Hostinger Review 2023: Check Out 7 Pros And 3 Cons

About Hostinger

Although Hostinger has been in the buzz in the last couple of years, Hostinger is not new in the Web Hosting Business. It was founded way back in 2004 as Hosting Media. Its two subsidiary companies 000Webhost and Hosting24 were founded in the years 2007 and 2008, respectively,

In 2011, Hosting Media rebranded itself to its current name Hostinger. Apart from 000Webhost and Hosting24, Hostinger also owns an Indonesian Web Hosting Company, Niagahoster, and a Brazilian Hosting Company, Weblink, that it launched in the years 2013 and 2014 respectively.

As of 2021, Hostinger is one of the largest hosting brands in the industry.

Hostinger Plans And Pricing

Hostinger is mostly known in the industry because of its super-affordable plans. So let's check out the various Web Hosting plans at Hostinger.

Shared Hosting Plans

Hostinger offers three Shared Hosting plans, Single Shared Hosting, Business Shared Hosting, and Premium Shared Hosting. What I like about Hostinger is that they offer LiteSpeed Webserver with each of their Shared Hosting plans.

Most hosting companies reserve the Litespeed server for their topmost plans except for the likes of ChemiCloud and Namesilo. Below are the details of Hostinger's Shared Hosting Plans

Cloud Hosting Plans

Hostinger also offers Cloud Hosting plans. For technical people, the Cloud Hosting Plans offered by Hostinger do not use KVM Hypervisor. Rather they use CloudLinux to limit the server resources available to each account. So technically they are shared hosting plans using Cloud Infra.

There are three available plans, Cloud Startup, Cloud Professional, and Cloud Enterprise. The only difference between each of these plans is the number of server resources you get to use. The basic plan offers 3GB RAM and 2 CPU cores while the topmost plan offers up to 12GB RAM and 6 CPU cores.

WordPress Hosting Plan

For WordPress Users, Hostinger offers 4 WordPress Hosting plans. Single WordPress, WordPress Starter, Business WordPress, and WordPress Pro. The first 3 plans are similar to shared hosting plans. I'd say this is just a marketing technique to sell the same product for a higher price. That's the first con for Hostinger.

As for the WordPress Pro Plan, it does offer more resources as well as Jetpack Personal license. Although I am totally against Jetpack and would uninstall it straight away, it's still there for those who like using it.

cPanel Hosting

For most of its hosting plans, Hostinger provides a cPanel-like control panel called hPanel that is lightweight and easy to use. However, if you are coming from a cPanel hosting, you might not like the limited options available at hPanel.

So, for cPanel lovers, Hostinger offers two cPanel hosting plans, cPanel Hosting Silver and cPanel Hosting Gold at a premium price to compensate for the extra pricing they incur to get the cPanel license. Notably, both these plans come with a free domain name.

VPS Hosting

Hostinger also offers Unmanaged VPS Hosting plans starting at an unbelievable price point of $3.95 per month for a 1GB RAM Server. However, scalability might be an issue with Hostinger as they offer VPS plans with up to 16GB RAM only.

CyberPanel VPS

Their VPS is cheap, but their CyberPanel VPS is an absolute steal deal. Priced exactly the same as their VPS hosting plans, they offer a lot more to you. First, their CyberPanel VPS is powered by Litespeed WebServer. Together with LS Cache, it can make your website fly.

The VPS also comes with a one-click installer for WordPress and Github Integration. You can also back up and restore your content to Google Drive AWS, etc. Another highlight of their CyberPanel VPS is the support for HTTP/3 and QUIC.

Registering With Hostinger

Hostinger has probably the most easiest and shortest registration process. Clicking on the below button will take you to their home page.

One thing that I want to note down here is that Hostinger's Home Page shows a countdown timer showing that the deal will expire in certain days or hours. However, that's mostly not the case. While evergreen timers are widely used across the web, I see them as misguiding the users.

Coming back to the registration process, you can see their shared hosting plans by just scrolling down the home page as shown below. So that essentially eliminates one click for most users looking for shared hosting. For people looking for other hosting plans, you can navigate to the desired page from the Hosting option in the top-right menu.

Whether you are on the home page or the product page, clicking on the Select option will straight away take you to the cart, where you can adjust your plan duration and also create an account.

What I like here is Hostinger collects no personal details. You just need to enter your email ID to create a Hostinger Account. That's really impressive and conversion-optimized.

Another thing worth noting is that there are absolutely no upsells. That's again impressive considering they are into the affordable hosting category where you can expect upsells all over.

Scrolling down you can choose your payment method. Hostinger has many payment options including Credit Card, PayPal, and Google Pay. Here you can also enter the coupon code.

Don't forget to use our exclusive Hostinger coupon code that gets you an additional 10% discount on hosting products.

Clicking on Submit Secure Payment will take you the payments page where you can make the payment to buy the hosting.

Onboarding Experience

Very few hosting companies have customized their onboarding and Hostinger is one of them. I've registered with them long back in 2018 and I guess 2019 too and I must say their on-boarding experience was pretty average. In fact, second time around, it was too confusing.

However, when I registered a test website for writing this review, they completely changed their on-boarding sequence. To say the least, it was spectacular. I don't think any other company comes even close to it.

First, Hostinger will ask you a series of questions to customize things for you. Once you are through it, you will get an option to Install WordPress, WooCommerce + WordPress or other applications of your choice.

Hostinger also offers you to use their Zyro Website builder, which is quickly gaining popularity among businesses for building static websites.

If you choose WordPress, unlike some other hosting companies, Hostinger offers you to select your own username and password. You also get an option to migrate your existing website, However, one thing that I would like to have is the ability to select between www and non-www versions of your website. But you can anyway change it later from your WordPress Dashboard.

If you don't already have a website to migrate, Hostinger also allows you to choose from several pre-built templates for your WordPress Website. Hostinger uses Pre-built websites themes from the Starter Templates plugin. The plugin will import the entire website for you to edit as per your liking. 

Next, you will see an option to buy a domain name or use an existing domain name.

Unlike most other hosting companies, in the very last step, Hostinger asks you to choose your Data Center location. Overall, the onboarding experience was spectacular and beginner-friendly.

Hostinger Control Panel (hPanel)

Hostinger has plans for both cPanel and hPanel. However, since cPanel is very common and most users already have experience with it, I chose to go with their regular hPanel Shared Hosting plans for my test account.

To my suprise, the hPanel looks really clean and clutter-free. Although it lacks some advanced options available in cPanel, you can find most regularly-used options in the hPanel. While advanced users might miss cPanel, for beginners, hPanel looks less complicated and hence a better option.

And not just the hPanel, even the one-click app installer is customized. So, Softaculous lovers would be disappointed. Having said that, their custom one-click installer works as good. What's missing though is the ability to use the www subdomain as your default URL. Not sure why Hostinger missed out on that one. 

Hostinger also has a Dashboard feature integrated into their hPanel that allows you to control your WordPress website without logging into your WordPress Dashboard.

From the Hostinger Dashboard, you can Force HTTPS, enable Maintenance mode, Activate/Deactivate as well as Flush Litespeed Cache. WordPress Updates, managing SSL Certificate as well as enabling and disabling Cloudflare can also be done from the Dashboard.

WordPress Dashboard is where you will come across Hostinger's first upsell. If you are on their Single Shared Hosting or Premium Shared Hosting Plan, you will have to pay extra for daily backups. I feel Hostinger should have included Daily backups at least with their Premium Shared Hosting plan.

Also, if you are on their Single Shared Hosting plan, you have to pay to enable Cloudflare from the dashboard. And nope, it isn't the pro version of Cloudflare. You're not going to get a $20 plan with a sub $2 hosting (Liquid Web, by the way, offers Cloudflare Pro plan with their $20 VPS that will get you 2GB RAM and a free cPanel License. Hard to believe, right?). 

Anyway, here Hostinger is making you pay to use the free plan of CloudFlare. Although I am not sure how many people fall for this trap, it might be generating Hostinger some extra revenue with no additional cost to them.

There's also a Plugins section in the hPanel that allows you to enable and disable plugins. However, you won't be able to add or delete plugins

Apart from the above options, the hPanel includes all the standard options including Checking your usage history, Renewing and upgrading your plan, adding and managing email accounts, managing your domains and subdomains, Auto-installer, file manager, and more.

It seems, Hostinger is also promoting Fiverr. You can find the Fiverr option in the hPanel and Hostinger seems to be using an affiliate link for the same. Strange for a web hosting company.

Speed

Hostinger is one of the fastest hosts that I have tested thus far. What's interesting is that Hostinger is quick right out of the box.

So, even if you are a non-technical person who understands nothing about Website optimization and caching, you can still enjoy lightning-fast websites with Hostinger.

For my test website, I always use the Starter Templates plugin by Astra Themes to build an Elementor-powered WooCommerce website. 

I specifically choose this combo as both Astra Themes and Elementor plugin are most commonly used in website developments. While Astra Themes is a light-weight theme, Elementor is a resource-heavy page builder that can significantly slow down your WordPress website.

This WooCommerce is 2.04 MB in size when compressed and 3.19 MB uncompressed and generates 62 requests which is quite average for WooCommerce websites.

The DNS is handled by Cloudflare. However, Cloudflare is bypassed by the website so you might see higher TTFB.

I first carried out the tests after removing the LiteSpeed Cache plugin. You can see the result below

The website loaded in around 2.5 seconds with the LCP loading in 1.9 seconds which I feel is quite decent for an unoptimized elementor-powered WooCommerce website.

As you can see the major reason for the slow load time is because of slow TTFB of 1.2, which is almost half the total page load time. It takes time to compile a page with 62 requests which you can confirm from the waterfall chart below.

Next, I turned on the the LiteSpeed Cache plugin from the Hostinger Dashboard and then repeated the tests. Just to confirm, even though Hostinger has Page Caching enabled by default, the Browser caching is left disabled.

As you can see, the first run isn't any different from the test we carried out with the LiteSpeed Cache plugin disabled. This is because LiteSpeed Cache only starts building cache after the first HTTP request, whether its from real user or a bot, like in our case.

However, I saw a huge dip in TTFB as well as page load time when I rechecked the page speed for the second time.

As you can see the TTFB was reduced to just 264 ms which is great given that I am not using a CDN. The LCP too improved to 1.1 second while the Fully loaded time was just 1.6 seconds.

So, Hostinger although quick, might not be the quickest with LiteSpeed Cache plugin installed. But since the Hostinger 1-click WordPress installer installs and activates the LiteSpeed Cache plugin by default, Hostinger can easily beat most websites when it comes to page load times out-of-the-box.

Hostinger Uptime

Uptime of a website is to be taken with a grain of salt as it totally depends on the quality of server you are hosted on.

It's more about luck as several high-end hosting can have poor uptimes on a specific server whereas a low-quality hosting can have great uptime on others. That's the reason, I don't cut too many points or give several extra points to a hosting company based on the uptime recorded

And my experience with Hostinger over the last several years of using and monitoring their test account exactly defines the same. When I started monitoring Hostinger's uptime, I faced frequent downtimes for no reason.

And a couple of downtimes were too long for my liking measuring at 3 hours and 41 minutes and 6 hours and 14 minutes as you can see in the image below.

However, when the Mumbai Data Center was launched, switched to the Mumbai server to check out the same. I did not record the exact period during which I was using Mumbai Data Center, so I cannot say for sure how was the uptime during that period.

However, as far as I remember, the uptime wasn't great. Anyway, I then switched back to the US data center. And this time around, quite likely that I got my account moved to a new server. 

However, ever since then, Hostinger's uptime has been brilliant. At the time of updating this Hostinger Review, the uptime was 100% in the last more than 3 months with the last downtime recorded over 100 days ago as shown in the image below.

P.S: You can see the dip in the response time graph after I installed the LiteSpeed Cache plugin for my speed tests.

Hostinger Customer Support

Customer Support is another crucial factor to be considered before selecting a hosting company. This is one area where Hostinger has to improve considerably. 

The response times are very slow. I see their chat option to be like creating a ticket and getting a response through a chat window. However, the good part is, you don't have to wait for the executive to respond. You get an email when an executive answers your query.

There's a plugin called Hostinger that comes pre-installed with WordPress. I was unsure what was the purpose of this plugin. So, I thought of reaching out to Hostinger's Customer support to enquire about the same.

At the time of sending the message, the chat window showed that the response time then was less than 10 minutes. However, the bot message indicated that it can take up to 30 minutes for live specialist to answer your query.

I received the first reply in about 15 minutes. You can check the screenshots of the reply.

From the time seen in first and last screenshot you can verify that it took almost 45 minutes for Hostinger to answer this basic query. So, this is certainly not the quickest of customer support.

I won't mind if the response times were slow for their Single Shared Hosting Plan which is aggressively priced. However, their Premium Plan is not much cheaper than competitors who provide a much better service. 

But as you see, the customer support for my Premium Shared Hosting plan was slow too. So, it's high time Hostinger should start offering Premium support to their costlier plans.

Hostinger Money-Back Guarantee

Hostinger has a 30-day money-back for its web hosting and several other products. The good thing is unlike most hosting providers, Hostinger also offers refunds on certain domain extensions if canceled within the first 96 hours.

Also, there aren't any vague statements that could be used by the company to deny you refunds which again is a great thing.

However, no refunds will be issued for products purchased using Cryptocurrencies due to it's volatile pricing which is understandable. In such cases, the refunds can be transferred to the Hostinger balance. 

Also, refunds will not be applicable for the following

Again, nothing to worry here as almost all hosting companies won't refund the above products.

Overall, Hostinger has a great refund policy. So, you can buy and test their services for 30-day with a free mind.

Alternatives To Hostinger

No web hosting is perfect. So this Hostinger Review would be incomplete without providing alternatives to Hostinger. So let us find out what other web hosting you can consider.

1. A2 Hosting

A2 Hosting is one of the most popular hosting in the Web Hosting industry. Like Hostinger, it's one of the few hosting companies that's not owned by EIG or GoDaddy. 

A2 Hosting is especially for their Turbo Plans that are lightning quick. And yes, A2 Hosting's Turbo Plans are capable of taking on Hostinger when it comes to speed. However, what gives A2 Hosting an edge over Hostinger is it's awesome customer support.

So, if you are looking for a web host that won't desert you and your website during outages, you can consider going with A2 Hosting. You can also check my A2 Hosting Review For 2022

2. ChemiCloud

ChemiCloud is another web hosting company that offers LIteSpeed WebServer with all their shared hosting plans. However, from pricing perspective, ChemiCloud isn't close to being as cheap as Hostinger starting at $4.48/month.

However, ChemiCloud does have several positives as compared to Hostinger. First, their base plan comes with 1GB RAM which is what you get with Hostinger Premium Plan. So, although ChemiCloud is still costlier, the price difference is not huge.

Second, they have an excellent customer support team as against the below-average support of Hostiger. And last, but not least, they have 9 data centers to choose from.

So, if you don't mind spending more for getting quality support, ChemiCloud is a great option for you to consider.

3. Cloudways 

Hostinger offers unmanaged VPS as well as managed Cloud Hosting plans. However, unlike their unmanaged VPS, their Cloud Hosting plans does not allocate dedicated resources for your website. Rather, it uses CloudLinux to restrict all the accounts to a certain resource limit.

You can think of it as a Shared Hosting hosted on a Cloud. However, if you are looking for Managed Cloud VPS and have a tight budget, Cloudways would be way to go as they offer Managed Cloud VPS starting at just $10/month. They are even offering free $20 hosting credits to Blogging Ocean Readers.