Considering buying hosting from Hostinger?
What's the Best Hosting reviews hosting services periodically to assess their quality and help you decide if their service is right for your online business.
In this review, we will analyze Hostinger hosting and evaluate its quality based on our experience using it and on the trials and tests we performed on a WordPress site hosted on Hostinger hosting we purchased.
If you like the features they offer, we can help you get a significant discount on the price of their packages as well as a free domain as a gift from Which Hosting is Best?
If you're unfamiliar with different web hosting services, it can be difficult to choose the right hosting service for your website from the hundreds of options available online. While the offerings of these services may look similar at first glance, there are a lot of differences hidden behind the scenes of these services that are hard to notice early on before you buy.
Therefore, the What is the best hosting team is keen to test these services intensively and for a long time to show how good these services are and to extract any hidden weaknesses.
Thus, visitors can rely on this information to facilitate the process of selecting the appropriate hosting service and get enough background on that company's services, strengths, and weaknesses to facilitate their management of their website.
We chose Hostinger this time to put it under the microscope because of its popularity and the low cost of its packages, which attract a large number of customers.
The rest of this page will contain the results of our tests of Hostinger's shared hosting service, analyzing its advantages and disadvantages in the hope of helping our visitors choose the right hosting service for their online business.
Company | Hostinger |
---|---|
Control panel | Special |
Hosting services | Shared, WordPress, VPS, Cloud |
Technical support | Live chat |
Moving the site | free |
Domain | Free for visitors to What is the best hosting? |
Hostinger coupon | AFDALHOSTING |
Hosting price | Starting from 1.27$ |
Hostinger Hosting Review
About Hostinger
Hostinger is one of the most popular European domain registration and web hosting companies, with a fan base of more than 29 million users and more than 15,000 new customers every day, making it a cut above the vast majority of hosting services when it comes to popularity.
Hostinger's web hosting experience spans more than a decade since it was founded in Lithuania in 2004 and is especially known for its low-cost plans, especially if you use a discount coupon like the one offered by What is the best hosting on this page.
Hostinger has seven data centers located in Lithuania, USA, UK, Brazil, the Netherlands, Indonesia, and Singapore, with more than 800 employees. Hostinger also has several subsidiaries such as 000webhost, one of the most popular free hosting services, Weblink, and Hosting24 as well.
In addition to domain registration services, Hostinger focuses on offering premium hosting services at competitive prices in both shared and cloud hosting packages as well as its own virtual servers. Hostinger also makes it possible to choose more customized hosting servers, for example for WordPress sites, online stores, content management systems, or even dedicated servers for the popular Minecraft game.
On the other hand, we find it strange that they neglected to provide full servers and reseller services, especially since they made sure to provide less popular services such as Windows Server Virtualization and email hosting.
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Advantages of Hostinger Hosting
In addition to its low cost of service, Hostinger Hosting has a lot to offer. Its servers performed admirably in our performance tests and its packages offer a lot of value for the money. The following bullet points go into more detail about these and other features:
Hostinger hosting uses fast servers
Regardless of the nature of your site, it's important that your visitors can navigate it quickly. If your site's pages are slow to load, it's sure to frustrate visitors and eventually cause them to abandon the site.
According to studies conducted by Google, every second of extra waiting will cost you 20% of visitors to your site. If your online venture is an online store or a for-profit business, you'll find that this penalty for slow loading is more than you can afford.
Fortunately for you, Hostinger does its best to provide fast servers to all its customers, even going so far as to include hardware upgrades, which are usually the most expensive. Such as relying exclusively on modern SSDs, creating multiple data centers to reduce response times, and carefully selecting hardware and network segments.
In addition to performing well in our tests of page load time and server response time, Hostinger did better than expected in our stress test, which is usually the Achilles heel of shared servers. Its service maintained a relatively stable response time with an average of 106 milliseconds even when the server was stressed by 50 virtual visitors and 32 requests per second.
There are still more additional services that boost your site's loading speed such as content delivery networks and additional customization services. If you choose one of their cloud or WordPress hosting plans, you'll find more advanced options that offer more support for your site's speed and load time.
Hostinger offers advanced security and privacy protection
For a low-cost hosting service, it was surprising to us to see the amount of security services and measures Hostinger offers its customers. While most of its competitors only offer a free or discounted SSL certificate, Hostinger goes one step further and provides several additional features for free, including:
- Cloudflare subscription to protect against cyberattacks
- Automatic daily or weekly backups
- SSL certificate to encrypt communications
- Bitninja Smart Protection Service
- Spam and spam protection
Most users think that having an SSL certificate is enough to protect their site, but the truth is that protecting your server needs a lot of security measures to protect you from various forms of cyber attacks and malware.
For example, Hostinger uses Cloudflare to protect your site from cyber attacks such as DDoS and brute force attacks, Bitninja to protect you from various malware, and you get security software built into your email service to scan and filter spam.
It's great to know that you won't need to purchase these services separately as with many competitors, which increases the value of Hostinger hosting compared to the costs you're paying.
Hostinger utilizes advanced caching technologies
Caching techniques are software optimization techniques applied to a company's servers, so they are not hardware optimizations, but they have a significant impact on the speed of your site, especially page load time. The caching technology used by Hostinger is known as LiteSpeed, which is one of the latest and most powerful acceleration technologies and has proven to outperform popular technologies such as Apache, which is used by GoDaddy hosting.
Using this technology does not require any prior setup from you. All you need to do is activate it from your dashboard to take advantage of the performance boosts it offers, especially for WordPress sites and other content management systems.
Caching technologies create ready-made copies of your site's content to make it available to visitors in the shortest possible time instead of regenerating pages and making queries over and over again. Your visitors will get a faster response time and reduce the load on your server at the same time.
Easy to use Hostinger hosting interfaces
Hostinger designed its control panel with ease of use in mind as it is aimed at novice and non-technical users. Therefore, the company made sure to use graphical interfaces that are simple, straightforward, and intuitive enough for users to handle without any prior experience or training.
In addition, Hostgator has created a free preview of the dashboard that you can try out without having to sign up for their service.
Looking at the hPanel interfaces, you can notice that it borrows the design style that Microsoft uses in its products, which reveals Hostinger's desire to give its users a sense of familiarity with the Windows operating system. You will find large buttons for each category with an icon that clearly expresses its task without the need to index through the different sections and categories, unlike many hosting services that look as if they are trying to hide their features deep in the control panel.
It's hard to imagine finding a control panel that's simpler and easier to use than the Hostinger control panel. However, experienced webmasters prefer to use a feature-rich control panel with specialized tools such as cPanel or Plesk.
Keeping this point in mind, Hostinger's design of a private control panel can be an advantage for beginners and a disadvantage for professionals, depending on your perspective as a user. In any case, it hasn't cut off its customers who want to use cPanel, as the company offers separate cPanel hosting packages just for their satisfaction.
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Hosting Hosting's uptime is good
It's comforting to discover that you won't have to compromise on your site's uptime when using Hostinger hosting. This is one of the most important performance indicators for your site and the one that has the most impact on your online business.
To some degree, we were expecting to see average to poor results in our uptime tests with Hostinger hosting, given the low cost of its plans, which makes us wonder about the quality of its infrastructure. Instead, we got above-average uptime in our stability tests, as shown in the image below:
On the other hand, Hostinger's performance in this indicator is barely above average and is not encouraging for those who want to host an online store or similar projects. There are many businesses that are particularly harmed when their site goes offline, in which case it is preferable to use shared hosting with stable servers such as FastComet, cloud hosting packages, or one of our recommended virtual servers that perform better on both speed and performance indicators.
While there are plenty of competitors who do better than Hostinger on this point, we find it to be a bargain when weighing what you pay and what you get. Plus, its servers managed to maintain uptime rates above 99.90% most of the time, which is good enough for small websites, blogs, and landing pages.
Low Hostinger hosting renewal prices
The vast majority of hosting companies use misleading advertising to promote the prices of their services by neglecting to mention the long-term upfront commitment and the high prices of subsequent renewals for the same package.
In fact, Hostinger does this as well, but its customers are in a much better position than the rest of its competitors as the renewal prices of its plans remain relatively low, with the cost of hosting for the first plan rising from 0.99$ to 2.99$. In comparison, its competitors' renewal prices are often many times this price, as in the case of HostGator and SiteGround hosting.
Similar to other hosting services, Hostinger's discounted promotional rates require you to book your hosting for a long period of 48 months, or four years, upfront. This is a lot longer than most of their new customers would like, but fortunately, Hostinger Hosting offers other options to book their hosting for two years, one year, or even one month.
Of course, the cost of these packages is inversely proportional to the aforementioned booking period, while you will get the highest value when booking for 4 years at 0.99$ per month, this cost will become 1.59$ per month when booking for 2 years, 2.99$ when booking for 1 year and finally 9.99$ + a one-time server setup fee of 4.99$ if booking monthly.
Hostinger Hosting offers a free domain for new users
As mentioned above, Hostinger is also an authorized domain registrar and seems to want to make the most of the company's various divisions to enhance the marketing benefits of its services. All Hostinger hosting packages include a free domain registration service for new customers, which means I've taken more costs off your plate for at least the first year. Don't forget that domain purchase prices usually range from 10$ - 25$ per year, which is higher than the cost of hosting for the same period.
A free domain registration service will give you just one domain name, which is often enough for most people. But if you want more, Hostinger Domain Registration allows you to reserve your favorite domain name at prices as low as 0.99$ per year.
Hostinger has a money-back guarantee policy
If you have doubts about the ability of Hostinger hosting to satisfy you, you can take advantage of their guarantee policy for new customers, which allows them to get their money back if they submit a request within 30 days of signing up. This means that you can buy their service without worrying about investing in the wrong hosting service, as you will have enough time to evaluate the quality and performance of the service.
On the other hand, the 30-day guarantee period is the industry standard for web hosting. There are many services that offer longer warranty periods of 45 days or even 97 days like DreamHost. There are hosting services that offer an impressive warranty policy that is valid for the duration of your subscription to their service, such as A2 Hosting.
On the other hand, there are many companies that do not offer any warranty period at all and you will have to trust the company's reputation before purchasing one of their services.
It's important to remember that Hostinger's warranty policy usually covers the price of its plans, domain transfer services, and SSL certificates, but it does not cover domain reservation, server setup fees, and privacy protection services.
Hostinger Hosting offers a free website builder
Hostinger has a website builder of its own design called Zyro, which is similar to other popular website builders that rely on graphical interfaces to build websites without having to write any code or have a technical background.
All it takes is to install one of the ready-made, customizable templates provided by the app and then edit it by dragging and dropping various interface elements such as images, text, and buttons into their proper places to form the web page you envision.
Of course, website building apps can't compare to the work of professional web designers, but they're a quick, simple, and cost-free way to launch your site. If you want to build a simple webpage, these apps may be enough to satisfy you.
However, if you want to design your site yourself, we recommend using a popular website builder like Weebly instead of the one provided by hosting services. You can install website builders from the control panel and you'll have more template options and greater customization possibilities.
Periodic backups
Depending on your chosen hosting plan, you'll be able to schedule weekly or daily backups, and of course, you can still perform manual backups at any time from your control panel without any restrictions.
All competing hosting services allow you to perform backups manually from the control panel, but this process tends to be long and monotonous, making it a nuisance for most webmasters who usually end up neglecting it altogether. It's better to rely on specialized software to schedule this process and do it automatically and periodically in case something happens on your server that could cost you your site's files and data.
All hosting companies realize the importance of this point, but they take advantage of this to sell the backup feature as a paid add-on, and while Hostinger hosting allows you to schedule weekly backups in its economy plans, this may not be enough. Depending on the nature and activity of your site, the need to copy data daily may be a necessity, then it would be impractical to perform this process manually every day and you will have to purchase it separately (this will cost you ~11.40$ per month) or upgrade to a premium plan. Business to get this feature for free.
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Disadvantages of Hostinger Hosting
Hostinger aims to provide high-performance hosting solutions at the lowest possible costs to target small businesses and individuals. If you look at the table of details of its packages, you will find that it has succeeded in this to some extent, but since it wants to make a profit from this service, there are a lot of compromises that its customers will have to accept to make these prices possible
That's why the team at What's the Best Hosting has identified the most important compromises that you should think about carefully before purchasing a Hostinger plan. We also recommend that you take a look at our Cheapest Hosting page, which will give you an idea of the best possible alternatives to Hostinger hosting.
There are a lot of limitations to the basic Hostinger plans
If you think it's impossible to get a full-featured hosting service for less than 1$ per month, you're absolutely right, as it's inconceivable that Hostinger can make any profit from those prices. You might be thinking that this might be the company's strategy to attract customers by offering an excellent and cheap service first and then increasing the price later after the customer gets used to its hosting service.
In fact, this strategy makes sense and is good enough to be used by the biggest hosting companies in the industry. You can get a GoDaddy hosting plan for a few dollars a month, but that offer is limited to the first year and requires a special coupon code similar to the one offered by our site. After that, the price of the plan will increase to 900% from its previous price in one of the biggest price jumps we've seen.
In comparison, Hostinger's hosting allows you to take advantage of that offer for four years and the increase in renewal prices is very low and they don't seem to avoid including basic features in this plan like GoDaddy does. How has Hostinger managed to maintain these prices?
The answer is that this package comes with a lot of compromises and resource limitations. Let's start with the computing resources, the storage space offered by the basic plan is limited to 10GB and there is a bandwidth cap of 100GB and ~10,000 visits per month. You can only host 1 website, 2 databases, 2 subdomains, and 1 FTP account.
Let's move on to the extras, first of all, you should forget about the free domain. This is kind of expected since we know that domain registrars charge a fee for every domain you register and we can't expect Hostinger to take care of that for us. Oddly enough, you won't get access to a CDN, you won't get an SSH connection to your server, you'll have to settle for weekly scheduled backups, and there are severe limitations to the Cronjobs feature as well.
It's clear that Hostinger is trying to carefully trim the features of the Economy plan to keep prices low without sacrificing their profits, but it makes you wonder if what's left of that plan is enough to support your site, especially since the restrictions on bandwidth and monthly traffic seem draconian.
Hostinger hosting does not use the cPanel control panel
We've already mentioned that Hostinger has designed its own control panel, and while this control panel is sleek and easy to use, it's specifically designed to make it easier for beginners to handle. It has all the basic features and tools you'll need to manage your server, but it lacks the extra features and special tools that more advanced control panels like cPanel or Plesk offer.
We can understand that Hostinger's use of a control panel of its own design significantly reduces its hosting costs, especially after cPanel increased the price of its licenses. However, for experienced webmasters who are used to dealing with the advanced tools in cPanel, this will be a hindrance, and getting used to a new control panel takes time and effort, which can be avoided by choosing a competing hosting service that uses cPanel.
Fortunately, Hostinger seems to realize how popular and important the cPanel control panel is for many webmasters, and they don't want to risk losing a significant number of customers by abandoning it. Therefore, the company has provided two cPanel-based hosting packages to manage.
Of course, using cPanel comes with additional costs for licenses, but the costs of the two hosting plans are still low at 5.99$ and 9.99$ per month.
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Hostinger's technical support can get even better
Hostinger has a generally good technical support department and provides technical support services through multiple channels including a huge knowledge base, email technical support, ticketing system, and live chat. It is also known for providing technical support to its customers in multiple languages Unfortunately, it does not include Arabic Hostinger now offers Arabic-language technical support for Arab customers.
We didn't have an issue when testing the quality of Hostinger's technical support, but we did notice that their service lacks a call center, which usually offers a faster response time than the technical support department, and the wait time is longer than usual when using live chats. It seems that Hostinger's technical support department is too busy to chat with potential customers as using this feature requires a login first.
There are a lot of negative comments that we came across when researching past customer reviews, mostly related to the long wait times when live chatting with technical support staff. There are also complaints that Hostinger sometimes automatically redirects users to the ticket support page when they try to use the chat support platform.
Serving more than 29 million customers can certainly be a burden for any company, and we've noticed that hosting services with a small fan base tend to offer excellent technical support. However, it remains the responsibility of the company to provide active and prompt technical support, regardless of the size of the challenges they face.
In general, the technical support experience varies from customer to customer, if you are using one of Hostinger's packages we would like to know your rating of the technical support you received, this will also help our visitors who want to use hosting from Hostinger.
Do you think Hostinger hosting is right for your site?
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Hostinger Hosting Packages and Pricing
Hostinger Hosting allows its customers to choose from three different packages in its shared hosting service. These plans are aimed at meeting the needs of novice webmasters and personal websites for individuals and small businesses.
You can use the information table below to determine the most suitable hosting package for your site based on its requirements and the nature of your business. Of course, you can use the comments section at the bottom of this page if you have any questions about choosing the right hosting package for you.
Single Web Hosting | Premium Web Hosting | Business Web Hosting | |
---|---|---|---|
Number of sites | 1 location | 100 locations | 100 locations |
File Storage Capacity | 30GB | 100GB | 200GB |
Free Domain Registration | No | Yes | Yes |
Free SSL certificate | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Number of databases | 2 | unlimited | unlimited |
Automatic Backup | Weekly | Weekly | Daily |
Email accounts | One account | unlimited | unlimited |
CDN service | Paid addition | Paid addition | free |
Number of monthly visits | 10K | 25A | 100K |
Price without discount | $9.49 | $11.95 | $15.99 |
Price after discount | $1.27 | $1.83 | $3.67 |
Hostinger coupon | AFDALHOSTING |
AFDALHOSTING |
AFDALHOSTING |
Getting the discount | Starting from 1.27$ per month | Starting from 1.83$ per month | Starting from 3.67$ per month |
Frequently Asked Questions about Hostinger Hosting
This section includes some of the most frequently asked questions we receive about Hostinger hosting in particular. If you have a question, feel free to ask it using the comments section at the bottom of this page and a member of the What's the Best Hosting team will get back to you as soon as possible.
What is Hostinger?
Hostinger is a popular European provider of web hosting and domain registration services. Founded in 2004, Hostinger has over 29 million registered customers and 15,000 new users daily.
What dashboard does Hostinger use?
Hostinger has designed a proprietary control panel called hPanel and uses it for all of its hosting packages. However, you can purchase a hosting package that uses cPanel for a little extra cost.
What payment methods does Hostinger accept?
Hostinger offers more flexible payment methods than most hosting services, including standard credit cards and PayPal as well as the ability to use cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Litecoin as well.
What services does Hostinger offer?
In addition to domain registration, Hostinger offers shared, cloud, and VPS hosting services. It also allows ordering dedicated servers for hosting content management systems such as WordPress hosting or online stores as well.
By the time you get here, you'll have finished reading our detailed review of Hostinger's shared hosting service.
If you have an experience with this service, we'd love to hear it, and if you have a question or something you'd like to share with us, please feel free to do so using the comments section at the bottom of this page.