Founded in 2004, Hostinger is an experienced Lithuanian web hosting (opens in new tab) provider with 1,000+ employees and more than a million subscribers around the world.
Datanyze (opens in new tab)‘ Web Hosting Market Share report ranks Hostinger in 36th place, used by around 71,000 companies, for 0.5% of the hosting market. Hostinger isn’t just building its own service, though: it has developed and launched new brands and products, including web host Hosting24 (opens in new tab) and the free 000webhost (opens in new tab).
In this review, we test Hostinger by creating a functioning WordPress website and signing up to Hostinger’s Premium shared plan. We then monitor our site’s performance, including speed and uptime and have a go using all the features available in the plan. We also go as far as utilizing Hostinger’s customer support with a real issue we came across during our test.
What sort of hosting plans does Hostinger offer?
Hostinger (opens in new tab) offers cheap shared hosting (opens in new tab) for small to medium low-traffic sites. VPS hosting (opens in new tab) and cloud hosting (opens in new tab) give your website more resources for extra speed, making them suitable for more demanding, business-critical sites. (How demanding? A good VPS can run a WordPress site with hundreds of thousands of visitors a month.)
Hostinger doesn’t have any dedicated server (opens in new tab) products, which is bad news if you’re looking for the maximum performance and reliability.
But by way of compensation for at least some users, Hostinger is one of the few big hosting names to offer pre-configured Minecraft server hosting (opens in new tab) from under $10 a month.
Which plan is right for you? Next, we’ll explore Hostinger’s shared, VPS and WordPress hosting (opens in new tab) range, break down what they offer, what they don’t, and help identify the best choices for you.
Hostinger shared hosting
Shared hosting works just as the name suggests: your site is stored on a web server along with many others, and everyone shares the server costs and resources. It’s cheap and relatively easy to use, and although this is the slowest hosting type, shared plans may still be able to handle sites with tens of thousands of visitors a month.
Hostinger’s shared hosting starts with the Single plan. It’s cheap at $1.99 a month over four years ($3.99 on renewal), and has some welcome features: free SSL (opens in new tab), easy WordPress installation and management. But it also has many limits: support for one website, no free domain, 50GB storage, a single email account, 100GB bandwidth, backups are weekly only. If you know exactly what you need, and this works, great; otherwise, it’s best ignored.
The Premium plan is still cheap at $2.99 a month initially ($6.99 on renewal), but lifts or removes all those limits: there’s support for 100 websites, a free domain, 100GB storage, 100 email addresses and unlimited bandwidth. Backups are still only weekly, which is a significant weakness.
The top-of-the-range Business plan adds the much-needed daily backups, though, and throws in Cloudflare’s CDN (opens in new tab) (Content Delivery Network) for maximum speeds. It’s priced from $4.99 a month for the first four years, $8.99 on renewal.
These are feature-packed products that performed very well in our speed tests, and are great value for what you’re getting. The Business plan is our pick of the range. It’s more capable than products twice the price from some other hosts, and Hostinger suggests it can handle sites of up to approximately 100,000 visitors a month.
Also consider HostGator, whose feature-packed shared hosting is great value, speedy in testing, and has some surprising bonus features for demanding users (free SSL upgrade and a dedicated IP in the business plan).
Hostinger WordPress hosting
WordPress is the world’s favorite website creator, a versatile platform which works for everyone from hosting newbies building a tiny family site, to international corporations with the most business-critical web projects.
Hostinger has strong WordPress support across most of its ranges, ensuring there’s a solution for just about everyone.
The Single WordPress plan is extremely basic (supports one website, a single email address, no free domain, few resources, reduced speeds.) But it has easy WordPress installation, weekly backups, and (Hostinger claims) can handle up to 10,000 visitors a month. The plan’s real appeal is its price, though, at only $1.99 a month over four years, $3.99 on renewal. It could work as a cheap way to learn WordPress, assuming you’re only building the most basic of sites.
The Business WordPress plan is our pick of the range. It’s significantly more expensive at $6.99 a month over four years, $16.99 on renewal. But it has far more capable specs – 100 websites, 100 email addresses, free domains, handles up to 100k visitors a month – and adds valuable extras including staging (a valuable website testing feature) and Cloudflare CDN (opens in new tab) (a major speedup plus). This is a capable plan with the power to cope with more demanding personal and small to medium business sites.
If your needs are even greater – you’ve several business-critical sites, or maybe a busy web store where speed is absolutely vital – then Hostinger’s ‘Hosting for Agencies’ range might help. It has all the same WordPress features, but makes it easier to manage and control access to multiple sites, and boosts performance by giving you far more server resources.
The Agency Pro plan is our pick of the range: it gives you twice the resources of the Business WordPress plan, but it’s still very affordable at $14.99 a month over four years ($49.99 on renewal).
Consider IONOS, too. Its Business WordPress plan has free SSL, a free domain and daily backups, but it’s just $0.50 a month for the first year, ideal if you’re looking to learn WordPress and see if it’s right for you.
Hostinger VPS hosting
Signing up for VPS (Virtual Private Server) hosting gets you a private area in a web server with your own system resources. This automatically gives any VPS a speed advantage over shared hosting, and the more resources your plan includes (CPU time, RAM, storage space) the faster it’s likely to be. If your site has 100k visitors a month or more, or it’s especially demanding and
Hostinger offers eight VPS plans, giving you plenty of choice. They start cheap at only $3.49 a month over four years ($6.99 on renewal) for an extremely basic 1 CPU core, 1GB RAM and 20GB storage VPS, but they ramp up from there, and the top-of-the-range VPS plan offers 8 cores, 16GB RAM and 250GB storage for $77.99 a month over four years ($131.99 on renewal).
The range is fair value, but it won’t work for everyone. One reason Hostinger’s prices are low is that their VPS plans are unmanaged (opens in new tab). That means Hostinger doesn’t monitor the operating system, set up the firewall, install security patches or do anything similar: you’re left to manage the server’s system software yourself. That’s manageable for experts, and if you know what you’re doing, the extra control can even be an advantage. But it’s a potentially complicated hassle for everybody else.
There are some technical limitations, too. Hostinger’s VPS plans get a 100Mbps connection to the outside world, for instance, which sounds good, but it’s less than many top providers, and could get swamped if you’re running busy sites with many simultaneous visitors.
If low prices are a must, consider IONOS. Its most basic VPS starts at $2 billed monthly, even a 6 core, 12GB RAM system is only $35 a month billed annually ($18 for the first six months), and all plans include a 400Mbps network connection.
But if it’s choice you’re after, look at Hostwinds (opens in new tab). It has cheap unmanaged VPS from $4.99 billed monthly, but there’s a managed VPS range (where Hostwinds does all the low-level server management for you) starting at only $8.24 a month. All plans are more configurable, there’s Windows hosting if you need it, more powerful systems at the top of the range, and 1Gbps network speeds keep performance high even at peak times.
Does Hostinger have a website builder?
If you don’t have a website yet, and WordPress seems a little intimidating, a website builder may be the easiest way to get started. Typically, they’ll have a gallery of pre-built website designs you can use to get started. Adding pictures, videos, maps and other page elements is as easy as dragging and dropping, and customizing the content with your own text and photos works much like any editor.
Hostinger has its own website builder, which comes with unmetered traffic, unlimited free SSL certificates, web hosting, up to 100 websites, free domain, free email, ecommerce features, plus more.
We found it to be a simple and straightforward tool that we could use right away. No need to spend an age scrolling through feature lists, comparing plans or wondering what you can afford: just hand over your email address to create an account and you can start building right away.
The editor is relatively basic, but the online shop’s what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) editor will give you tools to create detailed descriptions with HTML titles.
Hostinger website builder (opens in new tab) costs $2.79 per month and is a decent website builder for personal use and small sites. There’s not enough power here for business applications, and even if your site took off and became a real success, there’s no upgrade path to help you cope with the extra demand.
HostGator’s Gator website builder (opens in new tab) is worth considering as a value alternative. It’s fractionally more expensive, but has more features, and supports an unlimited web store for physical and digital products. If features are more important than price, Wix (opens in new tab) has more templates, more features, more power in every area, and is an absolute must for your shortlist.
Can you build a web store with Hostinger?
Hostinger doesn’t have a specialist ecommerce website builder (opens in new tab) plan like we see with many providers, but there are a couple of routes you can take to begin selling online.
The simplest option, as we’ve discussed above, is to sign up with Hostinger’s website builder service. With Hostinger Website Builder, users can add up to 500 products to their online store and over 20 popular payments are currently supported. It could be enough to run a simple home business.
If you need something more capable, the alternative is to sign up with one of Hostinger’s other hosting plans, then install and use a specialist ecommerce platform (opens in new tab). WooCommerce is probably the best-known option. It’s a hugely capable WordPress plugin, which Hostinger can automatically install on any hosting plan, and includes all the product cataloging, inventory managing, payment taking and worldwide shipping integrations you need.
If you’re happy with Hostinger’s shared or VPS hosting, and you’re willing to take the time to learn about WooCommerce (opens in new tab) and web stores in general, this could be a cost-effective solution.
But if you’d like hosting with specific web store features, and more help in getting your project online, it’s worth considering some alternatives. Bluehost has an excellent WooCommerce hosting plan with payment processing and a stack of essential sales and marketing tools. IONOS has even more options, including a simple online store builder, a WooCommerce plan, and hosting for a bunch of other ecommerce platforms: Magento (opens in new tab), PrestaShop (opens in new tab), OpenCart and more.
Hostinger’s performance
We rounded off 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 recorded 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 clearly on the slow side when it comes to response times.
Page load times matter too, though, so we used Dotcom Tools’ Website Speed Test (opens in new tab) to measure our site performance from 16 locations around the US and Europe. This time the results were much better at 878ms, putting it in the top 25% of providers.
A mixed story, then, but keep in mind these are comparisons based on the cheapest shared hosting plan from each test provider. Some of those plans cost 5x to 10x the $1.39 you could pay with Hostinger, so on balance we think the company did reasonably well.
How fast is Hostinger?
Our web host performance tests start by measuring uptime, the proportion of time your website remains accessible to visitors. We set up a test WordPress site on a Hostinger shared hosting package, then used Uptime.com to access it every five minutes for 14 days and report the results.
Hostinger achieved 99.98% uptime, which was a little disappointing (because we expected a perfect performance over such a short test) though still very acceptable overall (because it’s still significantly better than the 99.9% uptime guarantee offered by most web hosts).
We measure website load speeds with help from GTmetrix, which accesses a test page and reports how long its main content takes to load (a value known technically as Largest Contentful Paint, or LCP). A low LCP means your website is likely to pop up onto the screen more quickly, keeping visitors happy.
Hostinger scored here with a speedy LCP of 0.607 seconds, the second fastest result in our last 15 tests, just behind HostGator (opens in new tab). It’s not significantly ahead of the competition – most providers have an LCP in the 0.60 to 0.80 area – but it suggests Hostinger isn’t cutting corners to hit its low shared hosting prices. It really can compete with the likes of Bluehost (opens in new tab) and HostGator.
One-off load speed checks are important, but we also like to see how a site performs when it’s busy. To do this, we use the stress-testing service k6 to unleash 20 virtual users on our site and measure what happens.
Hostinger’s results showed some drops in performance at peak load, but that’s what we would expect for a shared hosting package. Overall, it was able to handle 15 requests per second throughout the test, a typical result for most providers.
These are broadly positive results, and show Hostinger performs better than most budget hosts. But keep in mind that our figures are based on testing a shared plan, and if you’re opting for VPS, dedicated hosting or any other product, your experience may be very different.
How easy is Hostinger to use?
Hostinger doesn’t offer cPanel (opens in new tab) to its shared hosting users, opting to use its custom hPanel platform, instead. Custom control panels make us wary, probably because most of them are underpowered in the extreme, but hPanel is a rare exception.
It looks similar to cPanel, for instance, with server details (location, IP address) in a sidebar, and colorful icons representing individual features, organized into sensibly-named groups: Domains, Emails, Files, WordPress and so on.
Most functions are accessible to even novice users. Create an email address, for instance, and you’re only asked for the address and a password. But a sidebar adds more advanced tools, from importing existing emails, to setting up SPF and DKIM records (to authenticate emails and protect against phishing) in just a few clicks.
Custom control panels still aren’t good news for hosting experts, as all their cPanel experience doesn’t count for much; they’re left to browse the menus and options, much like anybody else.
Overall, though, hPanel offers a good mix of power and ease of use, and the platform provides everything you need to get your site up and running quickly.
How good is Hostinger’s support?
Unusually for a top hosting provider, Hostinger doesn’t have telephone support. There’s 24/7 live chat (opens in new tab), though, and email or ticket support if you prefer.
We opened a ticket asking how we could install WordPress on a subdomain. That’s not a complicated technical issue, but it’s more involved than a simple product question, and gave us a better chance of getting an interesting response.
The reply arrived only 17 minutes later, just about as speedy as we could expect for ticket support. (Who needs live chat, anyway?)
The text used more jargon than we’d like, but was accurate and included all the detail we needed to figure out a solution.
Live chat is also available whenever you need it. We never waited more than a couple of minutes for a response, and agents were just as quick at identifying our issues and coming up with relevant and useful advice.
A web knowledgebase is on hand if you prefer the DIY approach. We’d recommend ignoring the Search box (it does a poor job of finding the best articles), and just browse the categories further down the page. There are hundreds of articles arranged into topics such as hPanel, cPanel, DNS, SSL Certificates and more.
These articles are often short, and not always organized or presented as you’d expect. The site does have plenty of useful advice on carrying out specific tasks, though, even when they’re not about Hostinger’s own services.
If your domain is managed by another registrar, for instance, most hosting providers don’t give you any real advice on how to modify DNS records. But Hostinger has separate articles for managing DNS (opens in new tab) at Bluehost, GoDaddy, IONOS, Namecheap (opens in new tab), HostGator, SiteGround, WordPress.com, DreamHost’s, and many more: 30+ providers in total.
There’s clearly work to do here, but Hostinger scores well in most areas, and overall delivers a far better quality of support than most budget providers.
Final verdict: Is Hostinger right for you?
Even Hostinger’s cheapest shared hosting plan lets you create a professional email address, and you can create multiple email addresses with the more expensive plans. This simple offering makes Hostinger stand out, and is quite useful.
Hostinger is a great option for beginners simply because the service is straightforward to use and comes with a lot of additional help and support. Its low pricing is also extremely attractive and because Hostinger doesn’t hold back on features and add-ons including in each package, it’s definitely value for money in our opinion.
As we mentioned above, we wouldn’t recommend its shared hosting plans for extremely busy websites but Hostinger performed adequately during our test so you may not need to completely rule them out if you’re looking for an affordable option.
Hostinger FAQs
What payment types does Hostinger support?
Hostinger accepts payment via credit card, PayPal, Google Pay, Alipay and Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies via CoinGate.
Does Hostinger offer refunds?
Hostinger has a 30-day money-back guarantee covering its hosting plans and some other products. These include SSL certificates, often excluded by other hosts.
It’s good to see Hostinger’s policy covers renewal fees as well as your original purchase, something else we don’t see with all hosts.
There’s a final bonus in a limited four day warranty for some domain registrations and domain name transfers (see the official Refund Policy for the list.) Sure, four days isn’t long, but most hosts don’t offer any domain-related refunds at all.
Does Hostinger have an uptime guarantee?
Hostinger has an uptime guarantee of 99.9% per month, similar to many other budget hosts.
If Hostinger doesn’t hit that target, you can contact the company and request a credit of 5% of your monthly hosting fee.
Capping your compensation at 5% is one of the least generous guarantees around. Other hosts typically give you much more. For example, ScalaHosting (opens in new tab) promises to credit users with a free month of hosting if its uptime drops below 1% (that’s around seven hours and 18 minutes of downtime.)
Where are Hostinger’s data centers?
Hostinger has data centers in the USA, UK, Netherlands, Lithuania, Singapore, India and Brazil. That’s far more than most hosts, and they’re also more widely spread (many hosts barely step outside of the USA and Europe.)
The advantage of having a lot of data centers is that more users can choose to host sites close to their audience, for the best possible performance.
There’s just one potential catch: some plans don’t support all the data centers. The Shared, Cloud and WordPress plans can be hosted in all seven, but Hostinger’s Linux VPS plans can’t be hosted in Brazil or India.
Check the small print of individual plans to find out more, or take a look at Hostinger’s ‘Where are your servers located? (opens in new tab)‘ support document.
What is my Hostinger IP address?
Log into Hostinger’s hPanel (opens in new tab).
Find your plan in the Hosting list, and click its’ Manage button to the right.
The left-hand sidebar displays your hosting plan, server location and IP address.
What are Hostinger’s nameservers?
Before using an existing domain with your web hosting, it may be necessary to point the domain to Hostinger’s nameservers.
The hPanel, Shared and Cloud plans use the nameservers ns1.dns-parking.com and ns2.dns-parking.com.
The cPanel plans use the nameservers cdns1.main-hosting.eu and cdns2.main-hosting.eu.
How do I cancel a Hostinger product?
Log into Hostinger’s hPanel.
Click Hosting in the menu at the top of the screen, then click Manage.
Scroll down and click Deactivate Account.
Choose whether to cancel your hosting account immediately, or when your subscription expires, and click Continue to complete the cancellation process.
