InMotion Hosting Vs HostGator: Web Hosting Comparison

Following up on our introduction post on HostGator Vs InMotion Hosting, we’re now going to take a deeper look into each web hosts’ shared hosting plans.

InMotion Hosting (review) has two level of web hosting: Cheap / Personnal Hosting and Business Class Hosting. The difference is that their Business Class Hosting customers are hosted on highend equipement and their websites are backed up every 24 hours. It also gives them access to the Premium Site Builder.

• InMotion Hosting
  Special Offers
• HostGator Special Discounts

Today we’ll be comparing HostGator’s hosting plans with InMotion Hosting’s Business Class Hosting plans but if you’re interested in their Cheap / Personnal Hosting plans, have a look at their detailed packages here.

InMotion Hosting Vs. HostGator: Hosting Plan Features

While InMotion Hosting offers unlimited disk space and bandwidth, HostGator offers a lots of resources too. Chances are you’ll never use that much storage space and bandwidth anyway.

As far as scripting languages goes, both web hosts support PHP, Perl, CGI and Ruby on Rails. But if you need Ruby on Rails support with InMotion Hosting, you’ll have to specify it upon signup so they’ll host your website on a different server.

HostGator is one of the few web host to offer ASP.Net on Linux web servers using Chilisoft ASP. Although this can be somewhat useful, I would rather find a Windows Web Hosting Company to host an ASP.Net website.

cPanel is the control panel of choice with both InMotion Hosting and HostGator. It is by far the best web hosting control panel for Linux web servers. It has so many features yet it is very easy to use. cPanel also includes Fantastico Deluxe, a great script installer that allows you to install tens of popular web applications like Wordpress, phpBB and osCommerce among others.

If you’re into ecommerce or if you need to have a secure website, both web hosts support private SSL certficates (depending on the hosting plan). You can acquire a private SSL certificate through InMotion Hosting for $99 and you’ll get a free IP address. HostGator can also provide you with a private SSL certificate for $75 and they’ll also give you a unique IP address.

I have tried to transfer files from both web hosts from two different locations (Dallas, Texas and Montreal, Canada). I have to say that they both performed almost equally, delivering the highest speed I could obtain from my ISP (just a little over 750KB/s).

InMotion Hosting provides data backup every 24 hours with every Business Class Hosting plans whereas HostGator takes data backups only once a week on Sundays.

InMotion Hosting Vs. HostGator: Conclusion

If you have come this far, you have definitely narrowed it down to two of the greatest web hosts around. Either way you won’t go wrong. Here are the pros and cons of each of them:

InMotion Hosting

• Pros: daily data backups, free domain, high-end equipment, premium site builder and room to grow (you can upgrade to a VPS and then to a dedicated server eventually).
• Cons: no monthly terms (except for the Pro plan) and a limited number of addon domains.

HostGator

• Pros: monthly terms, ASP.Net support, unlimited MySQL databases and SSH access.
• Cons: weekly data backups only and no free domain.

So my take is, if you’re hosting a business website, go with InMotion Hosting. Data backups are critical to your online business and eventually you’ll need to move to either a Virtual Dedicated Server or Dedicated Server so you won’t need to move to another host.

But if you’re going to host a personnal website or blog with no critical data, go with HostGator, they’ve got a great dynamic team who will take care of you and you can take the affordable Hatchling plan on a monthly basis if you can’t afford a whole year.

Links

• InMotion Hosting Hosting Plans Comparison
• InMotion Hosting Website
• InMotion Hosting User Reviews
• HostGator Hosting Plans Comparison
• HostGator Website
• HostGator User Reviews