Hostgator VS DreamHost

Both are popular web hosting services: DreamHost vs Hostgator. It’s one of the most asked questions in web hosting. Both are large and competitive. A few years ago, it wasn’t so clear which would rise up top. However, in the past few years, Hostgator has clearly become the winner. Hostgator’s revenue has been doubling at an amazing speed, whereas DreamHost’s bottom line hasn’t exploded quite the same way. The $7.5 million DreamHost billing error (later concluded to be $2.1 million in erroneous charges) in January of 2008 seemed to the prelude to DreamHost’s recent troubles. Hostgator on the other hand, has continued to recieve adoration and praise from the webmaster communities, and has even expanded into the Brazillian market.  Clearly Hostgator has growth and reputation on it’s side.

As for features, Hostgator has “unlimited” bandwidth and “unlimited” disk space, as is standard to the industry. However, some notable areas in which Hostgator shared hosting is far exceptional would be that generally they seem to allow higher RAM and CPU usage, though DreamHost does give fair warning to users who exceed their limits. Hostgator and DreamHost are both one of the very few web hosting services which offer both an unlimited number of MYSQL databases as well as unlimited MYSQL disk space for each of those databases (though I’ve not abused DreamHost’s databases and can’t verify if they can stand up to massive usage like Hostgator’s have for me).  It’s hard to find an area in which DreamHost exceeds Hostgator’s features. Both web hosts have Ruby on Rails, Server Side Includes (SSI), Perl, Python, and more. Overall, if you compare Hostgator vs. Dreamhost on features, Hostgator wins. In the ever important e-commerce area, DreamHost no longer offers the Miva ecommerce system or osCommerce: Zencart is the only option, while Hostgator offers a trifecta: ZenCart, osCommerce, and CubeCart.

As for the final arena of competition, price, Hostgator also dominates, being anywhere from a dollar to two dollars cheaper per month, but despite all of that talk, in the end, DreamHost is the web hosting that is best suited for newer customers to web hosting. DreamHost offers a free domain for life, has a super easy to use interface with an easy way to buy new domains. Hostgator’s interface is more complex, and there is no easy way to purchase and add domains, Hostgator only points customers to an expensive third party registrar.

So in the end, if you’re an advanced webmaster then Hostgator is for you. But if you were, one wouldn’t need a review to know that. For everyone else, DreamHost offers the best combination of ease of use and price. So visit DreamHost and give them a spin in their two week free trial, another feature Hostgator lacks which Dreamhost has that appeals to newer webmasters.