Overview
| Overall Global Performance | A+ |
| Free SSL Certificate | Yes |
| Uptime Guarantee | Yes |
| Features of Basic Plan | Weekly backups, LiteSpeed Cache, 100GB bandwidth, SSD 30GB |
| Hosting Types | VPS hosting, WordPress hosting, Shared and Cloud hosting |
| Starting Price | $0.99 per month |
Hostinger is one of the most economical web hosting options available in the market. They have a basic package that starts at $0.99; it doesn’t get cheaper than this.
Most hosts have a basic plan that costs three times more than Hostinger. Through our experience, you can’t expect much from cheap digital products.
However, we were pleasantly surprised with the features and performance that Hostinger has to offer, given the price.
Their pricing stands unbeatable. Let me point out one thing, in order for you to enjoy the low pricing, you will have to subscribe for a longer term than you would expect.
The service and features are great and at a steal away price, so this is a wise move to make.
Your clients are not concerned with the price your paying towards the web hosting service; all they care about is; good service, great features and a place where they are confident their sensitive data is safe and secure. The question is, can Hostinger provide all this?
We have our opinion on it, but this article is not just what we think of it, but what is the buzz in the market about Hostinger.
We have surveyed various web hosting professionals, this was an opportunity for us to conduct a large-scale survey, and results have been great.
Our website reaches every corner of the globe, giving us a chance to get in touch with 50 web hosting experts. They agreed to sign up and launch a testing website using Hostinger.
These experts were from 35 different countries. They optimized all the features available, monitored performance and loading speeds, and even flooded customer support with various concerns and queries.
These results were then compared to other hosts that are very popular in the market like; InterServer and SiteGround.
To answer the previous questions and declare the results of the tests, I must say Hostinger performed exceptionally well.
In countries like Israel, Hostinger backed the first place, and in Russia, it secured fourth place.
This article will give you a detailed breakup of the various features, uptime, loading time, and more, mainly based on the various tests conducted.
Features
Overall Rating 4.6/5
Looking at the pricing Hostinger has to offer, we were very skeptical about their performance and features.
We all would love to get web hosting at half the market price, but I’m sure none of us would want half their services. Lucky for us, we got excellent service too.
Hostinger provided us with hosting plans that had everything included in it that helped us get started. The plan had tools that helped boost performance with ample resources at our disposal.
Hostinger has three shared hosting plans; Single, Business and Premium. All of Hostinger’s plans work on the hPanel control panel that includes straightforward installs of WordPress that are automatic and various CMS (Content Management Systems).
We had taken the basic plan that included one email, support for one account, the bandwidth of 100GB and disk space of 30GB.
The resources are sufficient to build a decent website with over a thousand HD images and more than a hundred pages. It’s more than enough to display your services, products, creativity, writing and more.
Both the advanced hosting plans have unlimited websites, unlimited bandwidth, and email accounts are unlimited too.
Automatic backups are not performed daily, and this was a big bummer. The basic plan doesn’t offer this feature. So, we had to back up all our data manually every day. We also had another option of purchasing this service at an extra fee.
Hostinger has Zyro, a website builder that has the drag and drops feature. However, it isn’t available as a part of the plan. Drag and drop features can be very convenient while building your website from scratch.
Before we proceed to the best features that Hostinger has to offer, let’s take a look at the Cloud hosting and VPS hosting plans.
Hostinger is a shared hosting provider; let’s not be like the person who walks into the joint in town that makes mouth-watering pizzas and asks for a hamburger.
If that joint specializes in pizzas, there is no use in going to them if you crave burgers.
Similarly, various hosts specialize in Cloud hosting and VPS hosting services like Kinsta and Liquid Web. Hosting services are not bad, and I find no reason to go in for any other.
Basic Features of hPanel and places it lacks
As discussed, earlier Hostinger has its control panel with proprietary rights to it. This implies that you won’t have access to cPanel, which I’m sure you know about and probably even love working on it. It is better not to get attached emotionally to control panels unless you’re a weird one!
Moving on, not long ago, cPanel was the standard control panel available with most hosts (Hostinger included), but things change. Change is always constant, and rolling with it, is the best thing one can do.
On account of some not-so-interesting events that happened some time ago (let’s not get into it), panels have been switched by many hosts left, right and centre.
Hostinger has stepped into the panel world with its new hPanel venture. It is equipped with exciting goodies, everything you need.
We were pleasantly surprised. It has a MySQL database, file manager, straightforward auto-installs, and email accounts can be DNS zones configured. I know you’re thinking it too; yes, it’s very similar to the cPanel service.
However, not everything is alike; there are a few different areas; cPanel has Softaculous that performs auto-installs and allows you to duplicate your site, a backup schedule is configured, and a staging version is set up.
The auto-installer of hPanel does an excellent job with auto-installing WordPress, but I must say it lacks these very helpful extra features.
hPanel seems to be missing a few advanced features for emails like; routings, filters, and mailing lists. But to me, it never really made a difference.
To be honest, I never used them, even when they were available, so I’m cool with it. And I don’t know a person who uses it.
But, my job is to make it known to you guys. It doesn’t have everything, but it is sufficient for many customers.
Powerful Caching
LiteSpeed is the webserver technology used by Hostinger, and it’s not a metal physical server. It has been in the first position for being the most reliable and fastest servers. It has outperformed Apache that is an older technology; GoDaddy still uses it.
You don’t have to move a finger to configure it. Just kick your legs up, relax and experience the first-grade service it offers, mainly for WordPress sites.
We recommend you activate the caching function of LiteSpeed- known as LSCache, don’t miss out on it. Sounds very technical? You will find the Automatic Cache option- turn it ON, that’s all.
It will make copies of your cache pages; this will significantly affect the delivery times, cutting it down quite a bit.
This will have a positive effect on your visitors. The ones to benefit from it the most are static pages – portfolio and business pages.
SSL Certificate
All of us have someone or the other we have consulted with. No matter what you have been told about SSL certificates, let me stress on it; you need to get one. Why? Various evils are lurking on the internet.
If your website doesn’t have an SSL certificate, you will not be able to secure and encrypt all the sensitive data of your customers.
Not having an SSL certificate is a rash move as you put your project and your customers at major risk. And to top it all, your website will take a big blow regarding its rankings on Google – trust me, you want a good ranking; it’s great for business.
The good news is; Hostinger offers its clients SSL certificates with all their hosting plans. But, a few months ago, this was not the case; I didn’t get an SSL. Can anyone predict the future? In my experience, I have noticed Hostinger keeps tweaking its plans.
So, when you’re getting your plan, be sure to check if you’re getting an SSL certificate along with the plan.
If the SSL is not included with the package, you can always get one by paying an extra fee. But I’m sure that won’t be the case.
User-Friendly
Overall Rating: 4.5/5
Well-Designed but Plenty of Pop-Ups
The web hosting team of experts has designed an amazing interface that offers the users a great journey right from signing up to managing and using their host.
Like every business has its strategy, Hostinger constantly nudges you into purchasing extras and upgrading your package. It is infuriating and confusing.
However, the plans are very clear, upon signup. The only information they ask for is your email address, password and name. Yay! You don’t have to go through the painful process of giving out irrelevant information that most hosts are determined to collect.
Connect the Domain and Install WordPress
After I got my plan, I had to get my domain connected and then install WordPress.
When I was signing up, I was offered the option to get WordPress automatically installed, but I declined and chose to go old school – with the help of the control panel installing it. This allowed me to check and compare the tools Hostinger has to offer compared to other providers.
I had got the Single Plan, so I had free domain included; that means it was connected to the web hosting.
Like I said, who can predict the future! So if you get the Single plan today, it won’t have the free domain; it is only offered with the advanced plan.
So, if you get the domain name from some other hosting provider, connecting the same is very simple. At the beginning of your page, the nameserver is available. Now you need to copy it and then paste it to the domain panel.
About WordPress hosting – Go to the Auto Installer tool and open it – select WordPress as your choice of CMS and enter the details of the basic website.
It was much easier than the way Softaculous used to go about it. With this, your website will be all set up and running within minutes.
Straightforward hPanel
Now that we have gone through the entire process of getting your site online, from now on, you will need to use hPanel to change and edit your web hosting.
Running backups that are manual, email account setup, handling the database etc., can be easily done via hPanel.
If you’re thinking of how does it compare to cPanel, then, based on my experience, I can say it is way simpler than cPanel. hPanel has designed its panels to be bigger and well organized.
The interface is not filled with all those additional options that you will never end up using. Above all, Hostinger’s integration with other services likes; viewing billing, purchasing extra’s, support etc., is seamless.
Can I conclude by saying it offers the best user-friendly experience? No, because, as I mentioned earlier, you are disturbed, and your work is interrupted by the frequent pop-ups. I’m not raising the bar here, but Hostinger is keen on forcing plan upgrades for some reason.
I must say, please be prepared to turn them down-the limitless pop-ups. Don’t be fooled into thinking all your resources have been exhausted and you need to upgrade – well, that’s the purpose of these pop-ups.
Performance
Overall Rating: 4.8/5
The main factor that I am in search of is uptime and speed. Unfortunately, most shared hosting doesn’t do so well in this department.
As the name suggests, the main reason for this is that all the resources are shared with various other websites and their users (some of them host hundreds at a time).
It requires an exceptionally good host to level out everything and at all costs avoid congestion, this will slow everyone down, and I can assure you there are going to be many unhappy clients.
I am glad to announce that it has done exceptionally well regarding the test conducted on its performance. They have also achieved on and beyond other hosts with shared services.
They include the market giants like; InMotion Hosting, FastComet Hosting and SiteGround Hosting.
Two hosts did a tad better than Hostinger that too, by a very small margin was – Kinsta and Nexcess. If you check their prices out, they charge way more than Hostinger, and I can say approximately 20x more.
Check out the capabilities of Hostinger
We have a full-fledged landing page, and then it had a phenomenal loading time of 1.56s, and the uptime was 99.99%; they kept their promise.
Let’s take a moment and understand the methodology used for testing and the reports too. You feel you don’t need all the technical info at any point in time, and you can skip this part and move directly to the experience segment. I’m going to once again repeat it – Hostinger performed exceptionally well!
Our test website was hosted on their data centre located in the US – Asheville. Hostinger has multiple data centres based in Lithuania, Singapore and Amsterdam. Our website is still fully functional, with a working landing page, text and HD images.
We optimized our website to make it work faster, a standard thing we like to do with all the hosts we test.
So this is what we did, and I strongly suggest you do the same – seek help. The executive that I spoke with told me to update the PHP and WordPress to the latest version.
We were also asked to install a few optimization plugins. We decided to apply all the changes we were asked to make and continued with the testing.
GTmetrix
Over the months, we ran various GTmetrix tests, combined the results, calculated the slowest, average and best speeds.
Hostinger displayed an amazing average of 1.56s loading time, 1.96s was the slowest, and 1.0s was the best.
The slowest load time is below the market average of 3s; at 3s, be sure that more than half your visitors will leave your page. The average load time only proves Hostinger is the best in the business.
As I had mentioned earlier, there are some more hosts we were testing. Check out the results below
| Loading Times | Hostinger | FastComet | SiteGround | GoDaddy | InMotion |
| Fastest | 1.0s | 1.1s | 1.4s | 2.2s | 0.8s |
| Average | 1.56s | 1.84s | 2.02s | 2.94s | 1.97s |
| Slowest | 1.9s | 2.8s | 2.5s | 5.0s | 5.0s |
Sucuri Tester
Multiple times we ran the Sucuri test, just the way we did with GTmetrix. If you want to get results for various global locations regarding loading times, then this test will help you. So we got locations with the fastest speeds, and it comes as a no-shocker.
The locations are in the US (so we got lucky as they were close to our data centre), while the lowest was on the other side of the globe – India, Bangalore.
Let’s look at the worldwide average; the fastest location has an amazing 0.177s, whereas, in Bangalore, the average was not all that bad with 1.11s; the global average is 0.499s. With that being said, I must say my website earned an A on the global ranking.
I’ll be honest here, and I am super stunned by the results. If you check our chart or even the market, 0.499s as a global average is never heard of, especially with shared hosts. Installing a few plugins helped me optimize the site – nothing less, nothing more.
And let me add, there wasn’t a Content Delivery Network (CDN) active. That is LSCache and LiteSpeed for you.
Uptime Robot
What is the use of all the fast speeds globally, but there is low availability for your website? It will do you no good.
For the past couple of months, Hostinger has been giving us a very good uptime of 99.997%. We are updating and tracking the results.
The situation is tricky when it comes to the guarantee with regards to uptime. They guarantee a 99.99% uptime.
Now, Hostinger has a very unclear legal explanation of how to get your refund. When we went through it, it sounded like NEVER; suppose you qualify (by some miracle) for the refund, it would only be 5% of the monthly price. And the cherry on top of it all is, it’s available only for store credit.
But, apart from all this guarantee, rigmarole, Hostinger is the best in the business, well you can’t have it all, right!
Customer Support
Overall Rating: 4/5
We have been using their services for a long time. Testing Hostinger multiple times has been very gratifying. In the past, the best part about their services used to be their customer support.
They still don’t have phone support, but we never really missed it because their live chat was simply wow!
An extensive knowledge base backs their executives. Hostinger’s support team is also available 24×7, 365 days, above all very courteous and professional.
Today we have a concern; you ask what? Earlier the agents would reply instantly, today they take over 40 minutes.
We have also noticed, at times, live chat isn’t available. The system transfers you to a ticketing system, and we haven’t been lucky with it. This can get frustrating, especially if the matter is pressing.
I’m going to get real with you; all this simply means that you’re going to be stuck with the so-called rich knowledge base to get a solution to your issue.
Unless you have a lot of time on your hands to wait for someone to connect with you, when they do, the whole process seems extensive.
They take an average of 4 min in between chats. If you calculate this time, it is going to take up your entire working day.
Before we could sign up, we wanted to connect with customer support, and guess what; there was no live chat. We were asked to send an email, huh! Why would they want to put their clients through this? However, when I got a response from them, it was understandable that the executive has thorough product knowledge and told us what we should expect.
Like most of you, we are also wondering if Hostinger would help us set up the site. Now from experience, I can say, many just want to make a sale, so they will end up saying yes, and when it’s time to deliver, the truth is revealed.
You are on your own to get it done by yourself. However, the executive from Hostinger was honest enough to tell me that we had to do it on our own.
This honesty from them is much appreciated. Honesty with your customers will create loyal and long-term customers.
At the end of it all, what I’m trying to say is, the knowledge base is the best thing you have to help you sort your issue.
It is created to assist you with simplified solutions like; installing WordPress has a very simple tutorial explaining the entire process. So, it is not on the top of the list in this segment, but they can do better.
Pricing
Overall Rating: 4.9/5
Honestly, their pricing stands out compared to their competitors, and that’s why you’re here reading this article. A monthly fee of $0.99, it’s a steal. So, is there a catch?
Yes, you can avail this price if you’re ready to commit for the long term. Hostinger is keener on making long-term customers. They give their clients incentives for the same.
Hostinger offers four payment plans; monthly, yearly, bi-yearly and quadrennially. The meaning of quadrennially is four years. This option is very rare to find in the market. No hosts will ask you to stay with them for such a long period at signup.
So, get this, if you opt for the four years option, then you will get the best net price that is available for shared hosting on the globe. The four-year price is equal to the yearly price that most hosts have to offer.
So if you’re good at math, you’re going to end up with the quadrennially deal. If you’re wondering about the yearly and bi-monthly plans, then let me clear that out for you, they are not very expensive, but they are as good as what’s available in the market.
Final Thoughts
Hostinger is by far the cheapest shared hosting provider in the market that’s worth your consideration, your money and your time.
As I have stressed earlier, they have excellent performance, and it’s got all the features you would require.
Is it for you? If you’re creating a blog, small or medium website, personal project or business page. I’d say YES.
But, if you’re planning on building an e-commerce store or a course portal that is a complex service, then you might need a web hosting service that has more power than shared hosting.
You can go through some of the best options in the market. You can also check our review on the Best Ecommerce Hosting Canada.
We hope you find what you’re looking for. Cheers!