Hostinger is a Lithuania-based web hosting provider with seven data centers around the world that serve over 29 million users. It’s known for its impressive pricing, which starts at just $0.99 a month.
In our Hostinger review, we help you decide whether it could be the best web hosting service for your website by evaluating the service’s pricing, features, support, and interface.
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Hostinger: Plans and pricing
Hostinger offers shared web hosting, cloud hosting, VPS hosting, and email hosting. We highlight a few of the most popular options here.
Shared web hosting (where you share server resources like CPUs and hard disks with other people) starts at $0.99 a month for a single site. You get 30GB SSD storage, 100GB bandwidth, and a free SSL certificate. You can currently get its Premium Shared Hosting plan for an exclusive monthly price of $2.19, and get double the processing power, support for up to 100 websites, 100GB storage, and unlimited bandwidth.
VPS hosting from Hostinger is advertised as up to 30 times faster than shared web hosting. You get your own allocation of resources that aren’t shared with other websites. The cheapest VPS plan starts at $3.95 a month and includes 20GB storage, 1GB RAM, and 1TB bandwidth. The other five VPS plans on offer predictably increase the amount of CPU power, RAM, SSD storage, and bandwidth available to you.
Cloud hosting from Hostinger is essentially bulk VPS hosting at a discount. At $9.99 a month, you can have up to 300 websites on 200GB of storage. The Professional plan ($18.99 a month) and Global plan ($69.99 a month) bump up the amount of CPU power, memory, and disk space that your 300 sites have access to.
Overall, Hostinger has great pricing, particularly for its shared hosting plans. Note that the price of most plans increases after your initial period, though. Whichever plan you're interested in buying, check out our Hostinger coupon code page to see if we can save you on those monthly costs.
Hostinger: Features
Hostinger doesn’t skimp on features, except for the cheapest shared hosting plan, which does come with significant limitations. For example, you only get one email account, two subdomains, and two databases. But on most plans, you get 100 free email addresses, a free SSL certificate, and a free domain name for the first year.
Hostinger has its own website builder, Zyro, to compete with the best website builders including Wix and Squarespace. It’s a solid website builder too, with over 100 templates, a flexible drag-and-drop editor, support for ecommerce, and useful SEO tools.
Some of these tools will cost you extra. For example, ecommerce plans start at $8.99 a month and rise to $24.99 after your initial period. Still, Zyro’s pricing is typically a little lower than more established website builders, and it’s powerful enough to compete. We particularly liked its useful SEO and marketing tools.
Like most web hosting companies, Hostinger offers WordPress on all plans. You install it via a button on the web-hosting administration panel, and your new WordPress website is up and running in a matter of minutes.
Hostinger bills itself as a managed WordPress service. You get a bunch of WordPress plugins pre-installed and automatic plugin updates. Also, Hostinger automatically makes a backup of your site on a weekly or daily basis, depending on your hosting plan.
If you don’t want to use WordPress, Hostinger has an Auto Installer for other software. There are over 100 options, ranging from Joomla to InvoiceNinja, so there’s a good chance that the software you want to use can easily be installed on Hostinger.
Hostinger: Interface and in use
Though Hostinger offers many features, using the interface never feels overwhelming: everything on offer is well compartmentalized. Management duties are split into sections, such as accounts, files, databases, and domains, and more advanced features that many users never need to touch are hidden away under an advanced menu.
In performance testing, Hostinger performed reasonably well, responding with an average response time of 382ms. This puts it in the top 25% of providers that we’ve tested.
Hostinger: Support
Hostinger offers 24/7, year-round support to members, even those on the cheapest shared hosting plans. No phone support is available, but you can get support via email or live chat. Unfortunately, live chat seems understaffed. It took us over 15 minutes to receive replies on most occasions, and the conversations were painfully slow.
If you prefer to find solutions for yourself, there’s a comprehensive knowledge base and a fantastic tutorial section that details everything that you’d need to know about web hosting for beginners.
Alternatives to Hostinger
Bluehost’s plans start at $2.75 a month on a three-year contract. With Bluehost, you get a website builder that’s based on Weebly, which is a more popular choice than Hostinger’s Zyro. We also found customer support to be more responsive at Bluehost.
HostGator is another top choice if you want shared hosting. You get a 45-day money-back guarantee, free transfers for new accounts, and up to $200 in search credits that you can spend on Google advertising for your website.
Hostinger: Final verdict
Hostinger is priced well and includes a wealth of features. We particularly liked the website builder, Zyro, which is easy to use and powerful enough to create nice designs. It doesn’t quite rival more established website builders, like Wix or Squarespace, but it’s cheaper.
Performance-wise, Hostinger is average. We also found the live chat support to be slow enough as to be nearly useless. We also caution against buying the absolute cheapest plans before understanding their limitations.
But if you’re willing to manage most of your website administration yourself by reading Hostinger’s excellent knowledge base and tutorials, there’s much to like about this inexpensive web host.
Further reading on web hosting
Find out where Hostinger ranks in our buying guides for different types of web hosting, including the best VPS hosting, the best Linux web hosting, the best WordPress hosting, the best unlimited hosting, and the best cloud hosting services.
