Heroku vs HostGator

Heroku is strongest for teams migrating away. HostGator is strongest for beginners. Here's how they stack up on price, uptime, and support.

Feature	Heroku	HostGator
Starting price	$3/mo	$3.75/mo
Best for	Teams migrating away Legacy Rails/Node apps Historical PaaS comparison	Beginners Small business sites Budget-conscious buyers on long-term contracts
Stated uptime SLA	99.5% (Postgres Essential); higher SLAs on Standard/Premium/Private/Shield not separately published	99.9%
Storage	SSD	SSD
Regions	2	1
Managed Kubernetes	No	No
Support channels	Ticket, Docs (Dev Center), Community forum	24/7 Live chat, Phone, Ticket, Knowledge base
Compliance	SOC 2, HIPAA (Shield tier only), GDPR, PCI (Shield tier only)	PCI DSS (via SSL/hosting infra)
Hidden costs to watch for	Eco dynos ($5/mo flat) are personal-account only and not available to Enterprise/Team customers Postgres Essential tier has no fork/follow, no HA, and only 99.5% uptime SLA -- a hidden reliability cliff vs. Standard Add-on overages (Postgres row/connection limits, Redis memory limits) can force an unplanned upgrade to the next tier Performance dynos require an established payment/billing history before they can be provisioned Private Spaces and Shield Private Spaces carry a substantial network-isolation premium (2-3x) over common-runtime equivalents Heroku Postgres Advanced tier pricing is not published; requires contacting sales	Renewal prices are 2-3x the advertised introductory rate on every product line (e.g. Shared Hatchling $3.75/mo intro vs $10.99/mo renewal) Longest (36-month) term required to get the lowest advertised intro price; shorter terms cost meaningfully more per month Domain name is free only for year one; standard registrar pricing applies afterward Site/Domain Backup, SSL certificate upgrades, and dedicated IP are upsells on lower shared tiers VPS/Dedicated bandwidth is "unmetered" but subject to a fair-use policy capping sustained resource usage at 25% of system capacity for 90+ seconds
Last reviewed	2026-07-18	2026-07-18