Hostinger started as a personal hosting company in 2004 in Kaunas, Lithuania. In 2007 they began as 000webhost.com which was a free and popular web hosting service without advertising. In 2008, they rebranded to Hosting24.com – a cPanel web hosting platform.
Hosting24 customers surpassed one million in October 2010. In 2011, Hosting24 rebranded once more and became the highly-rated web hosting company we now know as Hostinger.
In the past decade, Hostinger has expanded with customers, services, and data centers all around the world. Hostinger had already exceeded the user base of ten million people by May of 2014. The user base had grown to 29 million people by January of 2017.
Hostinger has enjoyed amazing growth in just over a decade. This is not surprising because the company provides extra features you wouldn’t find on other popular hosting platforms. Some of these value-added features include – Zyro online store, Zyro website builder, Windows hosting, and Minecraft hosting.
The best part of it all? Hostinger is one of the most affordable web hosting providers in the world.
Would you like to know if this international hosting provider is a good fit for you? Let’s examine the advantages and disadvantages of this web hosting provider.
Quick Review
Here’s our quick review of Hostinger.
- Excellent page load speed (350ms)
- Very good uptime (99.95%)
- 24/7 Live Chat support and extensive knowledge base articles
- Hosting plans include shared hosting, cloud hosting, WordPress hosting, VPS hosting Minecraft hosting, and Windows hosting
- Build websites and online stores with Zyro
- 30-days money-back guarantee
- Free email and Free SSL on all hosting plans
- Up to $150 Google Ads Credit for premium and business shared hosting
- Single shared hosting comes with 10GB SSD storage, 100GB bandwidth capable of handling 10k monthly visits
- Pricing starts at 99 cents per month and $2.99 when you renew
- Free WordPress site transfer
- Host CMS sites like WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla. Also eCommerce sites like Magento, WooCommerce, and PrestaShop
Overview
Hostinger offers hosting and domain services. Their servers are deployed in 7 different regions – UK, US, Brazil, Lithuania, Netherlands, Indonesia, and Singapore. Furthermore, these servers are protected by multiple levels of fail-safes, RAID-10 regular backups.
Here’s a brief recap of services provided by Hostinger.
Web Hosting
Hostinger started as 000Webhost and they still offer free web hosting. Beginners can take advantage of this opportunity to learn how to create and manage websites. Get free web hosting with Hostinger.
Hostinger shared web hosting plans are fast, secure, and easy to use. Their web hosting service is packed with valuable features such as Cloudflare integration, custom hPanel, Litespeed Cache, Access Manager, Lets Encrypt, and more.
They offer three plans.
- Single Shared Hosting – suitable for beginners
- Premium Shared Hosting – suitable for personal websites
- Business Shared Hosting – suitable for small businesses and agencies
VPS Hosting
Hostinger also offers cheap cloud VPS hosting. With the VPS hosting, customers get full root access, dedicated IP with IPv4 and IPv6 support, top-level data backups, unrestricted 100Mb/s network, and much more.
| VPS 1 | VPS 2 | VPS 3 | VPS 4 | VPS 5 | VPS 6 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| RAM | 1GB | 2GB | 3GB | 4GB | 6GB | 8GB |
| SSD Disk Space | 20GB | 40GB | 60GB | 80GB | 120GB | 160GB |
| Bandwidth | 1TB | 2TB | 3TB | 4TB | 6TB | 8TB |
| Dedicated IP | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Full Root Access | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Price | $3.95 | $8.95 | $12.95 | $15.95 | $23.95 | $38.99 |
Minecraft Hosting
Hostinger Minecraft servers can be set up in minutes with their Multicraft panel. Otherwise, you can set up your Minecraft server manually with Centos 7, Ubuntu 18, or Debian 9 OS. Their Minecraft servers use the latest Xeon processors with SSD disk space.
All their plans are DDOS protected, automatic offsite backup and restore, free MySQL database, full root access to install modpacks and plugins. Hostinger guarantees 99.99% uptime SLA.
| Plan | RAM | Hardware | Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Alex | 2GB | 2 vCPU | $8.95 |
| Villager | 3GB | 3 vCPU | $12.95 |
| Creeper | 4GB | 4 vCPU | $15.95 |
| Herobrine | 6GB | 6 vCPU | $23.95 |
| Enderman | 8GB | 8 vCPU | $29.95 |
Cloud Hosting
Hostinger Cloud Hosting comes with an innovative custom made control panel to help you manage your server efficiently. The service is fully managed and comes with a dedicated IP. More so, Hostinger cloud hosting servers run on isolated virtual instances which puts you in control of all resources and limits.
Other benefits include top-level data backups, quick setup, free email, managed WordPress, free SSL, free CDN, daily backups, unlimited bandwidth, dedicated IP address, unlimited databases, dedicated resources, free migration, and much more.
Hostinger offers three cloud hosting plans – Cloud Startup, Cloud Professional, and Cloud Global.
WordPress Hosting
Hostinger provides managed WordPress hosting with features such as Free email, Free SSL, Free domain, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited databases, 100Gb SSD storage, automatic daily backups, and much more.
WordPress hosting features include
- SLA for their managed WordPress is 99.99%
- Protection with imunify360
- LiteSpeed for better speed and performance
- Developer tools such as SSh access, Git, WP-CLI, phpMyAdmin, and much more
Email Hosting
Hostinger provides professional email hosting with Titan. The Titan professional email is equipped with antivirus checks, advanced anti-spam, inbuilt calendar, and contacts for collaboration, mail filters, multidevice support for iOs and Android, and much more.
cPanel Hosting
Simplify your website hosting management with cPanel.
Website & Online Store Builder
Build your websites and online stores with Zyro. Simply pick a template, customize it, and then publish it. Connect your domain and enjoy SSL security.
Get free access to Unsplash library. Integrate with tools like Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, and more. The builder helps you create content faster and on the go with responsive pages designed with in-built SEO.
Windows VPS
An alternative to the regular VPS hosting. Get the same VPS hosting features and benefits with a windows operation server.
Domain Services
Find the perfect domain name with their domain checker tool. More so, you can transfer your domain to Hostinger if you want to migrate your domain or website to Hostinger. You can also check any domain WHOIS information with their WHOIS database.
Hostinger Pros
It doesn’t matter if you have unlimited or free services if you can’t keep your site online. Let’s put Hostinger to the knife and see how they perform.
1. High page load speed
According to Google, if a web page takes longer than three seconds to load, about 40% of people abandon the page. Page load speed is the median speed it takes a web page to load on your browser.
This is one of the most important metrics for any website. Fast page loading time is a precedent for a good user experience. A high page load speed will help your website reduce bounce rate. More so, it will improve your search engine ranking.
Hostinger provides the latest server infrastructure and technology such as Cloudflare and LiteSpeed to deliver your webpages to readers with incredible speed.
2. Very good uptime
Another important factor to consider when buying a web host is server Uptime. If your provider’s uptime is poor, you will eventually lose traffic, possibly lose business opportunities and no one is able to access your web pages. Even more, your SEO rankings may drop.
Although Hostinger performs pretty well in this area. Generally, they perform well by keeping their websites running. Don’t expect too much if you use a shared hosting service as you may experience some downtime within a year. To get 99.99% uptime, look into their managed WordPress or cloud hosting services.
3. Global customer support
Imagine 10 new visitors visit your website every hour of the day. You will be losing 240 visitors for every day your site is offline.
You might lose out on a lot of sales and even punished by Google if your site continues to remain unavailable. Many things can make your site become unavailable. Things can only get worse if you have no idea of what’s going and you’re unable to get help from your hosting provider. I can’t over-emphasize customer service is important, especially if you’re a newbie.
Hostinger provides 24/7 Live Chat customer support. Furthermore, they offer live chat support in most major languages.
I tried the live chat support. The support staff responded to me promptly, which was good enough for me. I also got answers to a few technical questions I asked the representative.
The knowledge base articles cover several topics about website builders, servers, hosting, domains, and general issues.
4. Ease of payment with 30-day money-back guarantee
Hostinger provides several modes of payment to customers. These payment channels include American Express, Discover, PayPal, Visa, JCB, Diners Club, Maestro, and MasterCard. They also accept cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Litecoin, and Ethereum.
Hostinger offers a 30-Day money-back guarantee so you check out their services worry-free. Be sure to read their refund policy to see what they refund and what they do not refund.
5. Low introductory pricing
This is a common practice in the web hosting industry. They try to attract customers to join their services by offering very low prices for a 2-3 year deal. Once they become a customer, their renewal will be at the regular rate.
To get the 99 cents per month pricing with Hostinger for the Single Shared Hosting, you have to commit to a four-year agreement. If you leave before that time, you forfeit your balance. Meanwhile, your renewal cost will become $2.99 per month – a 200% increase.
Relatively, the increase is a lot. But comparing to other web-hosting providers, it is still ridiculously low. Other providers start their predatory pricing from $2.99 and renew around $7.99 or more.
Most shared web hosting providers use low introductory pricing to gain new customers. If you like Hostinger hosting services and don’t plan to move your websites around, then consider this a great deal.
6. Free domain name
If you subscribe to a premium hosting plan or a higher-tier plan, Hostinger offers a free domain name. This is a great deal and money saver.
7. Feature-rich control panel with simple interface
Hostinger control panel (hPanel) helps you manage your website with a simple, well-designed interface. The hPanel dashboard helps you manage user logins, website traffic, bandwidth consumption, billings, email, and much more.
The hPanel is quite different from the regular cPanel. Hostinger’s hPanel is easy to use. However, this may be a bummer if you’re used to cPanel, especially advanced webmasters.
Get additional features and benefits when you subscribe to higher-tier plans. These include unlimited bandwidth, spam filters, unlimited databases, unlimited email accounts, unmetered usage, and much more.
Hostinger Cons
No doubt Hostinger comes with a lot of benefits such as affordable pricing, fast page load speed, very good uptime, and many other cool perks. However, Hostinger has it’s own issues. Asides from general industry deterring practices, Hostinger has no significant issues.
Let’s go through some Hostinger cons
1. Live chat feature only available when logged in
You have to be signed in to contact customer service. For instance, if you want to inquire about transferring your domain, you have to reach out to a representative via the contact us page.
The live chat option is only available if you have a Hostinger account and logged into the account.
2. Refund policy exceptions
Just like other web-hosting providers, Hostinger’s Refund Policy does not cover all your purchases.
They would not refund redemption fees, domain name cost, and privacy protection cost. Usually, most new domain name registrations can only be refundable if it’s canceled and processed within four days of registration, not 30 days.
Understand their refund policy and be sure before you make any purchases.
3. No cPanel
Hostinger does not provide cPanel. However, they provide hPanel. hPanel is a simple web management control panel designed by Hostinger. The issue here is that it lacks the robust features provided by cPanel.
New users may find it easier to use than regular cPanel. People already accustomed to using the cPanel may find this challenging. Because of this, advanced users may want to look elsewhere or pay more for the cPanel hosting.
Summary
Web Host Bros recommends Hostinger.
To be honest, Hostinger’s shared hosting server uptime may not have been the best in recent times. It’s safe to attribute this inconvenience to their recent expansion. However, Hostinger’s low pricing and incredible page load speed seems to be unrivaled by many US hosting providers.
The Single Shared Hosting plan is super low budget but quite limiting in terms of features and freebies. Their higher paid plans are great deals. Hostinger also gives a 30-day money-back guarantee if you’re not satisfied with their services.
Hostinger makes it easy to start and run your website with little or nothing to lose. Why not take advantage today?