Hostinger Review: Is It Right for Your Site?
Great for ecommerce hosting
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Best for
Best for Discounted Prices
Overall rating
4 out of 5 stars
Hostinger is not only an affordable alternative to some of the top hosting providers, but it’s also a great choice if you’re looking for an ecommerce hosting solution.
It offers free migration and a wide range of VPS hosting plans, but it does only come tenth in our list of the best hosts, receiving an overall score of 3.6 out of 5. Ultimately, Hostinger’s let down by its lack of storage and absence of dedicated hosting options.
Looking for a hosting provider can certainly feel like a daunting task. There are so many options out there, and they all look pretty similar on the surface. But our team at Website Builder Expert has done the deep digging to uncover the strengths and weaknesses of each provider. We’ve spent hours researching and cross-referencing their respective features, and have been helping regular people – not tech experts – get online for 10 years.
If you’re considering using Hostinger as your hosting provider, read on for the expert verdict. But first, a quick summary:
Our number one priority here at Website Builder Expert is to bring our readers accurate and reliable reviews, recommendations, and information. That’s why we put over 230 hours of research into hosting providers alone, identifying and investigating the five most important areas of web hosting:
- Types of hosting
- Uptime
- Disk space
- Features
- Value for money
- Help and support
We gather data for each of these areas across every provider we review, and give scores based on our findings. These scores are then averaged to create an overall rating for the provider.
Still got questions? You can read more about how we carry out our hosting research in our full methodology!
Build And Host A Website With Hostinger
Hostinger don’t just offer hosting, you can also create a website and ecommerce store with them.You can get online from $2.99 a month when you choose a subscription of 12 months or longer. Until February 12, that price goes down to $2.49 a month on the 48-month plan. You’ll also get a free domain and three months free!
Hostinger: Pros & Cons
Hostinger Pros
- WordPress plans: a strong onboarding experience on most WordPress plans ensures great ease of use
- Affordable hosting plans: starting from $2.99, billed annually, with extremely cheap discount prices for new users
- Great for ecommerce hosting: affordable plans and helpful ecommerce plugins for WooCommerce and PrestaShop
Hostinger Cons
- No dedicated plan: Hostinger doesn’t offer any dedicated hosting plans, meaning it’ll be a struggle to scale up beyond a VPS plan
- No phone support: you can’t reach out to Hostinger via phone, and instead have to use its 24/7 live chat
- Poor value for money: despite cheap introductory deals, you’ll be paying for basic features and not much else
Reliability and Performance
Hostinger has its strengths but it falls short when it comes to reliability and performance.
Despite an advertised uptime of 99.9%, our research found Hostinger’s site speed and uptime to be pretty mediocre in reality. In fact, it only scores 3.5 out of 5 for its uptime performance – an average score when compared to the likes of IONOS which scored a perfect 5 out of 5.
No web host can guarantee 100% uptime, though – unpredictable events such as power outages can throw a spanner in the works! That being said, you’ll want to aim for something in the 99.97-99.99% range, which equates to between 50 and 150 minutes of downtime per year.
Why Does Uptime Matter?
As you weigh up Hostinger’s strengths and weaknesses, you might be wondering how much a less-than-stellar uptime will matter for your specific site. Uptime is especially important if you’re hosting an ecommerce site, because the more downtime you experience, the less sales you’ll be able to make. Good uptime matters across the board, but we say it should be a make-or-break factor for ecommerce sites.
If website performance sounds critical to you, we recommend you check out IONOS instead since it has the best uptime and site speed out of all the hosting providers we’ve reviewed.
Need more ecommerce advice?
- Free Ecommerce Website Templates: Give your online store an attractive headstart on the competition with this selection of free designs.
- Best Ecommerce Software: We help you pick the right software for your business.
Types of Hosting and Features
Hostinger offers four different types of hosting: shared, WordPress, cloud, and VPS. Shared and cloud hosting are the cheapest and most beginner-friendly options, whereas WordPress hosting is excellent for blogging. VPS (Virtual Private Server) hosting, on the other hand, is best suited for larger sites that demand more resources.
Hostinger scores 3.3 stars out of 5 in our types of hosting research – missing out on a higher mark because it doesn’t provide dedicated hosting.
So, let’s take a closer look at what Hostinger does have to offer…
| Shared | WordPress | Cloud | VPS | Dedicated |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ | ✔️ | ❌ |
Think of each hosting type like an umbrella. Underneath each, there are different plans you can choose from to best accommodate your site’s needs. Features will vary across plans, but we’ve broken down the highlights of each below.
Hostinger Shared Hosting Features
In our latest research, Hostinger scores an overall mark of 4 out of 5 for its shared hosting plans. Shared hosting is the cheapest, easiest way to host a website and a great gateway for anyone looking to dive into the world of hosting. Scoring 4.2 out of 5 for its shared hosting features, Hostinger’s plans come equipped with weekly backups to unlimited bandwidth.
Unfortunately, you’ll need to upgrade from the cheapest plan if you want to unlock every feature. That being said, you’ll always be limited when it comes to storage, with Hostinger’s highest-tier plan only providing 200GB of storage space.
| Single Web Hosting | Premium Web Hosting | Business Shared Hosting | |
|---|---|---|---|
| One account | Up to 100 accounts | Up to 100 accounts | |
| Storage space | 50GB | 100GB | 200GB |
| Bandwidth | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Backups | Weekly | Weekly | Daily |
| Free domain | No | Yes | Yes |
| Secure Shell (SSH) access | No | Yes | Yes |
Hostinger WordPress Hosting Features
Hostinger’s WordPress plans are very similar to its shared hosting offering, just more optimized for WordPress-based sites – they still run on shared servers, and offer the same ease of use and affordability. In fact, Hostinger’s WordPress hosting scores an impressive 4.1 out of 5 in our research, making it the highest-performing hosting type that Hostinger offers.
Hostinger also receives a score of 4 out of 5 for its WordPress hosting features, largely due to its additional suite of WordPress tools, such as LiteSpeed Cache to help your site run smoothly and a WordPress Staging Tool to edit elements without affecting your live pages.
We’ve seen a lot of positive comments about Hostinger’s WordPress onboarding for customers as well, so you can expect considerable ease of use when you sign up for a WordPress plan.
| Premium | Business | Cloud Startup | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Up to 100 accounts | Up to 100 accounts | Up to 300 accounts | |
| Storage space | 100GB | 200GB | 200GB |
| Bandwidth | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Automatic backups | Weekly | Daily | Daily |
| Free domain | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| SSH access | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Hostinger Cloud Plan Features
While shared plans mean multiple websites sharing one server, cloud plans mean that your site is hosted in the cloud – a service that exists across multiple servers. It’s not a type of hosting we’d usually recommend for our readers, since it’s best suited for large-scale projects.
All of Hostinger’s cloud hosting plans include a dedicated IP address, a free domain, and unlimited bandwidth. Here’s where they start to differ:
| Cloud Startup | Cloud Professional | Cloud Enterprise | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Websites | 300 | 300 | 300 |
| Storage space | 200GB | 250GB | 300GB |
| RAM | 3GB | 6GB | 12GB |
| CPU Cores | 2 | 4 | 6 |
Hostinger VPS Hosting Features
VPS hosting creates a virtual environment that imitates a dedicated server – meaning you get many of the benefits of dedicated resources, but at a lower price. In our latest research, Hostinger scores 3.7 out of 5 for its VPS hosting plans, which is pretty poor in comparison to other hosting providers we tested, such as Bluehost which score 4.6 out of 5.
Looking at its features specifically, Hostinger scores a weak 2.7 out of 5. There are four plans to choose between – all plans come with a custom control panel, auto installers with popular web scripts and operating system templates, and up to 32GB RAM per server.
Ultimately, Hostinger’s VPS plans are categorized by the amount of CPU (Central Processing Unit) power given to the server, shown in the “vCPU” boxes below. Plans are also differentiated by increasing amounts of memory, storage, and bandwidth:
| KVM 1 | KVM 2 | KVM 4 | KVM 8 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| vCPU | 1 Core | 2 Cores | 4 Cores | 8 Cores |
| Memory (RAM) | 4GB | 8GB | 16GB | 32GB |
| Storage | 50GB | 100GB | 200GB | 400GB |
| Bandwidth | 1TB | 2TB | 4TB | 8TB |
What About Dedicated Hosting?
Hostinger’s shared, WordPress, cloud, and VPS plans all offer an decent array of features, though nothing standout in comparison to other hosting providers. But if you’ve been looking at hosting plans for a while, you might be wondering where Hostinger’s dedicated plans are.
This is one major drawback of Hostinger: it doesn’t offer dedicated hosting, which most other providers do. Of course, this will rule Hostinger out if you’re looking for a dedicated plan, but it’s also an important factor if you want to start on a shared or VPS plan, and still want the possibility of eventually scaling up to dedicated.
Dedicated hosting plans are generally regarded as the next step up after VPS. They’re a lot more expensive, and best suited to very large business and ecommerce sites. So if you think a dedicated plan might be for you, you can check out our ranking of the best dedicated hosting providers to learn more.
More Information
- Best Shared Hosting Services: Hostinger not quite the right fit? Discover other options in our helpful list of the top eight providers
- 8 Best WordPress Hosting Providers: Whether you’re a WordPress newbie or an experienced developer, pick from these hosting providers to give your site the best start in life
- Hostinger vs Bluehost: Bluehost is our top WordPress host, but you can find out which one suits your needs the most in our comparison guide
- Best Cloud Hosting Providers: Looking for flexible hosting? Feel free to browse our carefully curated list of the top cloud hosting providers to find your perfect match
- Best VPS Hosting Providers: Find out which providers offer the most power in our comparison of these VPS hosting providers
Hostinger Pricing
So how much does Hostinger cost? Hostinger scores a very low 2.9 out of 5 when it comes to value for money, so let’s take a deeper look at its pricing.
Hostinger’s plans are pretty affordable, especially with its cheap introductory deals. For shared hosting, it scores 3.7 out of 5 for price, and for WordPress hosting, it scores 3.8 out of 5! However, its VPS plans aren’t very cost-effective, scoring 2.9 out of 5 for price.
Hostinger’s plans don’t offer much in the way of features to make any higher cost worth it, and it provides little room to scale up, especially without any dedicated hosting options.
Hostinger Pricing Need-to-Knows
Hostinger’s pricing can fluctuate depending on your chosen plan, type of hosting, and subscription length! What does remain constant, though, is Hostinger’s 30-day money back guarantee.
For fair comparison with other hosting providers, we’ll be looking at Hostinger’s 12-month subscription fees from this point on. Let’s dive into its starting prices for each hosting type:
- Shared hosting: $2.99 per month
- WordPress hosting: $2.99 per month
- Cloud hosting: $9.99 per month
- VPS hosting: $3.99 per month
However, the longer you subscribe to one of Hostinger’s plans, the cheaper the plan will be. For example, you can enjoy Hostinger’s cheapest shared hosting plan for just $1.99 per month if you sign up to a 48-month contract.
But be wary of Hostinger’s steep renewal costs! Its $9.99 per month (billed annually) cloud hosting plan will renew at $24.99 per month after the first year.
How Does Hostinger’s Pricing Work?
Given the large array of hosting types and features, every Hostinger plan comes at a different price. Hostinger’s prices are very competitive with the rest of the industry, ranging from $2.99 to $117.99 per month, billed annually.
We know what you’re thinking – why such a huge range? Well, Hostinger is no different from other hosting providers in its use of temptingly low introductory prices. The more time you commit to during your first purchase, the more money you save – but only on that first purchase. This is worth keeping in mind at checkout.
What Subscription Lengths Does Hostinger Offer?
Don’t worry – you don’t have to commit to four years up front! You can choose to pay in advance for either: four years, two years, one year, or one month, and prices will vary accordingly. We recommend purchasing one year in advance, because it’s not too much of a commitment, and you’ll still save some money.
This range of subscription options means you have tons of choice over which pricing plan suits you best. Here’s an example – below is a breakdown of the pricing options you get for the Single Web Hosting shared plan alone.
Single Web Hosting Plan Subscription Details
| 1 month | 12 months | 24 months | 48 months | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Regular price/month | $9.99 | $9.99 | $9.99 | $9.99 |
| Sale price/month | ❌ | $2.99 | $2.49 | $1.99 |
| Renewal price/month | ❌ | $5.99 | $4.99 | $3.99 |
| Setup fee | $4.99 | $0 | $0 | $0 |
| Total plan price (using sales price) | $14.98 | $35.88 | $59.76 | $95.52 |
We’ve broken down Hostinger’s ranges in the table below, which shows both the introductory price of one year paid in advance, and the renewal price of one year paid in advance.
Hostinger Pricing Summary
| Hosting Type | Introductory Price (per month) | Renews At (per month) |
|---|---|---|
| Shared | $2.99-$3.99 | $5.99-$11.99 |
| WordPress | $2.99-$15.99 | $5.99-$24.99 |
| Cloud | $9.99-$29.99 | $24.99-$59.99 |
| VPS | $3.99-$117.99 | $7.99-$186.99 |
Hostinger also offers a 30-day money back guarantee that applies to all of its plans. This is pretty standard throughout the hosting industry, but still a major plus.
Also, if you’re a student, you’re eligible for Hostinger’s 10% student discount. You can access the discount code by verifying your student status through Student Beans for free.
Grab 10% Off From Us
Does Hostinger Have Any Hidden Costs?
Hostinger may be known for its enticing introductory discounts, but is all it too good to be true? Are there any hidden costs you should look out for? The answer is, not really! But here’s a rundown of the three main extras you should be ready to look out for:
We’ve already talked about how Hostinger’s discount prices for new users only last for your first term. So, if you sign up for 12 months, you get one year of discount.
After that, you’ll need to pay the renewal price, which will be higher. Our top tip is to always check the renewal price before signing up, to make sure you don’t get hit with an expensive bill once your plan renews!
Custom domain names are vital for any professional website. The good news is, with some of Hostinger’s plans, you actually get a free domain thrown in!
The Cloud Professional plan has many free perks included in the plan price – one of which is a free domain name.
Your free domain registration lasts for one year, which is great if you’re starting out your website on a budget.
But what happens once that year is up? Or what if your plan doesn’t include a free domain? Fortunately, you can buy a domain through Hostinger – the price will vary depending on what you’re trying to register, but here’s a rough pricing guide:
- .com: $9.99 per year
- .net: $12.99 per year
- .me: $8.99 per year
- .online: $0.99 per year
- .store: $0.99 per year
It’s worth noting here that domains work a little like hosting plans, in that you get a discount for the first year – after that, your yearly domain fee will go up.
For example, the domain “lucyscupcakes.online” costs $0.99 for the first year, after which it will cost $35 per year – a pretty big jump up in price!
You can choose a longer registration period, up to three years, but this doesn’t guarantee you bigger savings – the discount still only applies to the first year, after which the domain is still set to renew at $35 per year.
When picking a longer registration period, be mindful that the discount still only applies to the first year.
Hostinger isn’t super sneaky about this information, but it’s important to look carefully at exactly what is in your basket, and how long your discount lasts. Otherwise, that’s a $35 shock when renewal time rolls around!
More Information
- Get answers quickly with our how much does a website cost to host guide
- Looking for a bargain? Compare over 50 deals in our guide to the cheapest web hosting providers
- A great web host doesn’t have to cost the world. Discover the best web hosting providers in our carefully researched list
- And, if you’re already sold on Hostinger’s benefits – and want to know more about how much it’s going to cost you – check out our guide to Hostinger pricing for just that
Security
Looking to keep your website secure? The good news is that every Hostinger plan comes with free unlimited SSL certificates, meaning any sensitive data on your website is carefully protected.
Additionally, your website will be safe from harm thanks to Hostinger’s Cloudflare protected nameservers. This works by shielding and diverting potential DDoS attacks or harmful traffic away from your site. Your website will also sit behind in-house firewalls to further protect your website and monitor your site’s security.
As an extra layer of security, Hostinger’s plans offer daily or weekly backups, so you can rest easy knowing your work or data won’t be lost.
More Information
- Learn more about How to Secure a Website with our detailed guide
Help and Support
Sadly for Hostinger, its help and support services are incredibly weak with an overall score of 0.75 out of 5 – putting Hostinger joint last with Hostwinds for customer care. So why such a low score?
We tested Hostinger’s support across all hosting types, and it saw the most success with its WordPress hosting plans. But rein in that excitement! It still only scored 2.8 out of 5 for its WordPress support – the worst of all providers we tested.
Hostinger is lacking a necessity when it comes to customer support: a phone number. This provider does not offer support over the phone, which can be frustrating if you find live chat a little impersonal. Its live chat channel is available 24/7, but don’t worry if you can’t find it on Hostinger’s website – chat support is only available to Hostinger users who are signed into their account.
If you’re still looking for an answer, you can also browse Hostinger’s Knowledge Base, available tutorials, blog, or Hostinger Academy (a series of videos on YouTube).
Additional Products
Email Hosting
Email hosting is the service that literally operates email servers. It works independently from website hosting, and enables your site to use domain-specific email addresses, such as emma@yourdomain.com. Having domain-based email addresses lends your site credibility, and if you’re running an ecommerce site, it gives customers another reason to trust your business.
Minecraft Hosting
This last one might be the most niche. Hostinger offers Minecraft hosting, which enables users to play the popular video game on a multiplayer server. You can choose from five different plans, all of which include instant setup, a mobile app, and automatic off-site backups.
More Information
- Hostinger Website Builder Review: Hostinger also offers a website builder plan, starting at just $2.99 per month plus 3 months free if you sign up for 48 months.
Hostinger Review: Summary
Hostinger is a pretty basic hosting provider, scoring 3.6 out of 5 overall – it’s not the best host on the market, but we were impressed with its cheap introductory deals and ecommerce features, as well as the additional WordPress tools on its WordPress hosting plans. If you’re after cheap hosting, or an affordable ecommerce alternative to Bluehost, and you don’t mind an average uptime or lack of support options, Hostinger is a safe bet!
If you don’t want to compromise on uptime, or if you know you’re going to need a dedicated plan, then try IONOS – not only does it rank first in our research for uptime, but it also comes second in our dedicated hosting research, just behind Bluehost.
FAQs
However, if you want the best for your WordPress site, we have to be honest and say that Hostinger isn’t the top choice for WordPress hosting. Bluehost is the best WordPress host, so start there if you’re after high-quality WordPress hosting.
As for hosting providers, Hostinger is the winner of the two. WordPress doesn’t have its own hosting service, so you’d need to look at dedicated providers, such as Hostinger, to host your website.
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