It’s not always enough to review one web hosting provider – you’ve got to review two at a time to give readers the context they so aptly desire. That’s the purpose of today’s matchup, the clash in the steel cage between HostGator and InMotion Hosting – two relatively inexpensive and appealing hosting options that nonetheless share some subtle yet distinctive differences. Let’s tabulate them all and present them in visual form, shall we?

Features

The first place to look for differences is obvious: the features. The types of features a web hosting company offers can be a dealbreaker for even the less web-savvy among us. Why? Because even a great price is worth nothing if it doesn’t get your online presence anywhere. Here’s a side-by-side comparison of the offerings at both HostGator and InMotion.

It’s not difficult to see that InMotion Hosting basically takes a shellacking. Unless InMotion has a great price (such as paying you to host your web site, it looks like this is a battle that’s probably going to end pretty early on in the process. Let’s take a look.

Pricing

Although there are $5.95 and $6.95 versions of the InMotion plan, we like to keep things simple by showing the cheapest options head-to-head. The cheapest option in InMotion’s system is the “Starter” option of their “Value Class” – and, yes, what a sad world we live in that we still have to separate web hosting plans based on their class.

The price is more attractive than HostGator, but of course the decision you really face is whether those two extra bucks or so each month are with the perks. We think they are, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves.

Customer Support and Other Issues

The customer support on both sides is pretty satisfactory here, with 24/7 support being pretty well established as the industry standard by now.

One issue that bears mentioning is the idea that no pricing plan is created the same, even, in some cases, the prices look similar. If $3 gets you no bandwith on one hosting provider, for example, but $6 gets you unlimited hosting bandwith on another, what does that mean? The $6 hosting provider is really the one offering the sweeter deal. And that leads us to our conclusion.

Conclusion

What to make of this matchup? Quite simply, HostGator wins out. It’s got the better features, the better support, the better everything. The price may look a few dollars more expensive in our breakdown, but when you consider that getting the same hosting benefits will cost you more money over at InMotion, you start to see the scheme they’ve got going. Stick with HostGator and your web site will do just fine.