Disclosure: WebFin is reader-supported. If you buy hosting through links on this page, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Commissions vary between providers and our ratings do not — here’s our full disclosure.
HostGator and Bluehost belong to the same company, run the same add-on catalog, and answer the phone the same way. However, one of them got an infrastructure investment last year and the other did not. We set HostGator against managed WordPress at Kinsta in Kinsta vs HostGator.
In fact, that divergence shows up in the numbers, and it is the most useful thing we can tell you about either brand.
Is HostGator Good in 2026?
For a first site on a three-year commitment, adequately. It costs $135.00 across three years, the lowest of the seven shared plans we have priced, and the refund window runs 45 days rather than the usual 30. The same figures against SiteGround are in SiteGround vs HostGator.
However, past month 36 the picture changes. HostGator renews at $10.99 against $9.99 at its sister brand, so the cheaper start becomes the dearer stay. We set HostGator against a managed cloud server in Cloudways vs HostGator.
Two Brands, One Owner, Diverging Paths
To begin with, Newfold Digital owns both HostGator and Bluehost, and their own boilerplate names them alongside six other brands — we traced the paper trail separately.
In November 2025 Newfold announced that Bluehost was moving to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, with roughly a million customers migrated and 4 to 5 times median response improvements claimed. HostGator was not named in that announcement.
Therefore the two brands no longer share a performance story, even though they share a parent, a support model and a checkout flow. A benchmark that scores Bluehost 9.6 on hardware says nothing about HostGator.
Speed
Of course, there is a gap in our sourcing here, and we would rather state it than paper over it.
The long-running benchmark we cite in every other review does not currently publish HostGator figures. What exists is smaller studies, and they broadly agree on a range rather than a point.
For instance, one twelve-month study measured 487 milliseconds from New York and reported timeouts under 100 concurrent users. Besides that, another puts shared hosting TTFB between 400 and 800 milliseconds. A third describes the trend as stable rather than volatile.
⚠️ That same twelve-month study attributes the ceiling to processor age, naming an AMD Opteron 6376 released in 2012 and ranked in the bottom third of server CPUs it checked. We report that as their finding rather than ours.
Uptime
Meanwhile, the same study recorded 99.908 percent across twelve months, which works out to roughly 8 hours of downtime a year.
For a brochure site that is invisible. For a store it is eight hours of no orders, and the figure sits below what most hosts in our reviews record.
Price and Renewal
In practice, the Hatchling plan advertises at $3.75 a month on a 36-month term, which comes to $135.00 across three years. Inside that window nothing changes.
Then renewal lands at $10.99 on the same term length, $13.19 on a twelve-month cycle, and $17.59 month to month. So the multiplier is 2.93 from the advertised rate — the full field is here.
Yet extend to six years and the sister-brand comparison inverts. HostGator reaches $530.64 while Bluehost reaches $503.28, because a dollar a month on the renewal outweighs 24 cents a month on the promotion. We compare HostGator directly with Bluehost, a Newfold Digital brand, in Bluehost vs HostGator.
The Refund Window Is Genuinely Better
In short, most hosts give 30 days, though not all of them. HostGator gives 45, and that is a real advantage rather than a marketing line.
In particular, fifteen extra days matters most for anyone migrating an existing site, because migration and DNS propagation consume the first week of any trial period — we set out the timing separately.
What Renews Separately
First, backups are described as courtesy weekly copies rather than a guaranteed service. Daily backups require CodeGuard, priced from $2.99 a month. What to automate instead is covered in setting up automatic backups.
Moreover, SiteLock appears pre-selected at checkout in published accounts, from $1.99 a month. A dedicated IP runs $4.95, and professional migration beyond the free allocation is $149.99. The cart itself is covered in avoiding checkout upsells.
⚠️ One published review counts more than 1,400 complaints filed with the Better Business Bureau, many about SiteLock being enrolled without clear consent. We report that as their count.
Support
Still, phone and chat run around the clock, on the same model as its sister brand, and for a first-time site owner that remains genuine value.
Nobody publishes controlled measurement of support response times for any host, so this criterion rests on description rather than data throughout our site.
Who Owns It
Besides, HostGator was founded in 2002, acquired by Endurance International Group in 2012, and became part of Newfold Digital in 2021 when Endurance Web Presence merged with Web.com Group.
Newfold is backed by Clearlake Capital and Siris Capital, and its own boilerplate also names Bluehost, Network Solutions, Register.com, Crazy Domains, Web.com, Yoast and YITH.
So a shortlist containing HostGator and Bluehost contains one company twice. That is the single most useful thing to know before comparing them.
What We Don’t Love
The renewal exceeds its sister brand by a dollar a month, which reverses the three-year advantage by year five.
Our best benchmark does not cover it, so the performance picture rests on smaller studies than we prefer.
Backups are courtesy rather than guaranteed, and the paid alternative is an add-on rather than an included feature.
How We Research
Pricing comes from HostGator’s own pages and from published analyses that state the figures they read and when. Performance figures are attributed to named studies with their windows. Where our usual benchmark does not cover a host, we say so rather than substituting a weaker source silently.
We run no tests of any kind. Our five criteria are on our About page.
Frequently Asked Questions
The Hatchling plan renews at $10.99 a month on a 36-month term, $13.19 on a twelve-month cycle, and $17.59 month to month. That is 2.93 times the advertised $3.75.
They share an owner, Newfold Digital, along with a support model and an add-on catalog. They are separate products on separate infrastructure, and only Bluehost was named in Newfold’s Oracle Cloud migration announcement.
Published studies put shared hosting between 400 and 800 milliseconds, with one twelve-month test recording 487 milliseconds and timeouts under heavy load. The benchmark we cite in our other reviews does not currently publish HostGator figures.
Weekly courtesy backups, described as not guaranteed. Daily backups require the CodeGuard add-on, priced from $2.99 a month, which is separate from the hosting plan.
Forty-five days, against thirty at every other host we have reviewed so far. That difference matters most when migrating, since the move itself consumes the first week.
HostGator
Summary
The longest refund window and the lowest three-year total, attached to a renewal that beats its own sister brand.
The Verdict
HostGator earns 3.2, which places it below the five hosts in our top five and above the registrar.
Choose it if the 45-day refund window matters to you, or compare it against the host we rank first, and you are committing to three years.
Skip it if you are comparing it against Bluehost, because the same company will sell you a cheaper renewal under the other name.