In this post, HostGator and Kinsta are compared in terms of performance, pricing, features, and support. In the end, you’ll find a host between HostGator Vs Kinsta.
Quick Overview:
At any cost, avoid HostGator. The company is in a different league with the slowest loading pages, worst uptime, and poor load-handling capacity.
HostGator is the worst company we’ve tested so far in the last 24 months.
Contents
HostGator Vs Kinsta – Introduction
HostGator has been around since 2002 and is undoubtedly a popular name in the industry. The provider offers hosting services, including shared, WordPress, VPS, and Dedicated Server Hosting.Â
Started in 2013, Kinsta is one of the leading managed WordPress hosting providers. Over the years, the company has done a tremendous job supporting businesses of all sizes with excellent Premium WordPress solutions.
HostGator Vs Kinsta – Pricing
HostGator
HostGator offers as many as three plans to choose from based on the number of websites and, of course, pricing.
The lowest tier plan starts at an introductory price of $2.75 monthly. Let’s look at all three plan details:Â
- Hatchling Plan: $2.75 per month, Single website, Unmetered bandwidth
- Baby Plan: $3.50 per month, 5 websites, Unmetered bandwidth
- Business Plan: $5.25 per month, Unlimited websites, Unmetered bandwidth
However, it is always wise to go for the Baby plan if you can afford it since the Hatchling plan comes with just one website support. All the plans have these features in common:Â
- Free Domain for the first year
- Free SSL Certificate
- One-click WordPress
- Free email accounts
- Free website and domain transfers
- Free HostGator Website Builder
- 45-day money-back guarantee.
Kinsta
Kinsta provides customers with many plans to choose from, with around 11 plans. Besides, it also allows you to have the best-customized plan for your project by contacting the Kinsta sales team.
Kinsta has different customer plans based on the number of WordPress sites, disk space, and monthly visits.Â
- Starter: $35 per month, 1 WordPress install, 10GB disk space, 25,000 visits
- Pro: $70 per month, 2 WordPress installs, 20GB disk space, 50,000 visits
- Business 1: $115 per month, 5 WordPress installs, 30GB disk space, 100,000 visits
- Business 2: $225 per month, 10 WordPress installs, 40GB disk space, 250,000 visits
- Business 3: $340 per month, 20 WordPress installs, 50GB disk space, 400,000
Kinsta offers some features in common with all the plans, and they are:Â
- Free unlimited basic migrations from other hosts
- Google Cloud Platform
- 24 global locations
- Self-healing technology
- Automatic DB optimization
- Automatic daily backups
- 24/7 support
- Hack and malware removal
- Multi-user environment
- Staging area
- PHP 8.0 support
- Free SSL certificates
- SSH access
- Performance-monitoring tool
HostGator Vs Kinsta Datacenters
Kinsta runs on the Google Cloud Platform and has 35 server locations. Customers can host their website quickly close to their audience with such a vast number of server locations.
However, you don’t have much to choose from with HostGator. HostGator has just two data center locations in Houston, TX, and Provo, UT.
HostGator Vs Kinsta Performance
Server Response Time
Moving on to performance, I tested the server response time of both hosts for monitoring them for over 24 months.
The Kinsta reflected an average server response time of 360ms, and HostGator had an average uptime of 759 ms.Â
You can see that the Kinsta average server response time is less than half of HostGator’s, which gives Kinsta a leading edge over HostGator.
Uptime
Kinsta has a 99.99% uptime record, while HostGator has a 99.97% uptime.
HostGator Vs Kinsta Features
Control Panel
Kinsta uses a custom control panel, and unlike the usual cPanel, the Kinsta dashboard has many intuitive features.
Most importantly, it offers an excellent single control point for managing your account, including analytics.
HostGator uses cPanel, and beginners can get the hang of it in a few minutes. However, unlike the Kinsta control panel, HostGator’s cPanel has many unnecessary features that can confuse beginners.
The Kinsta control panel is undoubtedly the winner since the interface is easy to use and, at the same time, pretty advanced.Â
CDN
Kinsta uses Cloudflare CDN with Edge Caching with 275 global locations. On the other hand, HostGator uses free Cloudflare, which is not good in speed.
Backups
Kinsta is the premium host, so their backup features are top-notch in the industry.
On the other hand, HostGator offers basic backups and pushes upselling their CodeGuard service for better results.
Security
Kinsta security is pretty secure with resource isolation, DDoS protection, and Hardware Firewalls.
Security in HostGator is not as advanced as in Kinsta, and the security features comprise traffic encryption with SSL and SiteLock for malware detection and removal.
HostGator Vs Kinsta Support
Regarding the support service, there is a vast difference between the hosts.
The Kinsta support team has the most competent and dedicated executives with excellent knowledge of WordPress and other technicalities.
The support team provides customers with reliable 24×7 assistance through live chat and email.Â
HostGator offers assistance through 24×7 live chat, phone, and tickets.
Unlike Kinsta, HostGator support is ranked among the average support service, and the service has not been very fascinating in the past.
However, the mount seemed to have improved over the past few years.
Conclusion
I have tested Kinsta and HostGator services, spending many hours.
HostGator may be affordable but is not as advanced as Kinsta in many places.
Just for affordability, one can’t choose HostGator. It has poor page speed, uptime, load handling, and customer support.
Is HostGator good at any chance? No, I’ve tested 16 hosts for our Fastest Hosting for WordPress case study, and HostGator performed poorly in most tests.
There are a lot of better alternatives that offer the best value for money.
