Currently, every business is moving to an online platform for which they design their website and select web hosting company. To make your business a successful one, the web hosting services you pick has to best in its class. We are going to take a dig on two web hosting giants and will find out who is the best pick for your website.
The process we set for selecting the best web hosting services among top hostings including Hostgator, SiteGround, Namecheap, iPage etc goes through different tests. These tests we conduct in different sectors such as page load speed, server uptime, and customer support response time. We obtain the data from these tests that we use in finding out the answer.
A Brief Description About Hostgator and SiteGround
HostGator is a Huston based firm which has its existence since 2002. Founded by Brent Oxley, this web service provider is at present offers hosting services to above 9 million domains and has more than 400,000 satisfied customers. Endurance International Group is now owning the Hostgator company, from 2012.
Founded in 2004, Site Ground is a Bulgarian based web hosting company. This company has its headquarter in Sofia and till now it has offered web hosting services to more than 500, 000 domains. The data centers of this company are located in five different nation that are USA, UK, Netherland, Italy, and Singapore.
Now the main question is if their services are really reliable or their claims and promises are nothing but air bubble. The marketing blog many times just provide fake reviews to trap customers. But in this article, we will only talk about actual figures, obtained from our 328 tests performed over most popular web hosting companies like Hostgator, SiteGround, ipage (read comparison with Hostgator here), Bluehost etc..
Hostgator and SiteGround Hosting Comparison
The factors we took for measuring the performance of both of the hosting services are as follows.
- Page Load Speed Test
- Uptime Test
- Customer Support Response Time Test
Our Step by Step Procedure of Performing These Tests
Step 1: It begins with purchasing a similar hosting plan of Hostgator and Siteground.
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 SiteGround - Page Load Speed Test:
The page load speed is important for any website. According to a popular survey, a visitor doesn’t usually visit a new website again if the page loading is slow. We performed 20 tests for checking this aspect. Here are the results that we found in our page load speed tests.
- The average page load time of Hostgator was 3.11 seconds while it was 3.19 s for Siteground.
- The best page load time of Hostgator was 1.88 seconds while it was 2.31 seconds of Siteground.
- The Worst Page load time of Hostgator was 13.8 seconds, while it was 11.22 s of Siteground.
Site Hosted On Hostgator
Site Hosted On SiteGround
These tests demonstrate that Hostgator has an edge over Siteground.
Winner – Hostgator
Hostgator v/s SiteGround - Uptime Test Results:
A decent hosting service offers close to 99 percent Uptime. It is an essential aspect to look for in a hosting provider. Obviously, you don’t want to lose your customers or visitors during the peak time of your business due to downtime.
To measure Uptime, we have used Pingdom services for a particular time period on our dummy website.
- The average uptime of Hostgator was 99.97 percent while the average uptime of Siteground was 99.96 percent.
- The Worst uptime was 96.78 percent of Hostgator. While it was 94.43 percent of Siteground.
Site Uptime Result Hosted At Hostgator
Site Uptime Result Hosted On SiteGround
In our uptime tests, it was clear that Hostgator has the upper hand. Hostgator has significant lead over Siteground
Winner – Hostgator
Hostgator v/s Siteground – Customer Support Ticket Response Time Test Results:
We noted the response time of the hosting provider for our customer support tickets. Afterward, we calculated the average response time. Here are the results.
- The average response time of Hostgator was 4 hours while it was 3 hours of Siteground.
- The best response time we recorded for Hostgator was 1hour while it was the same of Siteground.
- The worst response time for Hostgator was 21 hours and it was 12 hours of Siteground.
In this test, Siteground has the upper hand over Hostgator.
Winner – Siteground
Hostgator v/s Siteground – User Interface Comparison:
If you are a novice website owner or developer, then this aspect will be helpful for you. We found that both of the hosting services have a user-friendly interface. One can easily perform basic tasks like adding a domain name, installing CMS, using file managers, and databases. Therefore, we would rate both of them equally.
Winner – Draw
Hostgator v/s Siteground – Hosting Packages and Pricing Comparison:
The pricing of hosting plans is a decisive factor for many website owners, especially the novice ones. As a matter of fact, this factor influences everyone’s decision from large to a small extent.
We found that pricing was nearly same of both of the hosting plans. However, Hostgator often comes with lots of discounts and offers that can incredibly decrease the cost.
Also, it features a 45 days money back guarantee in case you are dissatisfied with the services. Therefore, Hostgator is better than Siteground from this aspect.
Winner – Hostgator
The Final Verdict
In most of our tests, Hostgator’s results dominated. It was easy to figure out the winner, and the better hosting services. All of the tests points towards Hostgator as the best hosting solution.
