Hostinger is a web hosting company that is owned by its employees. It was founded in 2004 and originally had the name Hosting Media.
However, in 2021, once the company reached the milestone of having a million users, its name was changed to Hostinger.In 2007, Hostinger was a subsidiary of 000webhost.
The goal was to provide free web hosting around the world. Today, Hostinger has more than 25 million users worldwide, with subsidiaries that are in more than 178 countries. It serves as the parent company of 000webhost, Weblink, and Niagahoster.
It is estimated that 20,000 new clients sign up for this service each day. Hostinger boasts that they can allow their clients to create a website with complete freedom. In this review, we are going to look at some of those claims to see if this European host is any good.
What Is Hostinger Known For?
When talking about itself, Hostinger is direct and to the point. They don’t use glossy terms to describe their service. Instead, they say that they are all about cheap web hosting.
Let’s start with their pricing and hosting plans.
Hostinger offers three basic plans:
- Single Shared hosting with discounts run around $1.45 a month
- Premium Shared hosting with discounts run around $2.15 a month
- Business Shared hosting with discounts run around $3.45 a month
Currently, they are running a deal that brings the price of their Single Shared hosting plan down to $.80 per month.
With their Business and Premium web hosting plans, personal free domains are included. Let’s take a closer look at each of their basic packages.
Single Shared Hosting (Best For Newbies)
This is the least expensive plan available. You pay $1.45 each month for the first four years. If you continue to use the service after the first four years, the price of the service jumps to $7.99 per month.
This plan gives you:
- 100 GB bandwidth
- One email account
- An auto-installer
- 10 GB disc space
- Easy website builder
- One MySQL Database
- One Website
This is Hostinger’s entry-level plan. It is not designed to have all of the features you will see in some of the other plans we are going to review. However, when you are paying just $1.45 each month or even less with discounts, you really cannot complain about the features being offered.
The plan only allows you to host one website. This is reflected in the resources that are allocated to you. Ten GB of disc space and 100 GB of bandwidth are enough to create an impressive sight. The overall package is relatively bare-bones. But if you just have one website and you are looking to run the site without too many bells and whistles, this is a nice option.
One issue that some had with this package is that it just offers one email. It’s not unusual for small businesses to have just one website, but they usually have a couple of email addresses that they use. If this is a kicker for you, check out the Premium Shared Hosting Plan.
Premium Shared Hosting
This is the mid-tier plan. For the first 48 months, you are going to pay $2.15 per month. After that, the price increases to $11.95 a month.
This plan offers:
- Unlimited number of websites
- Unlimited FTP users
- Unlimited SSD disc space
- Unlimited email accounts
- Free domain name
- Unlimited MySQL database
- Easy website builder
With this plan, you are paying two times what you would pay with the previous plan. However, you are looking at a completely different package. This plan gives you access to just about all of the functionality and the power that Hostinger offers.
This has been made for people who have multiple sites and who are concerned about speed. With this package, you can have as many websites as you want, use as much disc space as you need, and chew up an unlimited amount of bandwidth. There is no limitation on the number of MySQL databases that you can have, and you can create an endless number of FTP accounts if you choose to.
The nice thing about this plan is that it has been optimized for WordPress. As a result, if you use the Premium plan for your WordPress site, you are going to get three times the speed as those who are stuck with the basic plan.
With this packet, you will also get a domain name included. There is no annual renewal fee. You also get a free SSL certificate. This helps to protect individuals who visit your site from the man in the middle attacks. It creates an overall safer browsing experience.
Business Web Hosting
This is the top-of-the-line plan that they offer. For the first 48 months, you will spend $3.45 per month. After that, the price increases to $15.95 per month.
This plan offers all of the perks of premium hosting plus:
- 5X WordPress optimized speed
- Daily backups
- 2X processing power and memory
- Free SSL certificate
- Deluxe life support
For just a couple dollars more, you can enjoy the benefits of the Business Shared hosting package. This is the most comprehensive service that they offer. Everything that we reviewed in the Premium plan is included in the Business plan.
The major difference you are going to see is the RAM and CPU allocation. Both of these are doubled in the Business plan. This is going to have a major impact on the performance of your site. The Premium plan is already quick. By doubling the speed with the Business plan, your service is so fast you cannot help but be amazed.
If you are running your site on WordPress, then things get more interesting. Instead of a 3X speed boost, you get a 5X speed boosts. This means that unless your site is getting thousands of visitors every day, it is always going to run fast.
Something else that we like about the Business plan is that it includes automated backup functionality. You likely know that manually backing things up is a boring, long, and repetitive process. This is where a lot of people quit doing it after a while and then regret it later.
An additional perk of the Business plan is that you are given priority access to Hostinger’s tech support team. That means that when you connect to tech support, you jump ahead of everyone who is not using the Business plan. When your site is having problems, this feature alone makes the small increase in price worth it.
VPS Hosting
We want to briefly discuss the VPS hosting packages Hostinger offers. Hostinger’s VPS plan makes it possible for a webmaster to get good speeds, reliability, and a reasonable price. Their VPS plans start at around $4.95 a month and go up to $75 a month.
The specifications for each plan vary, but they offer between one GB and eight GB of RAM. The CPU range is between 2.4 GHz and 14 GHz.
They are generous with the storage space. The lowest VPS plan has 20 GB of SSD storage. The highest level plan offers 160 GB of SSD space. Bandwidth for the lowest package is around 1,000 GB and goes up to 6,000 GB for the most expensive plan.
When we took an objective look at Hostinger’s pricing plans and what they offer for the price, we walked away with the impression of this being a cheap hosting company that offers a premium service. However, it is one thing to offer services at an inexpensive price. But how good is the service that they offer?
Uptime and Load Time
Very few things can get the blood boiling like trying to access a website and waiting patiently for it to load. Although the site’s load time is probably just a couple of seconds, in this world where we are accustomed to getting near-instant response times when we surf the web, waiting one or two seconds for a page to load can seem like an eternity. In most cases, the hosting company is to blame if the speed is slow.
We’ve been tracking Hostinger for the last year. You can see our live tracking here.
How does Hostinger stand up?
385ms Load Time
Hostinger has servers in the United States, Asia, and Europe. All of their servers are connected to a 1,000 Mbps connection line. These ensure maximum performance as well as stability. When you look at an average of Hostinger’s load times over 10 months, starting in December 2017 and ending in September 2018, it averages out to 385 ms. To put that in perspective, that is roughly the amount of time it takes your eyes to blink.
Uptime Score
Uptime is another factor to consider when determining whether or not a web host is worth the money. A web host could offer their services for five cents a month. But if their service is constantly down, you are paying for absolutely nothing. Think about it this way, how many times would you revisit a new website if the first three times you attempted the site was down? You would probably never go back because a site that’s constantly down saying a lot of negative things about the site’s owner.
