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
