Hostinger Review
What’s the scoop on one of the least expensive hosting providers out of Europe? Is Hostinger any good? Yes, it is.
The brand started as 000webhost.com in 2007 and evolved into the Hostinger brand in 2011.
A Quick Evaluation
It won’t mean anything if your service is free, unlimited, or cheap when your site can’t remain online. With Hostinger, you’ll receive fantastic support, strong uptimes, and fast speeds, among other advantages.
Hostinger exceeded a user base of 10 million people by May 2014. By January 2017, it had more than 29 million users! That’s pretty good for just a decade of growth. The company is proud of tons of free and unlimited features. That said, many questions arise about how free the perks actually are.
If you want to know how good or not so good Hostinger is, keep reading. We’ll offer some pros and cons of this popular web host.
Hosting and General Info Overview
You likely won’t get a better web host for such a low price as with Hostinger. The average speed you’ll enjoy is about 350 ms, averaged out from February 2018 through January 2020. During the same time period, Hostinger held a 99.95% uptime rate.
It provides support through 24/7 live chat. WordPress, PrestaShop, Drupal, Joomla, and OpenCart are the apps you’ll enjoy using. Their hosting plans are offered as VPS, Cloud, or Shared. Features you will find are 10GB of storage, an email account, 100 GB of bandwidth, and a website builder. You will get a single free site transfer, as well. New clients currently start at just .99 cents a month with a renewal price of $2.15 a month.
Advantages of Using Hostinger
We already mentioned that it’s not really useful to have a low-cost hosting service if you can’t get or stay online, but that is not an issue with Hostinger. Hostinger offers fantastic support, fast speeds, strong uptime, and so much more.
99.95 % Good Uptime
Uptime is the primary consideration in a web host. Hostinger is a strong performer in this area, with only a few drops in uptime. Overall, their websites are kept up and running.
Quick Load Times
Most website users base their experience on how fast a page loads when they visit the site. If you’re stuck waiting on a page to load, you’re likely going to surf on as everyone does. According to Neil Patel, 40% of people will jump to a different site if it takes more than three seconds for a page to load.
Hostinger has servers in Europe, Asia, and the United States, something which contributes to its quick load times. Reportedly, each has a 1,000 Mbps connection, ensuring load times are stable.
Money-back Guarantee for 30 Days
You have plenty of payment options with Hostinger, such as PayPal, Mastercard, Visa, Discover, JCB, American Express, Maestro, and Bitcoin. You can also utilize its 30-day money-back guarantee. This policy lets you try Hostinger’s services, and if it doesn’t go to your liking, get your money back and try a different web host.
Note that not all products can be refunded, and some have specific terms for refunds. Be sure to read Hostinger’s refund policy. You will read more about that in the cons section.
Customer Support Is Multilingual
Customer support is one of the pillars of a good web host. When your site is down, you want to speak with a real person as fast as possible. Loss of your site means a loss of sales. Hostinger excels in offering support. They offer live chat in multiple languages with Intercom integration for main support.
The only caveat to keep in mind is that you have to be logged into Hostinger to access live chat. We talk about that in our cons section. It would be more beneficial to offer live chat for everyone, so this is something worth considering. Even so, accessing it is easy once logged in as there will be a small icon at the right bottom page corner.
Chat support agents connected with us in under a minute and answered our question just as quickly.
Supplemental Support Via Knowledge Base
There is an extensive knowledge base from Hostinger, including comprehensive articles, guides, and tons of information for you to get questions answered. There are tutorials for various topics, from SEO to website building, including images and gifs.
Select between three main categories:
- Domains
- Website
- General
From there, you can browse the various resources.
Website Builder
You can opt for Hostinger’s free website builder with any of its plans. Many popular builders are better, but they would cost you, giving Hostinger’s offering an advantage. Hostinger also provides a large selection of templates to choose from on its builder. Once a template is selected, you can customize everything with your website builder from Hostinger.
Free Domain Names
With the Business and Premium web hosting plans, you also get free domain names in addition to your free website builder. Extra domains will come at a small fee.
Simple to Use Interface
Hostinger’s interface is modern, easy-to-use, and everything can be found in simple locations. You can easily update billing details, track logins, monitor emails, and manage domains from your dashboard.
The control panel is not traditional, instead featuring large icons that make it easy to find what you need. Some educated users will wish the cPanel was traditional, but many who are new will appreciate how simple it is to locate everything.
Business and Premium Plans Offer Unlimited Features
If you sign up for either of these plans, you receive free unlimited email accounts. They can be easily managed from your control panel, keeping the guesswork out of usage, spam filters, and archiving.
Email from Hostinger offers the ability to disable or enable accounts, set up autoresponders, and forwarding emails to domains.
Databases and bandwidth are unlimited with most plans except ‘Single Web Hosting.’ This plan gives you 100GB of bandwidth, 10GB of disk space, one email account, and one MySQL database.
Affordable Industry-standard Pricing
Web hosting companies tend to promote pricing that is confusing. Hostinger is similar, though more transparent than many.
For instance, their $0.99 Single Shared hosting deal has you committing to Hostinger for the next 48 months. When those four years are up, your monthly fee jumps to $2.15 a month. For those willing to make the commitment, you can save a lot of money compared to other hosts.
Often, low pricing equates to lower quality. With Hostinger, you’ll receive high-quality services compared to other hosting services in the same price range.
Disadvantages of Using Hostinger
While there is plenty to love about Hostinger, such as features, uptime, loading speeds, and quality support, there are some lackluster qualities, as well. There is no perfect host, and Hostinger has some flaws. For many people, the following flaws are things that you can live with, so you will have to decide if they are deal-breakers for you.
Live Chat Only Accessible When Logged In
As mentioned, you can only utilize Hostinger’s live chat when you are logged into your Hostinger account. This means if you have questions before becoming a customer, you can’t chat with someone live, which does make it a bit more challenging to find information. Luckily, reviews, like ours, tell you everything you need to know.
When you are not logged in, you can still access support, just not via live chat. When you’re not logged in, click “Contact Us” at the bottom of the page. This will take you to a page that you can choose to submit an inquiry or report abuse. When you submit a ticket, you need to add your message, email, and name.
Lack of Traditional cPanel
Generally, hosting services utilize a cPanel or control panel. Hostinger has its own version, and some customers find it easier to use. Those who are already used to the typical control panel may wish for a different dashboard. Advanced users may get irritated as they stumble through learning a different layout, but the learning curve should be quick.
Payment Terms
The money-back guarantee has some exceptions that you’d want to go over in Hostinger’s refund policy.
Standard terms for what’s refundable include:
- All hosting plans, except initial payment once the free trial ends
- Transferring domains except for .eu because they charge a non-refundable fee for transferring. If the transfer fails, the fee must be paid again
- SSL Certificates
Non-refundable items
Privacy protection, domain name renewals, and redemption fees aren’t refundable. New domain registrations are generally only refundable if processed and cancelled within four days of registration. Note these exceptions before using their services.
Extra Domains Mean Extra Fees
Customers who use the Business or Premium shared hosting plans and those who use the Cloud hosting annual plans get one domain registration free. Though additional domain registrations are affordable, they are not free. Domains with a ‘.net,’ or ‘.com’ are less than $10 a year and ‘.tech,’ ‘.xyz,’ and ‘.online,’ are just $0.99 yearly. The priciest is ‘.asia,’ at $12.99 each year.
Different Domain Pricing With Hostinger
With the Business and Premium plans, you receive unlimited subdomains, but just one domain name for free, which is a caveat not everyone realizes initially.
If you catch expired domains within 36 days of expiration, you can renew them at no extra fee. After the redemption grace period, you have until day 66 to redeem your domain for $53 with Hostinger’s expired registration recovery policy.
Quick Facts About Hostinger Plans and Pricing
Here is an overview of plans offered by Hostinger:
| Single Shared Hosting | Premium Shared Hosting | Business Shared Hosting |
| $0.99/month | $2.89/month | $3.99/month |
| 1 website | Unlimited websites | All Premium benefits |
| 1 email | Unlimited emails | Daily backups |
| Limited bandwidth of 100GB | Unlimited bandwidth | Free SSL Cert |
| 1x memory and processing power | 2x memory and processing power | 4x memory and processing power |
Single Shared Hosting
This plan provides you with the most budget-friendly pricing. You pay only $0.99 a month for the next 48 months, and then after that, pricing increases to $2.15 a month for this plan.
This plan provides:
- Single website
- Disk space of 10GB
- 1 FTP User
- 100 GB bandwidth
- 1 email account
- 1 MySQL Database
- Auto installer
- Easy website builder
Premium Shared Hosting
This is the middle of the pack plan, where you pay just $2.89 each month for the next four years.
This plan offers:
- Unlimited SSD disk space
- Unlimited bandwidth
- Unlimited websites
- Unlimited FTP Users
- Easy website builder
- Unlimited email accounts
- Unlimited MySQL Databases
- A free domain name for annual plans
- 3x WordPress optimized speed
Business Web Hosting
This is the top of the line as far as plans go and only costs $3.99 a month for the next four years. This plan comes with everything the Premium Shared Hosting plan does as well as:
- Superior live support
- Daily backups
- 2x memory and processing power
- Free SSL Certificate to increase SEO rankings and keep customer data secure
Is Hostinger Recommended?
Overall, we recommend Hostinger. It offers superior loading speed. Its average uptime has been strong. Though the entry-level plan, Single-Web Hosting, doesn’t offer a great deal of features or unlimited perks, it is very low-cost and appeals to those who don’t need much. The Business Web Hosting, Cloud Hosting, and Premium plans provide a lot more options. The 30-day money-back guarantee lets you try its services without penalty. Customer support is friendly, knowledgeable, and very responsive. Overall, the Hostinger plans offer many advantages for the small fees they entail.