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Hostinger Review Overview
Hostinger started its journey in 2004. They now have over 1.5 million customers worldwide. On top of this, they estimate they receive 15,000 new sign-ups every single day which is very impressive! In this Hostinger review we’ll find out exactly why Hostinger is so popular.
In 2007 they launched 000webhost.com which is a completely free hosting platform, with no advertising. Their aim is to provide affordable web hosting to the world, which is something I believe they can achieve.
Hostinger is an extremely affordable web host, offering hosting from just $1.99 per month.
Hostinger specialises in shared hosting, cloud hosting, email hosting, WordPress hosting, VPS hosting, Minecraft hosting, and dedicated hosting. Phew – that’s a long list!
Hostinger boasts 24/7/365 customer support and a whole host of other features.
I decided to sign up for their single web hosting plan which is less than $2 per month. You can’t even buy a cup of coffee for that, so I wanted to investigate whether their cheap hosting was actually any good.
I took the following factors into consideration in my Hostinger review:
- Pros and Cons
- Performance and Speed
- Features
- Pricing
- Customer Support
Does Hostinger Sound Right For You?
Speed & Performance
Given Hostinger’s incredibly cheap pricing, I wondered whether their performance would be any good. After signing up for their cheapest single hosting plan which is $1.99 per month, I began monitoring my website with UptimeRobot.
Hostinger offers a 99.9% uptime guarantee on their shared hosting plans. They also openly publish their server statuses which I find very reassuring. In the last 30 days (as of writing this review), Hostinger’s uptime on their server status page recorded an uptime of 99.945%.
Here are the uptime results from my tests:
- 100% (last 24 hours)
- 100% (last 7 days)
- 99.939% (last 30 days)
Hostinger’s uptime isn’t the best I’ve ever seen and isn’t comparable to BlueHost or SiteGround, but it’s certainly not bad either. They’ve exceeded their SLA of 99.9% and in a lot of cases, my website was only down for a minute or so.
One time it did reach 37 minutes of downtime, which isn’t great, but that only happened once thankfully.
I’m not 100% sure what location Uptime Robot uses to monitor response time, however, the results for my Hostinger website weren’t great which was disappointing.
The average server response time I received was 1391.69ms which is around 1.3 seconds. According to Hrank, 200-350ms is fast, 400-700ms is average, and all the rest can be called slow. This means, according to Uptime Robot, my Hostinger website is slow.
I wanted to get more perspective on my server response time, so I input my website’s details into Bitcatcha which allows you to see what your server response time is across multiple locations.
According to Bitcatcha, my website is exceptionally quick! It scored an A+ on performance and loaded in just 8ms from a London server location.
In the U.S. (W) the response time was 144ms, and U.S. (E) was 90ms. These are great results and have certainly reassured me that my website with Hostinger will perform well in terms of response times.
Pricing
Aside from free web hosting, Hostinger’s pricing is the cheapest I’ve come across at just $1.99 per month. Honestly, you’d struggle to find an item that price at the store, let alone a web hosting company.
Hostinger has 3 web hosting plans; Single, Premium, and Business. All of them include a free SSL certificate, 24/7/365 support, and plenty of WordPress optimised add-ons.
In a recent update, Hostinger have more than tripled their SSD storage on shared hosting plans, and increased it on their Cloud hosting plans. We’ve included the updated storage amounts below.
- Single: Hostinger’s $1.99 plan includes a few basic features that are ideal for setting up a small personal website, or blog, with a generous 50GB SSD storage.
- Premium: This plan boasts 100GB SSD storage and unlimited bandwidth, as well as unlimited websites, MySQL databases, and a free domain. If you’re thinking about growing your small to medium-sized website or potentially setting up a small business start-up, this is an ideal choice.
- Business: The Business plan offers the same as the Premium plan, but doubles up on the SSD storage up to 200GB, along with 4x processing power and speed, and daily backups. All of this for just $3.99 per month, perfect for larger websites with more traffic.
Features
When you purchase web hosting for just $1.99 per month, you probably don’t expect you’ll get many features to enjoy. Although Hostinger doesn’t boast insanely good speed and performance results, their shared hosting plans are very generous and include lots of features.
Some of my favourite Hostinger features include:
- Free SSL: A free SSL certificate is included with all shared hosting plans. This means your website will be secured by HTTPS.
- Data centers: Hostinger has 10 data centers which mean you can choose the one closest to your website visitors to offer them a better experience. Their locations include the United States, United Kingdom, Netherlands, Lithuania, Singapore, Brazil, Indonesia, France and India.
- WordPress: Hostinger is optimised for WordPress which means you’ll get fast speeds at an affordable cost. They also use SSD drives so your website will perform better without spending more money.
- Website builder: When you purchase shared hosting with Hostinger, you’ll get access to their website builder (which they claim to be the best) for free.
- Unlimited: Hostinger’s Premium and Business plans include unlimited bandwidth and MySQL databases, suitable for small businesses or larger personal, blog, and portfolio websites.
Customer Support
Before we take a look at what Hostinger’s customers think about them, I wanted to mention that they have multiple offices worldwide, as well as 24/7/365 support including live chat.
Their new-look knowledgebase makes it super easy to find the answers you need. It is categorised by website, domains, and general. All you need to do is click on the category you want to browse.
If you know what you want to search for, you can use the search function at the top of the help center page. For beginners and advanced users, Hostinger is really easy to use (one of the reasons why I rate it so highly).
If like me, you prefer a tutorial over a knowledgebase article, Hostinger has plenty of tutorials to help you through any issues you may encounter.
The tutorials are a breeze to follow, offering clear and concise guidance. I don’t know what it is, I just find my mind gets lost in reading lots of articles, whereas a tutorial keeps you focussed on the task at hand.
One frustrating point in terms of Hostinger’s customer support was their lack of telephone support. Some people like to be able to talk to a person, rather than waiting hours for a ticket response, or experiencing a potentially impersonal and long live chat conversation.
Rumour has it that Hostinger is supposed to be introducing a phone support feature to their customer support toolset this year, but we will have to wait and see if that happens.
Anyway, that’s enough of me rambling for a moment, why don’t we take a look at what other Hostinger customers think. I started my investigation with Hostinger’s Twitter account.
Hostinger seems very responsive on their social media pages, ensuring they reply to customer comments, even if they don’t necessarily invoke a response.
I’ve come across lots of positive messages about Hostinger as a whole, which is really reassuring.
There’s also other people commenting on the fact Hostinger responds well over Twitter, another positive point! Compared to some other web hosts I’ve reviewed, the feedback on Hostinger’s social media is actually a lot better.
However, I did come across a few customers who weren’t so happy. Needless to say, Hostinger still responded to them, even if it was a little generic. I suppose it’s better than no acknowledgement.
I came across one tweet where someone was having trouble with their website being down. Hostinger confirmed they would contact the data centers to see what the issue was. The original tweeter didn’t respond again, so I have to assume the issue was resolved.
Hostinger Review Summary
After reading our Hostinger review, it’s fair to say Hostinger offers fantastic value for money with enough basic features to launch a professional website. Hostinger is certainly a competitive web host on the market, making them a solid choice for beginners and small businesses.
However, you do need to make some careful considerations before signing up for Hostinger straight away. They offer a 99.9% uptime guarantee, which is by no means terrible, however, it isn’t a match for other competitors. In my own tests, which you’ll see in my Hostinger review, my website had a total of 99.93% uptime over a 30 day period.
If you’re not willing to compromise on uptime and performance, I suggest taking a look at my SiteGround review where you’ll see some awesome performance stats (I’m not kidding).
On the other hand, Hostinger cannot be beaten on price. For just $1.99 per month, you’ll get the core features required to build a small personal website, along with a free SSL certificate. If you want a free domain name like other web hosts offer, you’ll need to spend a bit more cash and upgrade to Hostinger’s premium plan.
Overall, I can’t fault Hostinger too much. When you consider what you’re getting for the price you’re paying, it’s hard to complain. Yes, there are much better web hosts on the market, but you’ll also need to pay more for them. For a budget web host, Hostinger is definitely a choice to consider, and at that price, you’re not exactly going to be financially ruined if you change your mind.
Are You Ready to Try Hostinger?
Hostinger FAQs
Hostinger shared hosting plans start from a mere $0.99 per month, however, that is for the first term. Terms are defined by a length of time, and in this case it’s 48 months. So you’ll need to sign up and pay for 48 months in advance. At renewal, the $0.99 per month plan renews at $2.15 per month.
If you’re not sure whether to commit to a full year, 2 years, or even 3 years with Hostinger, you can sign up for just 1 month. However, this becomes quite costly as the price becomes $9.99 per month + $4.99 setup. As you can see, they try to encourage you to sign up for longer by offering bigger discounts.
Hostinger’s $0.99 per month plan doesn’t include a free domain, however, you can purchase a domain from them. .com domains start from $8.99 per year, or you can get a free domain with their Premium and Business plans.
Daily backups are only included in Hostinger’s Business plan. However, you can upgrade your account to include daily backups for just $0.95 per month (which I think is well worth it).
User Reviews
Hostinger Pros:
- Easy to use
- 30-day money-back guarantee
- Multilingual support
- Free SSL certificate
Hostinger Cons:
- Live web chat only for customers
- Doesn't use cPanel
