This 1and1 vs HostGator comparison is made to help readers make a better choice among the two web hosts. In the light of our editors’ real hosting experience together with hundreds of verified customers’ reviews, this comparison will thoroughly analyze multiple aspects of 1and1 and HostGator shared hosting services, such as the reputation, price, feature, performance, and support.
Rating
Reputation
Feature
Performance
Reliability
Support
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1and1 Review
HostGator Review
Community Reputation
Founded in 1998 as a reseller of early technology products, 1and1 has been providing web hosting services for individual users and small-to-medium business owners since 2003. The company claims to provide various high-quality hosting services at affordable prices.
In the real world, however, it has received a mass of negative customer reviews, which are mainly addressed to the tricky pricing policy, slow page loads, and poor technical support that we will detail in the following sections.
HostGator, on the contrary, has enjoyed a good reputation in the field since its inception in 2002. With more than 500 employees being dedicated to serving millions of users worldwide, this company has gone all the way up to become an industry leader and received multiple noteworthy web hosting awards like the best Drupal web hosts.
As we reviewed, there are up to 99.9% of the 272 real customers being satisfied with its hosting services. You can check more detailed statistics in the chart below or read this comprehensive HostGator review on BestHostingSearch.NET, a popular web hosting review site.
Hosting Price & Promotion
In total, 1and1 provides three hosting plans for users to choose. These plans, named as Unlimited, Unlimited Plus, and Unlimited Pro, are now available at fairly cheap prices ranging from $0.99/mo to $9.99/mo.
However, the promotional prices above apply to one year only. After the specified period, 1and1 will renew its hosting plans at $6.99/mo, $9.99/mo, and $14.99/mo in respective, which are much higher than the industry average.
When it comes to HostGator, the company has also released three hosting plans and named them as Hatchling, Baby, and Business. In regular situations, HostGator prices the plans from $6.95/mo to $14.95/mo, which is also a little bit expensive than some budget web hosts at the first glance.
However, as a welcomed shared hosting provider, HostGator has spared no effort to help users narrow their budgets while made no compromise on the service quality. At present, it provides a 30% discount for new buyers using the coupon code EUNGE30OFF to purchase the plans at $4.86/mo, $6.96/mo, and $10.46/mo.
HostGator Coupon Code Activation
Besides, HostGator includes each plan with a variety of freebies, such as free site building tools, $100 Google AdWords voucher, $100 Yahoo!/Bing credits, and so on. The company also provides a 45-day full money back guarantee for users to buy their plans without any hassles.
Basic Features
Generally speaking, 1and1 shares some common points with HostGator from the perspective of hosting features. Firstly, they provide the latest versions of PHP and MySQL to grant users with a 100% Drupal compatible hosting environment. Also, they offer almost all the essential hosting features for users to run Drupal and other applications properly.
However, when compared more carefully, HostGator edges over the other company in multiple aspects, especially the allocation of server resources. To illustrate this more clearly, we have selected the two primary plans of both companies and made a comparison between their feature offerings as below.
Feature
Plan in Comparison
Unlimited
Hatchling
Web Space
Unlimited
Unlimited
Bandwidth
Unlimited
Unlimited
Sub Domains
100
Unlimited
Email Accounts
100
Unlimited
FTP Accounts
20
Unlimited
MySQL Databases
20
Unlimited
cPanel Control Panel
1-Click Installer
PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby
Cron Jobs
SSH Access
Money Back
30 Days
45 Days
Marketing Credits
$50
$200
Regular Price
$6.99/mo
$6.95/mo
Effective Price
$0.99/mo
$4.86/mo
Conclusion
Not Recommended
Recommended
Ease of Use
As we’ve mentioned in the section above, both companies include a 1-click installer within each of their hosting plans, which is helpful for users to install Drupal, WordPress, Joomla, Magento, and many other popular commercial and open source applications without taking many efforts.
However, while HostGator and many reputable companies provide a cPanel control panel to simplify the management of websites and hosting accounts, 1and1 offers only a custom control panel that is to some extent inferior to cPanel regarding ease-of-use.
Hosting Performance
It goes beyond saying that excellent uptime and fast speed are two critical elements for users to succeed in building an optimal online presence. From this point of view, both 1and1 and HostGator are reliable web hosts.
Despite being headquartered in Montabaur, Germany, 1and1 runs more than 70,000 servers in seven state-of-the-art data centers to cover the needs of users on a global scale. To maximize the hosting reliability and performance, it strategically locates these data centers in both Europe and the USA, equipping them with high-standard facilities and advanced technologies.
In consequence, 1and1 are granted with enough capability of guaranteeing high-level of hosting reliability for its users. As the chart below indicates, it has achieved an average of 99.97% uptime in the past thirty days.
On the other side, HostGator has also built itself a rock solid hosting foundation. It leverages two world-class data centers in Houston, TX and Provo, UT. To make sure that the hosting services remain in an uninterrupted manner, the company equips these data centers with highly redundant power supplies, HVAC, 24×7 monitoring, etc.
Also, HostGator partners with many industry renowned hardware suppliers, such as Arista Networks, Juniper, Cisco, and many more to ensure low latency and high throughput. Therefore, it is not surprising that the company can guarantee almost 100% uptime in the previous month.
Even though both companies perform well in terms of the hosting reliability, they differ a lot considering the loading speed. Presented as below, HostGator takes only 338ms for responding to a server request, up to 124% faster than 1and1. To be frank, HostGator server response time is much more outstanding than most competitors in the same field.
Customer Service
In order to render users with an optimized hosting experience, both 1and1 and HostGator provide 24×7 technical support via a wide range of channels, including a toll-free telephone, email, and ticket system.
Besides manual support, they also maintain a knowledgebase section, a blog, and multiple social media platforms that come with a tremendous number of helpful tutorials, guide, and other articles.
With these resources, users can troubleshoot some common problems by themselves and communicate with other users over the web.
However, there remain two obvious limitations with 1and1 customer service, making it less competitive than HostGator at this point. Firstly, live chat, one of the most popular contact methods among young users, is not supported by this company, causing some inconvenience for these users to get timely assistance.
Secondly, as many webmasters have reflected, 1and1 support staff are not as responsive and professional as that of HostGator, taking a long time for answering to a support request and presenting some desired solutions.
Conclusion & Suggestion
According to the in-depth analysis that we’ve made in this 1and1 vs HostGator comparison, the two companies indeed share some common merits like providing hosting services at affordable prices and guaranteeing excellent uptime.
However, HostGator is definitely a better choice among the two companies, offering abundant hosting features as well as ensuring up to 99.99% uptime and blazing-fast page loading speed. In this case, we sincerely recommend you sign up HostGator to start your shared hosting journey with confidence.