HostPapa, HostGator, DreamHost, GoDaddy & 1and1 Comparison – First Uptime Results

The first uptime results for my comparison between five of the most popular web hosts are in. I’ve got myself a web hosting account with HostGator, HostPapa, 1and1, GoDaddy and Dreamhost so I could see what it really is to host with them.

Since then, I’ve monitored their servers using WhatsUp Gold from IpSwitch. Of course, I can’t monitor all their servers so I monitored those on which I have an account. In order to make the test more accurate, I’ve also monitored the last hop before each provider’s network (this could be a router, a switch, etc.). If this hop was unreachable, then this wouldn’t be counted as a downtime for the web server.

(Click To Zoom)

I have also decided to monitor panel.dreamhost.com since their control panel hosted on another server.

For each of these servers I tried to monitor as much services as possible, including:

• HTTP & HTTPS
• SMTP
• POP3
• IMAP
• MySQL
• FTP

Each servers and their respective services were polled every minute.

In some cases, one or more of these services were hosted on a different server behind a firewall so I couldn’t monitor them. For example, GoDaddy’s MySQL servers are only accessible from their web servers.

So here are the results so far:

While it’s still early to draw a conclusion, here what one could think of these statistics:

• HostPapa has the fastest response time
• 1and1 has the best uptime (although 0.03% doesn’t make a big difference)
• GoDaddy has the worst uptime and the longest downtime

I will keep monitoring these servers and post more details in about a month. In the meantime I will perform some benchmark tests to see which ones performs best.

Stay tuned!

External Links:

• HostPapa.com
• HostGator.com
• DreamHost.com
• 1and1.com
• GoDaddy.com