iPage vs HostGator Web Hosting Comparison 2021 - Pick a Right Cheap Host for Personal Sites

This HostGator vs iPage comparison mainly aims at helping our readers make the right decision between the 2 award-winning web hosting providers. Undoubtedly, both of the 2 companies are reliable and affordable, coming with an excellent industry reputation, but which one is better in terms of cost-effectiveness?

This comparison includes almost every aspect of the hosting service, such as price, features, speed loading speed, uptime, technical support, and user reviews. See details as below.

• HostGator

  HostGator offers a broad range of hosting services, but is best known for the web hosting solution with 3 plans. The most basic plan named Hatchling (starting at $3.96/mo) is a 1-domain package without parked or add-on domains, but it would be fine for newbie to set up a simple website or blog.

  If customers want unlimited domains, dedicated IP, and private SSL, they need to choose the Baby or Business plan which has been priced starting at $6.36/mo and $10.36/mo. In a word, the cheap Hatchling plan is limited in feature, and the rich-featured Baby or Business plan are a little expensive.

  It is worth mentioning that HostGator provides great convenience for new beginners, by offering the most popular cPanel control panel which allows customers to handle complex tasks with few clicks in a single graphical interface. Besides, the self-developed SimpleScripts 1-click installer integrated with the cPanel supports the automated installation of 150+ web applications to set up a website easy.

• iPage

  iPage provides one of the cheapest web hosting services in the market, starting at $1.99/mo ($1.99/mo for first 3 months, then $2.95/mo) with anytime money back guarantee, free $170 advertising credits ($100 Google AdWords, $20 Yahoo!/Bing Credits, $50 Facebook Credit), and free domain transfer/registration.

  However, there are 2 main drawbacks about this web host. First, iPage doesn’t support some essential features, including SSH (Secure Shell), Ruby on Rails, Python, Perl, PostgreSQL, custom cron jobs, especially SSH which is responsible for secure data communication and remote command execution. Second, many customers have complained about the server slowness and occasional downtime. We analyze this might due to the fact that iPage has oversold shared servers in recent years, as well as the low rate does not allow them to upgrade the servers and network.

HostGator VS iPage > Feature

Due to the fact that the HostGator Hatchling plan likes a sandbox for beginners setting up only a simple site, and the Business plan is designed for business websites with tremendous traffic at a very high rate, we mainly compare the iPage all-in-one web hosting plan with the HostGator Baby plan as following.

According to the result, the 2 companies has included all the basic features into the web hosting package, including unlimited disk space & data transfer, the latest version of PHP & MySQL, e-commerce support and advanced software & scripts.

However, HostGator falls behind in terms of the free marketing tools and credits, and iPage falls behind in terms of some technologies and programming languages like Python, Perl, Cron Job, SSH, etc.

HostGator VS iPage > Uptime

Uptime is the amount of time that a website keeps visible online without interruption. Most web hosting companies claim to achieve 99.9% uptime. HostGator and iPage have the same guarantee.

We have set up 2 websites hosted with these web hosts, and scanned the site availability in every 5 minutes by utilizing a 3rd party monitor tool named UptimeRobot. According to the results, HostGator has performed the best reliability that the site hosted with them is nearly 100% uptime in the real world. Read the uptime chart in the past 30 days as following.

HostGator VS iPage > Speed

In addition to uptime, speed is another one of the most important factors for a popular site. According to the real customer feedback received at BestHostingSearch.NET, both of them have achieved a high satisfaction rate on page loading speed-up. Particularly, over 65% of the HostGator customers are positive in the review.

Besides, the server response comparison of the 2 companies listed as below clearly shows that the page loading speed of HostGator website takes approximately only 0.67 second, which is 100% faster than iPage.

HostGator VS iPage > Eco-Friendly

As the environmental-consciousness has grown significantly nowadays, HostGator and iPage devote itself in offering green web hosting service.

HostGator purchases Renewable Energy Credits (REC’s), and has invested heavily in Wind Energy to help offset server emissions. iPage also purchases enough Renewable Energy Certificates to reduce the carbon footprint, and to offset the energy usage by 200%.

HostGator VS iPage > Support

Responsive technical support can be seen as the core ingredient of the reliable web hosting service, so both of the 2 companies view this aspect seriously.

Once customers need help, they can contact the professional support staffs day and night through phone, e-mail, and live chat. Besides, there are so many useful articles and video tutorials available in knowledgebase, which give customers some basic knowledge about the web hosting offered by the 2 companies.

Conclusion

We recommend HostGator as the best budget & high performance web hosting company compared with iPage in this review, based on price, uptime, speed, features, and technical support. To learn more about HostGator, visit http://www.hostgator.com/