GreenGeeks vs HostGator

Selecting a web host is a challenging experience for a web designer, or anyone else making their own website. There are a great many web hosts out there, and it can be hard to tell the difference. The obvious differences–such as price–are typically small and don’t mean much in the long run. What does an extra dollar a month mean, if it results in faster load times? What do a few more megabytes more matter, if the server is frequently down?

Unfortunately, the important questions are very difficult to tell without personal experience. I’ll share some of my thoughts here, comparing these two hosts: HostGator and GreenGeeks from the perspective of running a WordPress site on shared hosting.

Customer Service

Both sites have 24/7 live chat tech support. It usually takes less than a minute, sometimes just a few minutes, to get through to a human–never an extended hold time.

In terms of email support, HostGator is usually pretty good. i have not had experience with GreenGeeks.

Site Speed

Load times among shared hosting providers could be a critical difference in choosing who to pick–but typically performance will always be the same with any shared hosting provider: bad.

I uploaded the same site to both hosts and tried multiple speed tests. I had substantially different results on each run and depending on which testing site I used–speed test results are often inconsistent. I could determine no clear difference; sometimes they seemed equal, sometimes one seemed slightly better than the other. Despite running dozens of tests, I cannot say with certainty that one is any better than the other.

Uptime Guarantee

HostGator’s Uptime Guarantee: 99.9% uptime. That means that (in a 30-day month) if you have more than 43.2 minutes of downtime and explicitly request a refund and they agree with you, then you get the charge for that month refunded. Typically they seemed to have about 10-20 minutes of downtime each month, total, generally not more than 30.

GreenGeek’s Uptime Guarantee is also 99.9% uptime. You also have to request downtime reimbursement, and then they only refund for the amount of time the servers were down. If the servers were down for 1% of the month, that means you would get 1% of your monthly payment refunded… next to nothing. I do not know how good their actual uptime is.

Control Panel

Both use CPanel and (for resellers) WHM, which tend to be the industry standard; it’s generally easy to transfer knowledge from one host to another.

Shared Web Hosting

Both offer basic shared web hosting accounts with unlimited space and bandwidth for $4.95 a month. However, GreenGeeks wants you to pay for years at a time. With HostGator, you can pay by the month. With GreenGeeks, the $4.95 price is only if you prepay for three years. Paying month to month through GreenGeeks costs $14.95 a month and has a $15 setup fee.

Reseller Program

Both have reasonably priced reseller programs, both for month to month–which means, ironically, that it’s cheaper to get a basic GreenGeeks reseller account for one month than to get their basic shared hosting account for just one month.

The significant difference is in the pricing schemes. HostGator limits disk space and bandwidth (which is interesting, given that even their cheapest shared hosting plan does not), but does not limit the number of accounts. GreenGeeks strictly limits the number of accounts, but offers unlimited bandwidth and disk space.

HostGator Reseller Plans
GreenGeek Reseller Plans

In my opinion, HostGator wins out here. I’m peeved that there are more restrictions on bandwidth and disk space than in their Hatchling plan, but in all honesty, it should take quite a few web sites to hit that limit. On the other hand, being limited to 10 or 25 accounts with GreenGeeks cramps my style.

Location

HostGator: located in Houston, Texas, with servers in Houston and Dallas.
GreenGeeks: located in Santa Monica, California, but their datacenter is in Chicago, Illinois.

What does this mean to you? Two points:
1. The closer your the viewers of your websites are to the web host’s servers, the better.
2. If you reside in the same state–or your business is in the same state–as the web host, they will charge you sales tax.

So if you’re in the Midwest, GreenGeeks would have the advantage. If you’re in California, HostGator would actually have the advantage–no sales tax and their servers are a little closer. If you’re in Texas, then it’s a toss-up of cost versus proximity.

Environmentally Friendly

GreenGeeks’ big claim to fame is that they pay wind energy credits for the energy they pull off the grid–in fact, that they pay for three times as many credit as they use, leading to the claim of being “300% wind powered.” They also claim to work harder at making their officers environmentally friendly. Different people will have different opinions on how much of this actually makes a difference.

Summary

I’d love to know more about GreenGeek’s server uptime and see if it’s superior to other web hosts, but don’t anticipate any significant advances there–especially with their uptime guarantee that seems to emanate a profound lack of confidence in their reliability. For now, I’m sticking with HostGator.

What do you think? Did I miss some important information? Please share your experiences in the comments!