Hostinger has come a long way since it first launched as a free web hosting service 15+ years ago. Today, it’s one of the most recognized names in web hosting—offering affordable plans, a high-quality experience, and other perks for website owners.
Whether you’re launching a new site from scratch or switching providers, you can use this in-depth review to see if Hostinger is right for you (hint: it probably is).
Compare Hostinger to The Best Web Hosting Services
Choosing a quality web hosting service is crucial. Your web host has a direct impact on things like uptime, page loading speed, and other performance metrics that impact the end-user experience.
Moreso, customer service, scalability, and ease of use impact your experience as the website owner.
We’ve used dozens of hosts ourselves over the years and performed thorough testing with just about every hosting provider out there. And one thing we can say for sure is that Hostinger offers an excellent balance of price, performance, support, usability, and long-term scalability.
That’s ultimately why it’s what we recommend for most new websites. Eventually, you’ll want to switch to something more powerful, like WP Engine. But that won’t be necessary for a long time.
Hostinger plans start at just $2.99 per month, which is one of the most affordable options you’ll find from a hosting service so reputable.
But don’t let that price fool you. It doesn’t feel cheap.
Bluehost and HostGator are two other options worth considering if Hostinger doesn’t meet your needs. Absolute beginners or those hoping to use a simple website builder, Web.com may work well–it offers web hosting and website builder plans, depending on what you need.
See our full list of the best cheap hosting providers if you want to weigh all your options.
Hostinger: The Good and The Bad
Like any product on the market, there are pros and cons to choosing Hostinger as your websites’ web host. We want to call out a few of the key elements that work in Hostinger’s favor and a couple potential drawbacks, so you get the full story on whether they’re the best choice for you.
The Good
Fast load times: If a visitor comes to your website and has to wait for things to load, they won’t stick around. In fact, many people aren’t willing to wait for more than a couple of seconds for a site to load.
The good news is that Hostinger delivers consistently fast speeds for a shared hosting service. And we’re not just going off of what they tell everyone on their webpage copy, we’ve tested their shared hosting, VPS hosting, and WordPress hosting ourselves. We experienced loading times around 470 ms across the board (with VPS hosting being slightly faster).
LiteSpeed web servers: These are the key behind Hostinger’s impressive speed. The use of LiteSpeed allows Hostinger to deploy its custom hPanel without sacrificing performance. It’s much faster than Apache web servers used by most cheap shared hosting providers. Additionally, LSWS uses a cache to store copies of your web pages, allowing visitors to load everything faster.
Global data centers: Hostinger maintains data centers across the globe, including North America, South America, Europe, the UK, India, and Asia. If you leverage Hostinger’s CDN (included with Business and up), your website will use whatever location’s closest to the visitor to keep load times as fast as possible. But the main advantages of multiple data centers are that you can choose the one closest to your audience and a different data center can take over if the one hosting your site experiences an outage.
It’s very affordable: Not only do you get blazing fast site speeds, but you’ll also pay rock-bottom prices. Shared hosting starts as low as $2.99 per month for up to 100 websites with 100 GB of storage to share across across them. It doesn’t get much cheaper than that. Hostinger’s shared hosting isn’t the only type that’s affordable, though–it’s cloud plans start at $9.99 per month and VPS starts at just $4.99 per month.
Feature-rich: Despite the low price tag, you get backups, free WordPress tools, a website builder, AI capabilities, malware scanning, a web firewall, a CDN, and more. Like we said, Hostinger certainly doesn’t feel cheap.
Free domain for the first year: Every Hostinger plan includes a free domain name for the first year. It comes preconfigured so you don’t have to do any of the technical, behind-the-scenes work to get started.
Complimentary AI-powered website builder: Hostinger offers one of the better website builders on the market—included for free with every plan. Whether you need a basic company website or fully-functional online store, it’s easy to use even if you have zero technical experience. There are more than 100 templates you can start with–or you can use the AI site builder to whip up a customized site in a matter of minutes.
It’s easy to get started: Hostinger is really easy to use, especially when getting everything set up. The hosting service’s clean interface, guided setup, and user-friendly dashboard makes it easy for first-timers; you don’t need to take a class on this hosting service to use it.
One-click installs: Though it’s simple, Hostinger doesn’t skimp on powerful tools. For example, Hostinger offers an Auto Installer feature that greatly simplifies the process of installing apps. It seriously takes one click and you can have a brand new WordPress, Drupal, WooCommerce, or PrestaShop site ready to go. No messing with code or going through lengthy installation processes to get going.
Easy site migrations: Hostinger will handle all the technical details of moving an existing website to their hosting services. All you have to do is initiate a website migration, provide a few details, and you’re good to go.
hPanel is very user-friendly: hPanel is an entirely custom website control panel that puts cPanel’s ease of use to shame. Everything’s designed well, laid out in a manner that makes sense, and incredibly easy to navigate. You won’t have to guess where things are, either. We found it to be a refreshingly well-done cPanel alternative you won’t get from any other host.
Strong customer service: While Hostinger’s support wasn’t the fastest, every rep we talked to provided clear answers. We walked away from every interaction knowing exactly what to do. They even provided annotated screenshots showing us where to click. This level of detail is something we didn’t experience from any other budget hosting service.
Moneyback guarantee: Not happy with your Hostinger purchase? No problem. You have 30 days to try it out and get your money back if your experience is not all you were hoping for. However, be sure to note that redemption fees, domain name renewals, and privacy protection are not part of the guarantee.
The Bad
No phone support: Hostinger offers a series of tutorials, blog posts, and knowledge base articles to help you if you need it. There’s also Hostinger Academy, which is a series of tutorials on YouTube.
As helpful as these items are, they aren’t the same as a phone call to walk you through things when you are experiencing some frustration. Unfortunately, the only ways to get in touch with customer support are via a live chat and email or ticket, both of which are available 24/7.
Spotty uptime on shared and WordPress hosting: During testing, we had quite a few instances where our site was down for a few minutes at a time. With that said, this kind of performance is expected on shared hosting. Hostinger’s VPS hosting performed much better with only 17 seconds of downtime over a full 60-day window.
No dedicated or unmanaged hosting: If a VPS server isn’t enough for you, you’ll have to switch to a different host as Hostinger doesn’t offer dedicated servers. You also won’t find any unmanaged hosting plans with complete control the hosting environment.
If you’re a developer this is a definite sign Hostinger isn’t right for you.
Hostinger Pricing and Options
Hostinger has a number of different packages for you to choose from. Each one offers unique things that are suited for specific needs.
If you’re on a super tight budget, Hostinger offers free hosting (via 000webhost). But we don’t recommend it if you’re serious about starting and growing your website. Here’s a closer look at Hostinger’s plans and pricing.
Hostinger Premium
This is Hostinger’s cheapest hosting plan. At $2.99 per month, you’ll be able to host up to 100 websites with 100 GB of SSD storage, up to 100 email addresses, a free domain for the first year, unlimited bandwidth, and a free SSL certificate for each of your websites.
You’ll also get free WHOIS privacy protection with your free domain name–this keeps your private information… private and usually costs anywhere from $10 to $20 extra dollars per year.
While you do have to pay for 48 months in advance to get the best price, you’ll still end up paying less than $150 out of pocket today.
Hostinger Business
If you’re looking to level up your plan, then Hostinger’s Business option may be right for you. With this plan you get everything included in the Premium plan, plus daily backups, five times the processing power, 200 GB NVMe storage, and much more.
Pricing for the Business plan starts at $3.99 per month for 48 months and goes up to $13.99 per month for a monthly commitment.
Cloud Hosting
If you’re considering cloud hosting vs. traditional shared hosting, take a look at Hostinger’s offerings.
Instead of your site being hosted on a single server, it is hosted in the cloud, which allows for more flexibility and easier scalability.
You can choose from:
- Cloud Startup – Starts at $9.99 per month
- Cloud Professional – Starts at $14.99 per month
- Cloud Enterprise – Starts at $29.99 per month
They all come with the same features, the only difference storage, processing, and computing.
VPS Hosting
If you need more control and more processing power, Hostinger’s VPS hosting plans are a great upgrade from shared hosting.
Every VPS plan comes with the same features, including weekly backups, full root access, malware scanning, dedicated IP, and AI assistant. The only difference is you’re getting more computing power, memory, disk space, and bandwidth at each tier.
Hostinger offers four VPS hosting plans to chose from, including:
- KVM 1 – Starts at $4.99 per month
- KVM 2 – Starts at $6.99 per month
- KVM 4 – Starts at $10.49 per month
- KVM 8 – Starts at $19.99 per month
The KVM 1 plan starts with 4 GB of RAM, 50 GB of storage, and 4 TB of bandwidth, while the KVM 8 plan scales up to 32 GB of RAM, 400 GB of storage, and 32 TB of bandwidth.
Minecraft Hosting
Hostinger offers a unique hosting service that many of its competitors don’t: a Minecraft hosting that is geared towards gamers. This hosting starts at $8.99 per month with a one-year agreement and goes up to $25.99 per month.
With this service, you can install your own game mods, along with many other things.
