Hostinger Web Hosting Review
Hostinger has come a long way since it first launched as a free web hosting service 15+ years ago. Today, it’s one of the best web hosting providers on the market—offering affordable plans, high-quality hosting, and other perks for website owners. Whether you’re launching a new site from scratch or switching providers, you can use this in-depth review to see if Hostinger is right for you.
Compare Hostinger to Other Web Hosting Services
Choosing a quality web hosting service for your website is critical. Your web host has a direct impact on things like uptime, page loading speed, and other performance metrics that are important for success. And, these issues usually translate into money.
Hostinger ranks among the highest from our research due to ease of use, options, and how much you have to babysit. It accommodates a wide range of use cases for both beginners and high traffic websites alike.
Hostinger is one of the most affordable web hosts on the market, with prices starting at just $1.99 per month. Even when compared to other budget-friendly hosting providers, this is a really low price. So, what’s the catch? But don’t let that price fool you. The service competes with other web hosts that come in at higher price points.
Hostinger is definitely best if you’re looking for a low-cost entry into the wonderful world of shared web hosting, or to migrate your site(s) from an overpriced or underperforming web host.
It’s also worth noting that Hostinger offers plans for resellers. These work well if you’re a solo web designer or web development agency serving individual clients or small businesses with sites that get average traffic.
Hostinger’s features
Excellent uptime
Reliability is one of the most important elements in any quality web host. A provider can offer as many other features as it likes, but if your site is down all the time, most of your visitors will disappear.
We measured Hostinger’s performance by setting up a test WordPress website, then using Uptime.com to monitor its speed and any downtime from multiple locations around the world.
Although our site was hosted on Hostinger’s most basic shared hosting plan, it still managed an excellent 100% uptime record over 10 weeks of monitoring.
If your site doesn’t do that well, Hostinger also offers a 99.9% uptime guarantee, but that’s not quite as good as it sounds. There are lots of exclusions, and even if the company missed the mark by a huge margin, it’ll only refund you a tiny 5% of your hosting fee.
Fast load times
We measure website load speeds with help from GTmetrix, which accesses a test page and reports how long its main content takes to load (a value called Largest Contentful Paint, or LCP). A low LCP means your website begins to appear on the screen more quickly, keeping visitors happy.
Hostinger scored here with a speedy LCP of 0.607 seconds, the second fastest result in our last 15 tests, just behind HostGator.
One-off load speed checks are important, but we also like to see how a site performs when it’s busy. To do this, we use the stress-testing service k6 to unleash 20 virtual users on our site and measure what happens.
Hostinger’s results showed it could handle 15 requests per second throughout the test. That’s similar to other providers, but very acceptable for shared hosting, and if you’re opting for a more high-powered shared or VPS plan, you should be able to handle even more visitors.
Low starter prices
Hostinger’s low headline prices start at just $1.99 a month for its four year Single shared hosting plan (renewing at a still very reasonable $3.99.)
Not keen on signing up for such a long time? Switch to the annual plan and it’s still cheap at $2.99 a month ($5.99 on renewal.)
It’s the same with most Hostinger plans. The mid-range Business WordPress plan supports hosting up to 100 sites, offers lots of resources and includes daily backups, yet it’s priced from only $3.99 a month over four years ($8.99 on renewal), or $4..99 (renewing at $11.99) on the annual plan.
Unlimited Free SSL, and a Robust Security Suite
No matter how tight your budget is, you can’t afford to go with a web host that’ll leave your site vulnerable to malware or DDoS attacks. Fortunately, Hostinger understands the importance of security and provides protection from an array of potential online threats.
Every plan includes free SSL for all your sites, an in-house-developed web application firewall, an automatic malware scanner, and Cloudflare DDoS protection for Hostinger’s nameservers – this is not to be confused with Cloudflare’s content delivery network (CDN), which isn’t enabled by default. This may not be the most advanced security suite out there – but it’ll keep you safe from the most common threats. It’s also more than what you’d get with most other budget hosts.
Beginner-Friendly hPanel Makes Hosting Easy To Manage
Hostinger has developed its own proprietary control panel, called hPanel. It’s a joy to use – it’s easy to navigate, cleanly designed, and gives you access to all the basic processes you need to manage your sites.
That said, it can be a bit slow at times, depending on which settings you’re accessing. Entering the File Manager can take several seconds of loading, for example.
Flexible Drag-and-Drop Site Builder, Included Free
If you want to design a website quickly and easily without having to learn WordPress, Hostinger includes a free site builder. Like hPanel, this has also been developed in-house by Hostinger, and it allows you to build websites via a drag-and-drop interface. You can easily add site elements such as text, buttons, galleries, contact forms, and more with just a few clicks.
One-Click Installer for 100+ Apps
In addition to a simple installation for WordPress, Hostinger’s Auto Installer lets you easily install over 100+ applications. This includes alternative CMSs (content management systems) like Joomla or Drupal, along with apps for database management, message boards, and more.
One of the Fastest Budget Web Hosts Out There
Despite being significantly cheaper than many popular entry-level hosts, Hostinger excelled in our performance tests. It was easily one of the best-performing shared hosting providers we’ve ever tested, and it wasn’t too far behind some of the top premium hosting providers.
Hostinger offers data centers in the US, Europe, Asia, and South America. If your site targets visitors from Africa, Australia, or the Middle East, you should choose the nearest available data center to their location.
Hostinger Cons:
Doesn’t have the power for the most demanding websites
Hostinger offers a wide range of shared, cloud and VPS (Virtual Private Server) plans, but these all require that you share your web server’s resources with other Hostinger customers. There’s no dedicated hosting option, where you can rent an entire server just for you.
That may not be a problem for smaller projects. If you’re planning a standard personal or business site with a WordPress blog, for instance, then even the cheapest Hostinger plan should be able to handle hundreds of visitors a day, while the top VPS plans can cope with many thousands.
Limits and restrictions with the cheapest hosting plans
Hostinger has some very low prices, but be sure to check the small print: the starter plans have a few potential catches.
There’s no free domain with the cheapest Single shared hosting plan, for instance. Keep that in mind if you’re comparing prices with other providers.
The Single plan supports a single email account only. And, the bottom of the range plans support automatic weekly backups only.
No telephone support
Unusually for a top hosting provider, Hostinger doesn’t have telephone support.
If you’ve a complex or urgent problem with a business-critical site, maybe it’s down or seriously misbehaving and every second counts, that could be an issue. There’s just no substitute for the quick back and forth of a phone conversation, where you can share thoughts with an expert, clarify the situation and get quality advice, perhaps within seconds.
Fortunately, Hostinger does offer 24/7 live chat, where typically we’re talking to an agent within a couple of minutes.
Hostinger Pricing and Options
Hostinger has a number of different packages for you to choose from. Each one offers unique features suited to your hosting needs. There are no free plans, but the “single” plan is priced very low.
Hostinger is easily one of the most affordable options for shared and WordPress hosting, with prices starting as low as $1.99 per month. These can be purchased on monthly, annual, biennial, and quadrennial (that’s 4 years!) billing cycles.
Signing up for four years gets you the best prices, but it also locks you into the longest commitment. The monthly plans are rather poor value, though you can still get a good deal with the annual or biennial plans. Hostinger offers a risk-free 30-day money-back guarantee, so if you aren’t satisfied, you can cancel within the first month for a full refund.
Hostinger shared hosting
Shared hosting works just as the name suggests: your site is stored on a web server along with many others, and everyone shares the server costs and resources. It’s cheap and relatively easy to use, and although this is the slowest hosting type, shared plans may still be able to handle sites with tens of thousands of visitors a month.
Hostinger’s shared hosting starts with the Single plan. It’s cheap at $1.99 a month over four years ($3.99 on renewal), and has features like free SSL, easy WordPress installation and management. But it also has many limits: support for one website, no free domain, 50GB storage, a single email account, 100GB bandwidth, backups are weekly only. If you know exactly what you need, and this works, great; otherwise, it’s best ignored.
The Premium plan is still cheap at $2.99 a month initially ($6.99 on renewal).
Hostinger WordPress hosting
WordPress is the most popular way to create websites these days, and is very popular at Hostinger. Probably the strongest type of hosting for Hostinger.
The Single WordPress plan is extremely basic (supports one website, a single email address, no free domain, few resources, reduced speeds.) But it has easy WordPress installation, weekly backups, and (Hostinger claims) can handle up to 10,000 visitors a month. The plan’s real appeal is its price, though, at only $1.99 a month over four years, $3.99 on renewal. It could work as a cheap way to learn WordPress, assuming you’re only building the most basic of sites.
Hostinger VPS hosting
Signing up for VPS (Virtual Private Server) hosting gets you a private area in a web server with your own system resources. This automatically gives any VPS a speed advantage over shared hosting, and the more resources your plan includes (CPU time, RAM, storage space) the faster it’s likely to be. If your site has 100k visitors a month or more, or it’s especially demanding and
Hostinger offers eight VPS plans, giving you plenty of choice. They start cheap at only $3.49 a month over four years ($6.99 on renewal) for an extremely basic 1 CPU core, 1GB RAM and 20GB storage VPS, but they ramp up from there, and the top-of-the-range VPS plan offers 8 cores, 16GB RAM and 250GB storage for $77.99 a month over four years ($131.99 on renewal).
Hostinger Premium
Hostinger’s next level, the Premium, offers everything the Single does as well as some added bonuses, including free domain registration (for the first year only), unlimited bandwidth, up to 100 websites, 100 GB of SSD storage, up to 100 email accounts, and more.
Pricing for this starts at $2.99/month with a 48-month commitment, all the way up to $11.99/month for a monthly commitment.
Cloud Hosting
If you’re considering cloud hosting vs. traditional shared hosting, take a look at Hostinger’s offerings. Not sure what cloud hosting is? We’ve got you covered. How cloud hosting differs is that rather than your site being hosted on a single server, it is hosted in the cloud, which allows for more flexibility and easier scalability.
There are three cloud hosting plans available: Cloud Startup, Cloud Professional, and Cloud Enterprise. They all offer unlimited bandwidth, free SSL, a free domain, daily backups and a dedicated IP address, and can host up to 300 websites on the same account.
Hostinger Business
If you’re looking to level up your plan, then Hostinger’s Business option may be right for you. With this plan you get everything included in the Premium plan, plus daily backups, 4 times the processing power, 200 GB SSD storage, and much more.
Pricing for the Business plan starts at $4.99/month for 48 months and goes up to $16.99/month for a monthly commitment.
Minecraft Hosting
Hostinger offers a unique hosting service that many of its competitors don’t: a Minecraft hosting that is geared towards gamers. This hosting starts at $8.95/month for 48 months and offers plans that go up to $29.95/month for 48 months.
With this service, you can install your own game mods, along with many other things.
Choosing Hostinger for your Hosting Services
Although there are many options available for hosting, we can confidently recommend Hostinger. For all their options at a great price Hostinger is among the best choices. The tipping point for us was Malware protection for limited cost.
For those of you who want an all-in-one solution for creating a website and getting your web hosting needs under one roof, Hostinger even has a website builder plan bundled with its hosting services.
Excerpts taken from these great sites: Crazyegg.com, Techrader.com, Websiteplanet.com
