Hostgator, the leading WP hosting company, has introduced a bunch of hosting services for people with various budgets. People who manage or own big sites will go for dedicated or VPS plans. Similarly, users that have small or low-traffic sites will choose a shared hosting service.
Hostgator has introduced three shared hosting plans – Hatchling, Baby, and Business. Business is the costliest subscription among the three. It is good for people who have a business site/money-making site built using an open-source framework and are looking for a cheaper server than the VPS and dedicated servers. The remaining two subscriptions are great for users who have planned to launch a new site or migrate their low-traffic site to a new host. Here are the similarities and differences between HG Baby and Hatchling:
Usage
If you’re confident about not building new sites in the future, Hatchling is a great plan for you. Is there a benefit of having a single site? There are advantages as well as disadvantages of having multiple sites. If you own many sites, you must give some of your precious time to each site.
The major advantage of having more than one site is that if you work hard, you can earn money from each site you’ve developed. With the Baby plan, you have the freedom to host 1+ websites powered by a different/same framework without paying extra money. What software does Hostgator support? HG lets you host a PHPbb, Drupal, Magento, Joomla, or WordPress site on its shared servers. It also supports many other frameworks that we’ve not mentioned.
Price difference
There’s a small difference between the cost of Hatchling and Baby. The latter will cost users $2.75 per month if they purchase a 3-year plan. The former is 0.75 dollars cheaper than HG Baby but you will have to buy the 3-year subscription. 1, 3, 6, 12-month subscription of HG Hatchling costs $10.95, $10.95, $10.95, and $3.95 per month respectively. The 24-month plan is $0.50 cheaper than the yearly plan. Baby’s 1, 3, 6, 12 months subscription is priced at $11.95, $11.95, $11.95, and $5 respectively. The 2-year plan is $0.75 cheaper than the 1-year subscription.
Performance
If you go for Hostgator Hatchling, you will pay 0.75 less than what Baby plan users pay. Will the performance of your site be lower? No. Both Hatchling and Baby Hostgator servers are of shared type. Several sites will be hosted on the same server.
Free domain
Hostgator generously offers one domain at no additional cost to anyone who buys one of its 1, or 2 years shared hosting plans. How to get a free domain with Hostgator? On the checkout page, you’ll see the option to register a new domain of the following type:
- .com, .net, .host.
- .me, .co, .club.
- .org, .site, .store, etc.
The domain, if available, will be registered instantly once you make the payment.
Unlimited bandwidth and storage memory
The storage used by a website may increase as the site ages. For example, suppose you’re using WP. Each time you publish a post, the WP CMS will save the post content in a database. It will also add images to a directory in the wp-content folder. The more posts you publish, the more the size consumed by the website will increase.
All web servers generate an access log file and add the visitor’s basic details to the access log file. They also generate an error log file that has basic details of the error. If you don’t use a program such as logrotate, the log files will consume a huge amount of storage memory if you don’t delete or gzip the files manually. Some companies will increase the web hosting bill by adding new storage blocks to the user’s hosting plan once they’ve used N GB space. As Hostgator shared hosting plans offer unlimited storage memory, you don’t have to worry about or monitor storage memory in use.
Other similar features (important ones):
Free SSL: All sites launched these days use an SSL certificate to ensure that the visitors find the website trustworthy and secure. Hostgator cPanel has the option to activate an SSL certificate for free.
One-click software installer: You can install various open-source frameworks with one click of a button.
Closing words: The Hostgator Baby and Hatchling shared hosting plans are cheap and feature-packed. Buy it if you’re looking for a better host than your existing hosting company or if you want to launch a new site with a beginner-friendly host.
