Hostinger may not be one of the most popular web hosts (yet), but that doesn’t mean it’s any less powerful than its competitors. In this Hostinger review, I’ll take an in-depth look at this web hosting company to help you decide if it’s right for you.
For this review, I’ve taken a look at several key aspects of Hostinger:
And before we dive deep 🤿 into the Hostinger review, I’ll give you a general overview of what Hostinger is.
What is Hostinger?
Hostinger is a website hosting company that provides affordable, high-quality hosting plans. This includes affordable plans for advanced options like VPS hosting, making Hostinger a great choice for medium-sized and even enterprise-level businesses as well as small businesses and individual users.
Hostinger also offers email hosting, which I’ll discuss later in this Hostinger review. This email hosting lets you create your own custom email address – e.g., [email protected].
Hostinger web hosting plans
The first thing I looked at for this Hostinger review was the plans themselves.
Hostinger offers WordPress hosting and regular web hosting plans for small to medium-sized businesses, plus cloud hosting for businesses with more advanced hosting needs.
💻️💻️💻️ All of these hosting types include some core essentials:
- Unlimited SSL
- Unlimited bandwidth
- LiteSpeed Web Server
- Free automatic website transfer for WordPress sites
- WordPress tools like one-click installation, pre-installed LiteSpeed Cache WordPress autoupdates, and WordPress vulnerabilities scanner
- DDoS protection (exact tools vary based on the plan you choose)
- Basic email hosting (the number of email accounts varies based on your chosen plan)
- Security features like a firewall, Cloudflare-protected nameservers, and a malware scanner
- DNS management
- Cache manager
I particularly like the emphasis on security features, as many web hosts either don’t offer the same level of security or don’t list security features up front, so you have to search for them.
Hostinger also uses LiteSpeed Web Server on all of its plans. Not only does this offer excellent performance and scalability, but it also means that WordPress sites can take advantage of all the functionality in the free LiteSpeed Cache plugin.
If you’re not familiar with this plugin, it goes beyond page caching to also offer tons of other performance optimization features. It can replace paid plugins like WP Rocket or FlyingPress, and it won’t cost you any extra money.
The final thing I want to highlight here is the presence of email hosting on all plans. Some other hosts restrict email hosting to their more expensive plans or offer it only as an extra, making this one place where Hostinger stands out.
WordPress hosting
Since this is a WordPress site, I’ll start my Hostinger review by looking at the company’s WordPress plans.
Hostinger’s WordPress hosting offers all of the WordPress features I’ve already mentioned, plus:
- WooCommerce optimization to simplify running an online store
- WordPress multisite support
- WP-CLI command-line interface for advanced management of your WordPress site
These tools allow you to create and manage a variety of business types with WordPress, using as much (or as little) code as you feel comfortable with. Plus, if you spring for one of the more expensive plans, you’ll also get access to a WordPress staging tool.
💳 Pricing: Hostinger plans start at $2.99 per month, billed annually, with an additional three months free.
Web hosting
Hostinger’s generalized web hosting plans come with the base security, email, and WordPress features from my list of Hostinger essentials, but what makes them stand out are the website builder features:
- Drag-and-drop website builder with 150+ designer templates
- AI tools for website creation, copywriting, SEO, and heatmaps making it easy to build your website and optimize it for marketing purposes
- Marketing integrations with tools like Google Analytics and Facebook Pixel simplify building your audience
What I like most about these plans is the diversity of tools and options. You can build one website with WordPress and another with the website builder, build all of your sites with WordPress, or build all of your sites with the website builder. Higher-tier plans also include ecommerce tools.
💳 Pricing: Hostinger’s regular web hosting plans start at $1.99 per month, billed annually. However, if you want to build multiple websites or have multiple email addresses, you’ll want to spring for the $2.99 per month plan.
Cloud hosting
Cloud hosting plans offer dedicated resources for medium-sized or small businesses with advanced hosting needs. These plans offer everything from the regular web hosting plans plus some additional features:
- Access to AI tools for both WordPress and the Hostinger website builder, simplifying website setup
- A dedicated IP address to ensure faster site speeds
- Free domain + WHOIS privacy protection to keep your information safe
- Advanced storage, starting at 200 GB
These tools allow you to quickly build a variety of websites and ensure fast, consistent access for your customers, so you can grow your business.
💳 Pricing: Cloud hosting plans start at $9.99 per month, billed annually, with two months free.
VPS hosting
VPS hosting plans are ideal for larger businesses. Each plan comes with at least one vCPU core and a dedicated IP address, so you won’t have to worry about sharing resources with other websites. This ensures fast site speeds and improved security.
Note that Hostinger VPS plans are run on unmanaged servers, so if you choose this option, you’ll need to manage updates and security yourself. If you want assistance with managing your web resources, go for a cloud hosting plan instead.
💳 Pricing: VPS hosting plans start at $5.99 per month, billed annually.
Hostinger web hosting user experience
Another important thing to consider in this Hostinger review is the setup process and user experience for managing your sites.
Let’s take a hands-on look at what it’s like to use Hostinger for website hosting…
Website setup process
When you first log in, you’ll be directed to a dashboard where you can view your existing websites and easily click through to the management area of any website you’ve already set up.
To create a website, head to Websites and choose Create or migrate a website.
From here, Hostinger makes it easy to set up the most important parts of your website in a few clicks. Whether you choose WordPress or the Hostinger website builder, you’ll be able to enter basic information about your business and ask the Hostinger AI to build your site.
Here’s an example of what using AI to build a WordPress site looks like:
Using the AI tools can save you a significant amount of time in building the core components of your site, and from there, you’ll be able to customize the details. And if you want to build your site from scratch, you can choose to create a blank website instead.
Hostinger’s custom hPanel (cPanel alternative)
WordPress users can also take advantage of the hPanel, a user-friendly visual alternative to the cPanel used by most website hosts.
Hostinger does offer hosting plans with cPanel, but only if you specifically choose one of the cPanel hosting plans.
You can access this by going to Websites and selecting Manage for the WordPress site you want to work on.
The main area of the hPanel shows you what key features of your web hosting are active, the results of your site’s most recent security tests, and your current performance score. You’ll also see tips to improve your website and any vulnerabilities detected.
The sidebar gives you access to pages where you can manage other aspects of your hosting, including WordPress security, hosting resource usage, email accounts, and subdomains. This is also where you can access more advanced tools like the file manager, database management, and PHP.
The hPanel offers a more streamlined visual experience than the cPanel, making it feel more welcoming to new website builders.
You can use it to accomplish many of the same website management tasks you would with cPanel, plus enjoy quick access to Hostinger’s support documentation any time you need it.
Experienced web developers might find the hPanel somewhat limiting, but for most users, the hPanel will be preferable to cPanel.
Hostinger web performance
Next, let’s look at another important part of our Hostinger review – performance.
To assess Hostinger’s performance, we created our own site and collected data from a variety of servers around the world.
👉 Here’s how our test site performed in different locations:
- East Coast, USA: 1.04 seconds
- West Coast, USA: 1.06 seconds
- London: 0.43 seconds
- Paris: 0.47 seconds
- Mumbai, India: 1.48 seconds
- Sydney, Australia: 3.18 seconds
Overall, Hostinger offers good performance for the money, with excellent performance in North America and Europe for our test site.
If you’re targeting an audience in Asia-Pacific, Hostinger also offers datacenters in Singapore that will help you boost performance in those areas.
However, keep in mind that, while Hostinger does advertise things like “unlimited bandwidth,” Hostinger’s cheap web and WordPress hosting plans do have more strict limits on resource usage like CPU, Input/Output (I/O), RAM, and processes.
If you hit these limits, Hostinger does give you the option to “boost” your site’s performance for 24 hours once per month. This can help if you go viral in a one-off event.
However, if you’re regularly hitting these limits, you will need to upgrade to a higher-tier plan to make sure you don’t degrade your website’s performance.
Hostinger reliability and customer service
Of course, loading speeds aren’t the only thing to consider when looking at a host’s reliability. Another thing to consider is customer support.
I reached out to Hostinger with some questions, and I’m happy to report that they were answered within a few minutes. The replies were detailed, helpful, and delivered professionally.
I don’t expect you to take my word for it, though. To complete my Hostinger review, I’ve gathered information from reviews listed on Trustpilot.
In the first Hostinger review selected from Trustpilot, a user named TJ talks about the number of educational resources available, the high-speed customer support, and the quality of the website builder:
User Mariko Barra says Hostinger makes it easy to build multiple websites on one plan and to transfer your email accounts to Hostinger email hosting. She also says the support team is friendly and works fast:
Josh_r says Hostinger has great customer service. He also highlights that Hostinger doesn’t lock you in like Squarespace or Wix, or charge additional fees for every extra service like GoDaddy.
Hostinger website builder review
While we’ve focused mostly on Hostinger’s web hosting plans so far, no Hostinger review would be complete without looking at Hostinger’s website builder tool.
Whereas you would probably install a CMS like WordPress on Hostinger’s web hosting plans, the Hostinger website builder aims to be an alternative to tools like Wix and Squarespace.
Once you’ve signed up for the website builder, you can either have AI build your website or choose a template yourself.
You’ll then be sent to the main area of the website builder, where you can click on any element of your homepage to edit it. You can also click on pages in the menu to edit them.
You’ll notice a series of customization options, such as Change background, lined up on the top right of the page.
You can also add elements like text, buttons, and image galleries by choosing the Add element option from the sidebar.
The sidebar also provides options for customizing your navigation, website styles (colors, fonts, etc.), blog setup, and store setup.
You can also access AI tools and analytics here, and if you need help with anything, you can click on Help and resources near the bottom of the sidebar.
This website builder doesn’t offer as many customization options as WordPress, but it gives you everything you’ll need to build a simple, functional website in minutes.
If all you need is a very basic website, having access to the Hostinger website builder might be an advantage over other hosts that don’t offer their own website builders.
Hostinger email hosting
The next thing to consider in this Hostinger review is the email hosting options.
All Hostinger plans allow you to create email addresses at your domain (formatted like [email protected]). Each email address comes with 1 GB of storage.
If you want even more email-related functionality, Hostinger also has a special partnership with Titan, a separate email hosting service that includes advanced features like templates, scheduling, and collaboration tools.
You can purchase Titan via Hostinger’s partnership for as little as $0.99 per month.
Hostinger review: Our final thoughts 🏁
Hostinger offers a wide variety of affordable, high-quality web hosting plans for everyone, from the individual starting a hobby site to the large business looking to host dozens or even hundreds of websites on a single plan.
The company also offers great tools for building your site, including a variety of WordPress tools and AI website building tools.
Another great benefit of Hostinger is the email hosting. Many web hosts either only offer email addresses as an add-on or provide a strictly limited number of email addresses, whereas Hostinger allows you to have up to 100 emails on almost any plan. The advanced email tools provided through the Titan partnership are also incredibly affordable, starting at just $0.99 per month.
In short, Hostinger provides the tools you need to launch your first website in minutes and build an online business around it, all for affordable prices. And, if you stick with Hostinger, you’ll be able to scale your business without switching web hosts or breaking the bank.
Curious about other hosting options? Check out our guide to the best WordPress hosting options.
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Keep reading the article at WPShout. The article was originally written by Dianna Gunn on 2023-08-30 14:15:53.
The article was hand-picked and curated for you by the Editorial Team of WP Archives.