Hostinger is a budget friendly web host that offers excellent hosting for a low price point. They’ve grown tremendously over the years and are now a recommended host by WordPress.
They provide standard shared hosting, VPS hosting, cloud hosting and managed WordPress hosting.
With your account you get a 99% uptime guarantee, a free domain name and unlimited bandwidth with select plans and a free SSL certificate to help make your website secure.
Hostinger Review Summary
Editors Rating:
I’ve been using Hostinger for years and they are my my go-to starter web host for anyone looking for quality hosting that’s fast, reliable and cost effective.
If you’re prepared to commit to 4 years you can lock in a shared hosting account for under $150 for 4 years of hosting. On top of that, you can always scale up your hosting if your website grows and demands more resources.
Hostinger is a great place to start learning WordPress and other technical skills. You may learn how to create sites with WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, create personalized emails, and code with PHP, FTP, cPanel, and MySQL without spending additional money.
They have a multi-lingual (20+ languages) customer success team that can typically resolve problems in less than two minutes through live chat and have an average page load time of less than 200 milliseconds and a 99.9% percent availability guarantee.
Hostinger provides a free WordPress website with 1-click installation and rapid launch. They also have their own website builder which is a similar experience to Squarespace. Numerous templates, sections and a structured editor.
Last but not least, there’s hPanel which is Hostinger’s bespoke, user-friendly dashboard. The design is straightforward and uncomplicated, exactly what you want for a website. They also provide one free SSL certificate with certain hosting accounts and give away a domain name with the purchase of any plan.
PROS
- Cost effective: Hostinger has low prices for good shared hosting. Perfect starter host.
- Good mid-tier options: Once you outgrow shared hosting, there’s a VPS and cloud hosting option.
- Excellent features: SSD storage, free SSL, free site transfers, unlimited bandwidth. Even on lowest tiers.
- 30-day money-back guarantee: A no nonsense policy to allow you to try Hostinger’s services risk free.
- Good user experience: With their own
“hpanel” – they provide a user friendly interface to manage your account, websites and billing.
CONS
- Performance fluctuations: Reliable, but there are some issues you may experience if you build a high traffic website
- Self-managed VPS plans: There no managed VPS option, self managed only. More technical to manage than a shared hosting account.
- Average support: To keep prices low, Hostinger provides average support through tickets and live chat is not always available. Response times can be anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour.
Multiple server locations for global hosting
While Hostinger is cheap, don’t be mistaken that they are some fly by night operation. They a global web host with multiple data centers around the world. This makes them a great choice if your audience is located outside of the US or Europe.
Their server locations are as follows for their shared, cloud and managed WordPress plans:
- Europe (the Netherlands, Lithuania, the United Kingdom)
- Asia (Singapore, India)
- North America (the USA)
- South America (Brazil)
I know a large portion of my audience is outside Europe and North America so if you’re in need of hosting at a good price point you may want to consider Hostinger.
Cheap hosting plans
Hostiner has three shared hosting plans: Single, premium and business. I suggest getting a “premium” hosting account at a minimum for a few reasons.
First, you can have multiple websites on your account and second you’re able to get a free domain name for the first year if you get a premium or business account.
I also suggest signing up for at least a two year plan as that is typically how long it takes to grow a website to significant traffic levels. But the unique selling point of Hostinger is low cost hosting so the longer the upfront contract you’re willing to pay, the better deal you can get.
Last, there are always various coupon codes you can use to reduce these already low prices even further. For example, if you use coupon code “webpro” you’ll get an additional 10% off.
Shared Web Hosting / WordPress Hosting
Shared web hosting is the core business of Hostinger. There general web hosting plans and “WordPress hosting” options are the same.
Your website resides on a server shared by other websites when you purchase a cost effective shared hosting plan. To put it another way, sites share a single server’s cost and resources.
As a result, low-cost web hosting is almost always shared hosting. The disadvantage of this is poor performance if you or another website on the shared server start to get a massive swing in traffic. You’ll then be prompted to upgrade your account in order to increase your resources.
Shared hosting is the perfect option for someone looking to launch their website in the most cost efficient way possible. Hostinger currently offers a free domain, unlimited SSL certificates, free website migration, multiple mailboxes, weekly or daily backups and unlimited bandwidth.
Please note that Hostinger offers an introduction rate for the term you sign up. Currently $3.99 a month for “Business” hosting is only if you sign up for a 48 month term.
Cloud Hosting
Cloud hosting is a type of web hosting in which your website is hosted on several servers. You may scale resources in real time because your site isn’t restricted by physical server limitations like a shared hosting account.
Hostinger has three cloud hosting levels: Startup, Professional, and Enterprise. The starting tier is has an introduction rate of $7.99 per month with a 48 month contract with 3GB of RAM, 2 CPU cores, a spacious 200GB SSD storage capacity, isolate resources and 100 email accounts.
The midrange professional starts at an introduction rate $14.99 per month for a 48 month contract and adds 6GB of RAM and 250GB of storage, more inodes and active and entry processes.
The enterprise tier introduction rate is $29.99 per month with a 48 month contract This plan includes a bump in all resource categories.
Hostinger offers a variety of cloud hosting packages and big discounts if you’re willing to commit to a 2+ year contract. Each plan includes a unique IP address, an SSL certificate for free and a capacity of 300 sites.
VPS Hosting
VPS hosting is the next step up from a shared host once your site starts getting over 100,000 visits a month. Unfortunately, Hostinger does not provide a managed VPS.
That means you’ll need to setup your own server, set domain records, set rules to filter incoming and outgoing traffic, create superuser permissions, manage databases and manage your VPS hostname. You’ll also need to learn how to use web host manager (WHM) and if you want cPanel you’ll have to buy a license.
If all this sounds overwhelming then skip on getting a VPS with Hostinger.
Hostinger offers four Linux-based VPS packages (KVM1, 2, 4 and 8). These are Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) technology for its VPS hosting. This give you the user full virtualization, and complete control over their server environment.
The benefit of this is that helps ensure isolation so that the performance of one VPS does not affect others on the same physical server, unlike shared hosting.
With your purchase you get dedicated resources like CPU, NVMe SSD storage, RAM and bandwidth to allow for consistent performance.
You also have full root access, scalability from one plan to the next level up, and a wide range of application support. From WordPress to Magento, to PHP frameworks like Laravel.
- KVM 1: 1 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, 50 GB NVMe SSD, 1 TB bandwidth – Excellent for mid-range websites and small scale projects.
- KVM 2: 2 vCPUs, 8 GB RAM, 100 GB NVMe SSD, 2 TB bandwidth – The most popular choice, plenty of resources for all sorts of websites..
- KVM 4: 4 vCPUs, 16 GB RAM, 200 GB NVMe SSD, 4 TB bandwidth – Perfect for resource intensive websites or applications.
- KVM 8: 8 vCPUs, 32 GB RAM, 400 GB NVMe SSD, 8 TB bandwidth – Top tier for high traffic websites, stores or complex applications.
Minecraft Hosting
Yes, Hostinger has dedicated Minecraft hosting (who knew?)
Through Hostinger’s VPS offering, they do have dedicated Minecraft hosting specifically tailored for gamers looking to set up and manage their own Minecraft servers.
You may create your own game modifications, impose regulations, and even include in-game advertising to help support the cost of running the server. With full root access, you have the freedom to install any version of Minecraft you like, various community mods, plugins, or modpacks.
With multiple data centers around the world, you’re able to provide low latency for your gaming community because you can host everything on a data center located near where you and your game members live.
Hostinger’s Minecraft hosting service removes a lot of the technical burden of VPS server management, while providing the necessary resources to provide fun gameplay, and the mod customization that the Minecraft community often demands.
No Dedicated Server Option
Dedicated hosting is a type of hosting that’s extremely powerful. A dedicated hosting plan puts your website on its own server, allowing you to take full advantage of the machine’s capabilities. If you expect a lot of traffic (over a million visitors a month minimum), a dedicated server is an excellent option.
Hostinger however currently does not provide dedicated servers. Again, their core business is affordable shared hosting via multiple data centers around the world.
Domain names
Hostinger apart from being a web host is also a domain name registrar. Currently you can register over 20+ domain name extensions through them.
Currently for domain names they offer up a .com at an introduction rate of $9.99 per year which renews at $13.99 a year. WHOIS protection is not included and will cost an additional $5 per domain name.
WHOIS protection keeps your personal information private as you’re required by ICANN rules to give accurate public information when registering a domain like your phone number and permanent address.
In general, I suggest using Namecheap for domains as they offer lower prices and free WHOIS protection with your purchase.
Get a free domain name
With Hostinger, they are currently running a promotion where you can get a free domain name with purchase of select hosting accounts. In particular their premium and business shared hosting plans.
What is the catch?
The catch is that the domain is free only for the first year. After you’ll need to pay renewal fees as well as the fee for WHOIS protection. So it’s a good deal if you’re wanting to get started and are not sure if long term a website is for you.
Fast Load times, acceptable up times
If you’re searching for speed and uptime you’ll be quite surprised and happy with the performance from Hostinger. Shared hosting services in general fall short when it comes to speed and uptime simply because (as the name implies) you’re sharing resources with many other people and their websites; sometimes hundreds of other sites.
To balance everything and avoid a resource bottleneck where everyone’s unhappy, it’s common for hosts to throttle sites that start become resource hogs and to then ask their owners to upgrade to a more resource rich account.
Hostinger overall surprised me with speeds an uptime on my test site that had 20 demo blog posts, images and videos. The site load speed was between 90 and 120 milliseconds. This is exceptionally quick from a budget web host:
Typically you’ll need to sacrifice a bit of performance for such low prices but Hostinger delivers good results that are ideal for a blog oriented business. While more expensive premium hosts like SiteGround perform faster (and they should considering that SiteGround costs over $20 a month), for a host that is a marketed as a budget host they do provide very good speeds overall.
90 to 120 milliseconds is obviously less than a second. Google as publicly stated that your website should load in under 3 seconds. At 1/10th of a second, Hostinger easily meets this requirement
For the up-time for Hostinger, it’s totally acceptable. Here is a test site showing the up-time for a website hosted on Hostinger. In general some months they are at 100% other months they are at 99.88%.
Up-time means your server and website are up and running so people can visit your website. If your server is down, your website is down. In general, no web host can maintain a 100% up-time ratio so you will want to look for a web host that is around 99.99% up-time per month.
Hostinger could be a bit better in this area, but for the price it’s acceptable.
Litespeed webserver
Hostinger runs on LiteSpeed, a web server technology. It ranks among the quickest and most stable web servers, surpassing previous Apache technology that hosts like GoDaddy utilize.
You won’t have to do anything to get it up and running. Simply sit back and enjoy the exceptional performance that it provides, especially for WordPress sites.
Simply toggle on LiteSpeed’s caching functio. Enabling the “Automatic Cache” option basically creates clones of your pages that are generated automatically, lowering delivery times for visitors.
Ease of use for beginners
Everything you need to get started with Hostinger is included within their three main packages, from adequate resources to performance-boosting utilities. The only big limitation is that the “Single” plan allows for only a single website.
As previously stated, the Premium, and Business are the two other shared hosting options. Hostinger’s custom hPanel control panel, which includes simple WordPress and numerous other content management systems (CMS) installation via automatic activation, is used by all three.
The two higher-level plans include limitless bandwidth, email accounts, and websites. Some additional benefits that you won’t get with the Single plan include SSH access for Linux-savvy developers, unlimited subdomains, and unlimited databases.
The one helpful feature that the Single and Premium plans lack however is automatic daily backups, which means you’ll have to perform backups yourself or purchase the service as a separate add-on.
Finally, a free trial of the Zyro website builder is included with your hosting account. Zyro is a separate service and business entity within Hostinger International (the parent company). It’s a structured website builder ideal for small business websites.
hPanel by Hostinger
CPanel used to be the industry standard used by web hosts. They made managing a shared hosting account easy for non-technical users through a graphical interface. However, CPanel thought they had a strangle hold on their monopoly and decided to increase their prices for their license.
As such, all web hosts responded by developing their own graphical interface. Hostginer came up with hPanel, an easy to use interface that’s perfect for beginners looking to setup WordPress or advanced users wanting to launch staging environments.
You’ll be using hPanel on a regular basis to make modifications and changes to your web hosting. Setting up an email account, running automated backups, administering the databases, and more are all feasible with hPanel.
How does all of this stack up against doing things with cPanel? In my view, it’s far simpler. The hPanel icons are large big box icons and everything is more organized by use a visual menu. The interface is less cluttered with superfluous options you’ll never use, and the connection between Hostinger’s other services (support, purchases extras, bill monitoring) is wonderful.
Excellent Support
Hostinger uses a live chat and ticket support system. I found their support to be helpful, fast and fun. If you watch the review video I posed on YouTube you’ll see that Hostinger support quickly answered my question and also email me a follow up asking that if I have any more questions they could help with.
During the support ticketing process I also liked that they have knowledge guides to help you solve your issue on your own as well.
Here is a support ticket I opened asking how to manually install an SSL certificate as they only provide a single SSL for free. I’m pretty technical but I did have some questions.
Not only did the support staff answer my questions they gave me a few SSL certificates for free without me asking for anything. I’m quite happy that Hostinger narrowed in and vastly improved their support as it used to be one of their weak points.
30 Day Money Back Guarantee
If the low price and free domain name with your hosting account were not enough Hostinger also offers a 30 day money back guarantee. To cancel your account simply contact support for a refund and they will process your request.
You can buy a hosting plan with confidence and if you’re not happy or you change your mind for whatever reason you can get your money back within the first 30 days.
SSL installation and management fee
An SSL certificate is a non-negotiable aspect when creating a website. It’s a ranking factor and you need to have an SSL for your WordPress blog or website.
SSL certificates are now free through a service called Let’s Encrypt. Most web hosts will install and manage your SSL for you on your behalf for your website. With your Hostinger account you get one free SSL.
Manual SSL installation
You can manually install an SSL yourself. However, please note that SSL certificate needs to be validated every 3 months so it is something you will want your web host to do instead of doing it yourself.
For Hostinger, they charge a small one time fee to install and manage your SSL certificate if you need to purchase more that the one free SSL you get with your account.
Hostinger Review Conclusion
Hostinger is an outstanding shared web host. Easily one of the best around. A global reach, multiple data centers, Minecraft hosting, coupon codes, great domain name prices and quality support.
If you’re looking for one of the best price and performance web hosts, I’m hard pressed you’ll find anything better than Hostinger. Check them out and use coupon code “webpro” for an additional discount.
Hostinger
Quality, affordable hosting at some of the most competitive prices around. Create your website with WordPress, Joomla or Drupal.
Get a free domain name for the first year with a purchase of a shared hosting plan. Use coupon code WEBPRO.
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