What Everybody Ought to Know About
Hostgator Web Hosting vs. Bluehost Web Hosting

• Prices as Low as $4.95 Per Month
• 4,500 Free Website Templates
• Eco-friendly Green Web Hosting
• $25 Google Adwords Voucher
• Technical Support 24/7 by Phone, Chat or Email

Technical Support

Excellent technical support is the number one thing you should look at when you compare hosting companies. You're a busy person and want to get your problems solved as quickly as possible. You want a web hosting company that respects your time and helps you solve your problems quickly. I can personally say that the support at Hostgator is excellent. You also want to know the experience of someone who actually uses the services of that hosting company and their opinion. Well, this AskGeekGirl site and three of my other sites are hosted on Hostgator. Their tech support is available 24/7, by phone, email or chat. Because I am a web designer and site builder, I often have technical questions and demands of my web hosting company. In addition to using Hostgator's excellent online Knowledgebase many times, I have probably phoned them about 7 times. Each time, I was helped quickly by knowledgeable people who solved my problem. I give Hostgator 5 stars for support.

Uptime is another factor to review in a web hosting company. You put hard work into planning and having your site created, and want to know others can view it. You should look for it to be functional for at least 99% of the time. As far as I know, I have never had my sites not function as a result of Hostgator's hosting services. In addition, I'm always comforted that Hostgator offers a 99.9% uptime guarantee. Of course, a guarantee only means that if they don't meet that standard, you are given your monthly fee back on a prorated basis. Note that like any other hosting company, they don't compensate your for lost traffic or sales.

Three more factors to look at are bandwidth, disk space, and the number of sites you are allowed to host. Bandwidth is the amount of traffic between your site and the internet. Say that Oprah mentioned your site on her show. You would need a ton of bandwidth for all of those visitors. Hostgator offers unlimited bandwidth. Disk space is the amount of space your files need on the web host's servers. It's all your files, photos, and videos that will make up your site. Again, Hostgator allows an unlimited amount of disk space. Do be aware that with any web hosting company, if you suddenly have a large increase in your need for bandwidth or disk space, you should check in with your hosting provider, even if they offer unlimited amounts. Another factor you should evaluate with a web hosting plan is the number of sites you are allowed to host. With Hostgator, this varies with each plan, but an unlimited number of domains are available on the medium and higher-priced plans.

Price is another factor to evaluate. You, like everyone, want the best price you can get. But we've all learned that you get what you pay for. My advice with regard to hosting cost is to try to get a good price, but know that really cheap hosting does not make up for a lack of good support and services. Be aware that there are free web hosting companies, often requiring you to put up with advertising. There are some free web hosting sites that do not have advertising, but know that free web hosting services disappear frequently. In my opinion, free hosting is not worth the hassle of moving your website to a new company every couple of months. Hostgator has three plans, the cheapest is only $4.95 per month, while the most popular is $7.95 per month. They have a great comparison chart of the plans on their site.

A free tip for you - Coupon codes are also available for Hostgator web hosting. One is usually on the front page of their site. In addition, go to the support section of the Hostgator website and type "coupon" into the search box. You will find all of the info you need about available coupons - including being able to try one of their hosting plans for only 1 cent.

I'm trying to come up with some negatives or cons about Hostgator, so this review is more even, and it's rather hard. I suppose I wish that the Hostgator Knowledgebase was so comprehensive that I never had to pick up the phone and call them. All in all, though, I don't mind calling because I get a fast answer. Another tip, visit the Hostgator website and click on "company" at the bottom. On the right side of the page, will see a link to Hostgator online forum, Real Reviews. You'll get to see actual customers talking about Hostgator. The majority are positive, but you'll also see a few negative reviews. I like to look at such negative comments when evaluating any company, and see if I think the negatives would be likely impact my experience.

You'll have to check out the Hostgator site for all the cool extras they offer, like a free $25 coupon to Google adwords, thousands of site templates, over 52 free scripts that are easily installed using Fantastico, including Wordpress, and CPanel, my favorite control panel for web hosting. Oh, they are also offering free transfer services from another hosting company and a 45 day money-back guarantee if you are not satisfied.

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• Free Domain Name
• Free Site Builder
• 24/7 Support
• Support Videos
• Shopping Cart Software

Technical Support

Bluehost is my second favorite hosting company. I have a couple of my sites hosted there and am very happy with it. Let's go through the same review process that we did for Hostgator and see how Bluehost stacks up. As I said, you want great support with any hosting company. Bluehost offers 24/7 support by phone and email. In addition, their help center offers a great knowledgebase, video tutorials, and a ticket system for specific problems. Five stars for Bluehost support.

Let's move on to uptime, the amount of time you can expect your site to be functioning with Bluehost. They have a 99.9% uptime guarantee for their network which is comparable to Bluehost - pretty great. Do note that when I was digging a little deeper into this, a customer support agent mentioned that they do not have the same guarantee for their servers. The servers are maintained in house. I appreciated the company's directness and honesty in making this distinction, one that I suppose holds true for most web hosts. The network or connection to the server is guaranteed, but they don't guarantee that the box itself will be up 99.9% of the time. Anyway, I haven't seen any downtime on my sites so this has not worried me.

Next up, let's review bandwidth, disk space and number of domains that can be hosted. Bluehost again offers the best in these areas - unlimited bandwidth, disk space, and an unlimited number of domains can be hosted. Offering all of these is a relatively new development in hosting, probably because of more sophisticated and powerful technology available now. I really like that you can host an unlimited number of domains. Believe me, after you start your first site, you will probably want more.

Our last, but not least important, factor to look at is hosting price. Bluehost offers only one comprehensive plan, available for a relatively inexpensive price of $6.95/month. It includes all of the features mentioned above and includes a free domain forever. I called them to clarify what they meant by "forever" and it means it's free for as long as you keep hosting that domain at Bluehost. Otherwise, you may be paying around $15/year for a domain. Therefore, the Bluehost plan is a great value and I gave them 5 stars for price.

Hostgator and Bluehost are both top-notch web hosting companies and know that Hostgator made my top pick by the slimmest of margins. I did want to point out that if you need to purchase a domain name, at this time you may want to opt for Bluehost and their free domain offer.

Last up is a look at the additional features at Bluehost. If you plan on doing e-commerce, they offer a number of shopping cart options. They also support 2,500 POP3 email addresses, and many free website plug-in scripts like Wordpress and Joomla. Visit Bluehost and check out their Live Demo on the "Tell Me More" products page and test-drive some tools they offer.

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