Hostgator vs. Wealthy Affiliate Review: Which is the Best Hosting for You?

If you’re looking for a thorough Hostgator vs. Wealthy Affiliate review, you’re in the right place.

So the scenario goes…

You’ve been studying over the last few months about how to make more money by taking your business idea online. You’re reading about people who are getting customers from online and adding substantial sums every month, but you’re not having the same results. Your site is running slow, people are leaving quickly as a result, and you’re not getting sales, then you discover…

The problems you’re having are partially because of the hosting provider you have, so you decide to find another one, but which one would be better? How did you go wrong with picking the host you have?

If you’re here, it’s likely you can relate to that scenario, right? You’re either looking for hosting for the first time or you’re unhappy with your current web host and you’re looking for an alternative. Hostgator and Wealthy Affiliate are two major hosting companies that satisfy some, but not all. In this article, I want to tell you the differences between these two main hosting companies, so you can decide which is best for you.

In this HostGator vs. Wealthy Affiliate review, I’ll give you:

• What each is
• How each works
• Pros and Cons
• What they each do well and they don’t
• What others are saying (good and bad)
• The Major Differences
• My Recommendation
• And, Alternatives (in case you want to do some additional comparison shopping)

If you decide at any point you want to skip the remainder of the review and TRY HOSTGATOR OUT FOR YOURSELF you can CLICK HERE TO CHECK OUT THEIR HOSTING PLANS. If you decide instead that you want to TRY WEALTHY AFFILIATE, you can CLICK HERE TO CREATE YOUR FREE FOR LIFE ACCOUNT.

What is HostGator? An Overview

HostGator is one of the largest hosting companies in the world.It was started in 2002 by Brent Oxley, and grew quite aggressively from there. Within one year, he had 100 customers, and in two years, he had 1031!

After carryig the mantle and growing Hostgator into a sizeable company, Oxley decided to sell in 2012 to Endurance International Group. They are the owners of majority of the hosting companies that dominate the market share in the web hosting industry.

Included in their portfolio of web hosting companies is Bluebhost, IPage, HostMonster, and several others. It’s very easy for customers who are unhappy with one EIG asset to attempt to find an alternative and find themselves experiencing the same problems from another EIG company.

Often times, they customers don’t realize it’s the same company behind them all, but it’s very eay to do that since EIG owns more than 70 web hosting companies. They’re known to acquire operating companies, fire the staff, and centralize the operations. As a result, even though the companies work under 70+ differet brand names, there are still many using the same servers, the same customer support, and the same protocol.

Despite the facts, millions of websites are hosted by EIG companies, and some people are satisfied, so they must be doing some things right. Their hosting companie hold the largest reputations in the industry, and are referred by major influencers all over.

What Services HostGator Offers

HostGator offers:

• Website hosting for the most common content management systems (WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Magento, etc.)
• Shared hosting
• Virtual private servers (VPS)
• and, dedicated servers.

For entrepreneurs who want to take their businesses or ideas online, they require web hosting. Hosting is the storage space that holds your website content and ensures it stays spam-free and gets served to your website visitors on demand. Hostgator is one company that offers this service.

What is Wealthy Affiliate?

Alternatively, if you’re looking for a privately owned company that offers website hosting and additional services to help you to be successful online, Wealthy Affiliate may be a better alternative for you. The company was founded in 2005 by Kyle Loumin and Carson Lim. The founders still operate the company and are very engaged with the daily operations. They greet and advise members, continuously update the platform, and lead a team of developers and technical experts to ensure the Wealthy Affiliate members are given the best hosting services and tools to achieve success online.

What Services Wealthy Affiliate Offers

Whether you’re running a startup or established business, Wealthy Affiliate has great tools to help sustain success online. Their web tools include:

• WordPress Website hosting
• 1000’s of hours of Internet Marketing Training (SEO, paid advertising, site monetization, etc.)
• Weekly Live Training with Q&A
• A Highly engaged Social media-style Networking platform (niche specific for entrepreneurs)
• A Custom Control Panel (instead of C-Panel)
• Single Logon for billing and website maintenance
• A Content writing platform so you can create content for any of your sites from one login and instantly publish to whichever site you choose
• A Site Feedback Platform so you can get on-demand constructive criticism to improve your website
• A Site Comments Platform so you can get comments on-demand to boost SEO engagement metrics

How Do I Get Started with HostGator?

To get started with HostGator, you’d have to:

1. Pick your plan

2. Enter your billing information

3. Purchase your website domain

4. Install your Content Management System (WordPress is the top recommended)

5. Get your CMS login

6. Begin customizing your website

How Do I Get Started with Wealthy Affiliate?

To get started with Wealthy Affiliate, there are two ways to get started, and both options are free.

The Two Options for Creating an Account | They’re Both Free!

In contrast to HostGator, getting started with Wealthy Affiliate is very simple and requires no risk because both options are free. The founders are confident that the tools and training of Wealthy Affiliate are valuable, so they give ten free training lessons and two free SiteRubix hosted websites for free. The free training and free websites give you the chance to see how the platform works, and helps you make an informed decision about whether the hosting and training platform suits you.

1. Create a Free Account

Wealthy Affiliate has a lifetime free account that gives you access to the networking platform, ten lessons of the Internet marketing training, and two free websites. To begin by creating a Wealthy Affiliate account, you simply, CLICK HERE AND ENTER YOUR USERNAME, NAME, AND EMAIL. No billing information is required.

2. Create a WordPress Website with the Wealthy Affiliate SiteBuilder

One major advantage to joining Wealthy Affiliate and hosting sites there is the ease of using their site builder. You simply pick the domain name you’d like and install WordPress within seconds. As a secondary way to join the platform, you can create a website using the Sitebuilder (attached below).

Disclaimer: the free websites are not self-hosted, so the domain name will end with .SiteRubix.com until you decide to become a premium member, which includes premium WordPress hosting. The Wealthy Affiliate support team will transfer your free website over to a paid domain (at no additional cost) once you’ve upgraded, then your website would have whatever domain name you’d like. For example, whateveryouwant.com could be your domain name (if no one else owns it).

Give the Wealthy Affiliate sitebuilder a try here:

HostGator Tools & Training

Even when you have experience in online marketing, sometimes you have questions or concerns. Maybe you’ve added lots of new content onto your site and your speed went down, or something technical has come up and you’re concerned.

It’s nice to have a hosting company that offers lots of traiing and support. With Hostgator, majority of the training is done by their affiliates, and often times, they charge an additional price for it. You can find lots of tutorials on Youtube or otherwise that will help you with various things online, and sometimes, the creators of the videos will reference Hostgator.

Aside from the tutorials by Hostgator affiliates, there’s not much training to help you navigate the site or to be successful online. They do offer Google adwords credit of $100, but you can go thru that quickly if you’re not knowledgeable about how to use it.

Wealthy Affiliate Tools & Training

You could argue that Wealthy Affiliate has more internet marketing training than any other site online because it’s so plentiful. They’ve been offering live training with Q&A for the last 10+ years and you can find all of the weekly training courses recorded.

Added to the recorded training from the weekly events, Wealthy Affiliate also hosts an open marketplace where many of the premium members have created training on various topics. Collectively, there is 1000’s of hours of recorded training on Internet marketing (social media, paid advertising, search engine optimization, copywriting, WordPress hacks, etc.).

HostGator Support

HostGator offers support by phone, live chat, and by email. There’s mixed reviews about the expediency of the support and the quality of support as showcased as many review sites like Whoishostingthis or TrustPilot.

Wealthy Affiliate Support

Wealthy Affiliate offers support by:

• Facilitating community engagement, so customers help one another
• They also have the Site Support platform where you submit tickets

Support at Wealthy Affiliate is superb and very fast. Many of the success stories and customer reviews highlight the superb support given from Wealthy Affiliate. Response times typically are less than 10 minutes!

What Does HostGator Do Well

Hostgator is most known for their low cost shared hosting plans. Sites that have low traffic or those that don’t serve a primary function in a business may be satisfied with the services at HostGator.

What Does Wealthy Affiliate Do Well

In contrast, Wealthy Affiliate was designed for people who want to make their online presence a predominate focus. As a result, their plans yield lots of storage, training, support, and features to help members to be successful online. These are some things Wealthy Affiliate does very well:

• No upsells
• No raising prices on loyal customers
• They have 1000s of hours of training
• They’ve created a highly engaged community of 1.4 million+ members integrated in a social media style interface
• They have a very modern user interface
• It’s privately owned and continuously improving
• Members suggestions are used to improve the platform continuously
• The owners are actively engaged with the members
• They provide lots of technical support
• They have a full suite of features to empower members to be successful online–they don’t just offer hosting
• They have very thorough step-by-step training on many topics that help people to be successful online (advertising, SEO, website monetization, affiliate marketing, etc.)
• They offer lower cost than hosting services that offer similar managed WordPress hosting with bandwidth and storage like Flywheel, WP Engine, or Siteground who offer comparable hosting packages (without the other features) for upwards of $200
• They offer 1-on-1 coaching with the membership (it’s best when you choose a knowledgeable sponsor)
• They have an amazing affiliate program with great training and a 40% recurring commission
• They offer unlimited business email and email forwarders

What Doesn’t HostGator Do Well

• Many customer reviews suggest that HostGator doesn’t provide quick and knowledgeable tech support consistently
• They have several upsells designed to help with common issues you might have as a website owner. As a result, a person who thinks they only need to pay $3/mo for hosting may be surprised to find they have many additional charges for privacy, security, malware cleaning, and more.
• They don’t offer training to help members achieve their goals online, which leaves gaps where customers have to pay for courses elsewhere (compiling the price of taking their businesses or ideas online)

What Doesn’t Wealthy Affiliate Do Well

• Wealthy Affiliate doesn’t offer hosting for sites with more than 500K visitors/mo
• Wealthy Affiliate only hosts WordPress websites–no other content management systems

HostGator Review Roundup

HostGator has quite a few positive reviews from affiliates, but often times, you’ll find the affiliates don’t actually use the service. They say you grow out of the service once your traffic grows to a certain point, but HostGator offers shared hosting up into dedicated servers that supposedly service sites with unlimited amounts of traffic, so it seems like a disconnect. Added to that, sites where you can find customer reviews had a monopoly of negative reviews in many instances like on TrustPilot…

Common Positive Feedback

• Reviewers who are light website users seemed to be satisfied with the services Hostgator offered
• Some reviewers were satisfied with the uptime
• Some reviewers were satisfied with their site speeds

Common Negative Feedback

• Customers question how secure the live chat system is since they’re required to pass along their verification info before getting help
• Many customers complained of long hold times for customer service
• Some customers complained about malware or having problems with their sites being infected or hacked

Most Helpful Positive HostGator Review

“Great experience”

Great experience! Great customer service. Try the online chat during the day. best result! night time they are closed so things get routed to India. other companies that I have been with route everything to India.

I have transferred and been with they for the past 4 months and so far so awesome 🙂 They have answered and tried to help me in every way. even answered questions that were not related to their hosting or their fault. Previous companies that I were with denied me as soon as the issue was not related to cpanel or their hosting. I LOVE GATOR

Michael Sayyad, TrutPilot reviewer

Most Helpful Negative HostGator Review

My site has been with Hostgator for over ten years. At the start, they were fantastic and then they were sold. What was a trouble free service turned into a nightmare.

Firstly, getting help took way, way to long. It was also clear that the help staff were either not reading the tickets properly, or were incapable of understanding simple, straightforward facts, or were incapable of thinking. The staff continually asked questions when the answer was in the last exchange of emails.

Or, their questions showed they had no real concept of what they were doing, and looked as though they were following a script. The next issue was the up time. Outages became frequent and trying to contact support was a waste of time as it took an unacceptable time to contact them, and their response time became the stuff legends are made from!

Hostgator finally, at long last, recognised they had a support problem, so what do they do? Made things even more difficult for the customer to contact them. They dumped the ticket system.

I guess they figured out they could run a great business if “those pesky, damn customers” didn’t contact them. I finally got the message and decided to move to a different hosting company (after trying them out first.) It took about 36 hours for another company to release a domain name to my new host. Getting a name released from these guys is a Herculean effort.

Ric Erinstein, Whoisishostingthis reviewer

Wealthy Affiliate Review Roundup

You can see a full roundup of reviews from Wealthy Affiliate members, what they like about the platform, and what they want to see on my full Wealthy Affiliate review post here.

HostGator Price

Wealthy Affiliate Price

HostGator vs. Wealthy Affiliate | Major Differences

Price – Wealthy Affiliate Wins

Wealthy Affiliate starts out for free, then the premium plan goes up to either $49/mo or $359/year. While the price for the premium plan may sound more expensive, you save yourself time and money by being properly informed, having others who share common goals to network with, and by creating content strategically using the keyword research tool.

Support – Wealthy Affiliate Wins

Customer reviews suggest there’s often time a bottleneck in the support. At Wealthy Affiliate, customer support is  top-of-the line. They are knowledgeable, helpful, and quick to respond.

Training – Wealthy Affiliate Wins Hands Down

Wealthy Affiliate has 1000’s of hours of training on internet marketing. If you want to know about social media, you can find answers there. If you want to know about paid advertising, they have answers. There’s a plethora of information to help you to be successful attracting customers and converting prospects into buyers and advocates.

Social Interaction – Wealthy Affiliate Wins

With HostGator, each customer has a very compartmentalized relationship with the platform where they only know about their own business. At Wealthy Affiliate, every customer is also a member of their large networking community of 1.4 million entrepreneurs. There are so many opportunities online, and by being engaged in a vibrant online community like Wealthy Affiliate, you can learn from others’ success online and improve your own business results.

Hosting Platform Features – Wealthy Affiliate Wins

HostGator offers basic hosting. Wealthy Affiliate offers hosting as well as a platform for you to get feedback, comments, interaction, training, market research, and sales.

My Final Opinion of HostGator vs. Wealthy Affiliate

Overall, Wealthy Affiliate wins hands down, in my opinion. Hopefully, this post explains well why I think they’re a better option than HostGator for most people. For those that need to host a different content management system like Drupal or Joomla, I recommend you take a look at A2 Hosting or InMotion Hosting. They are two privately owned companies who offer great prices, great services, and great support, but Wealthy Affiliate is my #1 Top recommended hosting solution. CREATE YOUR FREE ACCOUNT TO TRY WEALTHY AFFILIATE NOW.

Top Alternatives to HostGator and Wealthy Affiliate

Click on any of the links below to be taken to my full review:

• A2 Hosting
• InMotion Hosting 
• Siteground
• MacHighway
• Wp Engine
• FlyWheel

If you need help deciding what to look for in a good or bad web host, check out my post How to Choose the Best Web Hosting Company for You.

After reviewing dozens of web hosts, you can see my top 6 recommended web hosts for small businesses here.

VERDICT: Wealthy Affiliate Wins!

——————————————————-

Wealthy Affiliate Wins!

9.8

Reliability

9.8/10

Pricing

9.8/10

User Friendly

9.8/10

Support

9.8/10

Features

9.8/10

Create Your Free Account with Wealthy Affiliate Now!