Features
| Features | HostGator | Bluehost |
| Price | $7.16/Month | $6.95 |
| Plan | Hatchling Plan | Shared Hosting |
| Storage | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Bandwidth | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Domains | 1 | Unlimited |
| Installer | QuickInstall, Fantastico | Simple Scripts |
| Coupon | WORDPRESSHOSTING | N/A |
Company Information
HostGator is a company that offers a range of hosting plans at an affordable price. They was started in 2002 by Brent Oxley and has grown to have more than 5 million websites hosted with them. They are located in Houston and Austin, TX and have more than 750 employees. We have reviewed them and given them high marks.
Bluehost offers one plan that gives you everything you need at an affordable price. They were started in 1996 and host millions of domains. They are located in Provo, UT and own their own datacenters. Bluehost has grown in popularity because of their simple plans and well rounded feature list. Read our review of them for more info.
Control Panel
HostGator uses cPanel with all of the goodies that usually come with cPanel (MySQL Databases, Cron jobs, Domain Manager, FTP accounts, Email accounts, etc…). One main difference is that they come with their own one-click installer called QuickInstall. They also come with the 3rd party one-click installer Fantastico.
Bluehost comes with almost the exact same setup on their cPanel. The one major difference is that Bluehost uses their own custom script for installing applications called SimpleScripts. It was developed by Bluehost and is used by other hosting companies.
Setting Up WordPress
Using the one click installers it takes rough the same amount of time to set up WordPress on both HostGator and Bluehost. If you install WordPress manually you can use the file manager to upload the package to your servers and extracting. The process is essentially the same and works well with both Hosts.
Customer Support
Both companies have pretty great tech support. Both offer 24/7 phone tech support, live chat, ticket system, and email. They are quick to resolve issues and all support is local.
Speed
We have reviewed both HostGator and Bluehost over a period of time. Our conclusion is that HostGator does a better job at getting sites delivered fast. Both are shared servers, but we have seen better results from HostGator.
Conclusion
Our conclusion is simple. We have used both companies and have found over time that HostGator has been better. They do have a lot of the same features, especially at the shared server level. However, we have seen HostGator perform with speed. We also have needed to switch to large plans (including VPS) and Bluehost does not have that option.
David writes for a couple different websites that work with hosting and consumer reviews. He brings real-world application to harder to understand concepts in order to help people learn about specific subject matter. He also knows HTML, CSS and PHP to help out with building and configuring sites.
