Hostinger Review – The Good and Bad for 2023

Hostinger has come a long way since it first launched as a free web hosting service 15+ years ago. Today, it’s one of the best web hosting providers on the market—offering affordable plans, high-quality hosting, and other perks for website owners. Whether you’re launching a new site from scratch or switching providers, you can use this in-depth review to see if Hostinger is right for you.

Compare Hostinger to The Best Web Hosting Services

Choosing a quality web hosting service is crucial. Your web host has a direct impact on things like uptime, page loading speed, and other performance metrics that are important for success. 

Our team here at Crazy Egg did some extensive research, testing, and analysis on dozens of web hosting services on the market. Then we narrowed down our list of top recommendations. 

Based on our research, we can confidently say that Hostinger is the best web hosting service for most people. 

Hostinger ranks first on our list due to its high-quality hosting and flexibility. It accommodates a wide range of use cases for both beginners and scaling websites alike.

With plans starting at just $1.99 per month, it’s one of the most affordable options you’ll find from a hosting service so reputable. But don’t let that price fool you. The service competes with other web hosts that come in at higher price points.

While Hostinger is our top recommendation for web hosting, it’s just one of many options that could be a good fit for your unique website or use-case-specific needs. See all of our top picks here to check out our other recommendations and decide which one is right for you. 

Hostinger: The Good and The Bad

Like any product on the market, there are pros and cons to choosing Hostinger as your websites’ web host. We want to call out a few of the key elements that work in Hostinger’s favor and a couple potential drawbacks, so you get the full story on whether they’re the best choice for you.

The Good

Fast Load Times: It’s no secret that the loading time for your site is very important. If a visitor comes to your website and has to wait for things to load, they won’t stick around. In fact, many people aren’t willing to wait for more than a couple of seconds for a site to load.

That’s why we love that Hostinger provides quick hosting speeds. And we’re not just going off of what they tell everyone on their webpage copy, we’ve tested them out for shared hosting, VPS hosting, and WordPress hosting.

And Hostinger delivers. For each of those hosting types, we put a test site through FreshPing for a full month. Each one averaged well under one-second load times, with Hostinger’s VPS and WordPress hosting averaging right around 470 milliseconds. That’s wonderfully fast and better than just about every other hosting provider we tested in those categories.

The key behind Hostinger’s impressive speed is the use of LiteSpeed web servers (LSWS). The use of LiteSpeed allows Hostinger to deploy its hPanel custom hosting panel. This combination provides better speed and performance than the more traditional use of Apache web servers and the OpenResty hosting panel.

Additionally, LSWS uses a cache to store copies of your web pages, allowing visitors to load everything faster.

Hostinger also maintains data centers across the globe, including North America, South America, Europe, the UK, India, and Asia.

Having distributed server locations helps keep the overall loading times quick no matter where you or your visitors are located.

Fantastically Affordable: Not only do you get blazing fast site speeds on a Hostinger plan, but those plans come at some of the most competitive price points around.

Shared hosting starts as low as $1.99 per month for a single site, with plans that support multiple sites or allot more resources starting at $2.99 per month. WordPress and VPS hosting don’t require much more of an investment, either, starting at $1.99 and $3.49 per month, respectively.

Additionally, Hostinger recently dropped the price of its Business tier, as it now starts at $3.99 per month. This is an impressive price for a tier that can handle up to 100,000 visits per month on up to 100 websites. (The 100,000 visits is not a restriction; rather it is an estimation of the number of visitors your hosted site will be able to support successfully each month.)

Considering that you receive access to plenty of websites and plenty of storage at most price points with Hostinger, the value you receive becomes even better.

For example, with WordPress hosting, you receive up to 100 websites and up to 100 GB of SSD storage at the most popular pricing tier that starts at only $2.79 per month. That’s impressive.

Now, keep in mind these attractive rates are for a long-term commitment up front of 48 months. That can be a bit of a sticking point if you’re not ready to commit to four years right away. On the flip side, though, it means you lock in that attractive rate for a good while. And, since it’s such an affordable monthly rate, you’re only looking at a payment of $96 for 48 months of shared or WordPress hosting.

However, if you don’t want to commit to four years right off the bat, Hostinger has generously extended it’s best pricing for the Premium Shared Hosting plan to one-year commitments as well. That means you can pay just $41.88 today and snag Hostinger’s most popular shared hosting package for a full year, one which also comes with a free custom domain. (Hostinger simplifies the process of choosing a domain name as well.)

With all that in mind, the next few positives that follow should further put your mind at ease about committing to Hostinger and the value you’re getting.

Money-Back Guarantee: Not happy with your Hostinger purchase? No problem. You have 30 days to try it out and get your money back if your experience is not all you were hoping for. However, be sure to note that redemption fees, domain name renewals, and privacy protection are the only things not part of the 30-day money-back guarantee, so keep that in the back of your head. 

Otherwise, the hosting, domain transfers, and SSL certificates are all refundable within 30 days of purchase. 

Free Domain: You need a domain to go along with your hosting, and while you can buy your domain and your hosting from separate companies, it’s nice when you can do everything in one place. It’s even nicer when you can get the domain for free. That’s an option for those who opt for any of Hostinger’s web hosting plans above the single-site tier. 

Free Website Builder: Hostinger’s acquisition of Zyro gives you access to one of the better website builders for free with your plan.

Hostinger integration of Zyro’s easy-to-use builder into the Hostinger platform makes it great for whipping up a company website, but you can also build out a fully functional online store with it, too. Start from one of over 100 templates or drag-and-drop your way to a beautiful home on the web from scratch.

Either way, you get a site builder for free with Hostinger that doesn’t make you sacrifice any customization capability.

Simple to Get Started: One of the key elements of Hostinger that ranked it so high on our list is the ease of use, especially when getting everything set up. The hosting service’s clean interface, guided setup, and user-friendly dashboard makes it easy for first-timers; you don’t need to take a class on this hosting service to use it. 

Though it’s simple, Hostinger doesn’t skimp on powerful tools and reliable servers.

For example, Hostinger offers its Auto Installer feature as part of hPanel. This installer greatly simplifies the process of installing apps to use with your accounts, meaning you can take advantage of the features in the apps faster.

The effortless use continues after you’ve finished signing up for your hosting plan and right into the actual building of the site. 

With the help of Hostinger’s wizard, you will walk you through each step to quickly and easily set up your fully functional website.

Let Hostinger’s wizard walk you through each step. You’ll be amazed by how quickly it results in a fully functional website for you. And if you want to migrate your website to a new host, Hostinger simplifies this process, too.

The Bad 

No Phone Support: Sometimes you need a real human on the phone to get help with a problem, and unfortunately Hostinger does not offer that option. The only way to get in touch with customer support is via a live chat, although it is nice to have the chat available 24/7.

Additionally, Hostinger does offer a series of tutorials, blog posts, and knowledge base articles to help you with specific aspects of using Hostinger. There’s also a Hostinger Academy, which is a series of tutorials on YouTube that you may find helpful.

However, as helpful as these items are, they aren’t the same as a phone call to walk you through things when you are experiencing some frustration.

Spotty Uptime on Shared and WordPress Hosting: Speed and uptime are the two sides of the web hosting quality coin. Whereas speed relates to how quickly your pages load for visitors, uptime is a measurement of server reliability. Hosting servers can go down for any number of reasons, from planned maintenance to unforeseen errors.

Hostinger’s lower-octane plans haven’t performed too well compared to their peers. With their shared hosting and WordPress hosting, we’ve seen a lot of downtime, in the ballpark of one to two hours per month. That’s almost a full day per year that your website wouldn’t be available to visitors.

Fortunately, we’ve seen vast improvements when testing their burlier hosting offerings. Hostinger’s VPS hosting turned in only 17 seconds of total downtime when we tested it in late 2021.

Missing Features on Budget Plans: While not a dealbreaker for everyone, there are some helpful features missing from Hostinger’s entry-level plans that we’ve seen on comparable ones from their competitors. The most notable case is with their WordPress hosting, which doesn’t include a content delivery network (CDN) and automatic daily backups on the two cheaper plans (Single and Starter).

Make sure you look over the full feature set for the hosting plan you’re considering. You may have to pay for a higher tier to ensure you’re getting all the features and tools you need.

Hostinger Pricing and Options

Hostinger has a number of different packages for you to choose from. Each one offers unique things that are suited for specific needs.

There is no free plan available with Hostinger, but the Single Shared Hosting plan is so affordable it almost feels free. This is a great place to start.

Hostinger Single

Hostinger’s most basic plan is part of the shared web hosting offerings, which means that your website exists on a server with other websites. This is great for those who don’t have a budget for expensive web hosting, as the cost of the server is split between numerous others. However, the bad thing about this is site speed could be compromised because there are so many other people using the same server. 

However, if you are just starting out with a website, the Single plan gives you what you need to get the ball rolling. 

Hostinger’s low prices and overall service led to us naming it has the best cheap web hosting service. Because of its low price, its an ideal option for starting a new blog, as you don’t have to invest large amounts of money up front.

The Single plan pricing starts at $1.99/month with a 48-month commitment, and that price jumps all the way up to $9.99/month if you sign up for a monthly commitment. 

This plan gets you 1 website, 30 GB of SSD storage, 100 GB bandwidth, 10 GB solid-state storage, a free SSL certificate, 1 email account, and much more.

Hostinger Premium

Hostinger’s next level, the Premium, offers everything the Single does as well as some added bonuses, including free domain registration (for the first year only), unlimited bandwidth, up to 100 websites, 100 GB of SSD storage, up to 100 email accounts, and more. 

Pricing for this starts at $2.99/month with a 48-month commitment, all the way up to $11.99/month for a monthly commitment. 

Hostinger Business

If you’re looking to level up your plan, then Hostinger’s Business option may be right for you. With this plan you get everything included in the Premium plan, plus daily backups, 4 times the processing power, 200 GB SSD storage, and much more. 

Pricing for the Business plan starts at $4.99/month for 48 months and goes up to $16.99/month for a monthly commitment. 

Cloud Hosting

If you’re considering cloud hosting vs. traditional shared hosting, take a look at Hostinger’s offerings. Not sure what cloud hosting is? We’ve got you covered. How cloud hosting differs is that rather than your site being hosted on a single server, it is hosted in the cloud, which allows for more flexibility and easier scalability. 

Cloud hosting plans begin with the Startup at $9.99/month for 48 months. This is a great starting place. If you are looking for something more, Hostinger’s recommended cloud plan is the Professional, which starts at $18.99/month for 48 months. And if you need more than this still, the Global plan may be just what you’re looking for, and that will cost you $69.99/month for 48 months. 

The massive jump in price from the Professional to Global plan is due to a few features including 4 times the speed boost of the Startup Plan, 16 GB RAM, 8 CPU cores, and much more.

VPS Hosting

If you are looking to make waves with your business’ website, then VPS hosting may be right for you. VPS stands for virtual private server, and it means that you have your own server as opposed to sharing one with other users. 

Hostinger offers six different VPS hosting plans, starting at $3.95/month for 48 months. That price point gets you 3 GB RAM, 60 GB storage, and 3 TB bandwidth. The plans offer a few more features than the ones prior and take you up to the VPS 6 plan which includes 8 GB RAM, 160 GB storage, and 8 TB bandwidth. That will set you back $38.99/month for 48 months. 

Minecraft Hosting

Hostinger offers a unique hosting service that many of its competitors don’t: a Minecraft hosting that is geared towards gamers. This hosting starts at $8.95/month for 48 months and offers plans that go up to $29.95/month for 48 months. 

With this service, you can install your own game mods, along with many other things.  

When it comes to hosting, there is no shortage of options with Hostinger. They also offer WordPress hosting, which is a top choice for many people building websites. 

There is hosting for everyone at Hostinger, so do some more reading to see which one is the ideal plan for your needs.

Expanding Your Knowledge: Hostinger

Comparing The Best Web Hosting Services

Though Hostinger sits at the top of our list for best web hosting services, there are some other great options that also made the cut.

We can confidently recommend Hostinger for a wide range of use cases. It’s a great option for new websites that want a quality hosting service at an affordable price. Hostinger is also an excellent option for higher traffic sites that want to scale without switching providers. 

For those of you who want an all-in-one solution for creating a website and getting your web hosting needs under one roof, Hostinger even has a website builder plan bundled with its hosting services. While its uptime rates and speed aren’t leading the industry, Hostinger is still a reputable provider that can accommodate the needs of most websites.