The world has turned internet savvy, and every business is now working online. Web hosting is certainly an important need of any website owner be it is of e-commerce or blog. A good web hosting service will provide an edge to your website.
As a matter of fact, the customer also judges any e-commerce through their website. Due to this reason, it is necessary that a website should work smoothly. It will ultimately give a boost to your business.
Although there are many web hosting companies offering services, in this article, we are going to rate Hostgator and DreamHost hosting services. Both of them are currently the most preferred web hosting companies, and this article will help you to decide as which one is suitable for your need.
Hostgator & Dreamhost Hosting - Introduction
Hostgator is old and renowned web hosting company which is known for its services since 2002. Brent Oxley founded this company, and it has its headquarter in Houston, Texas, US. On the other hand, DreamHost Hosting services are in web hosting field since 1996. Headquartered in Los Angeles, California, this web hosting company offers cloud computing services for privately and state-owned companies. New Dream Network LLC is the owner of this company.
To provide the actual rating for the services being offered by these companies, we have performed about 328 tests. The result will answer all the queries regarding quality and performance of these web hosting companies. We will test them on every ground and based on the results we will declare the winner hosting company.
Our Methodology of Comparing Hostgator and Dreamhost
Here are the criteria we took for measuring and comparing the performance of hosting services just like we compared Hostgator with Arvixe hosting in our recent hosting comparison test.
- Web page load speed test
- Website uptime test
- Customer support response time test
- User Interface Comparison
- Pricing Comparison
Steps We Followed To Compare Hostgator & Dreamhost
Step 1: It begins with purchasing a similar hosting plan of HostGator and Dreamhost.
Step 2: We made a demo website and hosted it on both web hosting. They both have same files, built on WordPress CMS, content and plugins. Only the domain name was different. The file size we used was 93kb of HTML, 48 KB of CSS, 312 KB of JavaScript, and 1544 KB of images.
Step 3: To measure their uptime, we set up a pingdom.com account. We consistently buzzed both of the websites at the interval of 1 minute.
Step 4: To measure customer support service, we raised support tickets and waited for their reply. We have calculated their response times for every they replied. Afterward, we calculated their average response time.
Hostgator v/s Dreamhost – Webpage Load Speed Test:
It is important for your website to have a fast loading. If it takes much time in loading, then a visitor would avoid visiting the website again. To check this aspect of hosting services, we tested them 20 times. In our previous comparison between Hostgator v/s Digital Ocean, we found that Hostgator was the winner. Here are the results we got in our tests while comparing it with Dreamhost.
- The average page load time in HostGator was 3.11 seconds while in Dreamhost, it was 3.67 seconds.
- The best page load time in HostGator was 1.88 seconds while in Dreamhost, it was 2.12 seconds.
- The Worst Page load time of HostGator was 13.8 seconds, while in Dreamhost, it was 10.21 seconds.
In these speed tests, it is clear that HostGator has an edge on Dreamhost.
Site Hosted At Hostgator
Site Hosted At Dreamhost
Winner – Hostgator
Hostgator v/s Dreamhost – Website Uptime Test Results:
No web hosting provider serves 100 percent Uptime. However, you can get close to 99 percent Uptime in a good web hosting service like Hostgator, Bluehost, Inmotion hosting, Dreamhost etc.
It is an important aspect of a web hosting provides. Undoubtedly, you don’t want to lose customers due to website downtime especially at the peak hours of your business. We measured the uptime of both hosting providers by using the Pingdom services for a specific time period on our demo website. Here are the results we got after that.
- The average uptime in HostGator was 99.97 percent while in Dreamhost, it was 99.95 percent.
- The worst uptime in HostGator was 96.78 percent while in Dreamhost, it was 96.33 percent.
- In the uptime tests, Hostgator has a visible lead on Dreamhost.
Winner – Hostgator
Hostgator v/s Dreamhost – Customer Support Ticket Response Time Results:
A good web hosting will offer a decent customer service. This service demonstrates the level of dedication of a hosting company towards its customers.
It is an important aspect as well. If the company is responsive, then you don’t have to worry when facing technical problems in a web hosting service. Thus, to check this service, we raised many support tickets.
The results are as follows:
- The average response time of Hostgator was 4 hours while the average response time in Dreamhost was 7 hours.
- The best response time of Hostgator and Dreamhost was 1hour.
- The worst response time for Hostgator was 21 hours and in Dreamhost, it was 18 hours.
As you can see in the results, HostGator performed way better than Dreamhost.
Winner – Hostgator
Hostgator v/s Dreamhost – User Interface Comparison:
User Interface matters especially to novice website owners. We found both of the hosting companies have an equally simpler interface. Performing tasks like installing CMS, adding domain names, accessing file managers and databases, and others were easy. Thus, there was no real winner in this round.
Winner – Draw
HostGator v/s Dreamhost – Price comparison
The price of hosting plans is a significant factor that affects the decision of many website owners in the selection of hosting service.
In shared hosting, Hostgator comes with three types of plans. They are Baby, Hatchling, and Business plans. The hatchling is the cheapest while the Business is the priciest with many great features. On the other hand, Dreamhost has just a single hosting plan in shared web hosting. The price of that single plan is close to the price of the Business plan of Hostgator. However, the features in Dreamhost is way below than that of HostGator.
You can pay monthly in HostGator, while you have to yearly in Dreamhost. Additionally, HostGator often comes with coupons and discount offers that decreases the price more. While Dreamhost rarely introduces such offers.
Moreover, you can get a full refund within 45 days with HostGator in case you are dissatisfied with the services.
Winner – Hostgator
The Final Verdict
Based on the results of our tests, Hostgator dominated Dreamhost in every key aspect. A sensible one will definitely go with Hostgator rather than Dreamhost for professional usage.
