HostGator vs DreamHost: Dedicated Servers Features & Pricing

It’s now time for round 2 of DreamHost vs HostGator. Last time we’ve compared shared hosting plans but now lets see what both providers offer when it comes to dedicated hosting.

DreamHost Dedicated Hosting

In order to provide dedicated hosting, DreamHost has partnered with Hosting.com, a leading hosting company. Hosting.com has big-name clients such as Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, CBS Radio and Trump University just to name a few.

Their data centers are located in Boston (Massachusetts), Irvine (California), Louisville (Kentucky) and San Francisco (California). Hosting.com is a SAS 70 Type II certified company which means they have the necessary procedures in place to fully secure and protect their clients’ online data assets within their corporate data center facilities.

So DreamHost are actually reselling dedicated servers from Hosting.com and do not own their own data center.

HostGator Dedicated Servers

HostGator.com offers fully managed dedicated servers on both Linux and Windows platforms. As opposed to DreamHost.com, HostGator have their own data centers which are located in Dallas, Texas (Stemmons Freeway, Downtown and Infomart).

Security measures to protect their data centers include:

• Very Early Smoke Detection Apparatus
• Pre-action dry pipe sprinkler system
• Over 500 smoke detectors in integrated system
• Multiple TXU electrical grids
• Power-ware UPS units

Their network infrastructure is accessible via a fully meshed and redundant Certified Cisco Network featuring 10 backbone providers which include:

• Global Crossing
• UUNET
• AT&T
• Level3
• AboveNet
• Savvis
• Time Warner
• Private Peers

DreamHost vs. HostGator Features

Let’s compare both providers’ dedicated hosting features:

As you can see, there is a HUGE difference in pricing between HostGator and DreamHost.

The only advantage with DreamHost (Hosting.com) dedicated servers are the SCSI hard drives on DL320 and G362 packages. These dedicated servers have RAID 1 SCSI drives which will deliver more performance and reliability. But if you don’t need that much performance, a SATA or SATA II hard drive will do the job just fine.

DreamHost are also using their own custom control panel to manage their dedicated servers. In my opinion, their control panel is a bit messy and slow. I’ve also found out that it went down quite a few times over the last few weeks. I really do prefer WHM /cPanel when it comes to dedicated servers. It is a much more management complete solution.

HostGator vs DreamHost Dedicated Hosting: The Conclusion

With such expensive packages, I hope that DreamHost (or Hosting.com) can compare to RackSpace. Unless SCSI drives are a must, I would choose HostGator over DreamHost anytime. While their servers’ SATA hard drives may be slower than SCSI drives, they still got quality hardware and a solid network infrastructure.

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