Hostinger review.
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Price is often a factor when it comes to choosing web hosting. However, you may be tempted to overlook a poor feature set in order to obtain something within your budget. Don’t settle for the cheapest offer without looking at what’s inside the package. Doing some research beforehand is paramount. Our Hostinger review will take a look at this budget-maximizing option, and offer the information you’ll need to make an informed decision.

In just over a decade, Hostinger has grown from a small web host to one used by millions of people, which is due in part to its WordPress specific plans. On top of that, Hostinger publicly displays its server status, and its uptimes are consistently solid.

It’s no wonder this is an appealing option to so many new website owners.

In this Hostinger review, we’ll look at key elements, such as features and performance, to help you decide whether this host is worth your time and money. Let’s get started!

Hosting options and features ⚙️

Hostinger

To start with, Hostinger offers a range of hosting plans that cater to a wide variety of needs and user types. Let us explore the most popular use cases below.

Hosting options overview

As mentioned, Hostinger supports a multitude of hosting types:

  • Web hosting
  • Cloud hosting
  • VPS hosting
  • Managed WordPress hosting
  • Ecommerce hosting
  • …and more

In practice, although some of these are categorized separately, this is mainly for search engine and user navigation purposes so that people looking for different types of hosting will be able to find what they need on the Hostinger website.

For example, all of Hostinger’s web hosting plans also come with certain managed WordPress hosting features. Therefore, their web hosting is also de facto their managed WordPress hosting. If you’re planning on using a different CMS (e.g., Joomla, etc) then you might not care about those WordPress features, but they are there for those who do want them.

Similarly, Hostinger’s ecommerce hosting plans are their cloud hosting plans, while their cyberpanel plans are their VPS plans.

Overall, the main division is split between web hosting, cloud hosting, and VPS hosting, with many (but not all) of the other types being repackaged with a different wrapper, but in reality falling under one of those three categories.

Since most people reading this Hostinger review are going to be interested in either their general web hosting options or their WordPress offerings, we are going to mainly focus on those.

Hostinger web hosting features

When reviewing Hostinger’s web hosting plans, it’s evident that even the absolute cheapest entry-level option – dubbed “Premium” – will give you a very attractive setup. It includes the following:

  • Support for up to 100 websites
  • 100 GB storage
  • Automatic weekly backups
  • Free, unlimited lifetime SSL certificates
  • Unlimited bandwidth
  • Free email (create up to 100 unique email addresses)
  • Free domain name registration in your first year
  • Free WHOIS domain privacy protection

It bears repeating that the above are the minimum features you can expect from Hostinger’s base hosting plan. Going even one level up from that to the Business plan will already double your storage capacity to 200 GB and bump your automatic backups from weekly to daily (among other enhancements).

What about for WordPress users?

We’re glad you asked. WordPress users are in good hands with Hostinger, and that applies equally to casual WordPress aficionados, WordPress power users, and WooCommerce business moguls. Let’s review Hostinger for those scenarios next.

Hostinger review of features for casual WordPress users

If you’re a casual WordPress user then you will do just fine with Hostinger’s entry-level Premium hosting plan. It offers more than enough support for any beginner-to-intermediate WordPress blog or website.

We already reviewed the main features available in that plan, but as was stated, that was only scraping the tip of the host-berg. Beyond those, you’ll also get these other WordPress-specific features:

  • Free one-click WordPress Installation
  • LiteSpeed acceleration for WordPress (LSCWP)
  • WordPress multisite support
  • WP-CLI and SSH
  • WordPress auto-updates
  • Vulnerabilities scanner for WordPress

If you want to unlock even more WordPress goodness, then go for the Business plan, which is perfect for power users.

Hostinger review of features for advanced WordPress users

Hostinger managed WordPress hosting plans landing page.

By upgrading from the entry-level Premium plan to the Business plan, you’ll get additional WordPress features such as:

  • A staging tool that will allow you to test changes or updates in a testing environment before pushing them out to your live website.
  • Object caching, which is a process that stores database query results in order to quickly load them the next time they are requested. In short, it makes your site load faster for your visitors.
  • On-demand backup in case daily backups aren’t enough for you.
  • AI tools to accelerate your web design process.

💰 Oh, and did we mention that if you use our special link that you’ll get an even lower price than the already low price that Hostinger offers?

Hostinger review for WooCommerce users

Hostinger plans for WooCommerce users.

WooCommerce functionality with Hostinger can be unlocked in several ways.

One approach is to sign up for the Business hosting plan, which is the one we just discussed above. That plan will let you sell up to 100 products, and comes with a single language storefront, a single payment gateway, simple shipping calculation logic, and standard product types. It’s perfectly fine for a small online shop.

However, if you’re running a bigger ecommerce setup or a multi-lingual store, then you’ll want to spring for at least the Cloud Startup plan. That option will immediately upgrade your store to supporting up to 500 products, along with multilingual capability, multiple payment gateways, and advanced shipping calculation logic. You’ll also unlock the ability to sell special product types such as bookings, subscriptions, and memberships.

Either of those plans will get the job done, but Hostinger also has three WooCommerce plans that you can use if you want a truly WooCommerce-specific solution.

The base level plan is called Woo Starter and supports the following:

  • Up to 10 products in your store
  • Up to 100 websites
  • 100 GB SSD storage
  • Unlimited bandwidth
  • 1 GB RAM
  • 1 CPU core
  • Free email
  • Unlimited free SSL
  • Free domain name in your first year
  • Weekly backups
  • Free website migration

The two higher level plans are called Woo Premium and Woo Business, and those support stores with up to 500 products and up to 1,000 products, respectively.

How do we know this?

Because we asked Hostinger’s customer support team via chat:

Speaking of Hostinger customer support, let’s review that next.

Customer support ☎️💬

For many users, one of the most important features after price is support. While you’re setting up your website using one of Hostinger’s hosting plans, you’re bound to have some questions. Having a direct line to answer your specific inquiries is always appreciated.

The good news is that Hostinger’s support team is available 24/7 in multiple languages via chat:

The Hostinger support contact page.

As you saw, we contacted them to get more information about their WooCommerce plans. This was both so we could provide those details to you in the previous section, but also to be able to review Hostinger chat support for ourselves.

The initial interaction was with an AI chatbot, but this wasn’t an issue. Hostinger was very transparent about it. As soon as the chatbot realized that it wasn’t able to answer our question – which was almost immediately – it disclosed that it was a robot and that it was passing our inquiry onward to a human.

The human joined the conversation about two or three minutes later. We asked our WooCommerce plans question to which we were told that we’d need to wait about 15 minutes for an answer. We waited patiently. After the 15 minutes passed, the support rep checked in to notify us that she was still working on getting the answer. Finally, after another couple of minutes, she came back with the information.

Reviewing Hostinger customer chat support response time and quality.

All in all, from finding the chat page, initiating the conversation and getting a response, the entire interaction took about 20 minutes – maybe slightly longer. It wasn’t lightning fast, but it also didn’t feel like you were stuck on hold in an abyss. Plus the rep was very friendly and helpful. Overall, it was a great interaction.

Performance 📈

Above all else, the sign of a quality web host is how well its servers perform. After all, having a fast website is crucial for providing a positive user experience (UX) to your visitors, and keeping your bounce rate low. Fortunately, Hostinger offers the following performance-specific features:

  • Solid State Drive (SSD) hardware with the entry-level Premium plan and all WooCommerce plans
  • NVMe hardware with most higher level plans
  • 99.9% uptime guarantee
  • Custom-built cache manager

Hostinger’s uptime

Even better, unlike many other hosting providers, Hostinger offers public information on the performance of its servers. This includes uptime data and incident data for the previous 90 days:

The Hostinger system status page.

Server uptime depicts the amount of time a server is fully-functional and online. In general, you want to be as close to 100% as possible, as even .1% downtime means ~45 minutes of downtime per month.

Hostinger’s uptime can sometimes – though not always – be a little shaky, which is one of the tradeoffs you’ll make for its cheap prices. We monitor Hostinger’s uptime ourselves (along with over a dozen other hosting companies) and update it monthly across our articles. You can see the most recent three months below:

Hostinger uptime 📶
December 2023January 2024February 2024
100.00% ⭐100.00% ⭐99.99%

Hostinger’s page speed

Of course, it’s also helpful to get a real-world take on performance. For that, we use Pingdom to test page speeds. Pingdom is an effective and popular tool for this, and a basic test is free. Just like with the uptime tests, we also conduct monthly speed tests to review Hostinger performance. You can see the most recent results below:

Hostinger loading times 🔃
East Coast USA: 1.16sWest Coast USA: 1.76s
Central USA: 1.61sLondon, UK: 0.35s ⭐
Paris, France: 0.51s ⭐Mumbai, India: 1.71s

These results are updated on a monthly basis via a shortcode mechanism so you can be sure that you’re always looking at the latest performance data.

In case you’re curious as to how we do these tests or if you want to replicate them yourself, the process is as follows:

  • First, we set up a simple website on Hostinger’s servers, loaded with the default theme.
  • We then add a smattering of plugins covering various essential features, and also the WordPress Theme Unit Test Data.
  • Finally, we input our site’s URL into Pingdom and run the test from several different locations.

It’s considered a best practice to keep your page loading times under two seconds. Anything over that can have a negative impact on your bounce rate (how many visitors leave after viewing only one page).

Now, depending on when you’re reading this, the Hostinger data may or may not show sub-two-second loading times. Since we run the test every month, there’s no way to write a definitive 100% conclusion here because as the popular saying goes: results may vary.

Having said that, and having been at this for quite a number of years now, we can say that based on our experience, Hostinger typically has good loading times and frequently loads below the two-second mark. If that happens to not be the case right at this moment that you’re reading this, you can either wait until next month, or take our word for it and sign up for one of their hosting plans.

However, if you’re still not fully convinced, let’s review Hostinger pricing next. It’s probably lower than you’d expect for the features you’ll be getting.

Hostinger’s pricing 💸

Finally, we come to the pricing section of our Hostinger review. For many, this will be one of the most important factors when considering a web host. After all, awesome hosting won’t do you much good if it breaks your budget.

With that in mind, Hostinger has some surprisingly low pricing plans for the services it offers. For example, their lowest possible price starts at just $2.69 per month with promotional pricing (which only applies to your first billing cycle).

If you’re interested in the entry-level WooCommerce plan, then you’ll need to shell out $3.59 per month (paid up front for four years) and $7.99 per month when you renew. Granted, four years is a long commitment, but you could always test out the service with their month-to-month payment option ($12.99) and if you like it, then you could upgrade to the four-year plan afterwards.

Both the regular web hosting and WooCommerce plans come with a free domain name in your first year to go along with your hosting. In addition, higher-tier plans offer free daily backups and unlock an array of other advanced features – many of which we discussed earlier in this Hostinger review.

Along with the cheap hosting plans for beginners and WooCommerce users, Hostinger also provides advanced hosting options including cloud hosting (from $9.99), VPS hosting (from $4.49), email hosting (from $1.59), and Minecraft server hosting (from $5.99).

All in all, Hostinger is a very affordable option. This is especially true when you consider its server speeds. For newbies, this is a great place to start, and you can always look at upgrading your plan as your site grows.

Overall pros and cons 👍👎

To wrap up our Hostinger review, let’s quickly summarize its pros and cons. After all, it’s important to consider the whole picture before committing to a web host.

Pros

Free domain name and one-click WordPress installation

Affordable web hosting and managed WordPress hosting plans

Good performance results for the US and the UK in particular

Publicly-displayed server status

Cons

Moderate response times for support

Modest performance results for locations outside of the US and UK

Uptime can sometimes be a little unreliable

Conclusion 🧐

Overall, Hostinger is a strong choice for both experienced WordPress developers and newbies. It offers fast speeds and knowledgeable customer support. However, while its performance is solid overall, you may experience performance blips now and again on heavy-traffic sites.

If you’re still unsure and are considering other options, then take a look at some of our other past hosting reviews:

Do you have any questions about our Hostinger review that will help you make a decision? Ask away in the comments section below!

Hostinger

3.8 out of 5

Hostinger is a web hosting provider that offers affordable hosting solutions for individuals and small businesses, with a range of hosting options, including shared, cloud, and VPS hosting. It offers 24/7 customer support in over 20 languages and a user-friendly control panel for managing sites and servers.

User Rating
3.7 out of 5
Reliability
3.8 out of 5
Performance
4.1 out of 5

Pros

Free domain

One-click installation

Public server status

Cons

Slow response times outside the US/UK

Uptime is a little shaky

Free guide

4 Essential Steps to Speed Up
Your WordPress Website

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Hostinger Review
Our rating: 3.9/5
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Balogh
February 26, 2024 1:23 pm

I will recommend not to go with this cheap, sh%t#y hosting company, worse customer support, expensive plans compares to other, server speed is extra slow compared to other hosting providers.
Even you have the services in your cPanel/hPanel, you cant use it and if you complain to the customer support, they ask you to wait and no response and no solution.
In short, if you want to waste your money go for it, otherwise choose some other good hosting company.

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