Hostinger Review

Founded in 2004 in Kaunas, Lithuania, Hostinger was originally called Hosting Media. The name change to Hostinger was brought about in 2011 when the web hosting provider hit one million customers.

Today, the company boasts 29 million users spanning 178 countries. They also have established subsidiaries such as 000Webhost, Hosting24, Niagahoster and Weblink.

Hostinger web hosting is brought to customers through seven data centers located around the world. These are found in the U.S., U.K., Netherlands, Singapore, Lithuania, Indonesia and Brazil. Hostinger's international presence offers fairly good coverage, and performance should be consistent for customers located in any of these regions. If you and your customers are located well outside of these areas, you may want to consider a web host with local servers.

Uptime essentially is the measurement of the availability of your website. If your website isn't "up," then people can't visit it. That translates to lost sales, and that can ruin any business, particularly a new venture.

Accordingly, uptime is perhaps the most critical metric that you can consider when choosing a web host. Hostinger undoubtedly provides cheap web hosting services, but that doesn't mean that your website is going to be down more than it's up.

In fact, the average uptime for Hostinger over the last 15 months was 99.94%. That's right up there with the best in the industry. Last month, the uptime dipped to just 99.65%, which is definitely not as great as advertised. However, this web host knocked it out of the park on all other months, demonstrating a record for reliability.

What's more, Hostinger provides its customers with a 99.9% uptime guarantee. This means that whenever their uptime dips below 99.9% for any given month, they will refund you five percent of your monthly fee. All you have to do is contact them.

Next to uptime, speed is the most critical factor for ensuring the success of your website. Consider the last time you visited a website that took more than a couple of seconds to load.

It must have felt like ages went by while you waited for vital text and images to resolve. You may not have even stuck around to actually read the website, and you certainly didn't make a purchase.

Study after study have suggested that people lose interest in a website if it takes more than three seconds for that website to load. Obviously, this means that speed is a critical metric.

Fortunately, people who have a Hostinger login can relax. Their servers boast a 1,000 Mbps connection, and it shows. An average load time of just 369 milliseconds is lightning fast. With speed like that, your website is likely to best the industry average of 890 milliseconds with ease.

Accordingly, people aren't going to get frustrated with the speed at which your website loads. This gives you an opportunity to dazzle them with your content so that you can get sales.

It's also worth noting that website search engines also tend to rank websites higher when their response times are faster. This definitely makes it worth your while to seek out the fastest web host.

With Tier-3 datacenters located in several diverse regions around the world, it's likely for your customers to have the best-possible experience with your website. That's especially true if they are located pretty close to one of those data centers.

Because Hostinger doesn't have servers in Africa, for instance, you may not want to sign up for their services if that's where your customers are. That's because website load times are bound to be slower for customers who are located well outside of the geographic area of the site where the servers are kept.

Hostinger's Single Shared Hosting Plan is its cheapest offering. Unlike some web hosts that provide unlimited bandwidth in all of their packages, Hostinger limits these users to just 100 GB of bandwidth.

For some users, particularly those with a brand-new website, that may be perfectly adequate. However, if your venture begins to enjoy even modest success, you quickly may outgrow this restriction.

This means that you will have to step up to the Premium Shared Hosting package, as this comes with unlimited bandwidth.

The Premium plan is still pretty affordable, and you get a lot more features for the price. Nonetheless, those who are on a strict budget may find that 100 GB of bandwidth is far more than they need and be quite satisfied at a price of less than one dollar per month.

Throughout this Hostinger review, interactions with customer support were positive.

Their comprehensive knowledge base is easy to search. It's stocked with short, to-the-point, well-organized articles that cover most operations. If you have a question regarding how to do something, chances are good that you'll find the answer here.

Tutorials similarly provide step-by-step guidance for common processes and questions that arise for both new and experienced webmasters. The Hostinger blog is a solid resource for finding answers as well.

When all else fails, then it's time to contact customer service. Here's the problem with that. You must be logged into your Hostinger account to contact customer service. If you don't have an account and are just wanting to ask a question in advance of signing up, you'll have to submit an email ticket, and it may take a bit of time to get a response.

Usually, you could just pick up the phone and give your web host a call. However, Hostinger doesn't provide you with any contact phone numbers. That means that whether you are an existing customer or not, you won't be able to reach a customer service rep by phone.

That can be a huge drawback for some people, especially if they are looking for a more personalized experience. That said, Hostinger customer support typically involves speedy live chats, and these went well during the course of the review.

If you are satisfied with live chats and don't feel like it's necessary to speak on the phone with a representative, then you're probably okay with this level of support. As mentioned, these interactions went smoothly and provided useful answers and resolution.

However, if you'd much prefer to chat than type and you expect to need a great deal of guidance, you may want to look elsewhere.

Before you make a final decision with regard to Hostinger's web hosting services, there are numerous other features that need to be taken into consideration. One of these may tip you for or against this budget provider.

The Single Shared Plan only costs 80 cents per month without any added features. To get this price locked in, you need to sign up for a 48-month plan. The price after 4 years goes up to $2.15 per month for the same contract period, which pretty much still beats most hosting providers of the same caliber as Hostinger. 

If the Single Shared Hosting plan lacks a handful of features, then your best bet is going for their Premium Shared Hosting plan which is at $2.15 per month. Their mid-tier package is well known around the digital industry due to the sheer amount of value you get for the price that it costs. You get free weekly backups, the ability to host 100 different websites on a single plan, a free domain name, and a free business mailbox for 6 months.

The Business Shared Hosting plan is for those who need premium support, as well as those who need a lot of processing power. Although both Premium and Business Shared hosting plans get ample server capabilities, their most expensive package receives twice the amount of resources the mid-tier does - not to mention the fact that the difference in their prices is just a dollar.

If you like this company, but don't want a shared plan, you do have options. Hostinger also offers Virtual Private Server hosting in which you get increased speed and control as well as Cloud Hosting. The prices on these plans represent a huge step upward, but they also give you the ability to manage hundreds of websites with dedicated IP addresses, plenty of disk space and unlimited bandwidth.

The only thing that Hostinger doesn't offer is dedicated hosting packages. If you suspect that your website may get really big and require the ultimate in control and storage, you may want to look elsewhere.

Hostinger free hosting packages aren't available, but you can get a free plan from their subsidiary 000Webhost.

Hostinger may be the perfect web host for the budget-minded individual who needs to start a website. Even their basic plan affords access to reliable servers, and you'll get great uptime and speed.

Nonetheless, there are a lot of security tools and other features that are standard from other providers that you have to pay extra for when you choose Hostinger. If you want to expand your Hostinger email, you'll have to pay for it too.

In other words, Hostinger gives you rock-bottom pricing, but you may have to pay extra for some components that feel pretty essential. You can trust Hostinger to give you a good deal, specially with the $0.80c plan, but make sure you know what you need as it might not be available for less than a dollar per month.

All that said, Hostinger is an amazing hosting service provider. We highly recommend them to any budget-minded individual anywhere in the world.