Hostinger is a virtual private server that combines website creation and optimization along with other critical features on a single, unified platform. It offers built-in templates as well as themes that let users design white-labeled websites and custom images, text, icons, and menus. It also has cloud hosting functionality that lets employees set up custom domains and extension types.
Capabilities |
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Segment |
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Deployment | Cloud / SaaS / Web-Based |
Support | 24/7 (Live rep), Chat, Email/Help Desk, FAQs/Forum, Knowledge Base, Phone Support |
Training | Documentation |
Languages | English |
It’s no secret that finding a good web hosting provider is essential for any website. But with so many web hosting companies to choose from, it can be challenging to know which one is the best.
Hostinger is a web hosting provider that small businesses and entrepreneurs should consider. It’s one of the most affordable platforms on the market, and it offers a wide range of features that can be useful for growing businesses.
In this article, we’ll take a comprehensive look at this web hosting provider. Its pricing and features, pros and cons, FAQs, and our verdict.
Global Performance Grade | A+ |
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Uptime Guarantee | ✔ |
Free SSL | ✔ |
Hosting Types | Shared, Cloud, WordPress, VPS, Minecraft |
Basic Plan Features | 1 Website, 30 GB SSD Storage, 1 Email acc. |
Starting Price | $ 1.99 |
Try Hostinger |
Hostinger is committed to providing the best web hosting services to its clients. From building a website to managing and running it, you can do it all smoothly and quickly with Hostinger.
This web hosting service platform has been around for quite some time now. You can trace its first activity back to November 2004, under Hosting Media. In 2007, it started offering a free web hosting service under 000webhost.com.
The company leveled up from there and started operating as Hostinger in 2011. Besides launching its paid hosting plans, it also introduced its own-designed control panel.
Because of its commitment to offering the best web hosting service for newbies and people on a budget, Hostinger achieved its first 10 million mark just a few years later. Hostinger also became the fastest-growing web hosting company in the world.
You might be thinking, “Why should I care about this, and how will it affect my online business?”
Imagine your web host as the foundation of a building. The stronger and more reliable it is, the better. Selecting the right hosting provider will give you a chance to focus on other aspects of your business while being confident that your website is in good hands.
So, if you want to build a website with ease and worry less about downtime, go with an excellent web hosting service like Hostinger.
What makes Hostinger stand out from other web hosting providers is its ability to provide almost the same performance as some of the most expensive platforms out there.
It can provide the same 99.9% uptime, free SSL security, 24/7 support, and more that you can get from Siteground and A2 Hosting. Moreover, it is beginner-friendly but can also cater to more experienced professionals.
In addition, Hostinger offers a broader range of hosting services than others. Bluehost and iPage don’t offer cloud hosting, but Hostinger does. Siteground doesn’t offer VPS hosting, but you can get it from Hostinger. You get to choose from among the best web hosting plans and see which one is suitable for you.
Some cheaper web hosting services usually sacrifice uptime and loading speed, so buying them will only be stressful. I’ve seen reviews that say this happens mainly with GoDaddy and IONOS. Although Hostinger has its downs, it performs better than the two mentioned web hosts.
Let’s talk about some of its pros and cons so you’ll have a better grasp of what you’ll love and hate about this tool.
In a survey of Kissmetrics, 40% of users said that they’d abandon a site if it didn’t load within three seconds. Are you one of the 40%?
It shows how vital page speed is to your website. Not everyone has the patience to wait for it to load. Chances are, they’ll view other search results, and you’ll lose possible traffic and sales.
An expert from Google said that the ideal loading time is within two seconds. Can Hostinger help you meet this requirement? The answer is yes.
This web host promised speed and reliability to its users. And we don’t want to tell you this without fact-checking.
So we searched for three websites that were using Hostinger and tested them. We used PageSpeed Insights, GTMetrix, and Pingdom for this website loading test.
The first site we tested is cracksurl.com which has monthly traffic of 8,753.
Here are the results:
Next, we tested worldindustries.com. It has a good domain authority and receives almost 40,000 visitors monthly.
These are the test results:
The last site for this loading speed test is scampowners.com. It has around 1,500 visitors a month.
This is what we’ve got from the test:
The results above show that the websites’ loading time, interactiveness, and visual stability are good. They load fast enough for their visitors and provide a good user experience.
Editor’s note: The performance and results under GTMetrix and Pingdom may change depending on the test location. You can modify this before starting the test.
The main reason why Hostinger is fast is that it has a total of seven worldwide servers. In addition to that, the developers constantly upgrade their systems to ensure that their users get the best service. Some of these are:
Stress refers to the amount of traffic your website is currently receiving. If you are expecting a sudden surge in traffic due to product launching OR unexpected traffic because of a viral post, then your website needs to be able to handle that stress.
Websites that can’t handle the sudden influx of traffic will result in a prolonged loading time, or worst, they will crash. And we don’t want that to happen.
Hostinger can handle sudden traffic very well. They have a system to ensure your website won’t shut down. However, you should also note the monthly visit limit of your plan.
Caching is a technique or a system of storing a copy of the web page to the user’s computer.
For example, if the user revisits a website, the cached copy will be used instead of downloading the entire page from the server. In addition, when you do updates on your web pages, it automatically updates on the user’s computer.
Caching can speed up the loading of pages and improve the user experience. Faster loading pages mean that users are more likely to stick around and browse your site, resulting in increased traffic and conversions.
Not enabling cache will demand everything to be reloaded every time, so your website will load slower.
Speed is essential both for users’ and search engines’ experience. Because of this, page caching can also affect your ranking. Faster loading pages are more likely to rank higher in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
So how does Hostinger goes above and beyond other web hosts?
Well, there’s this application called LiteSpeed Cache Plugin. It is the software known for helping websites boost their page speed and improve their performance. With other web hosts, you need to download the plugin first before accessing its features.
However, if you purchase Hostinger’s, it’s already built-in. You only need to do a quick setup, which Hostinger provides a step-by-step process on, and enable it on your hPanel.
With the built-in LiteSpeed caching, you don’t need to worry about your website’s speed, as it will automatically do its job in the background. No need to download any additional caching plugin as this tool will suffice.
Hostinger offers the best initial hosting plans among web hosting companies. And it also provides one of the cheapest renewal costs. Even its close competitors like Bluehost and iPage cannot top this off.
Let’s compare their lowest hosting plans and see the difference.
Bluehost’s introductory price is $2.95/month for a 36 months contract. However, after that, the renewal fee jumps to $8.99/mo for the same term. That’s a difference of $217.44.
The same goes for iPage. iPage offers a lower introductory price at $1.99/mo for a 3-year term. But after that, the renewal price will cost you $7.99/mo. From $71.64, you need to pay $287.64 in total to use iPage for another three years.
However, with Hostinger, the single shared hosting costs only $1.39/month, and you can get a more extended contract period of 4 years. And after that, the renewal price for the same contract is $3.99/month.
The numbers show that you can save more with Hostinger’s hosting plans.
A control panel works at the back-end of your website. It’s where you can access and manage your domains, emails accounts, files, applications, and other essential features.
hPanel is Hostinger’s very own control panel. It’s the counterpart of the most widely used cPanel. Some of the features included in the hPanel are the following:
For beginners, hPanel is good enough as it provides all the essential features to run a website entirely. It’s clean, organized, and easy-to-use so you won’t feel overwhelmed by all the tools. In addition, hPanel is free when you avail of Hostinger’s web hosting service, but cPanel isn’t available to all, and it can get pretty expensive depending on what you need.
If you’re a more advanced user, you might find hPanel lacking. In this case, cPanel can provide more flexibility. It offers a virus scanner, website cloning, backup configuration, mailing filters and routings, and third-party tools. cPanel can be pretty overwhelming and outdated, though.
Hostinger mentioned that they offer 24/7/365 support. But, their customer support is usually offline and replies to queries much slower than other web hosting providers.
It offers live chat support for Hostinger users, but you have to wait for an hour or more before getting a response.
It may or may not be a minor criticism depending on your view. However, it won’t hurt if you’re someone who can wait for a few hours as they mainly help you resolve the issue.
Yes, Hostinger provides a 30-day money-back guarantee. But there’s a chance that you won’t be getting a full refund. There are a few exceptions, and I advise you to read Hostinger’s Refund Policy to avoid any issues after buying the tool.
Here are some terms that you should take note of:
Keep these in mind before moving forward.
Before discussing the shared hosting pricing plans, here are the other best web hosting services that Hostinger offers:
Beginners can benefit the most from this shared web host plan. But compared to the two higher web hosting plans, it’s constrained.
For as low as $1.99/per month, you can still get the basic features like the free SSL certificate, 24/7 customer support, hPanel access, and 99.9% uptime. It won’t be challenging to manage your site.
However, you’re only allowed to create one website, email account, and two subdomains. It’s not ideal if you’re planning to produce more content on different topics or create subpages. In addition, the Single plan only lets you park two domains, and you won’t get a one-year free domain like in the two higher options.
The storage speed is also limited to 30GB, and you can only store up to 100GB of bandwidth. So if you’re planning to upload videos and store heavy media formats, this might not be enough.
But don’t worry. You can upgrade your plan once your business and visitors grow. If you want to save more for this plan, you can choose the most extended contract, which is 48 months.
The Premium plan is perfect for those creators and professionals who have a growing audience. It gives more flexible limitations such as 100 websites, 100 GB SSD storage, and unlimited bandwidth for as low as $2.99/mo.
A higher SSD and unmetered bandwidth allow users like you and your visitors to access data faster. With this plan, you can accommodate up to 25,000 monthly visitors. These are useful for businesses and for people who are expecting higher traffic.
You can create up to 100 free email accounts and subdomains. Plus, a free domain for a year. The email accounts are valuable if you’re planning to make different emails for your business to organize the flow of the messages you receive.
Aside from unmetered bandwidth, you’ll get unlimited databases that you can use to store different types of content. You can use this space for lead capture forms, feedback forms, inventory, email addresses, etc.
The Premium plan pricing can go as high as $11.99/month if you choose the monthly contract but can go as low as $2.99/month for the 48 months contract.
Some features missing on premium web hosting are the Cloudflare CDN, daily backups, and WordPress staging tool.
Although you won’t access unlimited websites, the Business plan’s SSD storage and monthly visitors capacity are more massive than those above.
For only $4.99/mo, you can get up to 200 GB of SSD storage and accommodate 100,000 monthly visits for four years. It’s a better option if you’re managing a medium to larger-scale business.
It also has the Cloudflare CDN that the Single and Premium plan is missing. This feature gives a boost to your videos’ loading time and buffers regardless of your visitor’s location. The Business plan also provides daily backups and a WordPress staging tool.
The WordPress staging tool lets you test changes and new features on a clone of your website before implementing them on the live site. It can prevent major issues in case something goes wrong after the modification.
If you choose to pay monthly, it will cost you $16.99/mo, and it comes with a $4.99 setup fee. The setup fee is also included in the monthly plan options of Single and Premium shared hosting plans.
If you decide Hostinger isn’t for you, don’t worry. There are plenty of other great options to choose from:
Bluehost is a well-known web hosting company lauded for its straghtforward and easy-to-use platform. All plans include a free domain for the first year, free data CDN, and a free SSL certificate. Their reliable uptime is backed by real-life data and users get access to an easy website builder. Shared web hosting starts at $2.95/month, which already comes with resource protection and basic backup functionalities.
Hostgator is a popular US-based web hosting solution. They’ve been around since 2002 and have made their mark, offering low, competitive prices. From $2.75 a month, you can expect to host one website, connect a custom domain, and have an SSL certificate. In addition, Hostgator boasts good uptime speed, so you can be sure of its reliability. You’ll also have access to an AI-fuelled website builder, so you can set up a WordPress site in just a few clicks.
Hostgator’s drawbacks lie in its poor customer service. For example, they have notoriously long waiting times for their support chats. In addition, customers have complained that their team didn’t have a good technical understanding of website management. Also, as noted above, they have one of the slowest website speeds of all the competitors listed here.
SiteGround is an excellent choice if you’re looking for quick website speeds and reliable uptime as they reign supreme in both areas. They’re another European-based provider gradually gaining popularity for their well-priced and fast hosting services.
Their Starter plan of $2.99 (per month) gives you one website, SSL, and CDN certificate. You also receive free daily backups, access to their website builder tool, and free firewall security built into your website. Finally, they also have WooCommerce integration options available.
On the downside, Siteground only offers shared hosting plans. They don’t provide VPS hosting or dedicated servers. Your resource space is also considerably limited (10 GB) compared to competitors. Moreover, it doesn’t offer a free domain name.
Yes. Hostinger is a safe and reliable web hosting provider. They have been in the industry for over 18 years and have a good reputation. They provide free SSL certificate, 24/7 server security, DDoS protection, and website backups. These ensure your, your website, and your visitors’ safety to avoid any data loss and information theft.
Hostinger is a reputable web hosting company, and even with its affordable price, the plans and features are pretty impressive. It got satisfactory rates from different review websites. Here are some to name a few:
– TrustPilot – 4.2/5 from 3,143 reviews
– G2 – 4/5 from 139 reviews
– Capterra – 4.6/5 from 183 reviews
As of writing, Hostinger has seven servers across the globe. They have servers in the Netherlands, Lithuania, UK, Singapore, India, USA, and Brazil.
Among the hosting providers in the market, Hostinger is one of our favorite. We hope that the information we provided above is enough to convince you why it’s worth your money.
So if you’re looking for a shared hosting service that is affordable, reliable, and user-friendly – Hostinger is a perfect choice. Right now, they are offering a discount promo, and this is an excellent opportunity to start building your website, so don’t miss it out!
-organised ui with generally good ux pathways -good amount of settings to manipulate to suit user - excellent uptime on hosted sites
-poor management of staging and back up nevironments - would be good to have dev env - inconsistent uptime of all features on Hpanel
Affordability whilst still allowing good functionality within wordpress environment
The easy setup of the site and integration of all other necessary business applications available in one place
I find that the inability to have products added with extensions like dser is upsetting but not entirely disheartening.
Clutter
Very good responses to enquiries - both chatbot and direct customer support. Prompt replies and relevant advice. Easy to use account.
Problem migrating existing websites which use themes
Migration issues
The very affordable and smooth process for any services they offer.
Nothing so far since I'm a very new registered user of theirs.
The affordability of web hosting and domain especially for dreamers with visions.
Hostinger hpanel, it is very easy to use.
Sometimes my website goes down without any notification.
Fast response from the support team and affordable pricing.
I love their support, they almost always can instantly resolve issues and concerns. Their shared hosting plans and 'cpanel' like system is more modern than competitors. I love their file manager compared to the old school ones many other hosts still use.
Their price increases A LOT after the first year or after your initial contract. It's depressing. When I contacted support, I was told deals and offers were only for new customers. Their lack of rewards for loyal customers is upsetting and a bit of a turn off. Honestly, it's hard to suggest others to buy from them when they will have a bad price in the future.
I love their panel and file management control panels. I find they're much cleaner than competitors, and offer a much needed modern take on the website and file management idea.
the interface is easy to use compared to some that i use like namecheap or bluhost. the best part is reaching for support, the waiting time to good enough.
my experience is after two months from hosting expired, the data will be deleted. didnt know about that.
im able to host various of my clients websites and its cheaper compared to buying single website hosting per client
Performance is better than other hosts out there. Their User Interface is also very easy to use. Chat support is also good.
They need to include more features to the service and also consistency in the server performance is sort of concern. Running WordPress is easy with Hostinger however large scale applications can crowd the hosting packages.
User friendly, easy to use and understand web hosting platform.
Honestly the pricing, it's hard for start-ups to simply not lose money, and it's ard for young professionals to pay their bills, so going for discount prices and excellent quality is amazing.
The current staff level and the jump in prices after my 1st 4-year subscription, it's not sustainable to keep going up and at the same time, you're losing your good pricing.
I would like the pricing to be maintained and for cybersecurity to be heavily-invested in, most users don't know cybersecurity - so hostinger should on our behalf. And make your website builder as easy as WiX - with more templates than WiX.
Hosting is good, easy to use, easy to implement
I lost my MFA and after 1 month of support, my problem has still not resulted
I have a problem with my MFA and Hostinger takes so much time.
Performance - much better than either of the previous hosting solutions. The initial setup was relatively straightforward and the SSL implementation works efficiently. It is possible to reach someone but it is only via online chat. The caching system works reasonably well with Litespeed. Some of the help articles are very clear as long as you know how to search for them. Friendly staff who are helpful when you do contact them.
Large price change on renewal. Still billing in $USD but now from a UK company with UK VAT. Experienced significant trouble transferring domains to Hostinger from 123 and had to refund. Also, charged for renewal of a failed domain transfer 1 year later and spent over an hour trying to figure out what had happened and how to resolve it.
The performance was better than the previous 2 providers but since then the only experience has been the occasional problem.
Pricing seems great Customer support when you can finally get past the automated procedures, and chat with a real human.
error messages that don't offer insight as to what is wrong, or how to fix it. Complicated procedures that might seem easy to someone who knows what they are doing, but very confusing for a person who doesn't do this every day.
fees from previous hosting service were becoming outragous, Hostinger is much more affordable, if I can get everything to function.
Customers support help very good always and easy to install any site
site is slow and low ram and internet speed
Build online store
Nothing much. Slow support when servers are down
That they can't fix their email servers.
nothing much
Easy to use and navigate mostly. Mostly user friendly UI
Was emailing customer service for support. After 78 emails they did NOT resolve my issue. I called my IT brother and we resolved the issue in 5 minutes
Tha t is the problewm They are NOT helping me with my issue
It works when it's not down. And it's cheap.
Everyone in this competitive space offers the same thing so the measure of a good host would probably be reliability and support. And for us personally, we've had some bad times on this platform. Server downtimes with no indication what's happening. They take their Live Chat support offline during downtimes, which is completely incompatible with the whole purpose of a "support function" (well at least they do indicate that Live Chat is offline while the server is down...). And the worst of all, after the last downtime (36-hours approx.), they switched our severs without even informing us, never mind asking for our consent. This rolled the site back to a version that predated the overhaul of our site design and content, wasting a lot of collective man-hours and $$$. Their solution was to offer us free SSL certificate, so let's add tone-deaf to the list of gripes. Even as I'm writing this, the server is down again (which reminded me to post this review).
It gives us the opportunity to have our website online without having to set up our own server? Think that's it. And it's cheaper than the status quo for sure.
The read receipt feature of their premium email.
They prevent users from exporting emails in an effort to block them from leaving. You have to go find and hook up a third-party tool to download and leave. It's an anti-data portability strategy. It's enough that I'll never recommend them to anyone, and will actively recommend against ever using them. Honestly, I hope their servers and whole company catch fire and burn. It's not like I haven't already paid for years of service I'll never use. They don't even have the ability to pop out a message while you're writing it. It's like trying to compose all your emails on 3x5 index cards. Service has also dramatically degraded over the time I've been using them. It used to take 30 minutes to get someone in live chat. Now it takes 2 hours or more. The fact that hours is part of their estimate for a live chat at any is a pretty good indication that unless you have time to wait around, this is not the service for you. I also use Namecheap and GoDaddy and both are much better right now. Between those two, I'd recommend Namecheap. Hostinger has gotten so bad I'm leaving. I'm even going to spend the hours it's going to take to hook up a third-party tool to download my mail just so I can leave these guys. That's how bad it's gotten.
Domain registration, web hosting, and e-mail services.
Beautiful dashboards and very competitive pricing.
1) The "technical support" options do not offer phone-based support. However, their "chat" or online support isn't a live chat window but an email based system that leaves you waiting hours for responses. 2) The customer service agents, while "friendly", repeatedly asked the same questions, seeming to ignore the responses they didn't like. When I wanted to cancel my service I had to respond to ~6 emails from two different people with the same response... I wanted to cancel my service and I wanted a refund. Now... combine this with the fact that the emails are coming hours apart and you end up with a very frustrating situation. 3.) Once the service was cancelled and all refunded except the domain I selected, I was not given an option of how to migrate the domain (despite specifically asking for this in each of the above mentioned 6 emails). Now I'm back to tech support. Wish me luck!
Economical Website hosting for multiple domains
On the face, the discounts that they offer seem to attract customers, but the reality is you should never trust fake reviews given by their own team.
We paid for 48 Months VPS Plan 4. Every 2nd week their server is down for long hours, the support is stupid enough to repeat the same words "That the admins are working on it" After getting completely frustrated, i lost $800 and I am shifting to AWS
No benefits.