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Hostinger offers basic web hosting services at an inexpensive price. In fact, if you sign up for a four-year term, you could pay less than one dollar per month for their basic package.
That's a pretty spectacular price when compared with the competition. Does that mean that you'll be sacrificing in terms of service and performance?
In the case of Hostinger web hosting, no. Testing revealed that this company's services are consistent. Uptime and speed were more than acceptable, and the customer support team appears to be top notch, although it would be nice to be able to contact them via the phone.
Hostinger provides cheap web hosting that you can count on. That said, you may discover through this Hostinger review that this provider has some drawbacks that may be deal-breakers for you. As an example, the lack of a traditional cPanel interface may be the kiss of death for some users.
Is a Hostinger the right choice for you? Read on to find out.
What Is Hostinger?
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.
The main focus of Hostinger's services is shared web hosting. With shared hosting, each website is kept on a server with numerous others. This means that the websites are all sharing the same resources. The benefit of this type of hosting is the affordability. You're splitting the cost of those resources with lots of other people.
The downside is that your website may be slower than it could be with a dedicated hosting plan. Plus, your website may be affected by a sudden surge in traffic on another website. This could make your website slow down or potentially even crash.
However, a good website host like Hostinger typically works to ensure that every website has adequate resources to cope with the demands of the traffic they receive. As this Hostinger review reveals, this web host appears to know their business well and is able to deliver the reliability that a fledgling website needs.
Hostinger Delivers Consistent Uptime
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.
Hostinger Speed and Uptime
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.
Hostinger is Among the Fastest
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.
An Excellent Mix of Server Locations
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 Server Locations
Overall, Hostinger has a top-notch selection of data centers, boasting a diversity of locations that beats the offerings of web hosts that may only have servers in one place.
With a true Hostinger international presence, you're ready to take your website global.
Basic Plan Has Limited Bandwidth
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.
Solid Customer Service but with Limitations
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.
FatCow Features You Need to Know About
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 Minecraft Hostinger Connection
If you're a fan of the game, Minecraft, then you're about to fall in love with Hostinger. If you're unfamiliar with the game, then you may prefer to skip this section review.
For Minecraft fans, Hostinger is great because they offer Minecraft server hosting. You have five levels of plans from which to choose. These include the Alex, Villager, Creeper, Herobrine and Enderman Plans.
Memory capacity ranges from two GB up to eight GB depending upon your plan. Included in all packages are access to web and FTP files, DDoS protection, a free MySQL database and automatic off-site backups.
Thanks to the Minecraft - Hostinger partnership, you are now able to host your own Minecraft server. Even the smallest plan lets you have as many as 70 players. Step up to the Creeper Plan, and you may have an infinite number of players.
With Hostinger, you get a Virtual Private Server, or VPS, for hosting Minecraft. This ensures you better, more powerful resources and more control. If you're a dedicated fan, you can't go wrong.
The Proprietary Hostinger Control Panel
If you're an experienced webmaster, then the fact that Hostinger does not use cPanel may make you swear off of this web host forever. That is because cPanel is the most widely used, popular and familiar webmaster interface available today (Read more: Beginner's Guide to cPanel).
Experienced users love how easy to use cPanel is. They know its ins and outs, and they trust it implicitly. When a web host doesn't offer a cPanel interface, these webmasters may run for the hills.
Hostinger has designed a proprietary control panel. The Hostinger control panel is well-designed, approachable and easy to use. However, it is definitely not the same as cPanel.
If you've never owned a website before and don't know cPanel from the Hostinger control panel, then you'll be fine. Hostinger makes the experience intuitive and user-friendly. You'll find that you have many options and lots of control over your website.
For instance, you'll be able to use the control panel to adjust your Hostinger nameservers so that they point to your website.
If you're accustomed to cPanel but are open-minded about other options, then you'll have an enjoyable experience. Called hPanel, the Hostinger Control Panel is clean and not confusing.
Hostinger WordPress Hosting
With WordPress being the most popular Content Management System, or CMS, in the world, it would be remiss of Hostinger to ignore it. Fortunately for all of you fans, Hostinger's WordPress hosting is among the best in the industry.
Just check out a best WordPress hosting Reddit, and you'll discover that Hostinger is a widely recommended partner for this CMS. You'll have all sorts of integrations and plugins available, and WordPress optimization means that your website will work like a charm.
You Can Get a Free Domain
While some web hosts provide you with a free domain for one year regardless of which plan you choose, Hostinger isn't quite like that. You won't get a free domain with the Single Shared Hosting plan, but you will if you upgrade to either the Premium Shared Hosting or the Business Shared Hosting packages. This will save you a few bucks in the first year.
Alternatively, you can purchase a domain through Hostinger, though you may be able to do so more cheaply elsewhere.
Hostinger Lets You Build a Website
Hosting plans come with Hostinger's rudimentary website builder. While you may not get Hostinger gratis, it's nice that they offer you a free website builder. It's not as sophisticated and it doesn't have as many features as other builders, but it may be all that you need to create a functional, attractive website.
With numerous templates and layouts available, it's so easy to find something that you love.
Hostinger Webmail
Additionally, Hostinger has email hosting services. With two Hostinger webmail packages from which to choose, you'll be able to communicate with your customers like never before.
All you have to do is choose the package, pay for it and then create your domain-based email address. Soon, you'll be sending emails from your proprietary domain name to your customers.
It's worth noting that Hostinger webmail is an additional cost on top of your web hosting services. You do get one business email account with your package. If you want expanded services, you'll have to pay extra.
Good Security Measures for a Price
You get plenty of Hostinger free features when you sign up for a package. However, you don't get a free Hostinger SSL certificate until you upgrade to a Business Shared Hosting package. Considering that many hosts offer a free SSL certificate with all plans, this is a downside.
You'll also have to get the Business plan if you want Cloudflare CDN, daily backups and DDoS protection. Many of these security features are available without extra cost elsewhere.
Apps and Integrations
Hostinger gratis integrations include Joomla, Drupal, OpenCart, PrestaShop and much more. If you want to build an ecommerce website, create a better blog or display your artwork to the world, Hostinger can get you there.
Shared Hosting Plans and Pricing
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.
Hostinger's Shared Hosting Plans
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.
Different Hostinger Solutions Available
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.
Final Thoughts
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.
Frequently Asked Questions
Absolutely. Just look at a best WordPress hosting Reddit to discover that many users consider Hostinger one of the best. Hostinger even has WordPress hosting packages so that you can make the most out of your favorite CMS.