HostGator vs GoDaddy: Price, Features & What’s Best 2019

HostGator and GoDaddy are acclaimed domain hosting providers with integrated templates and website builders. HostGator is more affordable and easier to use for beginners with single-site hosting starting at $3.84 per month. GoDaddy, however, provides affordable ecommerce website options for advanced online stores at $5.99 per month.

When to Use HostGator

Nontech-savvy business owners should pick HostGator if they need a website builder to design and launch a basic, nonecommerce website. The host is ideal for users who want templates to work from when building their basic website. HostGator plans start at $3.84 per month, which includes a website builder, a free domain, unlimited email accounts, and free hosting.

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When to Use GoDaddy

GoDaddy is ideal for businesses that want to build an ecommerce website without coding. Website builder packages include ecommerce templates as well as email marketing, social media, and store-building features like shopping carts, product reviews, and PayPal integration. Plans start at $5.99 per month and come with a free domain, hosting, and email.

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HostGator vs GoDaddy at a Glance

How We Evaluated HostGator vs GoDaddy

Many small businesses look for a web host that is well respected and offers the features they need at an affordable price. HostGator and GoDaddy both fit these criteria, so it’s often hard to choose between them. That’s why we compared both by price, performance, website builder functionality and ease of use, extra inclusions, guarantees, integration with third-party platforms, and customer service to showcase clear differentiating factors.

Here are the criteria we used to evaluate HostGator vs GoDaddy:

• Price: We considered not only the cost of starter plans but site builder-inclusive plans for both HostGator and GoDaddy.
• Guarantee: A money-back guarantee safeguards a company’s investment, so we considered whether or not the providers in our comparison offer one and how extensive or comprehensive it is.
• Performance: Hosting performance, a key consideration in our comparison, was defined by a combination of web hosting uptime, storage, and regular backups.
• Website builders: Website builders were evaluated based on core editing features and ease of use. Ecommerce features were considered a bonus.
• Ease of use: The majority of business owners do not have technical expertise, so we considered the ease of site setup and site-building.
• Customer service: Customer service increases product satisfaction and overcomes technical difficulties for clients. This is especially essential for nontech-savvy small businesses, so we looked for customer service available to business owners via multiple channels.
• Customer reviews: Lastly, we looked at customer reviews to determine user experience and customer satisfaction.

Based on the evaluation criteria above, we found that HostGator excels at ease of site setup, owing specifically to templates that can be easily edited with the included site builder. GoDaddy, however, is a better choice for ecommerce businesses that need tools for attracting buyers to an online store and providing a smooth, exceptional sales experience.

HostGator vs GoDaddy: Pricing & Features

HostGator is cheaper than GoDaddy, but the features are more basic and aimed toward nontechnical users who just want an attractive website design without enhanced sales or marketing features. GoDaddy—priced slightly higher—includes benefits for tech-savvy users who want advanced customization or an ecommerce site.

HostGator Pricing

HostGator web hosting—with site builder—is more affordable than GoDaddy. The starter Hatchling plan costs $3.84/month, with plans increasing to $9.22/month that add more storage and bandwidth. All plans, however, include ample storage, a free domain, email, a secure sockets layer (SSL) certificate for site security, and easy WordPress installation.

HostGator Tiered Pricing & Features

Hatchling

The Hatchling plan for HostGator starts at $3.84 per month for website hosting with one domain. Unlike GoDaddy, HostGator’s starter plan provides unlimited storage, databases, and email accounts. The Hatchling plan also includes free SSL with one-click WordPress installation and the industry-standard cPanel for intuitive file and hosting management.

HostGator’s Hatchling plan is right for people who want to create a basic website to tell customers about their business—primarily because of its ease of use. The starter website builder gives businesses basic templates that can be edited using a drag-and-drop interface. This makes it easy to get an attractive website up in a short amount of time.

Baby

The Baby plan costs $5.99 per month, adding unlimited emails and domains to the features offered by the Hatchling hosting plan. The ability to host extra domains and emails gives users the flexibility to create multiple websites, landing pages, and email accounts as their business grows. This program is compatible with the features in GoDaddy’s Business Plus plan, which costs $12.99 per month.

Given the inclusion of unlimited domains, this plan is right for realty brokers, property managers, or web designers who want to create several sites to represent their business. It’s also ideal for businesses with many employees, given the addition of unlimited email. Additionally, the unlimited high definition (HD) audio and video uploads and analytics allow site owners to create dynamic content and track engagement—key for new businesses that are focused on building a brand.

Business

The Business hosting plan for $9.22 per month includes the performance enhancement features of improved site load times. Like the Maximum plan offered by GoDaddy for $19.99, the Business plan hosting amps up users’ ability to design and operate a multimedia-heavy or high-traffic website.

With a multimedia focus, this plan is right for users with lots of videos and visual content that takes up space—like graphic design or video editing companies. Also, the plan adds social media integration that makes building a brand around multimedia content more effective.

GoDaddy Pricing

GoDaddy pricing ranges from $5.99 to $19.99 per month, depending on features. All GoDaddy website builder plans include a free domain name, SSL, an email address, easy WordPress installation, ample storage, and quality customer service.

GoDaddy Tiered Pricing & Features

Personal

The Personal Plan costs $5.99 per month for a basic, non-ecommerce website builder with 100GB of storage. Included in this plan are a free domain, one email account, SSL certificate, and one-click WordPress installation. Files can be managed through cPanel or via file transfer protocol (FTP) upload for users who want more control over the files in their hosting account.

Given its basic offerings, this plan is right for businesses that are just starting out and want to get online. Businesses can use the template-driven website builder to create a mobile-friendly website in less than an hour. However, given the cost of this plan, users who simply want a basic business website are better off going with HostGator’s Hatchling plan.

Business Plan

The Business plan costs $7.99 per month for an unlimited number of websites and unlimited storage. There is still only one free domain and email address included, however. The ecommerce features—like PayPal integration—start at this level. Search engine optimization (SEO) tools are also included in this package to help increase ranking in search engines like Google.

This plan is ideal for businesses that host several sites for multiple brands like a web design company or small franchise. It’s also a good fit for customers that want to explore basic ecommerce functionality, as customers can process payments via PayPal.

Business Plus Plan

The Business Plus plan costs $12.99 per month and adds unlimited websites, storage, and databases to the features of the Business plan. This gives website owners the ability to host a large number of websites in their account and increase the amount of site traffic they can handle. Additional features include social media integration, online appointment setting, email marketing, and geolocation listings.

The Business Plus plan is the next step in online store building. Not only can companies use this plan to display unlimited images and videos of products—given the unlimited storage—but they can process payments and promote their store using social media sharing and business profile creation on platforms like Google My Business and Yelp.

Online Store Plan

The Online Store website builder, priced at $19.99, includes a wealth of ecommerce tools, including shopping carts, product reviews, discount codes, payment processing, inventory management, and sales tax inclusion. Additionally, unlimited storage and unmetered bandwidth mean you can create and manage large inventories without reducing site speed.

The Online Store plan is ideal for businesses with larger inventories that want to sell their products online. The ability to create coupons or promos, calculate shipping and taxes, and track inventory will help business owners boost their sales and keep their stock under control.

HostGator vs GoDaddy: Ease of Use

HostGator is designed for the nontechnical user who wants quick hosting setup and easy website building. GoDaddy is geared more toward the technical user who needs to design an ecommerce website with advanced features. Both are relatively easy to use, but HostGator starts off with less technical setup for a novice user.

HostGator Ease of Use

The whole experience for HostGator seems designed for novice users. From picking a domain name through site setup, HostGator offers a wizard-like experience that makes complex decisions simple to understand. HostGator also avoids upsells as a part of the sign-up and setup steps, so users can get straight to site design. Furthermore, the drag-and-drop site builder makes creating and launching a site straightforward.

GoDaddy Ease of Use

GoDaddy is easy to use for those who already have a basic knowledge of web hosting elements like SSL and domain names. The hosting setup requires some technical knowledge like connecting an email address through POP3/IMAP settings or connecting a domain name to ecommerce hosting plans. The website builder is very visual, however, with easy drag-and-drop content modules, templates, and built-in ecommerce features.

HostGator vs GoDaddy: Customer Service

HostGator and GoDaddy provide 24/7/365 customer service for customers. However, GoDaddy rises to the top due to the depth of its technical support knowledge combined with availability through email, phone, and chat in many languages. HostGator does not offer multiple language support.

HostGator Customer Service

HostGator shines with customer service available 24/7/365 via phone and chat. There is also a support portal for questions or comments. The online video tutorial library helps users who want to see how something is done instead of asking for a representative to resolve an issue. However, HostGator is missing reps who can help customers in multiple languages.

GoDaddy Customer Service

GoDaddy customer service is available 24/7/365 for questions via phone, email, and chat in several languages. There is also a blog, a searchable database for instructions, videos, tools for users who want to resolve issues on their own, and a moderated forum. Given the breadth of these offerings, GoDaddy customer service surpasses that of HostGator.

HostGator vs GoDaddy: Customer Reviews

Customers seem to feel that HostGator is better for novice users who are seeking a more affordable, basic option while GoDaddy is best for technical users with customized website needs. HostGator reps are more knowledgeable about how to guide beginners while GoDaddy support services are aimed at giving savvy users steps for using their hosting platform.

HostGator Customer Reviews

Reviewers note that the price is exceptional for HostGator users who want hosting without extra frills. Some users stated that the shared host performance could be slow at peak times during the day, however.

GoDaddy Customer Reviews

Many users noted that the dashboard for GoDaddy looks dated and can be clunky to navigate, but that the easy WordPress installation and website builder are top-notch. Reviews mentioned that the customer service is the best thing about using its hosting service.

Bottom Line: HostGator vs GoDaddy

Both HostGator and GoDaddy offer key hosting features like a free domain, email, SSL certificate, one-click WordPress installation, quality customer service, and website builders. However, HostGator is best for nontech-savvy users seeking easy-to-use templates for easy site creation while GoDaddy is better for those seeking advanced ecommerce features at a slightly higher price.