Hostinger Review

Groowops | Review, Tips, Deals And News

February 10, 2022 March 28, 2022

Hostinger Review, Price, Plan & Deals

Hostinger Web Hosting, Best Web Hosting For WordPress. Build a website at speed with this popular budget host

Hostinger Web Hosting Review, Price, Plan & Deals

Pros

Good, low-cost plans
Optimized for WordPress
SSD storage on all plans
Helpful customer service
Includes the company's own Zyro website builder
Weekly backup even in the cheapest plan

Cons

No Phone Support
Not every plan has a Windows option
Daily backups, CDN, SSH access only in pricier plans

Hostinger Web Hosting Specification
Shared Hosting	Yes
VPS Hosting	Yes
Dedicated Hosting	Yes
WordPress Hosting	Yes
Cloud Hosting	Yes
Reseller Hosting	Yes
Linux Servers - Cloud	Yes
Linux Servers	Yes
Windows Servers	No
Maximum RAM - VPS	8 GB
Maximum Storage - VPS	160 GB
Maximum Storage - Cloud	200B
24/7 Customer Support	Yes
Unlimited Monthly Data Transfers - VPS	No
Unlimited Monthly Data Transfers - Cloud	No

🎁 View Best Deals

Hostinger Review

Based in Lithuania, Hostinger is one of the largest hosting providers that cater to over 29 million users per day. The reason for its continued success is its dedication to performance and customer service.

The company claims an average response time of 143ms for its WordPress sites, and an average response time of 50 should you need any help. As plausible as these claims are, our experience was quite different on a single shared hosting plan, and par with shared plans from other hosting providers like HostGator, with average speeds closer to 800ms.

Still, Hostinger offers attractive features like SSL certificates and Cloudflare security if you buy a one-year subscription. In addition to offering an email account, Cloudflare security sets Hostinger apart from most of its peers, which reserve both of these features for higher-priced plans.

In addition to 24/7 chat support, you're likely to find relevant answers to your questions in Hostinger's help center, which is home to hundreds of different articles on a range of topics such as site migration, maintenance, performance, working with cPanel, and more. Or even Hostinger's hPanel, and more.

Even the cheapest shared plan includes Managed WordPress, which takes care of deploying updates, and LightSpeed Cache for WordPress, which is another feature that can help anyone deploying a professional-looking WordPress site. Will attract new and intermediate users.

Hostinger Web Hosting Pricing

Hostinger offers a wide variety of services including shared hosting, VPS hosting, cloud hosting, and even specialized hosting solutions such as WordPress hosting, cPanel hosting, etc. When choosing your hosting solution, you should carefully weigh the price of packages and features with your current needs. This is so that you don't spend money on a plan that supports 25,000 monthly visitors and lets you deploy multiple websites when you only need to set up a website that attracts around 8,000 monthly visitors.

You can get started with a single shared hosting plan for $1.39 per month if you opt for a four-year subscription. The plan is an absolute steal when you consider that it includes weekly backups, 30GB of storage space.

The convention with hosting providers is to provide a cheaper on-boarding price for a longer period. For example, the same plan costs you $1.99 per month if you choose a 24-month subscription. You should also note that this is an introductory offer only, renewal prices are high and vary depending on the period you choose.

Hostinger does not offer dedicated hosting, which is aimed at large enterprises requiring vast resources to accommodate their thousands of visitors. Your next best option is to choose one of the eight VPS plans on offer. The cheapest plan costs $3.95 per month for a four-year subscription and includes a single CPU core, 1GB of RAM, 20GB of SSD storage, 1TB of bandwidth, full root access, and assorted features. If you want to add more resources the prices go up faster.

For TechRadar readers only, Hostinger's Cloud Lite hosting plan is $1.79 per month for the first three months and its premium shared hosting plan is only $1.79 per month for the first 12 months.

Hostinger's typical price for cloud hosting starts at $9.99 per month for a four-year subscription and goes up to $18.99 per month.

The choice of plan will depend on your use case. For example, if you want to host podcasts on your website, your only option is to choose one of the VPS plans as Hostinger does not allow this on its shared or cloud hosting plans.

Like most hosting providers, Hostinger supports payment via Google Pay and most credit cards. Payment through debit cards and regional payment gateways or wallets are not supported. Although the hosting provider initially opposed cryptocurrencies, it has now partnered with CoinGate, another Lithuania-based company, and accepts cryptocurrencies as a form of payment. However, Hostinger's refund policy states that purchases made using cryptocurrencies are non-refundable, which may defeat the 30-day money-back policy.

Hostinger Features

Hostinger's cheapest shared hosting plans boast a single CPU core along with 768MB of RAM. While this may sound low, at $1.39 per month, the plan is aimed at small businesses or professionals who only need an email account, and expect less than 10,000 monthly visitors. Plus, 100GB of bandwidth means you can use 30GB of SSD storage space to showcase your portfolio and range of services, whether you're a business or a professional.

Hostinger consistently offers features in its shared plans that many competitors don't, such as a free email account, weekly backups, two sub-domains, and more. You can use subdomains to deploy blogs, or otherwise create a sister website that makes your website look more professional.

All shared plans are hosted on a cloud Linux 7 distribution, but unlike HostGator which provides a complete list of all installed software and underlying operating systems based on its knowledge, Hostinger does not publicly disclose this information. Your only recourse is to turn to the support staff for software and version information.

Hostinger WordPress Hosting

Hostinger's WordPress hosting improves on shared plans in several important ways. Even the cheapest Starter plan offers a single WordPress site, an email account, 30GB SSD, free SSL, WordPress acceleration, managed auto-updates, and all for $1.99 (4-year term) and $3.99 after renewal provides.

Upgrading gives you more storage space, support for more sites, and Jetpack Free on the WordPress Starter and Business WordPress plans. You are still restricted in various ways, although the WordPress Pro plan allows for up to 300 websites.

The higher plans are notably more expensive, starting at $2.99, $5.99, or $11.59 per month, so it looks to us like the Starter plan is the highlight of the range. Additional features with more expensive plans include the ability to manage multiple WordPress sites from one dashboard, automatic plugin updates, daily backups, and Google Ads credits.

Managed WordPress plans from other providers can be more powerful. IONOS's WordPress Pro includes advanced features like staging support (make major changes to your WordPress project without affecting the live site).

However, all this power comes at a cost. IONOS's prices are pretty low, but even its most basic single-site plan costs $18 billed monthly, about six times the cost of Hostinger's starter WordPress plan (though keep in mind that it runs for four years). There's more; also opt for monthly billing with Hostinger, and you'll pay $7.99.) If you're new to WordPress or working on a smaller site, start with a simple product, such as Hostinger's shared plans. Upgrade to full managed WordPress later, if you think you need to.

Hostinger Servers

More demanding users can try one of Hostinger's semi-managed VPS plans. These start for $3.95 per month on the annual plan with a basic 1 vCPU, 1GB RAM, 20GB storage, and 1TB bandwidth setup, increasing to $8.16 upon renewal. Or a very capable 4VCore, 4GB RAM, 80GB storage, and 4TB bandwidth plan for $15.95 for the first four years, $32.76 upon renewal.

It's good value, and notably better than most providers we see. For example, Hostwinds' equivalent 4 vCore 4TB VPS starts at $44.99 and renews at around $50, which is significantly more expensive.

If even the most powerful VPS isn't enough for you, we would generally recommend you turn to dedicated hosting plans. But in this case, the bad news: Hostinger has none.

Hostinger Account setup

While many hosts are vaguely vague about the low-level details of their packages, Hostinger lays out almost everything in a lengthy comparison table. If you care that the Baseline Single Shared Hosting plan only allows one cron job and doesn't support SSH access, for example, you'll find it here.

Choose a plan, click Buy and you are presented with various subscription options (usually this is monthly billing with one, two, and four-year plans).

Most often they work as you expect: the title price quoted on the site is for the longest term, and you'll pay a little more for shorter subscriptions.

The only important issue is the monthly plan, which is often so expensive that it's not worth considering. For example, the annual single shared hosting plan costs $35.88 in total; The monthly plan is $9.49 plus an initial $4.99 setup fee, for a total of $14.98, or a total of $33.96 after just three months.

Cloudflare integration is also available on all accounts.

There are a plethora of payment options available, including PayPal, credit card, Google Pay, and bitcoin. We chose PayPal and handed over our virtual cash as usual. A website link took us to a simple startup wizard and a welcome email with more details followed shortly.

Hostinger Creating a Site

Hostinger's setup wizard opens by asking us if we want to register a new domain, transfer a domain from another company, or use an existing domain, but leave it to the current registrar.

You can also easily choose where to host your site: North America, the UK, or Europe.

We selected the 'Existing domain' option and were given four Hostinger name servers, and were asked to update our domain DNS settings.

The final 'Start Website' step presented five options to help us build our website.

Install WordPress took us straight to the WordPress installer. All the default settings were intelligently assigned, and after choosing an administrator password we could set up the system with a single click.

Auto Installer uses the same automated approach to install 157 popular apps including Joomla, PrestaShop, OpenCart, PHPBB, and Drupal. We prefer Softaculous, the installer often provided by other hosts, but it's thorough enough and will install your chosen apps with speed.

Zyro Builder is the website builder of Hostinger. It includes all the basics, with nearly 200 responsive templates, easy drag-and-drop customization, and the option to embed videos, maps, social media widgets, and simple e-commerce features.

It's not for advanced users - there's no blogging platform, for example - and the design is more about a mild change of template than building something new from scratch. But it is capable of producing some quality sites, and there are no annoying restrictions on page count or site size to get in your way. (This is pretty unusual for a free website builder in budget shared hosting.)

File Manager opens a browser-based file manager where you can upload your site. It's most useful for small static sites, but you can also use it to manually install more sophisticated apps, perhaps setting up custom databases and editing configuration files.

Access Manager is an unusual additional tool that allows you to give others access to your Hostinger account, so they can work with you on building or managing a site. You can do something similar by sharing your credentials with others, but it's more secure. Everyone gets their login, and the people you invite don't get full access to your account. For example, they can create or edit a website page, but by default, they cannot buy a new product with your stored payment details or change account details such as your registered email address.

If you don't want to commit to it now, you can skip it and go straight for Hostinger's well-designed cPanel-like site manager, where you get domains, subdomains, databases, SSH access, email Tools to organize. , FTP accounts, and more. There's a lot of power here, and hosting for the first time can be a bit intimidating, but start exploring and it quickly starts to make sense. Even novice users will find their way around the key features in a matter of minutes.

Hostinger Performance

We ended the review by using Uptime.com to monitor our test website from multiple locations around the world, logging response times and any downtime.

Our test site was hosted on Hostinger's most basic shared hosting plan but still managed a solid 100% uptime record over 10 weeks of monitoring.

Uptime.com reported a response time range of 171ms to 1.73s, with an average of 382ms over the last seven days of testing. Starter shared hosting plans typically manage 200-400ms with an average peak of 700-800ms, so Hostinger is slow when it comes to response times.

However, page load times matter too, so we used Dotcom Tools' Website Speed Test to measure our site's performance from 16 locations in the US and Europe. This time the results were much better at 878ms, putting it in the top 25% of providers.

A mixed story, but keep in mind that these are comparisons based on the cheapest shared hosting plan from each testing provider. Some of those plans cost 5x to 10x the $1.39 you might pay with Hostinger, so on balance, we think the company did reasonably well.

Hostinger Support

Everyone needs help sometimes, even the experts, so a web host needs to have a good support system.

Clicking on 'Help' on Hostinger's control panel opens the service knowledgebase. The content in this group is by well-chosen topics (Setup & Install, Account & Billing, Hosting & Website, Privacy & Security, Domain, Email) and a search box to help you find everything you need.

Unfortunately, a lot of the content is not displayed upfront. There are only four or five articles listed in the various knowledgebase sections, and even these don't always cover the most general topics. (The highlighted email articles have nothing to do with creating or managing email accounts, for example, and mostly cover setting up email accounts on various device platforms).

However, using search allowed you to access more articles, and they turned out to be more useful. Searching for 'permissions' gave us advice on setting file and folder permissions as well as referencing specific error messages ('403 Forbidden'). Entering 'Change PHP Version' immediately highlighted the correct cPanel module. The content of these articles is basic but enough to point users in the right direction.

Hostinger has a large tutorial section with more detailed articles: 'How to Make a Website - All-in-One Guide', 'How to Launch a WordPress Website', 'How to Back Up Your Email,' and more. These seem to be well written and really helpful, but oddly, they can't be searched from the knowledgebase search box. For example, Hostinger has a long tutorial titled '30 WordPress SEO Tips', but if you type '30 WordPress SEO Tips' into the search box on the help page, it won't show up. You will have to go back to the Control Panel, click on the Tutorials link, and search there again.

Still, if you can't find what you need, there is 24/7/365 support available via live chat and a ticket-based system. We submitted a question via live chat, and a helpful agent started providing a helpful answer within minutes.

Hostinger: Final Call

Hostinger's starter accounts have some significant limitations, but they'll still work for some, and otherwise, its products offer a lot of features and powerful cPanel-like site management for a very reasonable price.

Related Blog

Best eCommerce Hosting in 2022

Best Cheap Web Hosting Deals In 2022

Best Windows Hosting Services In 2022

The Best Web Hosting In 2022

Best Free Website Builder In 2022

Best Anonymous Hosting In 2022

Best Unlimited Web Hosting In 2022

Best Video Hosting Websites In 2022

14 Best Web Hosting Services In 2022

Hosting: Best Web Hosting Service In 2022

The Best Website Hosting For WordPress 2022