HostGator vs DreamHost 2023: Is DreamHost Better Than HostGator?

In this HostGator vs DreamHost blog, I will compare the two web hosts on price, plans, performance, and security. I’ll cover all the essential things you need to know so you can decide which one is right for you.

If you’re looking for a fast-growing, profitable hosting company, you might be wondering whether to choose DreamHost or HostGator. These two companies are owned by EIG but serve different customer segments. Both provide affordable and reliable hosting solutions, but which one is better? Are there any advantages to using either of these companies?

It would be best if you chose the hosting provider with the right services for your needs. If you’re starting, you don’t need a large server with lots of RAM. Choosing the hosting plan that allows you to scale quickly would be best. It is not a good idea to buy a big server when you only need a few essential services.

Therefore, HostGator and DreamHost are both excellent choices. They offer top-notch service, support, and performance. Both provide a 99.9% uptime guarantee. They have good customer service, and their prices are competitive. Both companies offer a wide range of hosting packages for small businesses and several other services, such as domain registration, email, and website design.

HostGator is a large, well-known hosting company serving over 8 million customers and offering shared VPS and dedicated servers. In contrast, DreamHost is a comparably small, innovative company focusing on WordPress and other CMS-based websites. They offer many services, including a free domain name, unlimited email accounts, and a free website builder.

There are many perfect hosting companies. If you want the best host, you must decide which is better for your particular needs. Both companies offer good services, but you must choose the exemplary hosting service.

HostGator is a large hosting provider that provides a variety of options, but it also charges higher prices than DreamHost. DreamHost has unique features that make it a great alternative to HostGator. DreamHost specializes in offering excellent support services and has a customer service team that is available 24/7.

If you are short on time, We have created a comparison table between HostGator vs DreamHost for you to make the right decision. If you want to find out which is better, check it out.

 

 

HOSTGATOR – GET 65% OFF!

DREAMHOST – GET 79% OFF

 

As you can see, these two companies are quite different. HostGator is a well-known hosting provider that offers many hosting packages at a reasonable price. DreamHost is a company known for its fast and reliable hosting services.

Keep reading to find out more! You will make a well-informed decision for your company after reading this article.

What are the Key differences between HostGator and DreamHost?

HostGator and DreamHost are both good hosting platforms, but there are slight differences in their prices, services, and features.

1. Domain names: Both HostGator and DreamHost offer free domain names in their hosting plans. Still, the starting and renewal prices of HostGator domains are more costly than DreamHost’s.
2. Money-back guarantee: HostGator offers a 30-day money-back guarantee for shared, VPS, and reseller hosting. On the other hand, DreamHost offers 97-day money-back guarantee for shared hosting and a 30-day money-back guarantee for DreamPress.
3. Uptime guarantee: HostGator offers a 99.9% uptime guarantee, which is only applied on shared reseller web hosting accounts. On the other hand, DreamHost offers its customers a 100% uptime guarantee, and they offer it in every hosting account. I will discuss this in detail later in the Speed and performance topic.

You may be wondering why there’s no difference in pricing. Well, the pricing of both companies’ hosting plans is complicated, which makes it difficult to know who is cheaper or more costly overall.

HostGator vs DreamHost – What You Should Know?

I will discuss price, performance, customer support, and security. Let’s start with the price.

Features with the Price Difference

HostGator and DreamHost are web hosting companies that provide similar services at competitive prices. Both offer a free domain name, an SSL certificate, a 1-click WordPress installation, etc.

HostGator’s Hatchling introductory package costs $150 for 36 months and includes 10GB storage, unmetered bandwidth, one domain, and email addresses. DreamHost has its Shared Starter plan, which costs $116.99 for 36 months and includes 50GB of storage, unlimited traffic, and email accounts. That implies DreamHost is less expensive than HostGator. DreamHost’s basic plan is superior to HostGator’s since it includes 50GB of storage space.

However, to take advantage of the cheap prices promised by both hosts, a commitment of three years and payment in full is necessary. For example, you want to be a member every month. In that case, the charges will skyrocket, and you should count on paying up to three times the amount indicated, and sometimes even four times that amount.

Both HostGator and DreamHost base their pricing structures on a substantial amount of upselling in their customer relationships. When you made the initial purchase, you may have yet to be aware of other fees and costs. You may be responsible for paying for these items if you need to be more diligent.

The cPanel control panel that HostGator offers in their hosting plans is not free. When you select the plan, they will ask you to add cPanel to your hosting plan, which will cost you extra charges.

DreamHost immediately adds DreamShield Protection to your purchase, while HostGator promotes Sitelock Essentials and CodeGuard backups. Unfortunately, if you don’t remember to delete them, in that case, these add-ons may rapidly increase your shared hosting fees while seeming inexpensive.

Still, HostGator provides more excellent value than DreamHost since it gives you more for less. For instance, HostGator’s managed WordPress Business Plan offers Cloudflare CDN up to 2.5x faster page load times, unlimited storage, and unlimited websites. Moreover, you will have free SEO tools, free dedicated IP, which Dreamhost doesn’t offer in any of their hosting plans, and many other features.

In contrast, DreamHost’s identical plan DreamPress, only gives one site, an SSL certificate, and 30 GB of space for roughly twice the price.

The same is valid with VPS.

DreamHost and HostGator offer VPS Business plans, but Hostgator offers costly ones, and their renewals are even more costly. Furthermore, DreamHost offer managed VPS hosting while HostGator doesn’t.

DreamHost gives a 97-day money-back guarantee on shared hosting plans, whereas HostGator’s money-back promise is only 30 days. Although both should be long enough for you to discern if the service matches your requirements, I’d feel more secure knowing that I had three months to decide.

Website Security

Both HostGator and DreamHost Provide Adequate Safety Measures for Customers.

DreamHost vs HostGator is equal in terms of the level of security they provide. In addition, both servers offer free SSL certificates issued by Let’s Encrypt, which may raise your site’s ranking in Google’s search results.

In contrast to HostGator, DreamHost does not charge extra for domain privacy (also known as Whois). This indicates that DreamHost will hide your personally identifiable information using its proxy server, making it more difficult for hackers to access your data.

On the other hand, HostGator provides complimentary spam protection by SpamAssassin. Although, you can install this on your DreamHost VPS plan. However, shared plans often do not provide you with the administrative capabilities that are necessary for the installation.

DreamHost provides you with the choice to purchase DreamShield for additional protection. At the same time, HostGator allows you to buy SiteLock Essentials for your website. However, most of HostGator’s customers complained that the siteLock didn’t work when their websites were hacked.

Both services offer similar duties, such as checking your website for malicious code and monitoring your website’s reputation, among other things. So naturally, this is all for a price.

Speed and Performance – Which one is faster?

DreamHost Beats HostGator in the Speed and performance Race.

HostGator and DreamHost have two data centers based in the US. To ensure that visitors from Europe, Asia, and Australia have fast page load times, you should consider using a content delivery network (CDN). HostGator offers Cloudflare CDN with up to 2.5x faster page load times in the Business plan of shared hosting. On the other hand, Dreamhost offers unlimited CDN in their managed WordPress hosting (DreamPress) plans, except for the DreamPress plan.

Additionally, DreamHost recently announced CDN DreamPress powered by fastly.

HostGator and DreamHost provide SSD storage as standard in terms of shared hosting. Additionally, SSDs are up to 30 times quicker than HDDs in reading/writing speeds.

HostGator promises a 99.9% uptime guarantee, which my test shows meet. In addition, when HostGator has an extended outage period, it will credit your account for a whole month’s charge. In contrast, DreamHost would only credit you for 10% of your following renewal fee.

Hostgator’s uptime results from the past 5 months:

• november2022: 99.91%
• October 2022: 99.89%
• September 2022: 99.97%
• August 2022: 99.94%
• July 2022: 99.96%

As a competitor, DreamHost’s 100% uptime promise is supported by an SLA (service level agreement).

DreamHost’s uptime results past 5 months:

• november2022: 100%
• October 2022: 99.98%
• September 2022: 100%
• August 2022: 99.98%
• July 2022: 99.82%

DreamHost takes the lead in the competition’s website speed section by a narrow margin. In this way, both web hosting services exceeded industry standards and delivered an outstanding end-user experience.

Is Dreamhost faster than Hostgator?

Yes, we created two new test WordPress websites using Elementor, one with DreamHost and one with HostGator. We next checked the loading times of these sites using the web monitoring tool Pingdom.

The following are the HostGator site results:

Asia – Japan – Tokyo: 6.9s
North America – USA – Washington DC: 0.4s
Europe – United Kingdom – London: 3.7s
Pacific – Australia – Sydney: 4.1s

The DreamHost site’s outcomes are as follows:

Asia – Japan- Tokyo: 1.7s
Europe – United Kingdom – London: 0.8s
North America – USA – Washington DC: 0.3s
Pacific – Australia – Sydney: 2.2s

As you can see, DreamHost is much faster than its competitor when it comes to responding to customers’ inquiries. HostGator vs DreamHost were comparable in speed. However, Dreamhost emerged victorious.

However, remember that the speed at which your website loads dramatically depends on the location of the server that hosts your website and the locations of visitors. When it comes to web host companies, all of their websites are managed and tested inside the United States. Therefore, your servers must be near your audience if you want the most outstanding results.

However, DreamHost and HostGator only offer servers in North America. Hence, these hosting companies are not ideal if your customers are located on other continents.

Which one has the better Customer support?

DreamHost provides customer service via live chat, telephone, and ticketing. They also include a selection of tools for customers to help you manage your website. Furthermore, both web hosts offer free and paid consultations to the customers to improve your website on Google. They also help you build, develop, and design your website.

HostGator provides live chat, phone, and email support, which are available 24/7/365. It’s noteworthy that the support employees at HostGator are trained specialists that can answer your issues in less than 10 minutes each time they’re contacted. The representative with whom I had the chance to speak was kind, knowledgeable, and helpful in resolving my concerns promptly.

HostGator has an excellent live chat service, but a new tab asks for your name and category when you click on the live chat. They will ask you to write down your problem or whatever you want to ask in the description section.

HostGator comes out on top when it comes to providing customer assistance.

While on the other hand, DreamHost offers 3 direct assistance to the customers. Their award-winning US experts are available 24/7 through Live chat, phone, and ticketing, which can help with any problems you may have. But if you aren’t a customer yet of DreamHost and still need their assistance through live chat? You can chat with them between 8-6 PM PST.

However, I tried twice to chat with their customer team member, but sadly they couldn’t connect me with one.

However, this only happens sometimes, but the company should improve its live chat service for a better experience.

Nevertheless, the process of purchasing tickets is smooth. When employing this approach, most of the time, the issues are resolved within the first hour. You can also read their blogs and tutorials, and don’t forget about their extensive knowledge base section.

What are the Pros and Cons of HostGator vs DreamHost?

Pros

• Host unlimited domains except for the hatchling plan
• Free dedicated IP (business plan only)
• cPanel control panel
• 2.5x faster page load speed
• Unlimited disk space
• 1-click WordPress installation

Cons

• Upselling while checkout
• Bad customer support
• Additional fee while restoring backups
• Costly VPS hosting plans

Pros

• Host unlimited domains
• 97-day money-back guarantee
• SSD unlimited disk space
• 100% uptime guarantee
• 1-click WordPress installation and other CMS
• Announces CDN DreamSpeed for better page loading speed

Cons

• Require additional cost for email accounts in the starter plan
• Costly dedicated hosting plans
• Slow speed (mostly iPhone users)

HostGator vs DreamHost – Which one should you choose?

In the comparison of DreamHost vs HostGator, both of the web hosting services performed exceptionally well in the majority of the areas. Both DreamHost and HostGator offered competitive pricing.

However, DreamHost was superior to HostGator in terms of uptime and reaction speed. The prices shown by both companies were very competitive. The most critical distinctions were in the areas of customer service and security. DreamHost is the superior choice regarding protection, while HostGator proved challenging to surpass.

Who comes out on top when pitting DreamHost vs HostGator is a question only you can answer. However, DreamHost is the better choice if you are a more sophisticated user searching for a simple WordPress setup, solid security features, and fantastic performance outcomes.

DreamHost is known for its excellent customer support and high-quality services. They offer the same plans as HostGator but at a lower price.

HostGator is a little different. Although it has a history of being a bit scam (you can read HostGator customers’ reviews on Trustpilot), it offers some excellent services and cheap packages.

DREAMHOST – GET 79% OFF!

Conclusions

This was my HostGator vs DreamHost comparison article. I hope you’d love reading my article.

HostGator and DreamHost are two of the most popular web hosting companies.

With that said, you should consider DreamHost when deciding which company will suit your needs.

Let us know by leaving a comment below if you have any questions related to web host companies.

FAQs

Is DreamHost a good website host?

DreamHost is a fantastic host for any WordPress website because WordPress.org recommends DreamHost and Bluehost. They offer great features, a great platform, and fast servers at an affordable price. Their quality of service and pricing is on par with GoDaddy, HostGator, and InMotion Hosting.

Is DreamHost good for beginners?

DreamHost is great for beginners who want to make a website or blog. You will have 1 website, 1-year domain name, pre-installed WordPress, 1-year domain name, fast SSD storage, free SSL certificate, WordPress website builder, and free automated WordPress migrations for just $2.59 per month.

Does Hostgator use SSD?

Yes, HostGator used SSD in the VPS and dedicated hosting plans, except the Value Server plan. In this plan, HostGator offers 1TB HDD storage. The other 2 plans have been upgraded to SSDs.

How can I purchase a free domain name from HostGator or DreamHost?

Both Companies include free domain registration in all of the there hosting packages. They have extensive services, including shared hosting, VPS hosting, dedicated servers, and cloud web hosting.

Dreamhost and HostGator provide an easy-to-use interface to help you do this. If you purchase a domain name from either provider, you will get a free domain name from them for a year. HostGator’s website includes a “Buy Now” button; all you have to do is click on that button and follow the instructions.

However, the same process is also available on DreamHost’s website. You can go to “Get Started” on the top navigation bar, select a domain name, and buy it right away.