Hostinger review (2023)

Hostinger is a popular web hosting provider which offers feature-packed, top quality but low-cost plans for home users, small and medium-sized businesses.

In this review, we’ll talk about our extensive Hostinger research. How we built a test site, explored the impressive custom control panel, tested support, monitored speeds, uptime and more, and compared our results with the best of the competition.

What we found was a polished service, with excellent uptime, easy for beginners to use, but with the tools and flexibility to keep more experienced customers happy, too. The lack of dedicated hosting and phone support means Hostinger may not be the best choice for big corporations and the most demanding applications, although that depends on exactly what you’re trying to do.

Next up, we’ll explain where Hostinger scores, and where it really doesn’t, to help identify if this is the web host for you.

Hostinger: The pros

Excellent uptime

Reliability is one of the most important elements in any quality web host. A provider can offer as many other features as it likes, but if your site is down all the time, most of your visitors will disappear.

We measured Hostinger’s performance by setting up a test WordPress website, then using Uptime.com to monitor its speed and any downtime from multiple locations around the world.

Although our site was hosted on Hostinger's most basic shared hosting plan, it still managed an excellent 100% uptime record over 10 weeks of monitoring.

If your site doesn’t do that well, Hostinger also offers a 99.9% uptime guarantee, but that’s not quite as good as it sounds. There are lots of exclusions, and even if the company missed the mark by a huge margin, it’ll only refund you a tiny 5% of your hosting fee.

Fast load times

We measure website load speeds with help from GTmetrix, which accesses a test page and reports how long its main content takes to load (a value called Largest Contentful Paint, or LCP). A low LCP means your website begins to appear on the screen more quickly, keeping visitors happy.

Hostinger scored here with a speedy LCP of 0.607 seconds, the second fastest result in our last 15 tests, just behind HostGator. 

One-off load speed checks are important, but we also like to see how a site performs when it's busy. To do this, we use the stress-testing service k6 to unleash 20 virtual users on our site and measure what happens.

Hostinger's results showed it could handle 15 requests per second throughout the test. That’s similar to other providers, but very acceptable for shared hosting, and if you’re opting for a more high-powered shared or VPS plan, you should be able to handle even more visitors.

Low starter prices

Hostinger’s low headline prices start at just $1.99 a month for its four year Single shared hosting plan (renewing at a still very reasonable $3.99.)

Not keen on signing up for such a long time? Switch to the annual plan and it’s still cheap at $2.99 a month ($5.99 on renewal.)

It’s the same with most Hostinger plans. The mid-range Business WordPress plan supports hosting up to 100 sites, offers lots of resources and includes daily backups, yet it’s priced from only $3.99 a month over four years ($8.99 on renewal), or $4..99 (renewing at $11.99) on the annual plan.

Lots of features

Hostinger’s plans may be cheap, but they’re also stuffed with features, many of which are chargeable extras elsewhere.

Hostinger’s Business plan is priced from only $3.99 a month, but still includes ultra-fast NVMe storage, free website migration, daily backups, malware scanning, unlimited free SSL and support for hosting up to 100 sites. And if you decide next year that you really need a web store, for instance, no problem: built-in e-commerce support allows you to sell up to 500 items, with up to 20 payment options, and zero transaction fees.

If you’re an experienced hosting customer, or you’re building a business site and understand your requirements right down to the tiniest detail, this may not matter very much.

But if you’re more of a newbie, dipping your toe into the hosting waters and not quite sure where your site might go, the adaptability of most Hostinger plans is a real plus.

Data centers in eight countries

Sign up with many web hosts and they’ll give you storage space in a data center, uh, somewhere, but they won’t tell you where this is, or give you any choice of locations.

That could be bad performance news if, say, your target audience is in California but your website is hosted in a data center halfway around the world.

Hostinger has data centers in eight countries: the USA, UK, France, Netherlands, Lithuania, Singapore, India and Brazil.

That's far more than most hosts, and it’s especially good to see a service which doesn’t purely focus on North America and Europe.

There is one catch, though: some plans don't support all the data centers. The Shared, Cloud and WordPress plans are available everywhere, but Hostinger's Linux VPS plans can't be hosted in France, Netherlands or Singapore.

Check the small print of individual plans to find out more, or take a look at Hostinger's 'Where are your servers located?' support document.

Quality custom control panel

Hostinger doesn't offer cPanel (an intuitive server and site management platform) to its shared hosting users, opting to use its custom hPanel platform, instead. Custom control panels make us wary, probably because most of them are underpowered in the extreme, but hPanel is a rare exception.

It looks similar to cPanel, for instance, with server details (location, IP address) in a sidebar, and colorful icons representing features in categories such as Domains, Emails, Files, WordPress and more.

Most functions are accessible to even novice users. Creating an email address, for instance, is as easy as entering the address and a password. But if you need them, advanced extras from importing existing emails, to setting up SPF and DKIM records (to authenticate emails and protect against phishing) are just a click or two away.

Custom control panels still aren't good news for hosting experts, as all their cPanel experience doesn't count for much; they're left to browse the menus and options, much like anybody else.

Overall, though, hPanel offers a good mix of power and ease of use, and the platform provides everything you need to get your site up and running quickly.

Hostinger: The cons

No web hosting service gets everything right, and these are our main Hostinger concerns.

Doesn’t have the power for the most demanding websites

Hostinger offers a wide range of shared, cloud and VPS (Virtual Private Server) plans, but these all require that you share your web server’s resources with other Hostinger customers. There’s no dedicated hosting option, where you can rent an entire server just for you.

That may not be a problem for smaller projects. If you’re planning a standard personal or business site with a WordPress blog, for instance, then even the cheapest Hostinger plan should be able to handle hundreds of visitors a day, while the top VPS plans can cope with many thousands.

Limits and restrictions with the cheapest hosting plans

Hostinger has some very low prices, but be sure to check the small print: the starter plans have a few potential catches.

There’s no free domain with the cheapest Single shared hosting plan, for instance. Keep that in mind if you’re comparing prices with other providers.

The Single plan supports a single email account only. That may not be an issue for a personal site, where ‘me@mydomain’ is probably all you need, but it’s unlikely to work for family or business sites.

The bottom of the range plans support automatic weekly backups only. We’re glad to see at least some backups included (many providers charge extra), but if you update the site regularly, this has to be a concern.

Hostinger isn’t trying to catch anyone out, though; quite the opposite. Scroll down every product page and you’ll find a lengthy comparison table covering in fine detail exactly what you get (and don’t get) with each plan.

No telephone support

Unusually for a top hosting provider, Hostinger doesn't have telephone support. 

If you’ve a complex or urgent problem with a business-critical site, maybe it’s down or seriously misbehaving and every second counts, that could be an issue. There’s just no substitute for the quick back and forth of a phone conversation, where you can share thoughts with an expert, clarify the situation and get quality advice, perhaps within seconds.

Fortunately, Hostinger does offer 24/7 live chat, where typically we’re talking to an agent within a couple of minutes.

Email and ticket support can be a better route for tricky problems, where you need to send log files or screenshots, but in our experience even these get replies within an hour.

Hostinger's performance

First off, we used Uptime.com to monitor our test website from multiple locations around the world, logging response times and any downtime.

Our test site was hosted on Hostinger's most basic shared hosting plan, but still managed a solid 100% uptime record over 10 weeks of monitoring.

Uptime.com recorded a response time range of 171ms to 1.73s, with an average of 382ms, over the last seven days of testing. Starter shared hosting plans typically manage 200-400ms with an average peak of 700-800ms, so Hostinger is clearly on the slow side when it comes to response times.

Page load times matter too, though, so we used Dotcom Tools' Website Speed Test to measure our site performance from 16 locations around the US and Europe. This time the results were much better at 878ms, putting it in the top 25% of providers.

A mixed story, then, but keep in mind these are comparisons based on the cheapest shared hosting plan from each test provider. Some of those plans cost 5x to 10x the $1.39 you could pay with Hostinger, so on balance we think the company did reasonably well.

How fast is Hostinger?

Our web host performance tests start by measuring uptime, the proportion of time your website remains accessible to visitors. We set up a test WordPress site on a Hostinger shared hosting package, then used Uptime.com to access it every five minutes for 14 days and report the results.

Hostinger achieved 99.98% uptime, which was a little disappointing (because we expected a perfect performance over such a short test) though still very acceptable overall (because it's still significantly better than the 99.9% uptime guarantee offered by most web hosts).

We measure website load speeds with help from GTmetrix, which accesses a test page and reports how long its main content takes to load (a value known technically as Largest Contentful Paint, or LCP). A low LCP means your website is likely to pop up onto the screen more quickly, keeping visitors happy.

Hostinger scored here with a speedy LCP of 0.607 seconds, the second fastest result in our last 15 tests, just behind HostGator. It's not significantly ahead of the competition - most providers have an LCP in the 0.60 to 0.80 area - but it suggests Hostinger isn't cutting corners to hit its low shared hosting prices. It really can compete with the likes of Bluehost and HostGator.

One-off load speed checks are important, but we also like to see how a site performs when it's busy. To do this, we use the stress-testing service k6 to unleash 20 virtual users on our site and measure what happens.

Hostinger's results showed some drops in performance at peak load, but that's what we would expect for a shared hosting package. Overall, it was able to handle 15 requests per second throughout the test, a typical result for most providers.

These are broadly positive results, and show Hostinger performs better than most budget hosts. But keep in mind that our figures are based on testing a shared plan, and if you're opting for VPS, dedicated hosting or any other product, your experience may be very different.

How easy is Hostinger to use?

Hostinger doesn't offer cPanel (an intuitive server and site management platform) to its shared hosting users, opting to use its custom hPanel platform, instead. Custom control panels make us wary, probably because most of them are underpowered in the extreme, but hPanel is a rare exception.

It looks similar to cPanel, for instance, with server details (location, IP address) in a sidebar, and colorful icons representing individual features, organized into sensibly-named groups: Domains, Emails, Files, WordPress and so on.

Most functions are accessible to even novice users. Create an email address, for instance, and you're only asked for the address and a password. But a sidebar adds more advanced tools, from importing existing emails, to setting up SPF and DKIM records (to authenticate emails and protect against phishing) in just a few clicks.

Custom control panels still aren't good news for hosting experts, as all their cPanel experience doesn't count for much; they're left to browse the menus and options, much like anybody else.

Overall, though, hPanel offers a good mix of power and ease of use, and the platform provides everything you need to get your site up and running quickly.

How good is Hostinger's support?

Unusually for a top hosting provider, Hostinger doesn't have telephone support. There's 24/7 live chat, though, and email or ticket support if you prefer.

We opened a ticket asking how we could install WordPress on a subdomain. That's not a complicated technical issue, but it's more involved than a simple product question, and gave us a better chance of getting an interesting response.

The reply arrived only 17 minutes later, just about as speedy as we could expect for ticket support. (Who needs live chat, anyway?)

The text used more jargon than we’d like, but was accurate and included all the detail we needed to figure out a solution.

Live chat is also available whenever you need it. We never waited more than a couple of minutes for a response, and agents were just as quick at identifying our issues and coming up with relevant and useful advice.

A web knowledgebase is on hand if you prefer the DIY approach. We'd recommend ignoring the Search box (it does a poor job of finding the best articles), and just browse the categories further down the page. There are hundreds of articles arranged into topics such as hPanel, cPanel, DNS, SSL Certificates and more.

These articles are often short, and not always organized or presented as you'd expect. The site does have plenty of useful advice on carrying out specific tasks, though, even when they're not about Hostinger's own services. 

If your domain is managed by another registrar, for instance, most hosting providers don't give you any real advice on how to modify DNS records. But Hostinger has separate articles for managing DNS at Bluehost, GoDaddy, IONOS, Namecheap, HostGator, SiteGround, WordPress.com, DreamHost’s, and many more: 30+ providers in total. 

There's clearly work to do here, but Hostinger scores well in most areas, and overall delivers a far better quality of support than most budget providers.

What sort of hosting plans does Hostinger offer?

Hostinger offers cheap shared hosting for small to medium low-traffic sites. VPS hosting and cloud hosting give your website more resources for extra speed, making them suitable for more demanding, business-critical sites. (How demanding? A good VPS can run a WordPress site with hundreds of thousands of visitors a month.)

Hostinger doesn't have any dedicated server products, which is bad news if you're looking for the maximum performance and reliability. 

But by way of compensation for at least some users, Hostinger is one of the few big hosting names to offer pre-configured Minecraft server hosting from under $10 a month.

Which plan is right for you? Next, we'll explore Hostinger's shared, VPS WordPress, cloud and Minecraft server hosting range, break down what they offer, what they don't, and help identify the best choices for you. Note that Hostinger ranks at the top position of our best WordPress hosting guide.

• Hostinger is also top of our best Minecraft server hosting list

Hostinger shared hosting

Shared hosting works just as the name suggests: your site is stored on a web server along with many others, and everyone shares the server costs and resources. It's cheap and relatively easy to use, and although this is the slowest hosting type, shared plans may still be able to handle sites with tens of thousands of visitors a month.

Hostinger's shared hosting starts with the Single plan. It's cheap at $1.99 a month over four years ($3.99 on renewal), and has some welcome features: free SSL, easy WordPress installation and management. But it also has many limits: support for one website, no free domain, 50GB storage, a single email account, 100GB bandwidth, backups are weekly only. If you know exactly what you need, and this works, great; otherwise, it's best ignored.

The Premium plan is still cheap at $2.99 a month initially ($6.99 on renewal), but lifts or removes all those limits: there's support for 100 websites, a free domain, 100GB storage, 100 email addresses and unlimited bandwidth. Backups are still only weekly, which is a significant weakness.

The top-of-the-range Business plan adds the much-needed daily backups, though, and throws in Cloudflare's CDN (Content Delivery Network) for maximum speeds. It's priced from $4.99 a month for the first four years, $8.99 on renewal.

These are feature-packed products that performed very well in our speed tests, and are great value for what you're getting. The Business plan is our pick of the range. It's more capable than products twice the price from some other hosts, and Hostinger suggests it can handle sites of up to approximately 100,000 visitors a month.

Also consider HostGator, whose feature-packed shared hosting is great value, speedy in testing, and has some surprising bonus features for demanding users (free SSL upgrade and a dedicated IP in the business plan). 

Hostinger WordPress hosting

WordPress is the world's favorite website creator, a versatile platform which works for everyone from hosting newbies building a tiny family site, to international corporations with the most business-critical web projects.

Hostinger has strong WordPress support across most of its ranges, ensuring there's a solution for just about everyone.

The Single WordPress plan is extremely basic (supports one website, a single email address, no free domain, few resources, reduced speeds.) But it has easy WordPress installation, weekly backups, and (Hostinger claims) can handle up to 10,000 visitors a month. The plan's real appeal is its price, though, at only $1.99 a month over four years, $3.99 on renewal. It could work as a cheap way to learn WordPress, assuming you're only building the most basic of sites.

The Business WordPress plan is our pick of the range. It's significantly more expensive at $6.99 a month over four years, $16.99 on renewal. But it has far more capable specs - 100 websites, 100 email addresses, free domains, handles up to 100k visitors a month - and adds valuable extras including staging (a valuable website testing feature) and Cloudflare CDN (a major speedup plus). This is a capable plan with the power to cope with more demanding personal and small to medium business sites.

If your needs are even greater - you've several business-critical sites, or maybe a busy web store where speed is absolutely vital - then Hostinger's 'Hosting for Agencies' range might help. It has all the same WordPress features, but makes it easier to manage and control access to multiple sites, and boosts performance by giving you far more server resources.

The Agency Pro plan is our pick of the range: it gives you twice the resources of the Business WordPress plan, but it's still very affordable at $14.99 a month over four years ($49.99 on renewal).

Consider IONOS, too. Its Business WordPress plan has free SSL, a free domain and daily backups, but it's just $0.50 a month for the first year, ideal if you're looking to learn WordPress and see if it's right for you. 

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Hostinger VPS hosting 

Signing up for VPS (Virtual Private Server) hosting gets you a private area in a web server with your own system resources. This automatically gives any VPS a speed advantage over shared hosting, and the more resources your plan includes (CPU time, RAM, storage space) the faster it's likely to be. If your site has 100k visitors a month or more, or it's especially demanding and 

Hostinger offers eight VPS plans, giving you plenty of choice. They start cheap at only $3.49 a month over four years ($6.99 on renewal) for an extremely basic 1 CPU core, 1GB RAM and 20GB storage VPS, but they ramp up from there, and the top-of-the-range VPS plan offers 8 cores, 16GB RAM and 250GB storage for $77.99 a month over four years ($131.99 on renewal).

The range is fair value, but it won't work for everyone. One reason Hostinger's prices are low is that their VPS plans are unmanaged. That means Hostinger doesn't monitor the operating system, set up the firewall, install security patches or do anything similar: you're left to manage the server's system software yourself. That's manageable for experts, and if you know what you're doing, the extra control can even be an advantage. But it's a potentially complicated hassle for everybody else.

There are some technical limitations, too. Hostinger's VPS plans get a 100Mbps connection to the outside world, for instance, which sounds good, but it's less than many top providers, and could get swamped if you're running busy sites with many simultaneous visitors.

If low prices are a must, consider IONOS. Its most basic VPS starts at $2 billed monthly, even a 6 core, 12GB RAM system is only $35 a month billed annually ($18 for the first six months), and all plans include a 400Mbps network connection.

But if it's choice you're after, look at Hostwinds. It has cheap unmanaged VPS from $4.99 billed monthly, but there's a managed VPS range (where Hostwinds does all the low-level server management for you) starting at only $8.24 a month. All plans are more configurable, there's Windows hosting if you need it, more powerful systems at the top of the range, and 1Gbps network speeds keep performance high even at peak times.

Hostinger cloud hosting

If Hostinger’s shared hosting isn’t powerful enough for your needs, its cloud hosting packages might help. They come with allocated memory and CPU time (managed by CloudLinux with LVE containers if you’re interested in the technicalities), boosting speeds as you’re less likely to be sharing resources with others. But they’re also just as easy to use as the shared range.

There are three cloud hosting plans available: Cloud Startup, Cloud Professional, and Cloud Enterprise. They all offer unlimited bandwidth, free SSL, a free domain, daily backups and a dedicated IP address, and can host up to 300 websites on the same account.

The Cloud Startup plan includes 200GB of SSD storage, 3GB of RAM and 2 CPU cores for $9.99 a month billed annually.

The Cloud Professional plan increases these to 250GB storage, 6GB RAM and 4 CPU cores, but remains reasonably priced at $14.99 a month.

Opting for the Cloud Enterprise plan  gets you 300GB storage, 12GB RAM and 6 CPU cores, but it’s not as generously priced at $29.99 a month 

Although Hostinger’s focus on ease of use ensures this works for beginners, experienced or demanding users can get far more choice and configurability from providers such as IONOS and Dreamhost.

IONOS has no less than 13 cloud server plans, for instance. Bargain hunters can save cash with the basic $4 a month one core, 512MB RAM package, while the top-of-the-range 5XL plan flies past Hostinger with its monster 24 core, 48GB setup. That’s for monthly billing, too - no long term contracts - and you can even opt for hourly billing if you just want to try the service out. 

Hostinger Minecraft server hosting

Hostinger’s most unusual feature is its support for Minecraft hosting, something we rarely see with any of the other big name providers.

Setting up a server isn’t quite as straightforward as Hostinger’s 1-click WordPress installers, but it’s not difficult either. The support site has tutorials on how to get your server running, find and install mods, tweak key settings and change your server type (options include Official, Spigot, CraftBukkit, Paper, Forge and more.)

Plans start with a small-scale 4GB RAM, 1 CPU package for $6.99 a month billed annually, ranging up to $29.99 for a 16GB RAM, 4 CPU server with the power to build a real community. All plans include a dedicated IP to protect your server from DDoS attacks, while automated backups keep you safe from just about everything else.

It’s great to see a top web host offer Minecraft plans, and these are fairly priced for what you get. If you’ve big gaming ambitions and very deep pockets, though, Hostwinds’ has far more powerful plans, maxing out at a 16 CPU, 96GB RAM, 750GB storage setup for $328.99 a month.

Does Hostinger have a website builder?

If you don't have a website yet, and WordPress seems a little intimidating, a website builder may be the easiest way to get started. Typically, they'll have a gallery of pre-built website designs you can use to get started. Adding pictures, videos, maps and other page elements is as easy as dragging and dropping, and customizing the content with your own text and photos works much like any editor.

Hostinger has its own website builder, which comes with unmetered traffic, unlimited free SSL certificates, web hosting, up to 100 websites, free domain, free email, ecommerce features, plus more.

We found it to be a simple and straightforward tool that we could use right away. No need to spend an age scrolling through feature lists, comparing plans or wondering what you can afford: just hand over your email address to create an account and you can start building right away.

The editor is relatively basic, but the online shop’s what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) editor will give you tools to create detailed descriptions with HTML titles.

Hostinger website builder costs $2.79 per month and is a decent website builder for personal use and small sites. There's not enough power here for business applications, and even if your site took off and became a real success, there's no upgrade path to help you cope with the extra demand.

HostGator’s Gator website builder is worth considering as a value alternative. It's fractionally more expensive, but has more features, and supports an unlimited web store for physical and digital products. If features are more important than price, Wix has more templates, more features, more power in every area, and is an absolute must for your shortlist.

Can you build a web store with Hostinger?

Hostinger doesn't have a specialist ecommerce plan, but there are a couple of routes you can take to begin selling online.

As we’ve discussed above, Hostinger Website Builder can create web stores with up to 500 products, and supports 20+ popular payment types. It’s not very configurable, but it’s easy to use and could be enough to run a simple home business.

The alternative is to sign up with one of Hostinger's other hosting plans, then install a specialist ecommerce platform. WooCommerce is probably the best-known option. It's a hugely capable WordPress plugin, which can be easily installed on any Hostinger plan, and includes all the product cataloging, inventory managing, payment taking and worldwide shipping integrations you need.

Although this really does give you the power to build a world-class web store, you’ll have to handle most of it on your own. Hostinger will help with the hosting, but as it doesn’t have any ecommerce-specific plans, any store-type issues are left up to you.

If you’d prefer more help, consider hosts which do offer specialist web store products. Bluehost has an excellent WooCommerce hosting plan with payment processing and a stack of essential sales and marketing tools. IONOS has even more options, including a simple online store builder, a WooCommerce plan, and hosting for a bunch of other ecommerce platforms: Magento, PrestaShop, OpenCart and more.

Final verdict: Is Hostinger right for you?

Hostinger’s reliable, feature-packed but low-cost plans make it a great choice for personal and small to medium business sites. The lack of dedicated hosting means it’s less suitable for very high traffic sites, but don’t rule it out entirely: Hostinger’s high-end VPS plans may be able to handle hundreds of thousands of visitors a month.

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Fact checked by: Abigail Opiah

Abigail is a B2B Editor that specializes in web hosting and website builder news features and reviews at TechRadar Pro. As a B2B web hosting and website builder editor, Abigail also writes how-to guides and deals for the sector, keeping up to date with the latest trends in the hosting industry. 

Hostinger external ratings

Trustpilot rating
At the time of our re-review of Hostinger, Trustpilot gives the service 4.7 out of5 stars from the over 18,000 customer reviews.

G2 rating
From the 332 customer reviews, G2 rates Hostinger 4.4 out of 5 stars for its overall website hosting service.

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