HostGator.com and DreamHost.com are two very popular web hosting providers. But which one is better? As usual, the shortest answer possible sounds like “it depends!”. Both services are great, each with its strong and weak capabilities.Lets consider them in details.
Easy choice
What it takes for a web hosting service to be a good one? First, enough disk space, network bandwidth and other resources to run your WordPress, Joomla or Drupal website.
Then comes a decent customer/technical/billing support to answer your questions. Email and support ticket system are must. Phone and live chat are also commonly provided options.
Both companies provide unlimited disk space and bandwidth, availability to host unlimited amount of websites, domains, sub-domains and databases. Both have control panels with one click installs of common web software – blogs, wikis, photo galleries and forums. So both DreamHost and HostGator are good. The prices are pretty similar also. What makes them visually different is that they use different control panels. HostGator’s clients use industry standard called cPanel, when DreamHost is proud of its own proprietary control panel. At this point, if a good common web hosting for a reasonable price is what the choice is simple – choose what it looks better and enjoy it!
Hostgator – Great common hosting
What it takes for a web hosting to be called a great one? Great reliability and great support stuff. HostGator is widely known as one of the most reliable service among common web hosting services. Users of WebHostingJury, for example, give HostGator 4.98 out of 5.0 points for reliability. DreamHost reached only 3.31 and GoDaddy(another extremely popular hoster) got only 2.77 points for its reliability. When it comes to customer support level, WebHostingJury gives HostGator score of 4.84 and DreamHost receives 3.69 (all numbers as per Feb 2010). Thus, HostGator hands down wins the “Great Hosting” title. So if your require common set of web hosting features combined with excellent support and reliability go HostGator!
DreamHost – Good for nerds
But which features make DreamHost so desirable that it might out-weight the HostGator’s advantages?
Custom Unix users, custom SVN repositories, Jabber protocol, media streaming, more flexible domain, website and directory configuration. There is no such thing as “main domain”!
Access to such tools as crontab(via both web UI and command line), rsync are others very viable option for those users who prefer to have great control over their hosting account.
If most of those terms don’t make sense for you, it is safe to completely ignore this section. On the other hand, for web developers and small teams it might be crucial to be “in control” and don’t not to pay a fortune for that. Just one other example – DreamHost’s “Private Server” unique feature (provided at additional cost), allows to have guaranteed resources, just as in case of VPS server, but without leaving current shared hosting environment.
Both web hosting companies are great. if you do not need more than generic web hosting LAMP stack – Linux, Apache, PHP, MySQL – choose HostGator. But if you want something more, such as define different users or make a source version control repository, don’t want to pay additional fees to have those and ready to ’suffer’ from minor outages, then DreamHost is your ‘natural’ choice.
Hope it helps!
