Hostgator vs Nexcess: guide for 2024

Final verdict

Looking over HostGator vs. Nexcess, it’s clear why both hosts are so popular. They have both hosted millions of
websites that run on WordPress for decades, building up a loyal customer base.

• 
  Nexcess (Overall grade: 8.2)
  
  
  shines with its advanced features and performance, particularly in supporting WordPress and ecommerce sites. With a 99.88% uptime and fast load times enhanced by technologies like Nginx and Redis, Nexcess provides excellent reliability for demanding websites. Its superior support, PCI compliance, proactive security measures, and comprehensive plans make it a robust choice, particularly for agencies and enterprise users with specialized hosting needs. However, some users express concerns about the backup system and server performance, which have reportedly declined post-acquisition.
  
• 
  HostGator (Overall grade: 8.0)
  
  
  is a dependable choice for beginners or users with smaller-scale websites, thanks to its affordable plans, unmetered bandwidth, free SSL certificates, and extensive support via phone and live chat. Offering a 99.9% uptime guarantee, it ensures good reliability and a variety of hosting types, including shared, VPS, and dedicated hosting. However, the service has faced criticism for aggressive upselling, rising renewal prices, and occasional slow server performance. Despite these issues, HostGator remains a versatile and user-friendly option, particularly for those looking for straightforward, cost-effective hosting solutions.
  

Hosting types offered

Both platforms provide a variety of hosting types, each designed to meet the different needs of users.

Although both offer a variety of hosting plans tailored to different needs, in
certain cases, one platform may prove to be more suitable.

Detailed comparison

🏆 Winner
Nexcess: Nexcess: Demonstrates higher reliability in uptime and advanced features.

Nexcess shows a slightly superior performance in terms of reliability and speed. Both hosting services have impressive uptimes, with Nexcess slightly edging out Example hosting one with a 99.99% uptime over a 3-month period compared to Example hosting one’s 99.89%. This difference in uptime is reflected in the number and duration of outages, where Nexcess experienced 3 outages totaling 12 minutes, while Example hosting one had 5 outages totaling 2h 12 minutes.

HostGator offers a 99.9% uptime guarantee and ensures 24/7/365 support via telephone or Live Chat. With an annual downtime of around 8.76 hours, HostGator provides a dependable hosting service. Its competitors, including those with a 99.99% uptime, have slightly less downtime, but HostGator maintains strong reliability with its uptime assurance.

Nexcess’s advantage is more pronounced in terms of server response time. It boasted an average response time of 389ms, which is significantly lower than the shared hosting industry standard and faster than Example hosting one’s average response time of 670ms, which can peak up to 1152ms. This suggests that Nexcess is not only more reliable in maintaining uptime but also in delivering faster website loading speeds, making it a preferable option for users prioritizing performance.

🏆 Winner: Nexcess: Superior performance and advanced features make Nexcess an excellent choice for demanding websites.

HostGator and Nexcess both offer a range of impressive features, but some notable differences exist between them. HostGator provides scalable solutions with unmetered bandwidth and up to 240GB SSD storage, ensuring reliable performance for personal or small business websites. Nexcess, on the other hand, offers higher uptime (99.998%) and faster performance specifically for WordPress sites, enhanced by integrated caching technologies like Nginx and Redis. Both services use Cloudflare CDN to improve site speed, with HostGator offering free CDN access and Nexcess incorporating it into their plans. While HostGator has geographically diverse data centers, the lack of specific information about their locations contrasts with Nexcess’s superior overall performance metrics.

Website Speed

HostGator ensures good website speed with various storage options and increased vCPU allocations for certain plans. The use of Cloudflare CDN further enhances load times by distributing site content globally. Nexcess stands out with lightning-fast WordPress sites, benefiting from automatic caching powered by Nginx and Redis. Their autoscaled PHP workers also contribute to handling heavy traffic efficiently. Overall, Nexcess’s advanced caching and inherent performance features make it the better option for faster website speeds.

Scalability

HostGator’s scalability is straightforward, with various plans designed to grow with your website. Resources can be scaled as needed by upgrading to different plans, and free migration services make transitions smoother. Nexcess provides free autoscaling, automatically deploying additional PHP resources during traffic surges. This ensures your website can handle high traffic without manual interventions or forced plan upgrades. While HostGator offers dedicated servers, the automatic scaling capabilities of Nexcess set it apart for those anticipating fluctuating traffic levels. The cost for scaling with Nexcess aligns with their premium pricing, but the explicit pricing details are not provided.

🏆 Winner Nexcess: Nexcess offers robust security features and compliance measures tailored for modern web hosting needs.

Both HostGator and Nexcess, have notable differences in their approaches to technical and operational
security, as well as in their compliance with regulations.

Technical security measures:

HostGator provides free SSL certificates with strong encryption and multiple customizable SSL options, including Single Domain, Wildcard, and EV SSL certificates. Nexcess, on the other hand, offers a broader range of SSL certificates such as Standard, Premium, EV, Wildcard, and Multiple Domain SSL, catering to various security levels required by different sites. Both services support the latest PHP versions, with HostGator supporting PHP 8.2, and Nexcess supporting PHP 7 and 8+. HostGator’s additional security features include SiteLock security and Cloudflare CDN integration, while Nexcess features Performance Shield and proactive security monitoring powered by Cloudflare.

Operational security measures:

HostGator utilizes SiteLock for daily malware scans, automatic removal, and additional protection through Cloudflare CDN. Nexcess, however, boasts a comprehensive approach with advanced security hardening, daily server backups for 30 days, and Performance Shield for DDoS protection and threat detection. HostGator offers PCI compliance support for server-related aspects, but leaves software compliance to users. Conversely, Nexcess holds PCI DSS Level 1 certification across all hosting solutions, ensuring a secure environment in all aspects.

Compliance and certifications:

HostGator is GDPR compliant and takes measures to protect EU residents’ data according to GDPR guidelines since 2018. Nexcess not only complies with GDPR but is also recognized for its PCI DSS Level 1 compliance and undergoes SSAE-18 audits, including SOC-1 type II and SOC-2 type II assessments.

🏆 Winner
HostGator: A strong choice with extensive and versatile hosting features across multiple plans.

HostGator and Nexcess both offer robust hosting solutions, yet they serve different user needs. HostGator presents comprehensive features, including a website builder with simple drag-and-drop functionality. This is ideal for beginners but also caters to advanced users with complex customization needs via cPanel, MySQL support, and numerous programming options. HostGator’s hosting plans come with attractive promotions for new customers and a straightforward domain registration process, although VAT is charged separately, which might catch some customers off guard. Their versatility ranges from shared hosting to dedicated servers, making it a flexible choice for various website requirements.

Nexcess, on the other hand, focuses heavily on managed hosting solutions, particularly for WordPress, WooCommerce, and Magento. They offer standout features such as plugin performance monitoring, PHP compatibility checker, and automatic updates, emphasizing ease of use and reliability for developers and agencies. For WordPress users, Nexcess provides a free staging site and auto-scaling, which ensures efficiency and high performance. While not explicitly offering a built-in website builder, Nexcess compensates with features like free migrations and daily backups. However, it’s geared more towards specialized hosting with inherent technical advantages for niche applications, which might be overkill for simpler website needs.

Both providers support a range of users from beginners to experts with user-friendly website builders and WordPress staging areas. However, in terms of developer tools, both HostGator and Nexcess offer robust options including SSH access, support for multiple programming languages, and Git for version control, thus appealing to developers looking for advanced capabilities.

Email services:

HostGator provides unlimited email accounts across all plans, suitable for both transactional emails and custom email campaigns. They do not push third-party services, allowing users complete control over their email hosting. Nexcess also offers free unlimited email with their plans, focusing on ensuring smooth transactions and extensive email functionalities for businesses. Though both services offer substantial email hosting options, Nexcess’s emphasis on security and compliance makes it a potentially better option for enterprise-level needs.

🏆 Winner
Nexcess: Diverse plans with ample storage and enhanced performance features.

Evaluating the pricing of plans among various hosting providers can be complex due to their differing pricing and renewal strategies. Additionally, certain plans require annual commitments, which adds to the difficulty of making comparisons. The prices listed are based on monthly commitments; plans requiring annual commitments are indicated. Additionally, although some providers offer identical plans for WordPress and shared hosting, we have created separate tables for each to enhance clarity.

HostGator offers various hosting plans, including WordPress hosting, shared hosting, reseller hosting, dedicated hosting, and VPS hosting. Prices for HostGator’s plans range from $17.99 to $161.99 per month, with features like free domains for the first year, Cloudflare CDN, DDoS protection, and free migration services. Nexcess, on the other hand, provides cloud hosting and managed WordPress hosting plans starting at $21 and going up to $894 per month. Nexcess offers more significant storage, bandwidth, and PHP workers with advanced features such as PCI compliance, disaster recovery assistance, conversion optimization, and free object caching.

Enterprise plans

For enterprise plans, HostGator’s offerings start with the Enterprise Server at $141.99 per month, which includes Intel Xeon-D CPU, 30GB RAM, up to 2TB HDD or 1TB SSD storage, unmetered bandwidth, and comprehensive security features like DDoS protection and IP-based firewall. Nexcess, with its Enterprise Plan for managed WordPress hosting, is priced at $492.75 per month for the first 3 months and then $1,095 per month. It provides support for up to 250 sites, 800GB storage, 10TB bandwidth, and 50-60 PHP workers, along with 24/7/365 WordPress support, free migrations, and daily backups.

🏆 Winner
Nexcess: Known for seamless setup and comprehensive migration services.

HostGator utilizes a user-friendly control panel that simplifies the management of your online presence. It offers one-click installs for over 75 open-source scripts and pre-installed WordPress, making it easy for both technical and non-technical users to set up their websites. The layout is intuitive, allowing you to manage different aspects of your site from a single dashboard. Users find it accessible whether they have prior experience or not. On the other hand, Nexcess offers features that cater specifically to users of WordPress and WooCommerce, including a drag-and-drop builder and a visual compare tool. With professional staging sites to test changes and fast DNS propagation, Nexcess ensures a streamlined setup experience. Its control panel is designed to be accessible, making it suitable for users of varied technical backgrounds.

Regarding migration, HostGator provides free migration services, simplifying the process of moving your website. This is particularly beneficial if you’re concerned about the intricacies involved in switching hosts. Nexcess goes a step further by offering unlimited free managed migrations performed by professionals. This feature ensures you won’t have to handle the move yourself, making it extremely convenient and hassle-free. Both providers offer these services for free, but Nexcess’s offering is more comprehensive compared to HostGator.

When evaluating help center resources, HostGator provides 24/7/365 support via phone, live chat, and Twitter. It also offers a comprehensive KnowledgeBase, YouTube tutorials, a blog, a Facebook community, and regular webinars. Nexcess similarly provides 24/7/365 expert support through phone, chat, and email. Its Knowledge Base is equally extensive and includes articles and tutorials, along with a support portal for additional services like migrations. Nexcess also offers webinars and white papers for in-depth learning. Both companies provide accessible and excellent support resources tailored to assist their users effectively, but Nexcess edges out with its detailed application expertise and support resources.

The platforms provide extensive knowledge bases filled with guides, how-to articles, and instructional content. HostGator offers a wide range of resources alongside 24/7 chat and phone support. Nexcess also boasts a detailed help center with an intuitive search function and around-the-clock support via live chat, phone, and ticketing, ensuring comprehensive user support.

🏆 Winner Nexcess: Offers extensive flexibility and user management through custom teams and permissions.

The user management capabilities of HostGator and Nexcess differ significantly. HostGator provides three predefined user roles: Primary Contact, Administrative Contact, and Technical Contact, each with specific permissions that cater to straightforward administrative, technical, and primary account holder needs. In contrast, Nexcess offers more flexibility with its user roles, including Superuser, Billing, and Technical roles, alongside the option to create Custom Teams with tailor-made permissions. This adaptability allows Nexcess users to sculpt user roles precisely to their needs, making it better suited for diverse team environments.

HostGator employs a simple, intuitive Customer Portal interface for managing users. Its interface allows users to add and modify roles with a few clicks, making it user-friendly for non-technical users. Nexcess, meanwhile, offers a slightly more sophisticated interface through its Client Portal. Here, users can easily create and manage teams, assign different roles, and configure permissions using clear on-screen instructions. Both platforms excel in providing essential tools, but Nexcess stands out for allowing users to tailor team configurations more granularly.

When it comes to access control and scalability, HostGator includes essential measures like allowing the Primary Contact to control user access and edit roles. However, Nexcess goes further by enabling the creation of multiple custom teams, making it easier to manage a growing user base without restriction. Nexcess’s approach to managing permissions ensures that the right level of access is provided to each team member, accommodating expansion without compromising security.

HostGator user roles table:

Nexcess user roles table:

🏆 Winner
Nexcess: A hosting provider known for its extensive support features and proactive monitoring.

HostGator and Nexcess both offer 24/7/365 support, ensuring their users can get help anytime. HostGator provides assistance through phone support, live chat, and an extensive KnowledgeBase. They engage with their community through platforms like Twitter and Facebook and offer webinars and YouTube tutorials for additional support. Their money-back guarantee and frequent promotional offers are notable aspects for potential customers.

Nexcess excels in providing various contact methods including phone, chat, and email. They offer proactive monitoring, daily backups with 30-day retention, and free SSL per site. With free managed migrations and a content delivery network powered by Cloudflare, Nexcess is focused on advanced support features. They also specialize in PHP-based applications, adding to their appeal for users with specific needs.

User feedback

HostGator offers affordable, user-friendly web hosting services, which are appealing to both beginners and budget-conscious users. Key strengths include competitive pricing, reliable uptime, free SSL certificates, and efficient customer support. However, customers have reported issues such as slow server performance, aggressive upselling, rising renewal prices, and limited advanced features. While the overall experience can be positive, especially for small-scale or low-traffic sites, technical support responsiveness and server speed occasionally fall short, impacting the user experience.

User feedback on Nexcess hosting is highly polarized. Positive reviews frequently commend the platform’s knowledgeable and responsive customer support, emphasizing swift issue resolution and a user-friendly interface. However, negative reviews highlight significant issues with the backup system, slow migration processes, and unreliable server performance, causing operational disruptions and reputational damage. Many users note the decline in service quality following the company’s acquisition, culminating in mixed recommendations.

FAQ