In the last few years, Hostinger has emerged as among the most trusted web hosting service provider. They have climbed up so fast because of the premium service they provide and that too at the cheapest price.
Price is one of the major factors while selecting a web host. If you find a host which is cheap, as well as the services they provide, are top-notch then it does seem like a jackpot. Hostinger is the jackpot in web hosting services.
About Hostinger
Hostinger started as a free web hosting service provider for very small websites in the year 2007. Due to the quality of service, they were providing the demand started to grow. In only over a decade they are now among the most well-known hosting service provider around.
You may wonder what could be your options if you have a low budget and want reliable web hosting. There can be chances that you overlook some features just because it fits your budget. But what if you can get one of the premium web hosts at the same budget price, won’t it be great?
Our Hostinger review will walk you through this budget-maximizing option. We will let you know every pros and con before you go ahead with buying their service.
Hostinger has grown as one of the largest hosting providers in the WordPress environment. They are currently having around 29 million users in over 178 countries in the world. They also offer their customers a geolocation specific datacentre. This enables their users to choose datacentres as per their location and market, which as a result also gives a boost in server speed at the users’ end.
| Pros | Cons |
| Lowest price and most affordable | No Daily backups |
| Optimized for great performance | Uptime may be a little unreliable sometimes |
| 1-Click WordPress install | Moderate customer support |
| Free SSL certificate | |
| Free Domain registration |
Review Elements of Hostinger Web Hosting
Every web hosting company offers similar options and huge promises to deliver. Hostinger offers all the services at the cheapest rates in the industry. They also promise that they deliver all the services with the best performance.
Our review will look into each aspect of the hosting service and check if they keep up with their promises. The following are the major aspects we need to look into to determine if a web host is delivering or not.
Speed and performance: How fast your website will load when hosted on Hostinger? We all know that speed matters. The performance of the website will depend on your hosting provider server.
Pricing and features: No doubt they are the cheapest option out there. So what are the features and options available for a customer?
Customer Support: how quick they are to resolve the customer queries?
These are the major review factors on which we can tell if a web host is competent enough or not. We will go through every element of the above factors and review the web host so that you can get a clear picture of whether Hostinger is suitable for your website or not.
For you to save time here is a summary of what you will read in detail:
| Overall Performance | A |
| Average Response Time | 1.45ms |
| Free Domain | With all plans expect the Basic plan |
| Free SSL | Yes |
| 1-Click WordPress Install | Yes |
| Support | Live Chat/Email/Knowledge Base (Available 24/7) |
| Plans Starting from | $1.99/month |
Speed and Performance:
Above every other factor, the sign of a great web host is how well their server performs. The servers must be great and websites should not go down. You want your uptime to be over 99% or even 100%. The websites must load quickly for any user.
Hostinger is the only company that also publicly shares its uptime data. This makes it easier for any user to know if there is any maintenance or any other issue is going on with the servers.
The data are shown in the above image represents the uptime graph of the Hostinger server in the last week. The red graph shows on which days there had been a slight occurrence of downtime.
In the last 24 hours as per the data represents the uptime has been 100%. most of the days the uptime has been maintained up to 100% which is amazing. The average uptime provider by the Hostinger server has been 99.94% as per our observation.
An uptime of over 99% is what one must look at while choosing any web host. Hostinger outdoes itself at times by maintaining uptime of a perfect 100% for days. There are only a few days in a month when the uptime drops below 100 which is quite okay.
As compared to the web hosting service Hostinger does an exceptional job with the uptime. That too within the cheapest price is more than enough to consider.
A 0.1% drop in downtime means an average of 45 minutes of downtime in a month. Only Hostgator guarantees an uptime of 100%. All other web host has some downtime. With Hostinger the uptime averages over 99.94% which means there may be around 30 min of downtime in a month.
The uptime is quite okay for a website as we saw in the above graph and data. Only if you have an e-commerce platform or a services industry website then I won’t recommend Hostinger for you. Then you can look into Nexcess for an E-commerce platform and into Bluehost for low-cost service-based websites and WP Engine for high-end Managed Hosting service.
Page Speed Test
Page speed test shows how fast our website is loading when hosted with Hostinger. It is better to get a real-world experience to get a better picture. We used the GTMetrix tool to text our website loading speed. But note that loading speed does not only depend on the server. The server is a major factor but not the only factor in page loading speed.
As we can see our website loaded in a fraction of a second. You must remember that website loading speed is an important aspect in your website SEO factors and also in website ranking. Every 3-sec delay in website loading can decrease your conversion rates by up to 7%.
The server health is not only the loading speed factor but it is an important one. As per our tests done for our website, the page loading speed was found to be above the mark. Hostinger also proves to be quite well-performing in case of a sudden traffic spike.
A sudden traffic spike can happen to any growing website. As the user increases on the server the server should respond as quickly as it does when there was low traffic. The Hostinger servers are well capable to stand firmly and handle a large amount of traffic.
There can be instances that you have a low-end plan and the traffic is growing at a fast pace. There is also a chance that in a shared server if the traffic of any website hosted in the same server increases then it may affect the other websites on that server.
If anything such happens then Hostinger will contact you or the person whose website is experiencing a traffic surge and they will ask you to upgrade your plan. This is completely normal.
Server Response Time
The response time of the server may vary at different locations. This can happen due to the distance between the server and the user end. But as we can see the response time of the servers of Hostinger is amazing.
This is due to the multiple data center locations of Hostinger. Hostinger has a data center at the following continents:
- USA
- Europe
- Asia
- South America
They have a total of seven data centers that are located on these continents. The benefit from this the user gets is that they can choose the datacentre which is geographically nearest to their business location. This as a result reduces the time taken to reach the users and helps in having a better page loading speed.
CDN
CDN is an important factor that can also result in improved page loading speed. Hostinger does not provide free CDN with their basic plans but they give an option to buy them as an add-on in the basic plans. With the high-end plans, CDN is included with the plan.
If your business is located in one country or continent then with Hostinger you can also avoid buying any CDN as they have multiple data centers available. You can select the data center which will fit your business location best. But in case you have a global audience then you will have to pay a few extra bucks to buy the CDN.
In this one factor, Hostinger loses to only a few of the premium web hosts. Only a few of the premium web hosts such as Bluehost provide a free CDN with their basic plans. With most of the web hosting services, you will have to buy CDN as an add-on feature.
Pricing and features:
Hostinger offers a wide range of options to choose from and that too at the cheapest industry rates. You have Shared Hosting plans, E-commerce Hosting, VPS Hosting, Cloud Hosting, and also many different hosting plans with different website builders like Zyro and more.
Shared Hosting:
Hostinger offers shared web hosting plans at a mere cost of $1.99 a month. This is the cheapest option available out there. On top of this, the Shared Hosting plan comes in two categories. If you have a WordPress website then you have a separate option to choose WordPress shared hosting plan at the same price. The WordPress shared hosting plans are optimized specifically for the WordPress websites.
The shared hosting plans have three choices. The Single Shared Hosting costs you only $1.99 a month. This comes with 30 GBs of SSD storage which is more than enough for a small and mid-size enterprise website. In addition to this, you get a free SSL certificate. With this plan, you also get 100 GB of bandwidth.
One drawback of this Single Shared Hosting plan is that you do not get a free domain with this plan. You will have to pay for the domain with this plan. The upside is that with Hostinger the domain registration charge is only $0.99.
The other options in the shared hosting category are Premium Shared Hosting and Business Shared Hosting. With both these plans, you can host up to 100 websites. You also get a free domain registration with this plan along with a free SSL certificate.
Hostinger has designed these categories keeping the growth of any website in mind. For this reason, they have added Google Ads credit with Premium and Business plan. As you know that almost every online business runs ads. Google Ads is the most amazing way to generate leads and reach customers. Hostinger has simplified this for you with this plan.
With the Business plan, you also get a Staging area for your website. This enables you to test any changes on your website before making this life. The Business plan also has free added CDN which is a bonus.
The Shared Hosting has one more section of plans dedicated solely to WordPress websites.
WordPress Shared Hosting has four plans in the category. They have Single WordPress which costs you $1.99 a month. This has all the specs of Single Shared Hosting included with managed WordPress feature. This plan is customized for WordPress website performance.
The WordPress Starter plan will cost you $3.99 a month and this comes with free SSL, a free domain registration, and Google Ads credits as well. The Business WordPress and WordPress Pro plans are specifically designed for websites with high-end traffic and a large number of integrated marketing tools to grow your business. These also include free Cloudflare CDN included which is an added benefit for you.
Hostinger has done a great job in bringing these features at such a low cost to the customers. As we saw above the performance of the hosting provider is also top-notch.
Hostinger enables new website creators to get on board and they are the best platform for you to learn and grow your website without burning a hole in your pocket.
VPS Hosting
VPS hosting feature is the largest growing segment in the hosting category. As your website grows and the traffic increases you need more resources to run your website efficiently. VPS hosting enables you to get a fraction of the server resources dedicated solely to your website.
The VPS hosting plans of Hostinger are named VPS 1, VPS 2, VPS 3, and so on. Each increasing order has more resources than the other. The VPS 1 hosting starts at a mere cost of $3.95 a month. In the case of VPS hosting, this is the lowest price available among all the competitors.
You get 1 GB of RAM, included with 20 GB of SSD disk space and 1 TB of bandwidth. For a growing website, this is more than enough unless your traffics is suddenly skyrocketing. You will have a dedicated IP for your website.
As you move ahead towards VPS 2, VPS 3 and so on you will have the RAM increased, the SSD storage will increase and Bandwidth will increase. With the higher-end plans, you can get more than one dedicated IP for your website if needed.
For websites growing at a large pace, VPS hosting is considered the best option. Hostinger brings this at the minimum of cost.
Cloud Hosting
Cloud Hosting is used by large websites with tons of data to be transferred every day. Cloud space enables you to transfer, store and regulate data like no other. Every mobile app, largest of enterprise websites are hosted in the cloud.
Hostinger offers cloud hosting options in three different plans. They have Cloud Startup, Cloud professional, and Cloud Enterprise.
The Startup plan will cost you $9.99 a month, the Professional plan will cost you $18.99 a month, and the Enterprise plan costs you $69.99 a month. With each increasing plan, you get more resources and space. Every plan comes with a free SSL certificate, CDN, unlimited bandwidth, Google Ads credit, and daily backups too included.
The RAM space, the number of CPUs dedicated to your websites, and SSD storage increase with each high-end plan. The cloud has the capacity to handle millions of traffic a month without affecting your website performance.
Hostinger plans give you these three options to choose from.
Money-Back Guarantee
Every Hostinger plan comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee. If you are unhappy or unsatisfied with the level of service they provide you can claim this. Hostinger will return the complete amount of the hosting charge that you paid to them. You can say if you decide not to continue with Hostinger you are getting 30 days of free hosting service.
Customer Support:
Support is the second most considered hosting characteristic for any web hosting service. Every now and then you may need to have any query with the hosting service. There may be a traffic surge and your website performance seem to be depleting and you want to get in touch with a customer service representative.
There can be tons of reasons when you might need to reach out to customer support with any query. You will want your service provider to be quick and helpful in such a case. This is the most important part of customer service.
The interesting part of Hostinger customer support is that they do not encourage call support options. They say that the long waiting time can frustrate the customer and is bad for business.
You have chat and email options available. They are available 24/7 in both these forms. As we tried the chat option, the waiting time was not more than a few seconds. They do compensate for not keeping the call option with a fast chat support option.
The email option is also fine. They respond to your email queries within a few hours which is quite good for email support. Many people may find it hard without call support.
Apart from these Hostinger has a large pool of knowledge base. This includes frequently asked questions, videos, and many more. This section can solve many of the small problems and question that arises to the user in a fraction of a second without reaching out to the customer support representative.
Hostinger customer support stands out to be moderate in comparison to some other competitors. They are surely reliable and if you can work out without the call options then this is more than enough. If you understand your website and ask the right question through chat support then you won’t face any issues with the support service of Hostinger.
Conclusion
You have read all the features and specs of the performance Hostinger will provide your website. Now you will be easily in a position to make a decision if this is the right choice for you or not.
We surely recommend Hostinger to anyone who is starting with website creation or is in the initial phase of WordPress. Hostinger helps you grow and learn. This is the best platform for a small website, mid-size businesses, and niche bloggers.
Hostinger comprises all the elements one needs to host and grow your website. You get a one-click WordPress install with all the plans. There are also options to choose from VPS and Cloud hosting if you want dedicated and large resources for your business.
The prices are a winner. Hostinger services come at the cheapest industry price possible and they are among the few premium companies to provide web hosting services. The services and performance are top-notch. You can trust the service. There are a few lacking in terms of customer support which won’t affect if you are sound with the skill.
I would also suggest if you are looking to host a website that is largely E-commerce or wants to run a lot of data through it then you would want to look into dedicated hosting services first then you will want to look into Hostinger.
You can opt for Hostinger and as your website grows you can scale. This way you can start with a small cost and grow. This will let you see how much you can scale and is Hostinger supporting at a larger scale. They will be doing a great job I’m sure of this but for dedicated options, you may look at other options with time.