4.5
Very Good
The Best
Easy to use
Cheap
The Worst
No automatic daily backups
Limited number of sites
Starting From
$5.99
One Of Best Hosting Platform?
In this review, we take a look at Hostinger, one of the cheapest shared hosting providers you will find anywhere.
But is it easy to use? Will it have all the features you need? What’s the performance like? Is the customer support any good? And is it the right choice for your website?
We answer all these questions and more. So let’s get into it...
Summary
Hostinger offers dirt cheap hosting, that’s packed full of easy to use features and options. Our most recent tests found their speed and reliability to be pretty good.
Customer support could be faster, but it’s usually knowledgeable and helpful. And while some features are limited in scope, you’ve got to expect some compromises at these prices.
If low cost is your main priority, then Hostinger is currently one of the best options available.
What is Hostinger?
Founded in Lithuania in 2004, Hostinger is a small, employee-owned web hosting company. However, their coverage is global, and they host 29 million websites in 178 countries worldwide.
Originally, they offered completely free web hosting. While that’s not the case any longer, they still pride themselves on combining affordable pricing with powerful features for professional websites.
In this review, we’ll take an in depth look at their shared hosting plans. However, we’ll also take a quick look at the other hosting packages they offer.
Hostinger Pricing
* These are the prices that you will pay on renewal (if you pay for a year in advance), when the 1-year introductory offer ends
Let’s have a look at what you’ll get for these prices:
Single | Premium | Business | |
|---|---|---|---|
Websites | 1 | 100 | 100 |
FTP Accounts | 1 | Unlimited | Unlimited |
Inodes (files allowed) | 200,000 | 400,000 | 600,000 |
Storage (SSD) | 50 GB | 100 GB | 200 GB |
Bandwidth | 100 GB | Unlimited | Unlimited |
RAM | 768 MB | 1 GB | 1.5 GB |
MySQL Databases | 2 | Unlimited | Unlimited |
Database size | 3 GB | 3 GB | 3 GB |
1 Domain registration for free | No | 1 year | 1 year |
SSL Certificates | Yes | Yes | Yes |
SSH Access | No | Yes | Yes |
Backups | Weekly | Weekly | Weekly + Daily |
Email accounts | 1 | 100 | 100 |
CPU Cores | 1 Core | 1 Core | 2 Cores |
First year prices | $2.39 a month | $2.39 a month | $3.99 a month |
Price at renewal for 1 year-deals | $5.99 a month | $8.99 a month | $11.99 a month |
More information | |||
Price Increases on Renewal
Nearly all web hosting providers offer incredibly cheap introductory prices to lure you onto their plans. However, these low prices are not sustainable and when the introductory period ends, your plan will automatically renew at a higher price.
Web hosting price increases on renewal can be enormous
Some of the renewal prices are many hundreds of times more than the introductory prices!
However, it’s these renewal prices that you’ll pay going forward, and they represent the true value of the product. It’s therefore these prices that Tooltester uses to evaluate hosting plans and compare them to other web hosting services.
With Hostinger, the price increases on renewal are quite modest compared to other providers. However, you can expect your first year prices to more than double on renewal, so just be aware of that.
Price Transparency
While crazy introductory prices are inevitable in such a competitive market (and do have the advantage of letting you test a product cheaply), I expect the hosting company to be transparent about the increases on renewal before I click “buy”.
This means that on their pricing/purchase pages:
The renewal price is clearly displayed (and explained) next to the introductory price
How long you have to commit to, to get those introductory prices (1 year, 2, years etc), is also clearly displayed (and changeable)
Hostinger does clearly display the renewal prices just under the introductory prices:
Hostinger’s renewal prices are clearly labeled
So top marks there from me!
However, the only introductory prices you see are the ones you get if you pay for 24 months in advance, but there’s no mention that they are dependent on 24-month commitment anywhere.
You only see the other (more expensive) intro prices (for 12 and 1-month periods), once you’ve added the plan to your cart, and on the next page it’s actually the 48-month plan that is selected by default!
You only see the different periods later in the sales funnel, and 48 months is selected automatically.
Hostinger may argue that this is to keep things simple, but I think it’s a bit sneaky. I like a pricing page that shows me the different prices of the different commitment periods before I add one to my cart.
Namecheap do it better in my opinion:
Namecheap’s renewal prices and payment periods are clearly displayed at the top of the sales funnel.
By the way, 48 months is far too long to commit to any web hosting plan with any company. You’ll have to pay a big chunk of money upfront. And if you decide you don’t like it (outside of a short refund period), you won’t be able to do anything about it for the next 4 years!
At Tooltester we always recommend you go for the 12-month contract period and those are the prices we use in our reviews and comparisons.
Hostinger Review Conclusion
In my opinion, Hostinger has improved a lot since the last time we reviewed it!
The most significant improvement is their uptime. In previous years, the uptime was too poor for us to recommend Hostinger as a reliable option for serious projects.
However, this year’s scores were acceptable, and this means we can start to consider the other things Hostinger brings to the table.
The backend is fast and easy to use, there are tons of useful features available, your website will be pretty speedy and the customer support is not too bad either.
And all this at rock bottom prices!
Ideally, I’d like to see a free domain for the first year on all plans, and I’d especially like to see automated daily backups. But these can of course be purchased as add-ons.
Don’t forget to check out the other cheap web hosting providers and low cost WordPress options!
When to use Hostinger?
If you’re on a really tight budget, then Hostinger is a great choice. Of all the web hosts we review, only Namecheap is cheaper (on renewal) and as we’ll see below, Namecheap has its own limitations.
So I would definitely recommend Hostinger for small, personal projects where you might want to dip your toes into the website building without spending too much money.
And if you get more into it, you can feel confident that Hostinger has the all the features you need for more advanced development.
When not to use Hostinger?
Despite Hostinger’s uptime improvements this year, I would like to see consistently better uptime scores before I would recommend Hostinger as a web hosting provider for a really serious project.
For ecommerce websites and websites that are likely to attract a lot of traffic, I would still look for hosting providers that have a consistent history of solid uptimes and good all round performance (e.g. SiteGround or A2 Hosting).
> Try Hostinger risk-free for 30 days or check out our guide to the best web hosting.
