Hostinger, based in Lithuania, is one of the largest hosting providers, with over 29 million daily users. Its performance and commitment to customer service are part of the reason for its continued success.
For its WordPress sites, the company claims an average response time of 143 milliseconds, and a response time of 50 milliseconds if you need assistance. As admirable as these claims are, our experience on the Single Shared Hosting plan was quite different, and more in line with shared plans from other hosting providers like HostGator, with an average speed of closer to 800ms.
Even so, if you buy a year’s worth of Hostinger, you’ll get benefits like an SSL certificate and Cloudflare protection. In addition to providing an email account, Hostinger’s Cloudflare protection distinguishes it from most of its competitors, who reserve both of these features for their more expensive plans.
Apart from 24/7 chat support, you’ll most likely find answers to your questions in Hostinger’s Help Center, which contains hundreds of articles on topics like site migration, maintenance, performance, working with cPanel or Hostinger’s own hPanel, and more.
Even the cheapest shared plan includes managed WordPress, which handles updates, as well as LiteSpeed Cache for WordPress, which is another feature that would appeal to new and intermediate WordPress users looking to create a professional-looking site.
Pricing
Hostinger provides shared hosting, VPS hosting, cloud hosting, and even specialized hosting solutions such as WordPress hosting, cPanel hosting, and so on. When selecting a hosting solution, you must carefully consider the package’s price and features in relation to your current requirements. This is so you don’t waste money on a plan that supports 25,000 monthly visitors and allows you to deploy multiple websites when all you need is a single website with around 8,000 monthly visitors.
If you sign up for a four-year subscription, you can get started with the Single Shared hosting plan for as little as $1.39 per month. When you consider that the plan includes weekly backups and 30GB of storage space, it’s an absolute steal.
The standard practice among hosting providers is to charge a lower onboarding fee for longer periods of time. If you choose a 24-month subscription, for example, the same plan costs $1.99 per month. Keep in mind that this is only an introductory offer; renewal prices are higher and vary depending on the length of time you choose.
Hostinger does not offer dedicated hosting, which is designed for large businesses with thousands of visitors who require a lot of resources. Choose one of the eight VPS plans available as your next best option. The most basic plan costs $3.95 per month for a four-year subscription and comes with a single CPU core, 1GB RAM, 20GB SSD storage, 1TB bandwidth, full root access, and other features. If you want more resources, the costs will rise.
Hostinger’s Cloud Lite Hosting plan is $1.79 per month for the first three months, and its Premium Shared Hosting plan is $1.79 per month for the first 12 months, exclusively for TeheExpertCrew readers.
Cloud hosting at Hostinger starts at $9.99 per month for a four-year subscription and goes up to $18.99 per month.
The plan you choose will be determined by your needs. For example, if you want to host a podcast on your website, you’ll have to choose one of the VPS plans because Hostinger’s shared and cloud hosting plans don’t allow it.
Hostinger, like most other hosting companies, accepts Google Pay and most credit cards. Debit cards as well as regional payment gateways or wallets are not accepted. Although the hosting provider initially refused to accept cryptocurrencies, it has now partnered with CoinGate, a Lithuanian company, and now accepts them as payment. However, Hostinger’s refund policy states that purchases made with cryptocurrencies are non-refundable, potentially negating the 30-day money-back guarantee.
 | Hostinger's Premium shared hosting |
Features
The cheapest shared hosting plan from Hostinger comes with a single CPU core and 768MB of RAM. While the price may appear low, the plan is designed for small businesses or professionals who only require a single email account and expect fewer than 10,000 monthly visitors. At the same time, the 100GB bandwidth allows you to make use of the 30GB SSD storage space to display your portfolio and services, whether you’re a business or a professional.
Hostinger’s shared plans consistently include features that many competitors don’t, including a free email account, weekly backups, two subdomains, and more. You can use sub-domains to set up a blog or create a sister website that will help your site look more professional.
Hostinger uses the Cloud Linux 7 distribution for all shared plans, but unlike HostGator, which publishes a complete list of all installed software and the underlying operating system in its knowledge base, Hostinger does not. For software and version information, your only option is to contact the help desk.
WordPress Hosting
Hostinger’s WordPress hosting outperforms shared plans in a number of ways. Even the most basic Starter plan includes a single WordPress site, one email account, 30GB SSD, free SSL, WordPress Acceleration, and managed auto-updates for $1.99 for the first four years and $3.99 after that.
On the WordPress Starter and Business WordPress plans, upgrading gets you more storage space, support for more sites, and Jetpack Free. Despite the fact that the WordPress Pro plan allows for 300 websites, you’re still restricted in a number of ways.
The higher plans are also significantly more expensive, starting at $2.99, $5.99, or $11.59 per month, so the Starter plan appears to be the best value. Additional features include the ability to manage multiple WordPress sites from a single dashboard, automatic plugin updates, daily backups, and a Google Ads credit with more expensive plans.
Other providers’ managed WordPress plans may be more powerful.
WordPress Pro from IONOS includes advanced features like staging support (make major changes to your WordPress project without affecting the live site).
All of this power, however, comes at a cost. Even the most basic single-site plan on IONOS costs $18 billed monthly, which is roughly six times the price of Hostinger’s Starter WordPress plan (though keep in mind that’s over four years; opt for monthly billing with Hostinger, too, and you’ll pay $7.99). Start with a simple product, such as Hostinger’s shared plans, if you’re new to WordPress or working on a small site. If you think you’ll need it later, upgrade to full managed WordPress.
Servers
Users who require more power can opt for one of Hostinger’s semi-managed VPS plans. These start at $3.95 per month for a basic 1 vCPU, 1GB RAM, 20GB storage, and 1TB bandwidth setup on an annual plan, rising to $8.16 on renewal. Alternatively, for $15.95 for the first four years and $32.76 on renewal, you can get a powerful 4 vCore, 4GB RAM, 80GB storage, and 4TB bandwidth plan.
This is excellent value, far superior to what we see from most providers. For example, Hostwinds’ equivalent 4 vCore 4TB VPS starts at $44.99 and renews for around $50, making it significantly more expensive.
If even the most powerful VPS isn’t powerful enough for you, we normally recommend dedicated hosting plans. But there’s bad news in this case: Hostinger doesn’t have any.
Account setup
While many hosts are obnoxiously vague about the finer points of their packages, Hostinger lays it all out in a lengthy comparison table. You’ll find out here that the basic Single Shared Hosting plan only allows one cron job and doesn’t support SSH access, for example.
Choose a plan, then click Buy to see a list of subscription options (typically monthly billing, as well as one, two, and four-year plans).
The majority of these work as expected: the site’s headline price is for the longest term, and shorter subscriptions cost a little more.
The only significant drawback is the monthly plan, which is frequently so costly that it isn’t even worth considering. For example, the annual Single Shared Hosting plan costs $35.88; the monthly plan costs $9.49 plus a $4.99 setup fee, totaling $14.98, or $33.96 after just three months.
Integration with Cloudflare is also available on all accounts.
PayPal, credit card, Google Pay, and Bitcoin are just a few of the payment methods available. We went with PayPal and handed over our virtual money in the traditional manner. A website link directed us to a simple setup wizard, and we received a welcome email with additional information shortly after.
Creating a site
The setup wizard for Hostinger began by asking if we wanted to register a new domain, transfer an existing domain from another company, or keep an existing domain with the current registrar.
You can also choose where your site is hosted, which is convenient: North America, the United Kingdom, or Europe.
We selected ‘existing domain’ and were given Hostinger’s four name servers, as well as instructions on how to update our domain DNS settings.
The final ‘Start website’ step provided us with five options to assist us in building our website.
Installing WordPress took us to a simple WordPress installation page. All of the default settings were assigned in a sensible manner, and after selecting an admin password, we were able to set up the system with a single click.
The same automated approach is used by Auto Installer to install 157 popular apps, including Joomla, PrestaShop, OpenCart, phpBB, and Drupal. We prefer Softaculous, which is frequently provided by other hosts, but this one is perfectly adequate and will quickly install your chosen apps.
Hostinger’s website builder is Zyro Builder. With around 200 responsive templates, easy drag-and-drop customizations, and options to embed videos, maps, social media widgets, and simple e-commerce features, this covers all the basics.
It’s not for advanced users – there’s no blogging platform, for example – and design is more about minor tweaking of a template than completely new creations. But it’s capable of producing high-quality websites, and there are no obtrusive page-number or site-size limitations to get in the way. (This is unusual for a free website builder on a shared hosting plan.)
You can upload your site using the File Manager, which is a browser-based file manager. This is best for small static sites, but it can also be used to manually install more complex apps, such as custom databases and editing configuration files.
Access Manager is a unique extra tool that allows you to grant others access to your Hostinger account, allowing them to collaborate with you on site creation and management. You could do something similar by sharing your credentials, but this is a lot safer. Everyone has their own username and password, and the people you invite do not have full access to your account. They can, for example, create or edit a website page, but they can’t buy a new product with your stored payment information or change account details like your registered email address by default.
You can skip ahead to Hostinger’s well-designed cPanel-like site manager, where you’ll find tools for organizing domains, subdomains, databases, SSH access, emails, FTP accounts, and more if you don’t want to commit right now. There’s a lot of power here, and hosting newcomers might be a little intimidated at first, but once you start exploring, it all makes sense. Even inexperienced users will be able to navigate the key features within a few minutes.
Related: Bluehost Web Hosting Review
Support
Even experts require assistance from time to time, so a good support system is essential for web hosts.
The service knowledgebase is accessed by clicking ‘Help’ in Hostinger’s Control Panel. This site organizes content into categories (Setup & Install, Account & Billing, Hosting & Website, Privacy & Security, Domains, Emails) and includes a search box to help you find what you’re looking for.
Unfortunately, there isn’t a lot of content displayed right away. Only four or five articles are listed in each of the knowledgebase sections, and even these don’t always cover the most common topics. (The highlighted Emails articles, for example, are mostly about setting up email accounts on various device platforms and have nothing to do with creating or managing email accounts.)
Using Search, on the other hand, gives you access to more articles, which have proven to be more useful. We found information on setting file and folder permissions as well as specific error messages (‘403 forbidden’) by searching for ‘permissions.’ ‘Change PHP version’ brought up the correct cPanel module right away. These articles have basic content, but it’s enough to point users in the right direction.
Hostinger has a comprehensive tutorial section with articles such as ‘How to Make a Website – the All-in-One Guide,’ ‘How to Launch a WordPress Website,’ ‘How to Back Up Your Emails,’ and more. These appear to be well-written and genuinely helpful, but they are nowhere to be found using the knowledgebase search box. For example, Hostinger has a lengthy tutorial titled ’30 WordPress SEO Tips,’ but it won’t appear if you type ’30 WordPress SEO Tips’ into the Help page’s Search box. Return to the control panel, click the Tutorials link, and search there once more.
If you can’t find what you’re looking for, support is available via live chat and a ticketing system 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. We asked a question via live chat, and within a few minutes, a helpful agent began providing a helpful response.
Performance
We finished the review by using Uptime.com to track response times and downtime on our test website from multiple locations around the world.
Despite the fact that our test site was hosted on Hostinger’s most basic shared hosting plan, it maintained a solid 100% uptime record over the course of 10 weeks of monitoring.
Over the last seven days of testing, Uptime.com recorded a response time range of 171ms to 1.73s, with an average of 382ms. Hostinger’s starter shared hosting plans typically manage 200-400ms response times, with an average peak of 700-800ms, so response times are clearly on the slow side.
However, page load times are important, so we used Dotcom Tools’ Website Speed Test to assess our site’s performance from 16 different locations across the United States and Europe. The results were much better this time, at 878ms, putting it in the top 25% of providers.
The results are mixed, but keep in mind that these are comparisons based on each test provider’s cheapest shared hosting plan. Some of those plans cost 5x to 10x as much as Hostinger’s $1.39, so we think the company did reasonably well overall.
The final word
The starter accounts from Hostinger have some significant limitations, but they’ll still work for some people, and the company’s other products offer a lot of features and powerful cPanel-like site management for a very reasonable price.
