HostGator vs. WP Engine

HostGator

HostGator

46 Reviews and Ratings

WP Engine

WP Engine

55 Reviews and Ratings

Overview
Product	Rating	Most Used By	Product Summary	Starting Price
HostGator	Score 7.4 out of 10	N/A	HostGator, from Newfold Digital (formerly Endurance), is a web hosting service with WordPress hosting, VPS hosting, and dedicated hosting capabilities.	$2.75 per month
WP Engine	Score 8.9 out of 10	N/A	WP Engine is a website hosting service built to host WordPress for companies of any size, with features such as daily backups, firewall,SSL, and proprietary caching technology.	$25 *Per Month

Pricing

HostGator

WP Engine

Editions & Modules

Hatchling: $2.75
per month
Baby: $3.50
per month
Business: $5.25
per month

Startup: $25.00
*Per Month
Growth: $95.00
*Per Month
Scale: $241.00
*Per Month

Offerings

Pricing Offerings
HostGator	WP Engine
Free Trial
No	Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No	No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No	No

Entry-level Setup Fee

No setup fee

No setup fee

Additional Details

—

*Pricing for annual contract.

More Pricing Information

Community Pulse
	HostGator	WP Engine
Considered Both Products	HostGator Verified User Anonymous Chose HostGator I prefer HostGator over GoDaddy. HostGator does have better and more reliable customer support, and the user interface and user experience are overall much more friendly and easier to use. GoDaddy does have downtime associated with their hosting in my experience, but I have not … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose HostGator I have used Bluehost and Westhost before. All of these hosts were very similar--similar pricing, interface, uptime, and hosting options. We ended up moving to Bluehost as our sites grew. Overall, I like Bluehost better. They were more reliable and easier to use and I liked … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose HostGator I've found HostGator shared hosting to be a faster alternative to InMotion Hosting. InMotion's i/o limitations keep it second to HostGator, in my opinion. When compared to BlueHost, I've found HostGator to be faster and easier to configure and manage. The support for InMotion … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose HostGator HostGator is packed with much more features than our previous web hosts, and They had a lot of positive reviews. One of the reasons we selected them over some of the others was that even though they were WordPress-friendly, they still allowed us access to more complex features … Incentivized Helpful? Doug Skinner District Instructional Data Officer Chose HostGator Before moving to HostGator, we used a local hosting company that offered features and services it could not maintain. The cost escalated briefly while the product suffered, eventually killing the company altogether. Thankfully HostGator was available to provide everything we … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose HostGator This is for web design purposes. In versatility, not as good as WordPress, but pretty close to Squarespace and Wix. In ease of use, much easier than WordPress, about the same as Squarespace and Wix. In the choice of design templates, as good as all three. The current client … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose HostGator I haven't used any other hosting providers. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose HostGator We chose HostGator because we were looking for a cloud hosting solution that has cPanel. Other cPanel hostings like SiteGround also provide cPanel cloud hosting but their price is really expensive. Other hosting solutions like DigitalOcean and Vultr are pretty affordable but … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose HostGator HostGator is #1 in this category. BlueHost has terrible reviews and is always going down. Incentivized Helpful? Dan Gospe Chief Operating Officer, and HIPAA Privacy Officer Chose HostGator When we were looking at hosting companies, it boiled down to both HostGator & GoDaddy. We chose HostGator because the sales team spoke to us more directly, whereas GoDaddy felt like they were reading a script. I did not compare speeds of websites between the two hosting … Incentivized Helpful? Steven Davis Founder and Managing Director Chose HostGator HostGator is competitive in pricing. Siteground and GoDaddy were close competitors. I also ended up using WebSynthesis with a unique IP and a managed WordPress service which solves any hacking issues. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose HostGator HostGator has far fewer services and features. HostGator also has terrible support. For a little more money you can invest in a better support team like SiteGround and InMotion hosting offer. Incentivized Helpful? Jack Kingsman Web Developer Chose HostGator Ultimately, WebHostingPad just didn't have the quality or reliability I needed and full on VPS services like DO or Linode were total overkill. HG is fantastic for "it just works" FTP accessible hosting on a LaMP stack. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose HostGator Godaddy has ALOT of cons but is usually picked for being cheap. Host Gator is way more worth it. Incentivized Helpful? Jennifer R Glass Chief Executive Officer / Chief Payments' Professional Chose HostGator We looked at GoDaddy and a few other hosting companies before signing with HostGator as a reseller. We've continued to look at other companies when a particular business case presented itself for us to do so, however, it has always come down to us staying with HostGator for … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose HostGator GoDaddy comes with a reputation for quick install options, but HostGator had more to offer at a cheaper rate. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose HostGator HostGator is a good platform, but not quite as capable as WPEngine. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose HostGator I believe that HostGator is the most affordable and no-nonsense hosting provide of all that I've tried. I think they most closely compare with GoDaddy. However, HostGator is easier to work with and often has better pricing over the long run because they offer more promotional … Incentivized Helpful?	WP Engine Jesse Haraldson Principal Software Architect Chose WP Engine For Acquia and AEM the major differentiator was the cost for WPEngine was significantly lower and we could use the more common WordPress CMS. AEM is better for large marketing sites that integrate with the Abobe Marketing Cloud and we didn't feel we could support Drupal on … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose WP Engine WP Engine provides premium WordPress hosting. I haven't dealt with other dedicated WordPress hosts, except for wordpress.com by Automattic, which is good, but WP Engine is professional-grade, dedicated WP hosting. I have found that generally, non-dedicated WordPress hosting … Incentivized Helpful? Kelly Michael Skelton Internet Marketing Manager Chose WP Engine WP Engine and Go Daddy both had great support offerings and were both very competent when it comes to hosting websites. We chose WP Engine because their platform was just much easier to use and our marketing personnel could perform the majority of the essential daily tasks that … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose WP Engine DreamHost is good as well, but overall I really enjoy the experience I have had working with WP Engine with all of our clients. The support is pretty good with all three that I mentioned, but WP Engine is superb. WP Engine is really great and the interface is super easy to … Incentivized Helpful? ML Matt Levy Manager Digital and Social Media Chose WP Engine If DIY hosting is your thing, you are 100% better off on Linode or Google Cloud. Pantheon ultimately won our business and respect with 100% uptime. Incentivized Helpful? Thomas Petty Owner Chose WP Engine There's absolutely no comparison between the other companies and WP Engine. WP Engine is far superior in all ways. Every time I do a security audit on a potential client's website, I can tell right away that it's on an overloaded server at one of the competitors. The first … Incentivized Helpful? MH Michael Herchenroder Senior Software Engineer Chose WP Engine We were originally on GoDaddy until we got a malware attack on their shared server. Cleaning up an infected server is almost impossible, so we decided to jump ship and set up our sites on Site Ground. We needed faster hosting anyway. Site Ground was decent, but their customer … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose WP Engine While we still use GoDaddy for some services, WP Engine definitely has been a major upgrade for our WordPress hosting. In addition to faster load speeds, WP Engine has been more adept at allowing us to manage a high number of websites without straining the system. We have never … Incentivized Helpful? Josh Peichoto Digital Strategy Manager Chose WP Engine Other hosting companies are garbage by comparison. Budget, shared environment hosts are clunky, slow, and not as secure. Larger hosts generally require someone with a decent amount of knowledge with configuring and maintaining the hosting environment. WPEngine fills the void in … Incentivized Helpful? Quentin Aisbett Digital Strategist Chose WP Engine We've evaluated many hosting providers over the years and in fairness, we've now been with WP Engine for 5 years so I'd imagine each of them has improved over that time also. However, WP Engine's support team, product development, and user experience is better than any other … Incentivized Helpful? Gordon Seirup Owner Chose WP Engine I selected Kinsta to replace WP Engine because their performance statistics, security configuration, and technical support prowess reminded me of WP Engine circa 2012 - top-notch. Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose WP Engine I used a solution from Rackspace years ago which was just their dedicated server product (not available for selection above so had to choose managed hosting). They pretty much give you shell access to a box and then it's up to you to manage everything yourself. This is … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose WP Engine I used to work for GoDaddy when they released their own WordPress hosting. It's not bad, but not nearly as well developed. They have too many irons in the fire if you ask me, and WP Engine is so laser-focused on WP hosting. A2 hosting is a great budget solution that is also … Incentivized Helpful? Jeremy Estes Chief Media Buyer Chose WP Engine WP Engine blows all these hosting companies out of the water when it comes to WordPress hosting. I ultimately moved to WP Engine when my to WordPress sites continued to go down, performed slowly, or got to the point where they were impossible to manage. Now, if I see someone … Incentivized Helpful? Alec Dibble Founder Chose WP Engine I have used WP Engine for several years and love the service. Their technology, security, speed & support are unparralleled. I've had to file several support tickets & the experience was really good every time. Being a consultant & tech integrator, I often have to deal with B2B … Incentivized Helpful? Collin Berg Freelance Web Developer Chose WP Engine WP Engine has a no worry solution for automatic backups and free SSL is great for $30/month. They scale to our needs as well so we never have to worry about being throttled if we get a lot of press. and at $1 for every 1000 visitors over your quote, hits one of the cheapest … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose WP Engine I have worked with other top web hosting companies and none offer the simplicity of WP Engine. WP Engine is more expensive, however we deem the cost justifiable for the features that are included. Other web hosts are simple boxes that give you more control, however do not offer … Incentivized Helpful? Peter Filias CEO (Chief Executive Officer) Chose WP Engine We tried to run this site on Wordpress-optimized versions of hosting offered at MediaTemple and GoDaddy... neither sufficed. Incentivized Helpful? Ben Whitaker President Chose WP Engine WP Engine blows these guys out of the water in regards to reliability, security and customer support Incentivized Helpful? Will Paccione Owner Chose WP Engine We used to use HostGator in the past. We feel they've gone downhill in the past few years. When other hosting companies offer free SSL certificates through the trusted "Lets Encrypt", HostGator still down't offer it (last I checked). Support takes a long time. Ability to use a … Incentivized Helpful? Rachel Maner Content Marketing Specialist Chose WP Engine Prior to WP Engine, we had an off-site consultant hosting our site. It was terribly inconvenient and counterproductive. We selected WP Engine because the platform is intuitive and the price is very reasonable. I've never used another hosting service, so I can't speak to how … Incentivized Helpful? Eric Mann Tekton Chose WP Engine WP Engine was cheaper than the alternatives, and our site was already present on their servers. It wasn't so much a choice of WP Engine over another hosting company as it was a choice to stay with WP Engine rather than invest the time required to switch to another provider. All … Incentivized Helpful? Verified User Anonymous Chose WP Engine I don't know if I can repeat myself another time, but I suppose I will. WP Engine is a WordPress first hosting solution. If you are looking to build a simple or complex WordPress website, you should use this solution. Whether you're a company that builds WordPress websites or … Incentivized Helpful? Tim Colling President Chose WP Engine There's no comparision in terms of reliability, uptime, convenience, flexibility, pricing, and especially, tech support. WPEngine support is just simply superb. GoDaddy support cannot come close, nor can the others. InMotion Hosting has been very unreliable of late. So was A2 … Incentivized Helpful? FA Fareed Abolhassani Information Technology Manager Chose WP Engine WP engine is good if you don't want to do all of the IT work such as back up, website scaling, website performance, etc. Of course you will have complete control over customization. Incentivized Helpful?

Best Alternatives
	HostGator	WP Engine
Small Businesses	Flywheel Score 9.9 out of 10	Flywheel Score 9.9 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies	WP Engine Score 8.9 out of 10	Pantheon Score 8.6 out of 10
Enterprises	AccuWebHosting.Com Score 9.8 out of 10	Pantheon Score 8.6 out of 10
All Alternatives	View all alternatives	View all alternatives

User Ratings
	HostGator	WP Engine
Likelihood to Recommend	6.9 (0 ratings)	9.9 (0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew	8.0 (0 ratings)	3.0 (0 ratings)
Usability	- (0 ratings)	10.0 (0 ratings)
Support Rating	7.8 (0 ratings)	7.7 (0 ratings)

User Testimonials
	HostGator	WP Engine
Likelihood to Recommend	HostGator is cheap and will host your website and the users of your email. However, we did run into some issues over the years. They sold us SiteLock, which is supposed to be an extra layer of security. We had it for a while, when our site was hacked. When I called HostGator they said that the SiteLock plan we had wasn't the right one to protect you, so they tried to upsell me on more SiteLock. This was very frustrating, as our site was down due to hacking and we were seen as a sales opportunity instead of clients who needed help. It turned out during this time that the basic backup that was included with HostGator was not going to work to get us back up. The problem is that it backs up once per week, and overwrites whatever was there before. So, it had backed up after the hack. After that we decided to get their premium backup plan. HostGator is good if you only need the most basic of services, unless you are willing to pay for the add-ons, and you might not even be aware of the add-ons until there's a problem. Incentivized Dan Gospe Chief Operating Officer, and HIPAA Privacy Officer Read full review	New users to WordPress can rejoice with a very hands-off hosting approach. If 100% uptime is not essential, you can get breakneck speeds with minimal tinkering using their platform. If you need to get up and running quickly and scale as required, the cost-benefit is here, although you need to pay a lot to get the most from it. Incentivized ML Matt Levy Manager Digital and Social Media Read full review
Pros	HostGator is a very reputable company. So you know that your website is in good hands. They have one of the most affordable cPanel cloud hosting services that you can find. The speed of HostGator's hosting is pretty fast. And little to no downtime. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	I love the database backups and how quickly & easy it is to restore from an old backup point. This gives me & my clients confidence that any change can be rolled back. The built in caching & CDN mean that I have to spend less time worrying about the speed of the server & site. The caching has some side-effects that take getting used to (on-page dynamic PHP code sometimes needs to be moved to API endpoints), but this is true for most caching systems. They have really good support for multiple environments. It's very easy to have separate production & staging environments. It's also very simple to deploy from staging to production, making product launches and large scale website copy changes much easier to coordinate. Incentivized Alec Dibble Founder Read full review
Cons	Tech support is responsive and helpful, but not without a special pin code. Since we need tech support infrequently when I do, I can never find that pin. It would be nice to have a quick client verification system. Publishing updated pages are quick but could be faster by eliminating a couple of extraneous click. Incentivized Doug Skinner District Instructional Data Officer Read full review	The user interface is not very intuitive, which means new staff members require more training than I'd like. The way they manage production/development servers and FTP access is somewhere between nebulous and tragically unique. Their premium pricing is surely worthwhile, but it is significantly higher than virtually all of their competitors, without much obvious distinction in feature sets. Some very basic features like spinning up a second instance require a PHONE CALL to their BILLING department to enable. What is this, 1990? Incentivized Robert Allen WordPress Developer Read full review
Likelihood to Renew	Because we have in house technical support to compensate the lack of quality HostGator tech support, and because the price continues to be affordable the business is likely to continue using HostGator. They provide what the business needs and we have in house support to maintain it. Verified User Anonymous Read full review	I was in a situation where I had to bolt Wordpress on to an existing infrastructure that could not support it. If I ever end up in that situation again, please kill me. Other than that reasonably common use case, I don't think it offers a lot of value over robust shared hosting, virtual private server (VPS) or dedicated servers. Joe Preston E-Commerce manager Read full review
Usability	No answers on this topic	It took very little time to learn their dashboard for managing WordPress sites. Their built-in tools are really well done, and the addition of security and CDN tools is great. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
Support Rating	While you will get support from HostGator, it seems to be a different level from 8-10 years ago. It may take 15-20 minutes to get someone on chat, and unless you follow up, I've found followup email support to take a couple of days. If you stick with it, though, you will get support, and I've never had a problem they couldn't help with. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	Support is generally great. Enterprise support is fantastic, with little to no wait times. I find that chat support can almost always take care of the problem without escalating to a ticket for a higher level of troubleshooting. The chat support for many other hosting providers can only handle basic issues. This is a big bonus for us to get quick and helpful answers. Incentivized Josh Peichoto Digital Strategy Manager Read full review
Alternatives Considered	This is for web design purposes. In versatility, not as good as WordPress, but pretty close to Squarespace and Wix. In ease of use, much easier than WordPress, about the same as Squarespace and Wix. In the choice of design templates, as good as all three. The current client chose HostGator after we poured through hosting, email, and web design comparisons. She wanted all these services through the least number of vendors, and the price was right. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review	For Acquia and AEM the major differentiator was the cost for WPEngine was significantly lower and we could use the more common WordPress CMS. AEM is better for large marketing sites that integrate with the Abobe Marketing Cloud and we didn't feel we could support Drupal on Acquia. AWS EC2 is a viable option if you are going to self support and maintain your own WordPress experts. We felt that the value from WPEngine was they handled the support and the WordPress security patches and knowledge beyond simple theme usage. Pantheon was the closest in matching but we felt with our large installs that the hosting model for WPEngine was more cost-effective than the Container architecture for Pantheon Incentivized Jesse Haraldson Principal Software Architect Read full review
Return on Investment	Usage of resale options easily quadrupled the money I was spending on HostGator Trust in the host has to be earned, and HostGator has not retained that for me -- it will be a while before I feel confident in their uptime again Overall, HG has been a positive impact on my business as a web developer Incentivized Jack Kingsman Web Developer Read full review	Positive: We've been able to scale up more easily as adding new sites has been easier. Positive: The load speed improvements we saw were immediate and have not let up. Negative: Adding advanced security and other tools to a multiple sites is expensive. Incentivized Verified User Anonymous Read full review
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