Linode vs HostGator Web Hosting Comparison 2021

Both HostGator and Linode offer award-winning VPS hosting services, but which one is the better choice? In this article, we’d like to come out the answer by carrying out an in-depth and comprehensive comparison of the VPS hosting offered by the 2 companies, based on price, features, performance, and technical support.

VPS Hosting Overall

Criteria	HostGator	Linode
Price
Features
Uptime
Speed
Technical Support

HostGator

HostGator offers 9 levels of VPS hosting services, from semi-managed to fully-managed for both geeks and newbies. The Level 1 and Level 2 are semi-managed packages without cPanel or Plesk, but still come with Virtuozzo (VZ) Power Panel, weekly off-site backups, tremendous server resources, unlimited e-mail accounts, and advanced technologies like full root access. The rest levels are all fully-managed plans, including all the features offered by semi-managed plans, plus the optional cPanel with WHM control panel.

Linode

Linode is a well-known hosting company only focusing on VPS hosting service. It offers 5 upgradable unmanaged VPS packages with different levels of price and server resources. Besides, due to the fact that unmanaged VPS hosting solution requires customers to control everything of their websites and doesn’t feature the pre-installed control panel and any other virtual applications, Linode also provides managed VPS that is $100/mo per account for some amateurs or customers who lack advanced knowledge.

Price & Feature Comparison

Cost-effectiveness	HostGator	HostGator	Linode
Plan	Semi-Managed	Managed	Unmanaged
Price	$14.96/mo	$29.96/mo	$20/mo
Money Back	45 Days	45 Days	7 Days
RAM	384 MB	768 MB	1 GB
Storage	10 GB	30 GB	48 GB
Bandwidth	250 GB	500 GB	2 TB
cPanel

Without doubt, the VPS hosting offered by HostGator is much more cost-effective than that of Linode, which has been priced starting from $14.96/mo only by activating the coupon code BWH25Percent in the checkout, featuring large volumes of server resources and almost all the latest advanced VPS related technologies.

HostGator

The semi-managed VPS packages of Level 1 and Level 2 are priced starting at $14.96/mo and $22.46/mo respectively, coming with 0.57 GHZ to 0.85 GHZ of CPU, 384 MB to 576 MB of RAM, 10 GB to 20 GB of disk space, and 250 GB to 375 GB of data transfer.

Note that all the 9 plans come with unlimited domain hosting & email accounts & FTP accounts, weekly website backup, free website building tool, free website templates, and cutting-edge technologies like PHP, MySQL, Ruby on Rails, Perl, Python, full root access, FFMpeg and many more. Besides, HostGator offers 45 days money back guarantee, with which customers can get all their money back if they cancel their accounts before the first 45 calendar days of registration.

Linode

Linode unmanaged VPS hosting plans are a little bit expensive, which cost customers from $20/mo to $320/mo. If customers need managed VPS service for server monitoring, network optimization, and hardware configuration, they have to pay additional $100 each month.

Admittedly, the features included in Linode VPS hosting are quite attractive, such as 1 GB to 8 GB RAM, 48 GB to 768 GB storage, and 2 TB to 20 TB transfer, full SSH, full root access, dedicated IP address, transfer pooling, and managed DNS with API, etc. However, this company only supports 7 days money back policy, which is far from enough for customers to get a nice try of this hosting service.

Uptime & Speed Comparison

HostGator utilizes quality Dell PowerEdge Servers to host websites, which feature industry-standard hardware specifics. Besides, it locates all of these powerful servers at world-class datacenters with continuous power supply, HVAC units, fully redundant network, and 24/7 monitoring.

By leveraging the power of cutting-edge servers and state-of-art data center infrastructure, HostGator is able to guarantee fast speed and no downtime. As tested, this company has achieved a swift server response of 338ms and at least 99.9% uptime in the real world.

In terms of Linode, we only have found that it has 6 data centers in US, Europe, and Asia-Pacific, without any detailed information concerning about the redundant power and security technologies, monitoring system, and speed acceleration techniques.

Summary – HostGator is Recommended

No matter for the cost-effectiveness, data center infrastructures, and hosting performance, HostGator wins over Linode. Besides, while Linode only offers phone and e-mail support, HostGator also allows customers to get help by clicking the live chat button to start an instant online conversation with support staffs at any time of the whole year.