Hostinger Review: Modern But Lacks Service

Hostinger has many of the same features you know and love from hosts. They support cPanel, shared hosting, VPS hosting, and dedicated options. The addition of Minecraft hosting is a bit of an oddity, making this one of the more “gamey” web hosting services available.

Because most people looking for hosting services aren’t typically looking for Minecraft, our focus isn’t going to be on these servers. Instead, we will see if Hostinger’s robust lineup of options is worth paying for.

Is this provider a worthy player in the web hosting game? Let’s find out by checking out the details below.

What Is Hostinger?

Hostinger was founded in 2004 under the much more boring name, Hosting Media. The company is entirely employee-owned, with the current CEO being Balys Krikščiūnas. It was founded in Kaunas, Lithuania but expanded to the US in 2008.

It currently has four subsidiaries:

• Hostinger (the main one)
• 000Webhost
• Hosting24
• Niagahoster
• Weblink

These companies are all under Hostinger ownership, located in various countries. Niagahoster is Indonesian, while Weblink is in Brazil.

Hostinger has over 29 million users under its belt. With a team of over 400 people, I imagine they are pretty busy! As one of the more popular hosting providers available, has the success gone to Hostinger’s head? Let’s find out below.

Is Hostinger a Good Host?

The answer to that question depends on what you are looking for. If you’re looking for web hosting, you’re in the right place. If you’re looking for more of a Mincraft oriented Hostinger review, this article probably isn’t for you.

Would Recommend If…

Hostinger is fine if you are a small business needing simplicity in hosting. Hostinger has a simple website builder, control panel, and support for multiple Linux servers. They also are incredibly inexpensive if you don’t mind paying four years upfront.

Would Not Recommend If…

Hostinger isn’t suitable if you a medium or large-sized business that needs security. Hostinger isn’t recommended for eCommerce websites or sites with quick expansion potential. The cloud hosting plans offer great potential, but dedicated servers are typically best for the largest businesses.

Hostinger Pros & Cons

Hostinger Features

Hostinger has a series of good things going for it:

30 Day Money Back Guarantee

Hostinger is one of those providers that offer a familiar 30-day “trial period.” If hostinger doesn’t meet your needs for the first thirty days, they will give you back your money.

Dashboard and Site Builder Demo

To ensure that you like the look of things, you can create an account without providing payment information. This feature is nice for those who are picky about how the panel looks.

HPanel, which is Hostinger’s control panel, is clean and easy to use. So if you want to get a sneak peak under he hood before making the commitment, that option is available.

Free Domain Name and Website Migrations

If you are willing to pay for multiple years at once, you get a few freebies, as well as a more affordable price overall.

These freebies include a domain name and a free website migration, which is excellent for those who don’t have the technical knowledge to make such a move.

Unlimited Emails and Ad Credits With Higher Tiers

Hostinger’s higher tiers give you a little treat for paying for the bonus stuff. Unlimited email addresses and ad credits can be helpful when establishing your business.

You’ll find that the cheapest tier doesn’t have any of this, despite only differing by cents. However, the renewal prices will hit you a bit harder in this case (which is part of the strategy).

Great International Support

Hostinger has excellent international support with data centers in six locations:

• UK
• US
• Netherlands
• Singapore
• Indonesia
• Lithuania

Cons of Hostinger

Hostinger also has a few issues to address:

No Dedicated Hosting and Limited Windows Hosting

You’ll find that Hostinger has the same preference that many of these web hosts do: they don’t like Windows. However, a less common thing Hostinger doesn’t seem to want is offering dedicated hosting.

Instead, Hostinger relies entirely on its cloud hosting platform, which isn’t necessarily terrible. However, you do alienate the largest businesses by doing this.

Disk Space Limitations Can Be Frustrating

Hostinger’s larger tiers are great if you want unlimited bandwidth and numerous websites. However, the disk space issue starts to become an issue when transitioning between different levels.

For example, going from 50 websites to 300 websites with the same level of disk space makes absolutely no sense. This limitation can lead to internal debates for those who run numerous websites or participate in reseller hosting.

How Does Hostinger Perform? (Speed & Reliability)

Hostinger web hosting services look good on paper, but how is its performance. To test this, we looked at one of their known websites using three separate testing sites:

• Pingdom
• GTmetrix
• Web.dev

Pingdom

I did the first test from Pingdom on a 2 MB site. The load time of the page was about 1.53 seconds, which is pretty fast for this site. When we compare this to GTmetrix’s speed ratings, here’s what we get:

GTMetrix

GTmetrix gave a performance rating of “A,” this mainly comes from a first contentful paint of one second. However, the overall page loading speed was 6.2 seconds.

Given that the stats show about 1 MB worth of Javascript requests, this page will be slower. But it seems that there is some good potential speed behind Hostinger.

WebDev (Lighthouse Score)

Web.dev shows us something a bit weaker:

The first contentful paint is about 3.2 seconds, which is a bit higher than you might want. The speed index is also much weaker, sitting at about 6.3 seconds.

This gives us an average page loading speed of 4.67 seconds between the three test sites, not a significant number. The largest contentful paint is a bit lower, sitting at about about 10 seconds.

So that means that Hostinger has some speed potential, but it isn’t the best. I would say it’s about an average web hosting company regarding speed but definitely not the fastest web hosting company.

Hostinger Uptime Guarantee

Like other web-hosting providers, Hostinger offers a 99.9% uptime guarantee. If Hostinger fails to meet these demands, you can request 5% of your monthly hosting fee for that month.

Here’s how Hostinger web hosting compares to other companies uptime guarantee’s:

You can only use that credit towards the purchase of other Hostinger products. So, it’s a bit of a win-lose situation if you want to take your business elsewhere.

Thankfully, Hostinger has a strong track record of reliability. The web host has fallen below that reliability rating once in the past year:

Is Hostinger Secure?

When taking a closer look at the security of this hosting provider, it reveals a bit of a mixed bag. We will discuss what that means below.

Free SSL Certificate

Like most web hosts, you’ll find that they have a free SSL certificate at all levels. This is necessary to establish trust with your customers and remain secure with new sites.

A Secure Socket Layer, or SSL, establishes a secure client-server connection. This prevents people from intercepting connections or stealing data in the transfer process.

Hostinger offers a free SSL, but the individual SSL offerings are a bit weak. Other companies provide Wildcard SSLs and Domain-Verified SSLs on an individual basis. To get those, you’ll need to seek out another provider.

SSH Access

Another secure network protocol they provide is SSH, or Secure Socket Shell, access. SSH enables web administrators to access data securely using public key authentication and robust password features.

It also enables users to access data remotely. That means you can feasibly manage your servers from anywhere (assuming you can confirm your access).

SSH access isn’t available with the cheapest plans offered by Hostinger. So you will need an upgraded hosting account to use SSH access.

Weekly Backups & Daily Backups

Among shared hosting plans, you have the option of weekly or daily backups. Weekly backups are with the two cheaper plans, while daily backups require you to pay for the business plan.

The cheapest plan might be weaker, but the weekly backups protect your website from being hijacked. That way, you can backup your website to a previous version if you end up losing data.

Other hosting services have similar plans, but it’s still an excellent bonus to Hostinger’s offerings.

However, Hostinger isn’t entirely free from fault, as they have had a security breach.

The Hostinger PHP Security Breach

Going back to 2019, Hostinger had a significant data breach that compromised the data of 14 million users. This was (and is) nearly half of their total user base, making it an incredibly significant reach.

The breach was discovered in August of 2019, where security was alerted to an unauthorized third-party group using an authorization token to increase their access.

Hostinger triggered a required password reset for all users among the data set. At the time, it was using the SHA-1 algorithm for encryption, but it has informed the media it has upgraded to SHA-256 encryption, a significant security upgrade.

Having a recent, well-known security breach on file is an important note. We can only hope the company has learned from its mistakes. Thankfully, Hostinger did own up to the error, which is better than some companies.

Customer Service

The Hostinger customer success team offers 24/7 live chat support. This is great for sites that work internationally.

Because Hostinger is internationally based, you can expect a multilingual customer support team. However, wait times for that team can sometimes take up to one hour.

Thankfully, you can check Hostinger’s status page to check the maintenance schedule.

Eventually, I was able to get an answer to my question about dedicated servers, but it did take more than an hour:

The support team needs more support, but there is no problem with the support quality once you get there.

Real Hostinger Reviews – Looking at Trustpilot

While waiting for the Hostinger team customer support to answer my calls for help, I decided to check out their public ratings. Despite the delay, Hostinger is known for a reasonably positive customer service response:

With a closer look, you’ll find that that Hostinger has a pretty solid customer support team. Most people compliment them with some regularity.

Here’s one example of a positive customer experience:

It also seems I’m not the only one suffering from extended customer support wait times:

About 9% of customer responses are from people who aren’t happy with Hostinger. Some of them complain about the security:

With 80% positive responses from the customer success agents, it seems like team Hostinger can take a lot. We hope they plan on giving some much-needed support to the customer service staff.

Ease of Use: Hostinger HPanel

Hostinger’s dashboard and switching between multiple websites are pretty simple. Everything you need is on one page, making it easy to switch between various WordPress sites.

The process for integrating WordPress typically involves inputting a domain. Moving takes a bit more time, but they do offer free website migrations.

Hostinger also has support for cPanel, enabling you to choose your preferred management methods:

Hostinger also has another feature known as the Zyro Website Builder.

Zyro Website Builder

The Zyro Website Builder is Hostinger’s answer to GoDaddy, Wix and Squarespace. It is a fully customizable drag and drop interface that comes with numerous themes and templates.

Zyro offers 15 pages of templates, which is a pretty hefty chunk. You can also choose a blank theme if you want to start with a clean slate:

The builder is incredibly fast and powerful. It enables you to switch between different sections and elements at will, providing a unique website with no coding required.

The site builder also has AI tools that enable you to automate logo creation, website content, and an AI heatmap to guess where people are most likely to click.

If you are expecting a free website builder, you either need to pay Hostinger or Zyro. Regardless, you need to pay for publishing.

Hostinger’s partner, Zyro, has two options when paying for its builder:

• The Basic Plan – $2.90 per month
• The Unleashed Plan – $3.90 /mo. (Renews at $12.49 /mo.)

Both Zyro plans come with blogging tools, SEO tools, unlimited templates, web hosting features, and free email for six months.

With the Unleashed plan, you can also integrate messenger chat, WhatsApp, Google Analytics, and Facebook Pixel. However, if your goal is to host numerous websites, stick to making purchases through the Hostinger plans we will be discussing next.

Hostinger Pricing and Plans

Hostinger offers a wide variety of plans but has no support for dedicated hosting and limited support for Windows Servers.

Hostinger Shared Web Hosting Plans and Pricing

Hostinger’s shared hosting comes in three different price points:

• Single Shared Hosting – $1.39/mo paid at four years up front. Renews at $2.99 /mo.
• Premium Shared Hosting – $2.49 /mo for four yrs (renews at $5.99)
• Business Shared Hosting – $3.99 /mo for four yrs (renews at $8.99)

You can also choose to pay in increments of 12 months or 24 months at a rate between those mentioned above.

Your basic shared hosting plan comes with these features:

• One website
• 30 GB of SSD storage
• Free SSL
• One email account
• 100 GB of bandwidth
• Two databases
• GIT Access
• Weekly backups
• Two subdomains
• Two cronjobs (for running server commands)
• A limit of 10 thousand monthly visits

For websites that already have a medium audience, you’ll find yourself running through these features fast. That’s why Premium Shared Hosting is the most popular. It costs slightly more for many more features:

• 100 Websites
• 100 GB SSD disc storage
• A visitor cap of 25 thousand visits
• Free unlimited email / databases / Cronjobs and FTP Account
• Google Ad credits
• SSH Access
• Free domain

All of these additional features come with a monthly markup of about 80 cents. When you pay for four years upfront, the increase can add up a bit.

Also, you need to pay for one of the two later shared plans to get a free domain name.

The business web hosting plans come with 100 websites, 200 GB of storage, a free CDN (content delivery network), and daily backups.

Managed WordPress hosting is also included with these, but they have specific plans for those who prefer WordPress.

Managed WordPress Hosting Plans – Pricing

Hostinger offers four forms of plans for those who like WordPress:

• Single WordPress – $1.99/mo for four years upfront ($3.99 /mo at renewal)
• WordPress Starter – $2.99 /mo for four yrs ($5.99 /mo renewal)
• Business WordPress – $5.99 /mo for four yrs ($10.99 /mo renewal)
• WordPress Pro – $11.59 /mo for four yrs ($19.99 /mo renewal)

Just like all of Hostinger’s plans, you can also choose to pay in one or two-year increments.

The basic plan comes with everything expected from the shared plan listed above. So one website, 30 GB of storage, and a free email.

The starter plan makes an immediate jump to 100 sites with 100 GB of storage, making it comparable to level two of the shared hosting plan. The next plan also pre-installs Jetpack for free, enabling you to access more WordPress themes.

The business plan doubles your SSD storage to 200 GB and offers 100 thousand visits monthly. It also includes the free CDN, making it comparable to level three of the shared hosting plans.

All WP plans come with WP-CLI, which enables server admins to automate updates of WordPress plugins using a command-line interface. That means no digging through WP’s menus, which ideally should make it easier to update for those who know a bit of code.

The Pro plan includes all of this and boosts your total to 300 sites. You also receive JetPack Personal, which provides you with more themes and other WordPress boosting features.

However, you receive no storage space boost at the highest tier, which is a bit confusing. When this space runs out, you can move on with cloud hosting.

Hostinger Cloud Web Hosting Plans and Pricing

Cloud hosting plans from Hostinger immediately start at the highest tier available from WP hosting. You can expect three forms:

• Cloud Startup – $9.99 /mo for four yrs (renews at $18.99)
• Cloud Professional – $18.99 /mo for four yrs (renews at $38.99)
• Cloud Enterprise – $69.99 /mo for four yrs (renews at $84.99)

Because cloud hosting is meant for more heavy-duty needs, the cheap hosting stops here.

The Startup plan starts where the highest level WP plan starts. So 200 GB SSD and everything mentioned before. However, you also receive speed limits based on 3 GB of RAM and 2 CPU Cores.

The next plan increases them to 250 GB of SSD, 6 GB of RAM, and 4 CPU Cores. The last plan goes to 300 GB of SSD, 6 GB of RAM, and 6 CPU Cores. The free domain names, SSls, and everything else from the premium plan in section one all stay the same.

Hostinger VPS Web Hosting Plans

VPS hosting, otherwise known as Virtual Private Server hosting, can own a portion of a server. In the case of Hostinger, all VPS plans come with dedicated IP, which gives you a secure non-domain location to access your files.

VPS hosting through Hostinger comes in these forms:

• VPS 1 – $3.95 / mo for four years to start ($9.95 /mo at renewal)
• VPS 2 – $8.95 and $19.95 /mo at renewal
• VPS 3 – $12.95 and $39.95 /mo at renewal
• VPS 4 – $15.95 and $49.95 /mo at renewal
• VPS 5 – $23.95 and $79.95 /mo at renewal
• VPS 6 – $38.99 and $109.99 /mo at renewal
• VPS 7 – $57.99 and $164.99 /mo at renewal
• VPS 8 – $77.99 and $219.99 /mo at renewal

RAM sizes vary from one to sixteen gigabytes, with SSD space going from 20 to 250 GB. Bandwidth in these plans goes from 1 to 12 TB. All plans come with a dedicated IP address and full root access.

Full root access enables you to create an administrative-level login to manage your servers. That way, you have complete control as a web admin. The standard VPS plans are better for those who have staff who know how to manage servers.

If you prefer managed VPS servers, check out their list of CyberPanel Plans:

CyberPanel VPS plans cost the same as standard VPS Plans. The only difference comes back to server control: With managed servers, you release complete root access control in favor of Hostinger’s support team managing your server.

Other Hosting Server Options

Hostinger offers two other forms of server hosting that are far less popular. One of them, cPanel hosting, is a helpful tool for those who prefer cheap hosting outside of WordPress.

Hostinger offers two cPanel plans:

• cPanel Silver – $1.95 /mo (renews at $3.99) for four years of service
• cPanel Gold – $3.25 /mo ($6.99 renewal) for four years

The annual plan includes free domain registration. Otherwise, these plans match the basic shared plan noted above. The only difference here is that silver is for one site while gold allows fifty.

The “other other” hosting service they offer is Minecraft Servers. Because Minecraft hosting is a bit off-topic for what we usually discuss, we won’t go into any details here.

Top Alternatives to Hostinger

Hostinger admittedly lacks the broad expandability that comes with dedicated hosting, meaning other competitors have an automatic advantage over them. Still, it’s interesting to compare them to some of the other hosting providers.

HostGator beats Hostinger by offering Dedicated servers. HostGator does it at a competitive cost for both their cloud hosting plan and Hostinger’s VPS hosting.

HostGator also has support for a custom site builder and free domain transfers. Overall, the two are pretty similar, making them suitable substitutes.

BlueHost beats Hostinger by offering an overall cheaper hosting package. BlueHost also offers a dedicated server plan, which is another reminder of what Hostinger lacks.

Neither are good with Windows servers, but BlueHost has a much worse customer service experience. BlueHost is good if you are looking for a quick interface for a low price.

SiteGround has a more robust set of security features when compared to Hostinger. SiteGround also isn’t known for being part of any security breaches.

SiteGround is also slightly better on the customer service front. However, the site builder from SG is from a third-party provider and is much less intuitive.

Customer Feedback on Twitter

If you have a Hostinger account, now is the perfect time to go to Twitter to voice your opinion. If you don’t, you can live vicariously through these user reviews in the form of tweets. Check out what Hostinger’s users are saying about the company:

FAQs

Final Thoughts – Is Hostinger Worth It?

If you struggle to find a good web host, Hostinger is an alright selection for your small to medium-sized business. Hostinger has more than a few things to improve, but WordPress is easy to use and install.

One of Hostinger’s most valuable and underrated features is the site builder. The site builder is robust and comes with AI tools. However, you don’t want to purchase any hosting plans through the builder.

Customer service is satisfactory, but wait times have increased to an hour as of late. It’s a significant problem that you’ll find other Hostinger users complain about often.

Hostinger has many simple features and is suitable for budding businesses. Still, recent security breaches and a lack of dedicated servers make this company’s ceiling come up fast for growing businesses. Overall, Hostinger isn’t bad, but they don’t exceed the competition.