Hostgator vs GoDaddy: Joomla Hosting Comparison

Finding the right web host for your Joomla website is not an easy task. There are thousands of web hosting companies out there, each of them claiming to be the best of them all.

The two most popular hosting companies are without a doubt Hostgator and GoDaddy. Each of them offers affordable web hosting plans with Joomla support. But how well do these two web hosts perform when it comes to Joomla hosting?

Hostgator vs GoDaddy: Joomla Installation

Hostgator provides you with the industry’s standard control panel, cPanel, which makes it really quick and easy to manage your website account. cPanel features Fantastico Deluxe, a script installer, which allows you to install Joomla within a few clicks without any technical knowledge required. We also tried installing Joomla manually on our Hostgator account it worked just fine.

On the other hand, GoDaddy provides you with their own control panel which can be confusing to use sometimes. Another downside of their control panel is that most of the tasks that you will perform will be queued in order to be processed later. For instance, creating a MySQL database can take up to 10 minutes. While this is surely done in order to protect the resource usage of their servers, it doesn’t benefit their customers at all. Instead of being slow during the peak hours only, their control panel is always slow.

GoDaddy also provides you with Hosting Connection, their own script installer. We have installed Joomla this way and it worked nicely. Installing Joomla manually wasn’t as easy though. We first tried to install Joomla within a subdirectory (ie.: http://www.mywebsite.com/joomla) and never got it to work properly. We finally installed it on a subdomain instead and got it to work.

Hostgator vs GoDaddy: Joomla Benchmark Tests

In order to test the performance of both web hosts, we installed a vanilla version of Joomla 1.7 with no extensions at all except for Xmap so that we could generate an XML sitemap. We then used the ab tool (Apache HTTP Server Benchmarking Tool) to benchmark the performance of both Joomla websites.

For our benchmarking test, we had ab send five (5) HTTP requests from five (5) concurrent connexions to fifteen (15) different URLs on each website. So basically, it’s like there were five (5) visitors requesting the same pages at the same time.

We realize this does not represents a huge load but guess what: it’s the most traffic our GoDaddy website was able to handle!

Here are some of the results from our benchmark test:

We also performed some tests using Pingdom Tools. Here are the results for our Hostgator Joomla website:

As well as the results for our GoDaddy Joomla website:

As you can see according to Pingdom Tools, Hostgator is almost 3 times as fast as GoDaddy.

We also did some performance tests using WebPageTest.org:

GoDaddy vs Hostgator Joomla Hosting: The Verdict

As far as Joomla hosting goes, Hostgator is definitely a better choice than GoDaddy for the following reasons:

1. Better control panel;
2. Faster connexion time;
3. Faster processing time;
4. More stable web servers.

In addition to better performance, Hostgator also provides great customer support.

Click here to visit Hostgator