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Hostinger Review: Awesome Uptime (100%), How About Features?

What is Hostinger?

It’s about time we get an updated review of Hostinger up. After all, Hostinger has been a major hosting force in an internet full of different hosting platforms.

If you haven’t heard of Hostinger before, you might be surprised to learn it is, in fact, a sprawling hosting provider. I mean it: Hostinger has over 29 million users and subsidiaries in 178 countries.

It started in 2004, but from its small beginnings, it’s become a fantastic hosting option.

In this review, we’ll talk about a lot—but to give you a quick answer, Hostinger is good. Not perfect, but overall cheap relative to what you get for the buck.

But hey, that’s an oversimplification. So what are we waiting for?

Let’s dive in.

Hostinger Cons

Okay, bad news first: what is Hostinger doing badly?

Hostinger’s Single Shared Hosting plan comes at a low cost, but you won’t be getting a ton of features out of it.

That’s not to say Hostinger overall is lacking in the features department (it’s not!) just that the lowest price plan is bare.

low cost

As many of you may be interested in going for the cheapest plan, especially if you don’t have hefty needs, it’s a kind of important drawback.

You may want to consider upgrading to Premium or looking into a different service that gets you more features for smaller needs.

Here’s another thing: I’ve heard someone lost some uptime using Hostinger. This has not been my experience, to be clear—but from a quick Google, at least one reviewer experienced some downtime.

Honestly, I don’t expect this to be a problem. It hasn’t been a problem for me when I’ve been using Hostinger, and Hostinger currently guarantees 99.9% uptime—the review may be outdated.

Aside from that, Hostinger’s pricing is good…as long as you are okay with paying for two years.

Yep, if you want to take advantage of their lowest prices, you’re going in for a two-year commitment—something many people (understandably) may not be willing to do.

One final note on the pricing: there’s a 30-day refund policy for your hosting package.

Good!

However, that 30-day policy does not extend to domain names you purchase; for those, you’ll get 4 days to refund.

refund policy by hostinger

I think that takes on most of Hostinger’s flaws. The main points are a misleading pricing structure, and a weak entry-level package.

The other concerns are more minor; the lesson here is to research the terms and conditions properly before settling.

Don’t get too despondent!

There’s a lot of good news to look forward to as well.

Hostinger Pros

Now that we’re done with the bad news, what does Hostinger have going for it?

Glad you asked, because the answer is: a lot.

First off, as will soon become obvious, is the price.

Hostinger has great “sales” (I suspect they may be semi-permanent pricing rather than limited time only sales).

At their current sale price, which is 80% off their cheapest plan, they’re pretty hard to beat.80% off Regarding the two-year commitment—well, that does suck, but it’s still a good deal if you’re okay with settling in for a long time. On that note, their 30-day refund policy is good enough to figure out whether you want to commit or not.

Secondly, the features: it’s not that Hostinger has the best features or the greatest toolkit of all the hosting platforms. It doesn’t need to be the best though, because it still packs plenty of punch and for, again, a pretty well-priced package.

This mostly goes for, again, second and third-tier Shared Hosting packages. Still, it’s a good toolset for the price.

One of the best things about Hostinger is its user-friendliness. I mean, some people may even want a platform that’s a little more robust, but I found it to be a good mix of user control and easy user experience.

This includes their website builder. Yes, most website builders are easy to use (that’s their purpose after all), but it’s nice to see consistency throughout the toolkit, especially for a tool you’ll use often.

website-builder

Along the lines of ease of use is customer support, and boy do they have solid customer support. Their live chat is one of the most responsive I’ve dealt with and their on-site documentation isn’t too bad either.

Finally, their security is pretty solid. Once again, I don’t have uptime problems with them, and their site boasts a good array of security protocols/infrastructure.

Overall, Hostinger has a lot going for it, despite a couple issues here and there.

Pricing

Now that our overall pros and cons are out of the way, let’s take a look at one of the biggest points of concern: price.

At the time of this writing, Hostinger has a bountiful summer sale that takes 80-34% off the cost, depending on your plan.

When I started writing this, there was a 4-hour countdown for the sale’s end; checking in a day later, the sale is still there.

The next day? Still there.

Just in case it does evaporate, here’s the breakdown of the normal pricing: $3.99 a month for their first tier, Single Shared Hosting. Premium Shared Hosting, the second tier, comes in at $8.84 a month, and Business Shared Hosting, their highest tier, comes in at $11.99 a month.

With the sale, the first tier is $0.80 a month. Yes, that’s right: less than a dollar. Premium Shared Hosting gets $2.15 a month with the sale, and Business Shared Hosting gets $3.45 a month.

cheap hosting

Why all the focus on sales? Believe it or not, it’s not to rub your face in what you might have just missed.

The fact that Hostinger showed itself willing to drop down its prices so significantly speaks volumes, and this sale seems to have been ongoing for a while.

In fact, there’s an entire page on their site called “Cheap Web Hosting” that is essentially the Shared Hosting plans I just described above—with the sale prices—so these low prices might not be going anytime soon.

In any case, if that sounds like a pretty basic pricing structure, you’d be right. These are the main options, but there are plenty more for a more customized package.

We’re mainly talking about the shared hosting options in this article, but separate pricing also goes for Virtual Private Server hosting (which has six tiers), Cloud Hosting (which has three tiers), WordPress hosting (which has three tiers at the same prices as the shared hosting options), and Business Hosting plans (which has three tiers).

As a matter of fact, we use one of the Business Hosting plans, but because Hostinger mainly advertises its Shared Hosting plans—and because that’s what many of you are likely looking at—that’s what we’ll keep focusing on.

Overall, Hostinger has solid pricing. I was astonished by the sale, and if you’re uncertain about purchasing a plan with them I would recommend checking back on the site every now and then to see if the sale, or another like it, is still there.

Moreover, all tiers come with 30-day money back guarantees.30-day trial

Discounts and refunds aside, Business Hosting is competitive and Shared Hosting plans are just an overall great deal—if they aren’t, just get your money back in the first month.

Features Overview

Now that you’ve heard the all-important pricing, it’s time to figure out whether the features offered are worth it.

If you get Single Shared Hosting, you’ll get one site, an email account to go with it, as well 10GB of disk space and 100GB of bandwidth.

There’s an easy website builder to go with it, a “powerful” control panel, and an access manager.

Those are the main features, but more minor ones include an allowance of 1 subdomain, 50 auto installer scripts, weekly backups, and more.

Most handily, you get a 99.9% Uptime guarantee—though I suppose that’s basic for hosting services.

Even Hostinger knows the first tier is a little basic: they call it the “survival plan” on their site, after all.

If you want to go bigger, you can get Premium Shared Hosting for $2.15/mo.

hostinger's premium hosting

This upgrade of a few bucks gets you an unlimited number of sites, unlimited disk space, unlimited bandwidth, and a free domain name (if you have an annual plan). Secondary features include unlimited subdomains, over 90 auto installer scripts, and unlimited domain parking.

For the last tier—for those with hefty business needs—you can get pretty much everything offered from the previous tier (easy site builders, unlimited bandwidth, unlimited disk space, unlimited sites) as well as a free SSL certificate, daily backups, high WordPress optimized speeds, special live support, and twice the process power.

The secondary features are largely similar to the Premium plans.

If you want to see the full feature list per-tier, you can check out their pricing table here.

Hostinger features

That all sounds great, but how do the tools perform?

In my experience, they’re pretty sturdy. Admittedly I have not been using Shared Hosting options, but the tools at work are essentially the same (website builder, guarantees of uptime, etc).

They’re solid, and my main reporting is that I don’t have many complaints.

Overall, I applaud Hostinger’s feature set: it might not have everything, but it has plenty—however, I would mainly say the Premium and Business

Shared Hosting plans offer a satisfactory amount of features for the price.

If you want to be more serious about your hosting and move up from Shared Hosting, that’s fine too—Hostinger will provide—just make sure you’re willing to cough up a little more money.

Check out the next section to see my experience using these tools!

Ease of Use and User Control

Ease of use and user-friendliness are in high demand these days, and for good reason: not everyone is an expert, and you want to make managing your online presence as efficient as possible.

Thankfully, Hostinger doesn’t fail to stack up. The moment you log in, you get greeted with your hosting accounts and easy “manage” buttons, as well as some quick setup options, so you can get straight to work.Hostinger cpanel 1

If you’re trying to get to the heart of your features, it’s not too difficult: just click “manage” as shown above, or head to the hosting tab and find the appropriate hosting account.hostinger hPanel new

This is user-friendliness: easy buttons, simple and streamlined layouts, intuitive categorization, etc.

I don’t think you would be too confounded by your options: everything is largely self-explanatory, and if you need help, you can always ask.

As long as you’re going for Premium or Business, you’re unlikely to run out of options for managing your hosting and your site; while this is not the easiest hosting service to use, per se, it’s about as easy as it can get without sacrificing features.

Customer Support

Part of what makes service easy to use for customers is solid customer support. Hosting companies, as they typically make internet hosting accessible to large numbers of people, are expected to have robust customer support.

Hostinger does not fail here.

First off, there’s Hostinger’s documentation and educational resources. For example, their tutorials site, which holds tutorials on a wide range of subjects. Hostinger also has a knowledge base, which is pretty common for Software-as-a-Service options but nonetheless useful.

The tutorials focus more on helping you learn or improve your web skills to make the most of your tools. The knowledge base helps you more with the questions you may have; FAQs, and also not-frequently asked questions that you still need to know.

Aside from on-site information that can help you right away, there’s the more important part of customer support: representatives who can answer your questions right away.

I actually found Hostinger to be a little less accessible here. Many services have at least live chat or even email support options easily available upon entering the site, but I couldn’t find anything like that on Hostinger’s site.

You need to log in to get access to live chat support. But once you do log in, a small chat option will always be around in the lower right corner of the screen, so that’s pretty handy.

In my experience, the live chat is excellent. I asked a simple question (straight off one of their help articles) and got a response before I could even take a screenshot of my question.hostinger chat 1hostinger chat 2

There you go. About a minute after I typed a question, I got a helpful response. This has generally been my experience, but here’s some proof…their live chat is one of the best around (or I’m just lucky).

Overall, I think they have a strong customer support factor. It’s unfortunate you need to be logged in to access most of it; for those interested, but unsure about committing, customer support can be a great way of getting a sense for the product.

Even taking that into account, I hardly feel let down by that. The knowledge base is handy and should take care of most things you can do via livechat, but there’s still the livechat and plenty of tutorials to get the hang of things.

Security

Last but not least, how’s security? As we mentioned, Hostinger proudly states they have a 99.9% uptime guarantee regardless of your shared hosting pricing plan.hostinger's Uptime

Here’s the average Uptime:
hostinger-uptime-2019

  • May 2019: 99.43%
  • Apr 2019: 99.67%
  • Mar 2019: 99.84%
  • Feb 2019: 99.93%
  • Jan 2019: 99.91%

hostinger-uptime-2018

  • Dec 2018: 99.92%
  • Nov 2018: 99.98%
  • Oct 2018: 99.96%
  • Sep 2018: 100%
  • Aug 2018: 99.99%

Here’s the average Response Time:

  • May 2019: 1,145 ms
  • Apr 2019: 1,278 ms
  • Mar 2019: 1,238 ms
  • Feb 2019: 1,315 ms
  • Jan 2019: 948 ms
  • Dec 2018: 482 ms
  • Nov 2018: 636 ms
  • Oct 2018: 706 ms
  • Sep 2018: 620 ms
  • Aug 2018: 711 ms

Clearly, our uptime for August has been pretty good, with 100% uptime so far.

A bad month could still come up, but based on the evidence I would say Hostinger keeps its uptime promise.

Note: We have stopped measuring Uptime of this hosting for the time being. But whatever we have recorded that we have listed above.

Aside from uptime, backups are also important.

Your pricing plan affects the frequency of your backups: Personal and Premium plans both get weekly backups, whereas Business Shared Hosting plans get them every day.

Business Shared Hosting and Business Hosting plans get a free SSL certificate, which lets you handle payments securely and ensure your customers will trust you.

Aside from that, you can buy an SSL certificate from Hostinger to protect your site if your plan does not come with a free one.

Aside from the stuff that you can do on your end, Hostinger servers come with their own protection. This isn’t exceptional, but it’s good to know.

Their site lists a fair string of protections: multiple fail-safes for server data, RAID-10, measures against DDoS attacks, firewalls, and strong disaster recovery so you can quickly backup your account in the event of a serious crash.

It’s a pretty comprehensive set of shields they’ve got, and it’s not surprising. Hostinger has such a sprawling base of users that it’s unlikely they’d be able to hold on to so much traffic and business without being pretty secure.

From our end, at least, Hostinger has certainly proved secure and reliable. With that out of the way, let’s move on to our final evaluation of Hostinger!

Do I Recommend Hostinger?

Whew! What’s the verdict at the end of the day?

If you’ve been reading this far, you can probably guess that Hostinger is guilty…of being good.

I like Hostinger so much that…it hosts the site you’re on right now! It’s been a pleasure using Hostinger.

I won’t pretend it’s perfect for everyone, and I don’t know if I would even recommend its first tier pricing option (for Shared Hosting).

For those considering second or third tier Shared Hosting plans, I would say it’s probably worth the money, and if you want to move beyond Shared

Hosting into something more serious, you’ll still get a solid deal.

The primary drawback is you need to read the fine print; Hostinger is great as long as you know how to use it.

Once you’re in though, you’re set for solid uptime, customer support, security, and features for a low price. I highly recommend Hostinger.

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UNITED STATES
Elijah
http://jimmorrison.pe.hu/


Mar 25, 2019

Uptime

Performance

Value for money

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Overall Rating

With Hostinger now for over than one month and it looks great! Have a premium plan, using it for blogs with WordPress - had some issues at first but after contacting their amazing support understood that there are no issues actually! Just automatic website optimization is needed and everything would be perfect :)
NIGERIA
Obasi Miracle
https://www.3ptechies.com


Feb 22, 2019

Uptime

Performance

Value for money

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Overall Rating

Using new hosts for new websites/projects is like a hobby to me. I've been doing so for years until I came across Hostinger hosting services. I bought their shared and VPS hosting plans and has been somehow satisfied with their VPS than I am with their shared hosting servers. While the performance, support, and security were generally good, the management dashboard and uptime was far from excellent. I canceled the shared hosting plan after about 13 months of use but kept the VPS as it offers the greatest value for money. While it is unmanaged, it comes with support for Webuzzo, Vesta CP, and other free VPS management software. So far, the VPS uptime is good, and I haven't had a reason to contact support for over three months already.