This comparison between the 2 professional web hosting providers – HostGator and SiteGround – is carried out to analyze their web hosting services to figure out which company is a better choice for hosting business and e-commerce websites.
To make details clear enough, we have compared the 2 companies' web hosting price, features, uptime, speed, technical support and editorial ratings respectively.
Editorial Ratings
In the past months, our editors have taken comprehensive reviews on both companies. To make the reviews independent and impartial, we have personally hosted a sample Joomla-based website with the same content on HostGator and SiteGround and kept monitoring their performance.
Based our real hosting experience and careful reviews, the ratings on the companies' overall service, performance, reliability and technical support are as the following table.
Editorial Rating
HostGator
SiteGround
Overall
Performance
Control Panel
Technical Support
Website
HostGator.com
SiteGround.com
Business Hosting Price & Features
Having been dedicated to meeting all kinds of online business needs for over 10 years, HostGator now offers 3 upgradable shared web hosting plans as well as several VPS hosting and dedicated server plans. For subscribers going through the promotional link below and using the coupon code
TCWH25Percent
, the price of the shared web hosting services starts from only $3.71/mo.
HostGator Coupon Code Activation
SiteGround also has 3 upgradable shared web hosting plans that are suitable for business websites with a maximum of 100,000 monthly visits. With a 60% discount offered by the company, the effective price of the packages is quite affordable, starting from $3.95/mo. However, the regular price of the plans starts from $9.95/mo, much higher than the average in the industry, honestly.
According to our reviews, all of the shared web hosting plans are feature rich, coming with nearly everything needed for hosting a good business website. Below is the comparison between the features of the basic plans from HostGator and SiteGround – HostGator Launch and SiteGround StartUp.
Feature
HostGator Launch
SiteGround StartUp
Disk Space
Unlimited
10 GB
Bandwidth
Unlimited
Unlimited
Hosted Website
1
1
PHP 5
MySQL 5
Ruby on Rails
Control Panel
cPanel
cPanel
SSH
Shared SSL Certificate
Money Back Guarantee
45 Days
30 Days
Google AdWords Credits
$100
N/A
Price
$3.71/mo
$3.95/mo
Website
HostGator.com
SiteGround.com
Web Hosting Uptime & Speed
When it comes to uptime and speed, the quality of data center and network facilities cannot be ignored. Fortunately, both HostGator and SiteGround have got the performance of all their hosted websites backed by several first-rate data centers and the best network connectivity.
HostGator has been partnering with SoftLayer, a collocation provider owning some of the world's best data centers featuring multiple power feeds, power generators, enterprise-class UPS backups, and 24x7 engineer powered server monitoring. The network utilized to get customers' website connected is fully meshed and redundant, purchased from Cisco.
SiteGround operates 3 data centers located in Chicago, IL, Amsterdam, NL, and Singapore, SG respectively, all of which are equipped with high performance web servers, power redundancy, network redundancy and high-end physical security to ensure customers' websites to be stable and secure.
We have kept monitoring the 2 companies' web hosting uptime and speed for more than half a year. As a result, we find that both of the companies have delivered good uptime that surpasses the guaranteed 99.9%.
HostGator: 99.99% uptime in the past 30 days.
SiteGround: 99.93% uptime in the past 30 days.
As for speed, our monitoring statistics show that the server response time of HostGator averages 330ms, approximately 50% faster than that of SiteGround which averages 500ms. Read the following chart for HostGator server response speed.
Technical Support
Responsive and professional technical support is important for online businesses, especially for those websites with no technicians working on the site management. In this sense, both HostGator and SiteGround are good options as they offer the same 24x7 technical support via phone, live chat and email.
To test the support quality, we have contacted their support teams several times through various ways. The average response time is as following.
HostGator: 33 seconds on phone, 40 seconds on live chat & 4 hours for emails.
SiteGround: 60 seconds on phone, 52 seconds on live chat & 7 hours for emails.
Which Is Better for Online Business?
HostGator and SiteGround are both good for hosting business websites. If a choice needed to be made between them, we personally recommend HostGator for the company does slightly better in price, features, performance, and the refund policy.