Hostinger Review
Hostinger offers a wide variety of hosting services, ranging from the advanced with VPS cloud hosting plans to beginners who just want to get started with a free hosting that’s risk-free.
My Story with Hostinger
But how does this company from Kaunas, Lithuania stack against other hosting services?
To find out, I setup an account with Hostinger and added a test site , to their platform. Because the web host is so easy to use, I have added more sites from my other projects to my Hostinger account and became a real user of their service.
In this review, I will take you behind the scenes and show you features through my Hostinger account. I will share some results I gathered from my speed tests and uptime monitor to showcase the performance of Hostinger servers.
I also spoke to different managers at Hostinger and discussed about their service throughout the years I have been working with them. You’ll see one of their responses below.
About Hostinger, the Company
Hostinger started out as a personal company named “Hosting Media” back in 2004. They changed their name later on and launched 000webhost.com — a popular web hosting service that’s offered for free.
With the rampant growth and expansion, Hostinger went on to achieve a huge milestone of having 1 million users, just 6 years from the day that they started. Today, Hostinger Web Hosting manages over 29 million users and has established worldwide localized offices with 150 people working across 39 countries worldwide.
In this Hostinger Review
Hostinger Hosting Plans & Pricing
- Hostinger Shared Hosting Prices & Plans
- Hostinger VPS Hosting Prices & Plans
Verdict
- Who should go for Hostinger
- Hostinger alternatives
Hostinger Pros: What Makes Hostinger Right?
1. Solid Performance: Excellent Website Uptime + Great Speed
Part of my Hostinger rating is based on proven data. In case you are unaware – my team and I have launched a new system named HostScore to track hosting performance in 2019.
We now have a system that constantly tracks server uptime every 5 minutes and runs speed tests from 10 locations worldwide every 4 hours. The massive data collected by the system enables me to understand a web host’s performance better and make a more accurate judgement.
Our Hostinger test site’s uptime and speed test results show that Hostinger is not fooling around when it comes to service reliability.
Hostinger Hosting Uptime
Hostinger Hosting Speed
2. Value Pack: Cheap Shared Plan ($0.99 per month) & Great Features
Premium features often come with premium pricing but Hostinger offers an affordable plan that includes a wide variety of premium features for as low as $0.99/mo. It’s an awesome deal for users who want a basic website at the cheapest rate.
Notable Features
Here are a list of key features that are offered by Hostinger –
- Support PHP 7, HTTP/2, IPv6, LiteSpeed Caching by default – Great feature for better website speed, available in all shared plans ($0.99/mo and up)
- Zyro Website Builder – Website builder that helps design a website with built-in templates, available in all shared plans ($0.99/mo and up)
- WordPress Acceleration – Optimization for best WordPress performance, available in all shared plans ($0.99/mo and up)
- Github Integration – Convenient for web development and versioning, available in all shared plans ($0.99/mo and up)
- Free SSL – For better branding and HTTPS connection, available in all shared plans ($0.99/mo and up)
- Free domain – Save cost, available in Premium Shared and up ($1.99/mo and up)
- Unlimited Cronjobs – For website automation and easy management, available in Premium Shared and up ($1.99/mo and up)
- SSH access – For better security and easy website management, available in Premium Shared and up ($1.99/mo and up)
- Free CDN – Faster page load time for visitors from different geographical locations, available in Business Shared ($3.99/mo and up)
3. Plenty of Room to Grow Your Site: Upgrade to VPS and Cloud Hosting
With Hostinger there a number of hosting plans that you can opt for, depending on the needs of your website.
There’s the shared hosting plan which breaks down into three separate packages: Single, Premium, and Business. Single offers the basic features you’ll need to run a single website. Premium, on the other hand, offers more features and performance while Business offers features and performances for those that focus on eCommerce websites.
A bigger website can choose to go for VPS hosting, which gives the best performance in terms of speed and resources. All the different hosting plan gives your website plenty of flexibility to grow and expand once your business becomes bigger.
4. Choices of 7 Data Centers
Part of Hostinger’s vision is to have as much presence around the globe as possible – that’s why have over 150 offices across the globe. The same can be said for their data centers.
As of today, Hostinger has 7 data centers spread across the US, Asia, and Europe (UK), all of which you can choose to host your website. All of the data center servers are connected to 1,000 Mbps connection lines which ensure maximum performance and stability. That means that you’ll get maximum speed for your website.
Also check – Hostinger best Hosting deals .
Having multiple is definitely helpful in keeping your website loading fast, partly because it helps reduces latency for users when they try to access your website’s data that’s nearer to their physical location.Map of Hostinger – Office and server locations around the globe. Note that Hostinger.in and Hostinger.my is our #1 regional hosting pick based on speed test results.
5. Free and Cheap Domain (.XYZ at $0.99/year)
For domain name registrations, Hostinger offers some of the more affordable pricing when it comes to domain extensions.
Domain Prices: Hostinger vs GoDaddy
Compared to popular domain registrars such GoDaddy, Hostinger’s prices for popular extensions, such .com and .net are, much cheaper.
For less popular domain extensions like .xyz or .tech, you can get it for as low as $0.99, compared to GoDaddy which offers it at $1.17 and $10.17 respectively.
6. User-Friendly Control Panel
Hostinger uses their in-house developed control panel,named as hPanel, for their shared hosting platform. It functions similarly to cPanel but it comes with a posh design and some modern usability tweak – which makes it better than cPanel in my opinion.
Here’s what Hostinger hPanel (the user dashboard) looks like:
The entire layout of hPanel dashboard makes it easy for users to access important system functions such as managing web files using drag-and-drop uploader in File Manager, setting up email accounts or changing your password, as well as switching PHP version and tracking web host resources usage (refer to images below).
7. Accept a wide range of payment options
Hostinger makes the payment process for their services easy to its users by allowing a wide variety of payment methods. You can make your payment using either PayPal, credit card (Visa, Master, Discover, American Express), Maestro or even Bitcoin.
Hostinger Cons: What Should Be Better
1. Lack of site migration support
To win new customers, many hosting companies will help new users to migrate their websites. Unfortunately that’s not the case with Hostinger. For users who are switching web host, you will have to move your sites to Hostinger manually by yourself.
For guidance in transferring your site to Hostinger, check out this official tutorial. To find a different hosting provider that come with free site migration assistance, check out this list.
2. Price increase during the renewal
For the most part, Hostinger plans are quite affordable when you first sign up. When you renew, however, Hostinger will increase the prices quite significantly. While they have changed their renewal pricing to lower the hikes recently, the price increase is still an unpleasant surprise for many.
3. Lack of Free SSL Support
Installing a free SSL certificate at Hostinger is rather troublesome – though the official website states that they are offering free SSL in shared plans.
To install a free SSL certificate on your Hostinger site, you will need to generate a free SSL certificate at SSL for Free and manually copy the certificate and private key to your account. You can find the detail steps to install a free SSL on Hostinger here.
Hostinger Web Hosting Plans
Shared Hosting Plans & Pricing
Hostinger offers 3 shared hosting plans that you can choose from, which are Single Web Hosting, Premium Web Hosting and Business Web Hosting. Since all of them come with a 30-Day Free trial, you can test out their services risk-free.
Single Web Hosting offers the basic in terms of features and performance. For those who need more, premium and business includes a number of features such as more SSD disk space and unlimited bandwidth. Business hosting, in particular, gives you 4x enhanced processing power and a free CDN which is great for eCommerce stores.
* Note #1: Hostinger’s Premium Shared Hosting plan ($3.79/mo) is ~30% below market average price according to our 2019 hosting market studies.
** Note #2: Hostinger does not offer dedicated IP for shared hosting users. Get Hostinger Shared
VPS Hosting Plans & Pricing
There are 6 tiers of VPS hosting on Hostinger, starting from Plan 1 to Plan 6. If you’re looking for blazing fast loading speed, the Hostinger Cloud VPS is 30x faster than other normal shared hosting services.
In addition to that, all of the Cloud VPS come with 100 MB/s Network, IPv6 Support, and SSD drives. Their Plan 6 can get you up to 8 CPUs, 8 GB Ram, 160GB disk space and 8000GB bandwidth, which can handle any kind of website. Plus, if you need help, they have dedicated in-house Live Chat supports ready to help 24/7/365.
* Note: Hostinger offers six pre-set VPS hosting plans – please check out plan #4 – #6 at their official website. All Hostinger VPS hosting comes with free dedicated IP address and full server root access.Get Hostinger VPS
Verdict: Is Hostinger Right for You?
Why Hostinger?
Naturally, the question “What makes Hostinger better than the others” come up and here’s the response I got from the management.
Message from Hostinger
Giving the opportunity for people to learn led Hostinger to become an industry’s price leader with a strong community of more than 29 million happy clients all over the world who choose to continue their journey with Hostinger and unlock all the unlimited web hosting features for the BEST price & quality balance.
Starting from $2.15/month [update: $0.99/mo] webmasters can experience powerful SSD based shared web hosting services & for more demanding ones – only $4.95/month [$3.95/mo] to take absolutely full control over their personal cloud VPS servers.
— Sarune, Hostinger
Bottom Line { Conclusion } – What I Really Think
Hostinger brings a lot to the table, from fantastic pricing to a wide range of server location and the depth of plan types to grow into. These advantages do come at some sacrifice though – such as the lack of migration assistance. Of course, you’ll also have to content with plan renewal price hikes, but that’s quite typical.
Bottom line, Hostinger is a good choice for those who are looking one-stop cheap hosting solution – in particular newbies who are just starting out.
Hostinger Alternatives
Hostinger is often compared with other budget hosting solutions such as A2 Hosting ($2.99/mo), BlueHost ($2.95/mo), InMotion Hosting ($2.49/mo) and TMD Hosting ($2.95/mo).
In term of pricing, Hostinger has the cheapest plan in all three shared hosting categories (basic one-domain, intermediate, and business plan). Some (such as A2 and InMotion) come with more advanced features and other benefits – please make use of our hosting comparison tool if you are undecided.
