HostGator vs WPEngine 2021 Comparison - Which is Better Plan For WordPress

As many customers are wondering whether WPEngine or HostGator is the best WordPress hosting company, our editors have carried out an in-depth comparison between the two, which discusses the price, features, WordPress compatibility, uptime, speed, and support. Note that this WPEngine VS HostGator review contains 2 parts: the same points between them, and the differences between them.

The Same Points between WPEngine and HostGator

WordPress Hosting Environment
The minimum requirements of running WordPress are PHP 5.2.4, MySQL 5.0, and at least 16MB of PHP memory_limit which can be offered by both WPEngine and HostGator. Here, we have listed some key features offered by the 2 web hosts, with a view to ensuring the most stable and secure WordPress hosting services.

Website Security & Safety
According to the Google Safe Browsing Diagnostic Page, the websites hosted with both WPEngine and HostGator are totally safe and secure, with no malicious activities and suspicious content. WPEngine provides a segregated hosting environment, so that each customer’s data is isolated, and any unauthorized access is prevented. HostGator has an extensive custom firewall rule and large mod_security rulesets protecting each server, as well as a Flood Protection System to keep customers away from DDoS attack or UDP flood.

Hosting Reliability
The website reliability is something that webmasters concern the most; after all, no one wants downtime. To be frank, WPEngine and HostGator have done a good job in this aspect, guaranteeing customers an at least 99.9% uptime by leveraging the power of world-class data centers, quality web servers, specialized network maintenance engineers, and a very strict No-Overselling-Policy.

The Differences between WPEngine and HostGator

Price
The WordPress hosting services of WPEngine are definitely more expensive than that of HostGator, which have been priced at $29/mo, $99/mo, and $249/mo for the Personal Plan, Professional Plan, and Business Plan respectively. In terms of HostGator, the WordPress hosting is quite affordable, starting at only $3.71/mo with the newly launched coupon code BWH25Percent. See HostGator effective pricing table as following.

Page Loading Speed
In fact, both of the 2 web hosts have a solid data center infrastructure and utilize the latest advanced web servers, so it is hard to know which one offers a faster hosting speed. In this circumstance, our editors have done the performance testing for a WordPress site with the same scripts and the same content hosted with WPEngine and HostGator. As a result, HostGator is 100% faster than WPEngine on the performance of MySQL database query, page generation and page rendering, with the server response time of 338ms averagely.

Customer Service
In terms of customer service, HostGator is more helpful than WPEngine, as it provides 24/7 US based technical support via phone call, email, and live chat, and promise that the waiting time is less than 30 seconds for hotline & live chat, and less than 1 hour for e-mail. In order to test whether they can keep their promise, we have sent them an e-mail asking about domain transfer, and have received the reply after 10 minutes with a very detailed and professional answer.

The customer service offered by WPEngine is a little bit frustrated. This company does not offer live chat and 24x7x365 round-the-clock support, but the telephone support which is only available for the Business Plan from 9am to 6pm Central Time. Although it claims that emergency calls are taken 24/7, it’s not clear what could be count as an emergency, and whether calls are actually answered out of the working hours.

Summary

Based in the information we have discussed above, HostGator is a better plan for WordPress than WPEngine, as its hosting services are more affordable and fast, and the customer service is more responsive.