Comparison & Experience With Both of 1&1 Hosting vs. HostGator (Part II)
Performance
A web host’s primary purpose is to serve up your website files as quickly and as reliably as possible whenever a visitor navigates to your URL. All reputable hosts guarantee 99.9% uptime (in other words, you may have about 1 hour of downtime per year). Both HostGator and 1&1 claim that their internal metrics match those numbers.
There’s always going to be a lot of anecdotal evidence either way. Customers for 1&1 often claim that they have had significant downtime. A lot of HostGator customers experienced a day’s worth of downtime when they switched data centers in August 2013 (my sites weren’t affected, but numerous others were).
It’s tough to make judgments on future uptime based on the past for all web hosts – since even Google and Amazon do go occasionally. So, I’d say that both are going to give you solid uptime (but always make sure you keep your own backups), and look at things that you can measure – like delivering your files quickly.
There are a lot of variables that go into how quickly your website can load – but the factor that you can specifically look at to gauge host performance is time to first byte (TTFB) – again, there are a lot of other factors, but this is the only one you can distinguish from website setup. This is a measurement of how long the server takes to acknowledge the request and start returning files.
In other words, if you walked up to a counter and asked someone to go into the back of the store to grab a package, TTFB would be how long they just stood there before running into the back of the store.
Additionally, “Speed Index” is a metric that gauges all the other factors. In this case they are apple to apple comparison since I have identical WordPress setups going on. Again by that metric, HostGator has significantly better performance than 1&1 hosting.
