmost importance. Both these services give an excellent response time. Hence, deciding between the two may be difficult for some people.

Loading speed of a website hosted on HostGator:

Loading speed of a website hosted on SiteGround:

To achieve maximum speed, both companies take different approaches.

While SiteGround uses SuperCacher (a cache process) to keep things running at a rapid pace, HostGator doesn’t offer such an advanced system for loading speeds and better management of resources.

Over the past couple of years, SiteGround has indeed improved immensely with its own caching system that is provided with some of the more premium plans, which truly make it stand out from HostGator.

Support Center

HostGator also lacks when it comes to hosting support. You will have to wait very long to get answers and even after that, you won’t get knowledgeable support to resolve your query.

While the HostGator support center is okay-ish, SiteGround takes all the numbers as it has a system of replying within ten minutes. This amazingly fast system is very beneficial for those facing any web hosting issues.

Here are real user reviews of both hosts on social media sites:

SiteGround and HostGator both offer outstanding customer care. There are extensive knowledge centers, 24/7 chat and telephone support, and tickets. Since we have to choose, due to its fast support, we would vote for SiteGround.

Price

Affordable does not always guarantee good value, particularly when it comes to web hosting. For web hosting providers, it is normal practice to show low prices and increase it by adding required features.

On the bright side, neither HostGator nor SiteGround is too sneaky, but bear in mind that the cheapest prices you see are made on the assumption that you are locking in for years and will never use add-ons.

There are three plans that HostGator offers at different price points. Other than that, it provides hosting plans for more advanced websites, which includes reseller hosting, VPS hosting and dedicated hosting with dedicated hosting being the most expensive.

Like HostGator, SiteGround provides three different hosting plans at different price points. For higher-level hosting, it provides three plans, naming web hosting, cloud hosting and dedicated hosting. Again, dedicated hosting is the most expensive one by a large margin.

It’s true that SiteGround has quite reasonably priced entry-level plans, but perhaps its focus is on more profitable plans. It does not scale up gradually unlike HostGator, but there is little difference between the two services if you are unlikely to go further than the basic plans.

Overall Comparison

SiteGround

• Free website transfer or new setup
• One-click WordPress installation
• Fast reply with 24/7 support
• Affordable plans to accommodate high traffic
• Automatic backup and safe server provider
• Top-notch WordPress support
• Excellent for high-traffic businesses
• Customized domain
• Website transfer for free
• SuperCacher to increase response time
• Best performance
• Helps give a professional appearance
• SSH and cPanel access

HostGator

• Drag-and-drop page builder
• Easy-to-use format
• Unlimited space and email accounts provided
• Unlimited bandwidth
• No contract required
• Customized domain name
• One-click WordPress installation
• Free editing tools
• MySQL database
• Extensive knowledge center
• 24/7 support

Conclusion

There is no comparison between these companies because they are both equally valuable. Despite both being hosting companies, their functionalities are very different in many aspects.

Hence, the hosting provider you choose will depend on your needs. Depending on what you are looking for, one of these companies will be much more suited for you than the other.

HostGator would be the most ideal choice for you if you were looking for cheap and reliable hosting. Its team has done an outstanding job of making hosting so easy for those of us who do not know anything about technology.

It is especially great for novices who want to quickly set up their site and get it running.

SiteGround is the most ideal choice for you if you are serious about your online business and need hosting that won’t give you problems.

We have even compared SiteGround with Bluehost, SiteGround with InMotion, SiteGround with WPX Hosting and many other hosting providers and it always comes on top. So it’s the best choice.

Also check HostGator’s comparison with Bluehost if you’re thinking about those two.