Summary

Hostinger offers a wide range of extremely budget-friendly hosting services, a website builder, domain names, and email. If you have a tight budget, this is the host for you.

Shared web hosting plans start at $1.39 per month and come loaded with advanced features perfect for beginners and technical users alike.

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Introduction

On our quest to find the best web host for your online presence, our team ranked the best web hosting companies. Hostinger offers a great option for beginners or anyone with a tight budget looking to get started online.

In our Hostinger review, we dig into this popular web hosting provider to show you in the ins and outs so you can determine if it’s the right fit for your website. By reviewing pricing, features, user interface, and support quality, you can determine if Hostinger is a good choice for your website.

Plans and pricing

Hostinger definitely offers a wide rang of web hosting services. Along with providing shared web, WordPress, Ecommerce, and VPS hosting, they also provide Minecraft hosting. They have a Website Builder and email hosting as well. Although performance isn’t the focus, Hostinger does know how to give bang for your buck.

Hostinger Shared Web Hosting

Exclusive Hostinger shared web hosting plan: 48 month plan – $1.39 per month ($66.72 total cost)

Hostinger shared web hosting plans are budget-friendly and provide access to advanced features and tools to build your website.

Single Shared Hosting – $1.39 per month

Premium Shared Hosting (Recommended) – $2.59 per month

Business Shared Hosting – $4.99 per month

At $1.39 per month, the Single Shared Hosting plan is perfect for getting 1 website up and running at a super cheap price. Coming with 30 GB of storage along with 1 email account and a free SSL certificate, you’ll have everything you need to get your website started.

It’s hard to imagine having 100 websites, however Hostinger’s Premium Shared Hosting (Recommended) plan lets you have exactly that. Including a free domain name for 1 year, up to 100 email accounts and unlimited databases with 100 GB of storage, this plan packs a lot of value. For $2.59 per month, you also get loads of advanced features such as SSH access, unlimited FTP accounts, and unlimited cron jobs. If you’re planning on hosting more than 1 site, the Premium plan is your best bet.

The Business Shared Hosting plan is $4.99 per month, not much more than Premium, but gives a big boost in resources. It lets you host 100 websites as well and access to 200 GB of storage. You get all the same advanced features in addition to a free CDN with 152 global locations (and growing) to speed up your website and protect it from malicious traffic and spam.

One thing that is unique about Hostinger is the amount of features packed into each shared web hosting plan. Although prices are cheap, they don’t skimp on value.

To highlight just a few, Hostinger’s shared web hosting plans come with these helpful features and tools:

All of their plans also come with a 30-day money back guarantee. Their plans definitely stand out for the value you get at such low prices.

Hostinger WordPress Hosting

Exclusive Hostinger WordPress hosting plan: 48 month plan – $1.99 per month ($95.52 total cost)

WordPress Hosting by Hostinger is optimized for WordPress beginners, business owners, and advanced users. With a single site starting at $1.99 per month, Hostinger gives you a full set of WordPress specific management tools on their WordPress plans.

There are 4 types of WordPress hosting plans: Single WordPress, WordPress Starter (Recommended), Business WordPress, and WordPress Pro.

Single WordPress – $1.99 per month

WordPress Starter (Recommended) – $2.99 per month

Business WordPress – $7.99 per month

WordPress Pro – $11.59 per month

On the Single WordPress plan for $1.99 per month, you can host a single WordPress website and 1 email account. You get access to 30 GB of storage and resources to sustain up to 10,000 visitors a month on your site. This is a great plan for WordPress beginners looking to get their feet wet.

WordPress Starter (Recommended) is $2.99 per month and packs great value. It lets you host up to 100 WordPress websites, receive up to 25,000 visitors a month across your websites and access to 100 GB of storage. If you’re a developer, you will love WP-CLI and access to WordPress multi-site functionality.

The Business WordPress plan is 3x more expensive than the Single plan, however, you get a lot of value for your extra dollars. Similar to Starter, you can host up to 100 WordPress websites. Your websites can sustain up to 100,000 visitors a month. On this plan, you’ll get access to unlimited email accounts (always helpful when you’re running a business), and up to 200 GB of storage. One unique feature of Business is the free CDN included, which loads your websites from servers closer to your website visitors and automatically blocks out malicious or potentially harmful traffic.

The last plan, WordPress Pro, provides the ultimate WordPress experience. It is $11.59 per month and comes with all of the advanced features on previous plans, in addition to a Jetpack Personal subscription (valued at $40 a year) for free. This gives you automatic site backups and access to a 30-day site archive as well as automatic restores. It’s a handy feature if backups are important for your websites (which they pretty much always are).

Similar to their shared web hosting plans, Hostinger’s WordPress hosting plans come with great features at low prices. If you want fully featured WordPress without spending a fortune, Hostinger WordPress Hosting is a solid choice.

Just to cover a few of their features, check out some of the best features included on the Hostinger WordPress plans:

Hostinger also lets you choose from 7 datacenters located in Europe, North America, Asia, and Latin America. This means your WordPress websites can be geographically closer to your audience for a boost in speed and performance.

Hostinger Website Builder

Exclusive Hostinger Website Builder plan: 48 month plan – $1.99 per month ($95.52 total cost)

If you’re new to websites or just want an easy to way to build your website by dragging and dropping, a website builder is your go to option. Hostinger uses the Zyro website builder, which gives you 55 (and counting) designer level themes from different industries to build a personal or business website.

There are 2 types of Website Builder plans: Basic (personal) and Unleashed (business).

Basic – $1.99 per month

Unleashed – $2.99 per month

Both plans come with designer level templates, free SSL security, SEO tools, and even AI-integrations to boost automation on your website.

If you’re comparing, for $1 more, Unleashed is definitely the better choice giving you more resources, and integrations with Google Analytics, Facebook pixel, and Messenger Live Chat. Whether you’re building a personal or business site, Unleashed is an excellent option to get a website up quickly for a couple bucks a month.

Hostinger Online Stores

You can also build an online store using the Hostinger website builder, starting at $8.99 per month, you can sell up to 100 products and accept online payments 100% commission free.

Exclusive Hostinger Online Store plan: 48 month plan – $8.99 per month ($431.52 total cost)

There are 2 online store plans at Hostinger: eCommerce and eCommerce+, the big differentiator being the number of products you can sell, points of sale, and product management features.

eCommerce – $8.99 per month

eCommerce+ – $13.99 per month

If you plan to sell to customers in multiple languages, eCommerce+ gives you a multi-lingual selling option, pretty handy. Considering the point of sale on different platforms and cart features you get, eCommerce+ is a solid deal.

It also means 0 website maintenance and management, since a website builder is completely self-contained. This way you can focus on your sales and customers, not website maintenance.

Hostinger Cloud Hosting

Hostinger provides Cloud hosting plans as well for sites where speed is key, they claim 4X more performance. They start at $9.99 per month.

Hostinger VPS Hosting

If you’re looking for a budget-friendly VPS (virtual private server), Hostinger has 6 VPS levels, with Level 1 starting at $3.95 per month for 1 GB memory and 1 TB of bandwidth.

Although the prices are enticing for Cloud Hosting and VPS, our internal tests found the performance on Hostinger’s VPS suboptimal for high traffic websites.

We also found frequent crashes and downtime, which is why we recommend sticking to their shared hosting and website builder plans if performance and reliability are key for your websites.

Hostinger also offers Minecraft, cPanel and CyberPanel VPS hosting.

Core features

One core feature that sets Hostinger apart is the Managed WordPress and WordPress Acceleration tools they include across all of their web hosting plans.

Managed WordPress means you’ll have WordPress installed for you along with a starter toolkit – for a newbie, this is super useful. WordPress Acceleration means your WordPress website will run on LiteSpeed cache, this is a powerful caching plugin that boosts WordPress website speed considerably.

During our internal tests, we found Hostinger’s performance hit and miss, but offering caching and a starter toolkit for WordPress at $1.39 per month is a deal you’d be hard pressed to find elsewhere.

There are other advanced features worth mentioning. All of Hostinger’s hosting plans come with Cloudflare protected nameservers (good to prevent DDoS attacks), free SSL, and backups (either weekly or daily). Another great feature (that developers will love) is cron jobs, which is the ability to run scripts and commands on your hosting at intervals or scheduled times.

If you’d like to migrate an existing website, Hostinger offers a website migration service inside of their panel. In our experience, you’ll be waiting, but their team will eventually get it done. They also make website migration tutorials available if you’d like to do it on your own.

Interface

Hostinger uses their own control panel called hPanel for most of their hosting services. It fairly easy to use and gives you a clean interface for managing your websites, email, SSL certificates, and domain names.

hPanel in action

If you’ve ever used cPanel, their hPanel works somewhat similar. You get an interface to manage all of your websites. If you have multiple websites, they’re all managed from the same spot, which definitely makes things pretty easy to access.

hPanel comes with an installer that lets you install WordPress and other popular apps like Joomla, Drupal, PrestaShop, OpenCart, and phpBB.

hPanel doesn’t offer anything special for WordPress management beyond single sign on to your WordPress dashboard. However, one cool feature was the SSL activation and management, along with the ability to manage and add new websites to your hosting with 1-click.

hPanel is very basic compared to other control panels, however this did make it easier to navigate. The pages on the interface load quickly and generally you don’t have to click much to find what you need. It’s a great interface for beginners and intermediate users alike.

Support options and quality

At $1.39 per month, the biggest concern is how Hostinger could provide any level of support. Do they even have enough money to pay support staff 24×7?

Hostinger guarantees 24/7/365 support across their hosting plans. The support is through live chat, and only live chat. There is no ticket-based or phone support available. What does that mean? Wait times. Sometimes, very long wait times. Also, at times we found chats were never picked up, even after waiting in queue for 2+ hours.

One thing that is impressive about Hostinger is that they offer live chat support in over 11 languages, some very niche like Vietnamese, Thai, Indonesian and Lithuanian. Their team even says you can write to them in any language you’d like and that they’ll translate it and respond to their best of their ability in English. That’s a pretty good effort on their part.

Nonetheless, Hostinger has definitely polished the self-serve support model. Their Help Center is split between a Knowledge Base and Tutorials. Their Knowledge Base contains detailed and visual guides on how to use every aspect of your hosting service, there are even videos in some. Tutorials cover common questions like how to navigate the WordPress dashboard, use WordPress plugins, and even how to build different types of WordPress websites. These were also informative and contained a lot of videos. If you’re good with independently finding your own answers, you’ll be happy.

That said, tutorials and guides can only go so far. What if your website is down? What if you run into a critical website error and panic? What if your website is going very slow and you’re losing money? What if your website is completely down and you lose a bunch of sales? This is where waiting for a chat is not ideal. You’ll feel pretty helpless and run the risk of a disaster. There’s no priority support at Hostinger.

The competition

Hostinger offers super cheap web hosting with value packed features. Although support is mainly self-serve, they offer a budget-friendly platform for beginners, junior developers, or anyone on a shoestring budget to get online easily and quickly. However, there are competitors who win in quality, speed, and support.

A great option is Skystra who puts an emphasis on quality performance, speed, and support for WordPress websites and WooCommerce online stores. Prices start at $7 per month to host 1 WordPress website and all hosting plans come with free SSL, free CDN, free email, and advanced options such as premium caching to boost your website speed by up to 125%.

Skystra’s biggest difference between themselves and Hostinger is their quality of support and performance. Read our Skystra review to learn more.

Another great alternative if budget is important is HostGator, with shared hosting plans starting at $2.75 per month, they also have a website builder available at $3.84 per month. All of HostGator’s plans come with free SSL, a free domain on year 1, and 24×7 live support. Read our HostGator review to find out more.

Final verdict

Hostinger’s jaw dropping low prices definitely raise some eyebrows. Despite their low prices, they provide advanced features helpful for beginners and technical users alike. Their hPanel interface is easy to use and intuitive from a management perspective.

Something to note about the low monthly pricing at Hostinger is the 48 month lock in and trade off on support quality. This means you have to sign up for a 4 year contract (4 years is a long time) to get serious monthly discounts. You’ll also need to get good at answering your own questions with their self-serve support model. If you’re starting out and not looking to spend much, Hostinger could be an ideal choice.

Ultimately, Hostinger offers hosting plans for beginners or those just wanting to get online at a very low price. If website speed, performance, and quality support are at the top of your requirement list, you’d be better served at a different hosting company. Hostinger is a hosting company that provides value for websites where price over quality is the main priority.

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