Hostinger review 2024 (first-hand insights from 3 years of experience)

Hostinger is an excellent hosting provider for website owners who run one or multiple small websites and are looking for 24/7 support. They offer solid value for money, but don't expect world-class hosting for their a few euro per month plans.

PROS

·????? Ridiculously fast LiteSpeed hosting (top 3 in the Netherlands )

·????? Good value for money

·????? Free website migration service

·????? Generous specifications (lots of disk space)

·????? hPanel hosting which is super easy to use for beginners

·????? 24/7 support via live chat

CONS

·????? Uptime isn’t flawless

·????? Customer service is hit or miss

·????? Mainly suitable for smaller sites

>> Visit Hostinger now for a 75% discount

Hostinger is a company with millions of customers which offers hosting packages at rock-bottom prices.

Usually such a formula does not bode well for the quality of a web host. Look at companies like Strato or HostGator that offer super cheap hosting but fall far short in terms of speed, uptime, support and features.

Hostinger surprised me because their hosting is ridiculously fast, they offer excellent specifications for what you pay and they have a very user-friendly self-developed hosting dashboard (hPanel) which is ideal for beginners.

Sure, their support cannot match that of their more expensive competitors. But they are available 24/7, with wait times that are somewhat manageable (30-40 minutes).

Personally, I wouldn't host my mission critical websites with them, but for smaller (business) websites, they are an excellent choice.

Hostinger at a glance

Uptime guarantee: ?

Customer support: 24/7 live chat, ticket support

Managed WordPress: ?

Kinds of hosting: Shared, cloud, VPS

Features: 1TB bandwidth, 100GB storage, website builder, email, free SSL security, Cloudflare, and more

Mostly suitable for: Small (business) websites and hobby projects

Server locations: Amsterdam, Manchester, Vilnius, Sao Paulo, Asheville, Jakarta, Singapore

Price: €2,99?per month

Hostinger speed

As a budget hosting provider, Hostinger obviously fills their servers ‘til the brim with websites, but as a user you don't notice much of this.

I've been running a hosting plan with Hostinger for months (their Business plan) for testing purposes and the site on it is consistently fast.

You feel that speed not only on the front end of your website, but also within the WordPress dashboard (take a look here ).

And to give you an idea of speed for your visitors, this is how fast you click through a site running on Hostinger.

For the record, this site does not have caching or other speed optimizations.

Let's now take a look at the results of the speed test. The test website I used looks like this:

·????? WordPress theme: Kadence (we also use this theme for Start24 )

·????? Plugins: Block Navigation, Kadence Blocks, Post Duplicator

·????? SSL certificate (Let's Encrypt).

The site includes a multipurpose WordPress theme, text, images and other graphics, making it representative of a small business site or blog.

The Google PageSpeed and GTMetrix test results (these are the most popular tools for measuring a site's speed) are as follows:

As you can see, it's mostly green what catches the eye here. So add some perspective, Hostinger is the second-fastest provider in the Netherlands according to these speed tests.

Especially impressive is Hostinger's Time to First Byte (TTFB), which is 123ms. Simply put, TTFB is the response time of the server. So suppose you click on a link and the TTFB is 500ms, it takes half a second for your Web page to just start loading. According to Google, you should start to worry when your TTFB exceeds 500ms. Anything below 200ms they describe as "very good."

When I used the free LiteSpeed plugin on this test site, the TTFB even dropped to 50ms. Roughly a third of the time it takes to blink your eyes.

The bottom line is that Hostinger is very fast as well as consistently fast. With Google's increasing focus on website speed, this is good news for Hostinger customers.

Hostinger uptime

I've been monitoring my test site at Hostinger for months through UptimeRobot, popular tool that tells you when your site is down.

For the past 30 days, my Hostinger site had an uptime of 99.997%, which means it was down for a minute every now and then.

In some months, the uptime was 100%.

Of course, one test site says little about the uptime of a hosting provider as a whole. That's also why I always dig through Facebook groups, forums and user reviews.

The bottom line is that Hostinger doesn't come out completely unscathed. You see reviews from customers reporting downtime which is then confirmed by Hostinger itself.

Is this a structural problem? Not as far as I can tell. I myself have not been affected by it and downtime complaints constitute only a fairly small part of the online sentiment around Hostinger, which is mostly positive (a 4.6/5 score on major review platforms after 20,000 reviews).

Look, with a budget hosting provider that serves more than 2 million customers, you can't expect the same uptime as with a boutique hosting service that costs 10x as much. Nevertheless, in most cases you should have little trouble with downtime at Hostinger.

Hostinger support

Hostinger's support is available 24/7 via live chat and an email/ticket system. They also have an extensive and very well maintained knowledge base.

If you are used to the support of most local hosting providers, then you will probably be impressed with Hostinger's customer service. They are there for you day and night and you usually get a hold of them within 30-40 minutes. Compared to your better local or premium international providers, however, they are less impressive.

My notes on Hostinger's support:

·????? Once you get a hold of them, the time between their messages can take several minutes. This means that resolving a simple problem can take an hour or more.

·????? The quality of their support team is inconsistent. Some support staff are very helpful, while others clearly do not know what they are talking about.

Again: with a provider that caters to a mass audience, don't expect support that is so good that it brings tears to your eyes.?

Something that does deserve mentioning are the logistics behind Hostinger's customer service. First of all, you can easily reach support from a your dashboard via a floating button that is always visible.

There you can describe your issue after which you will be presented with several knowledge base articles that will (usually) give you the answer to your question.

Unlike many other hosting providers, these knowledge base articles are up-to-date and easy to follow via screencaps.

You can also choose a preselected topic after which you get to chat with a "personal assistant." This assistant is an AI-powered chatbot that can do useful things like check the status and performance of your site. It can also direct you to relevant articles within the knowledge base.

In case this chatbot doesn’t solve your problem, you can still chat with a real human.

Hostinger’s hPanel is incredibly user-friendly

I have a weakness for intuitive, beautifully designed software, and Hostinger does not disappoint in this regard. Instead of using Plesk, DirectAdmin or cPanel, off-the-shelf hosting dashboards that always feel a bit clunky, Hostinger offers their self-developed hPanel.

hPanel is well-designed, easy to use, and lets you manage everything from your billing details to your file manager.?

On top of that, it is suitable for not only beginners, but also advanced users. As a beginner, you won't be knocked around the head by all the bells and whistles found in Plesk and cPanel.

At the same time, experienced users looking for advanced settings will not be disappointed: most of the functionality you have in the well-known hosting dashboard can also be found in hPanel.

Features and specifications?

Depending on the package you choose, Hostinger offers the following features:

·????? Weekly and daily backups (up to 7 weeks and 7 days, respectively)

·????? CDN (except for their cheapest plan)

·????? Free domain name for one year

·????? Free website migration service

·????? WordPress vulnerability scanner

·????? WordPress staging tool (except with the cheapest package)

·????? Object cache for WordPress

·????? WordPress AI tools

·????? Good security, including Cloudflare protected nameservers

Hostinger is also generous in terms of specifications. Their standard web hosting plans offer between 100- and 200GB and you can install 100-300 websites on them.

For the average user, this is a bit overkill, but if you manage a lot of small sites, this is very attractive.

Hostinger plans and costs

Hostinger offers shared, VPS and cloud hosting. But shared hosting is what they excel at. It is what they specialize in and what most of their customers use.

I would pick either their Business or Cloud Startup plan - depending on how many resources you need.

Their cheapest plan (Premium, a somewhat awkwardly chosen name) offers no staging functionality or on-demand backups and uses old SSD hard drives (instead of NVMe). Moreover, the price difference between Premium and Business is negligible.

What is interesting about their Business and Cloud Startup plans is that you can install 100 and 300 websites, respectively, and get 200 GB of storage. This is significantly more than many competitors offer.

Hostinger claims that all their plans offer unlimited bandwidth, but you have to take this with a grain of salt. Once you reach 20,000-100,000 visitors per month (depending on your plan), you can expect Hostinger to kindly yet urgently ask you to upgrade.

Hostinger's price tag is attractive - especially if you pay a few years in advance.

Their Business plan costs €3.99 per month (€7.99 after renewal) which is dirt-cheap.

For who do I recommend Hostinger?

Hostinger is an excellent provider for smaller websites of various kinds. Think of a blog, online store or a small business site.

Hostinger is a provider "for the masses," but you won't feel this immediately when using them. Their hosting is super fast because they invest heavily in the latest LiteSpeed servers, and you generally won't have to deal with any downtime.

Their user-friendliness is impressive. You can tell from everything that it is a well-oiled machine - not a hosting provider tied together with tape and strings like many local web hosts. You easily set up a hosting plan and through hPanel, you can directly manage your site(s) in an easy way and reach the support team.

Admittedly, the support is a bit hit or miss. Not all staff members are tech savvy and waiting times can sometimes be considerable.

Mission critical sites on which 10s of thousands of monthly revenue depend should not be hosted with Hostinger. For that kind of site it is better to pick a boutique hosting provider with a more personal approach.

However, for smaller sites they are an excellent choice.

>> Visit Hostinger now for a 75% discount