Hostinger Review

Updated


Disclosure: Our content is reader-supported, which means we earn commissions from links on Digital. Commissions do not affect our editorial evaluations or opinions.

Hostinger is a very popular hosting provider that has earned a near-perfect reputation over the years. It offers hosting for any type of website as well as custom-configured options for specific uses, making it a wonderful option for many situations.

As far as its website builder goes, it easily hits the mark for ease of use, which is one of the most important factors to consider. I created a website quickly using one of Hostinger’s pre-built templates and intuitive site editor — complete with an SEO-optimized blog. You can also create an online store via Hostinger. It does have some limitations, but for a new small business owner, it’s worth a try.

Who should choose Hostinger? Hostinger is an excellent choice for new websites, small businesses, local shops, bloggers, entrepreneurs, ecommerce sites, developers, and Minecraft gamers.

Featured Partners

Advertisement
Grey circle with an i in the middle Featured Partners pay us for placement on our site. When you sign up for one of them using our links, we get paid a small percentage at no cost to you.

Hostinger

The easiest option

Starts at $2.49 per month

  • Fail-proof setup
  • Great for beginners
  • Free AI tools

Bluehost

For new WordPress sites

Starts at $2.95 per month

  • Guided onboarding
  • Recommended by WordPress
  • 24/7 support

HostGator

Best security and scalability

Starts at $3.75 per month

  • All types of hosting
  • Enhanced security tools
  • Affordable as you grow

Hostinger Pros and Cons

I love Hostinger for many reasons, including its reliable hosting environments, quality CDN, and proven reputation. With its website builder, there are more than 100 pre-made templates, but it isn’t as customizable as other builders on the market.

While there are no huge problems with this company, there are some downsides to note in case they will affect your decision.

What we like about Hostinger

  • Very popular: Hostinger has over a million sites operating on its servers.
  • LiteSpeed: Hostinger uses LiteSpeed, which I am a big fan of. This can give you noticeable performance improvements on most types of websites.
  • Affordable hosting: Whether getting an entry-level option or something more advanced, the prices are always favorable at Hostinger. However, you must sign up for at least a year to get the best deals.
  • Easy to use: I enjoyed building a website on Hostinger’s website builder, particularly because it is intuitive. Menus are where they should be, and you can double-click to edit any element — plus, undoing any action is a cinch.
  • Artificial intelligence (AI) tools: Hostinger is leaning into AI and machine learning for content creation and image editing. It’s great to see a company embracing this technology. It’s not perfect, but I have high hopes for improvement.
  • 30-day money-back guarantee: All new customers have a 30-day “no questions asked” money-back guarantee.
  • 99.9% uptime guarantee: The hosting environment at Hostinger is very stable, and it is backed up with a 99.9% uptime guarantee.
  • CloudFlare protection: All Hostinger web hosting benefits from CloudFlare-protected nameservers.
  • Free domain: New customers will be given a free domain for the first year (with a 12-month hosting contract).
  • Free SSL certificate: All websites hosted with Hostinger will have access to a free SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt.

What fell flat

  • No dedicated servers: Hostinger does not offer dedicated servers, which some larger companies may require. If your site grows to the point where you want a dedicated server, you must either migrate to another company or consider one of Hostinger’s higher-end cloud hosting options.
  • hPanel – The custom control panel used by Hostinger is not perfect. While it is easy to use and allows you to do most things without a problem, I still consider it slightly less functional than the standard cPanel option.
  • CloudFlare CDN missing on basic hosting packages: If you opt for one of the two lowest-end hosting packages, you will not get the CloudFlare CDN services.

Digital.com’s Editorial Review

Hostinger has a solid reputation from its users, amazing hosting, competitive pricing, and some features that make it an ideal option for many people.

It’s website builder is one of the easiest on the market and comes with plenty of pre-built templates so you don’t have to start from scratch. However, it’s not as flexible as others and has some added costs that can start to add up.

“I have personally used and recommended Hostinger in the past and have always been very happy with its hosting. After completing the research and testing for this web hosting review, my respect for the company has only gone up.” -Michael Levanduski, Digital.com web hosting industry expert

See how we review hosting providers.

Plans & Pricing

Jump to Review

  • Shared–$1.99 per month
  • Website Builder–$2.99 per month
  • VPS–$5.99 per month
  • Cloud–$8.99 per month

Features

Jump to Review

  • Free domain on most plans
  • Drag-and-drop website builder
  • Pre-built builder templates
  • Built-in AI tools
  • Free SSL certificate
  • Custom hPanel
  • Lots of site tool add-ons
  • Domain-specific email addresses

Performance & Uptime

Jump to Review

  • CloudFlare CDN
  • LiteSpeed technology
  • 99.9% uptime guarantee
  • 100% uptime in our testing
  • Average response time: 450ms

Security

Jump to Review

  • Advanced security features
  • CloudFlare nameserver protection
  • Automated backups
  • DDoS mitigation
  • Free SSL certificate
  • Level 1 PCI compliance

Support

Jump to Review

Hostinger’s support team is staffed 24/7 to help you with anything you need. In my experience, it is very responsive and offers useful information no matter what type of issue you are facing.

  • Live chat
  • Email
  • Help center

Improvements

Jump to Review

While Hostinger has been around for over a decade, it is still committed to continuous improvement with new technology and features to meet your needs.

Plans and Pricing

Hostinger offers a range of beginner-friendly hosting options. That said, it’s missing more advanced types, including unmanaged plans and dedicated servers.

Shared–starts at $1.99 per month

  • Good for: hosting a single new website, beginners, small business sites

Website Builder–starts at $2.99 per month

  • Good for: portfolios, simple websites, basic online stores

VPS–starts at $5.99 per month

  • Good for: websites or stores that have outgrown shared hosting

Cloud–starts at $8.99 per month

  • Good for: intermediate users who want more control over their environment

While there is a separate website builder plan, it’s also included for free in all of Hostinger’s hosting plans.

Features

Hostinger is a low-cost hosting provider with high-quality features that will more than meet the needs of most people.

The website builder includes pre-built templates for easy design for websites and online stores. Integrated third-party tools also help you manage orders, inventory, and analytics. You can even embed code on your website if you’re so inclined.

Overall, it does an excellent job of giving customers access to important features without adding unnecessary features that do little more than drive up the cost.

Free domain on many hosting packages

When you sign up for hosting at Hostinger, you will likely qualify for a free domain name for the first year. Some of its entry-level packages do not include this perk, but I recommend using at least the Premium Shared Hosting package, including the free domain name.

Nameserver protection from CloudFlare

All of Hostinger’s nameservers are protected by CloudFlare’s DDoS mitigation services. While the nameservers are shared by all Hostinger customers, this is an important layer of security to have in mind. Unprotected nameservers represent a serious vulnerability with some hosting companies, which could result in unwanted downtime. This may be a simple feature from Hostinger, but I love the added protection it provides.

Free SSL certificate

All hosting packages at Hostinger come with a free shared SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt SSL that will provide your site with significant security. It also ensures your site is following best practices regarding security, which Google confirms is important for proper SEO.

Built-in website builder

All of Hostinger’s plans include a free drag-and-drop website builder for simple, beginner-friendly website creation. With the builder, you can choose from a wide range of free templates, leverage the easy site editor, use its handy AI-powered features, and even build a full online store.

Pre-built templates:

Hostinger offers over 100 pre-built templates for site design. Keep in mind that some of them are meant for online stores, but they don’t have to be. You can turn the shopping cart or bag on or off as needed. In fact, all of Hostinger’s templates are fairly customizable. Change the layout of your header menu; remove, add, or move sections on a page.

As far as design goes, I think Hostinger leaves a lot to be desired. The templates are clean and modern, but end up feeling very similar to each other.

All of Hostinger’s templates are mobile-responsive, so they’ll look great on any device. As you’re customizing your design, click on the mobile device button at the top to preview your site in its shrunken form. Also, editing the pre-built templates is intuitive — simply click or double-click to reveal a menu with options.

Drag and drop editor:

It’s important for a website builder to have an easy-to-use site editor along with the ability to customize everything, otherwise, you may as well build a site from scratch. Hostinger makes it easy to edit all elements on your site with its intuitive layout, menus, terms, and helpful tips in popup windows.

Although you don’t need to know about grids in layout to modify your design, Hostinger offers a switch you can turn on to enable grid gaps. Having them on will make it a cinch for you to align images with text and other elements, making your design more visually pleasing.

Hostinger makes it so easy to add, move or modify any element that you can really mess up a good-looking website.

Online store builder:

You can easily upgrade your Website subscription to a Business plan, which allows you to build an online store. You can even choose from pre-built e-commerce templates to start designing.

More importantly, you’ll be able to start selling digital or physical products from your site. You can list up to 500 products and easily manage them from your Hostinger dashboard. After adding a product image, choose what type of product you’re selling, and then you can set your price, sales price, and add an SKU number.

Hostinger’s inventory management system makes it easy to track your stock and categorize your items. You can even add variants, so if you offer a t-shirt design in sizes small to extra-large, you can add those. Unfortunately, you can only add one variant per product. So, if you offer the same design in different colors, you’ll have to add the different colors as separate products.

Though Hostinger isn’t technically a point-of-sale (POS) system, it does let you set up payment processing so you can accept payments online. You can accept more than 20 different payment methods using some of the biggest gateways, including Apple Pay, EPS, Sofort, and more. Transaction fees vary from the third-party payment processing companies, and you’ll have to pay 1% to Hostinger.

AI Tools

Hostinger offers several artificial intelligence-powered tools to help you with your marketing plans, such as creating content, coming up with a new business name or tagline, or overcoming the dreaded writer’s block with AI-generated blog content.

These AI tools also help you in polishing your brand identities with logos, favicons, and image enhancements.

Using Hostinger's AI tools to remove the background from an image

I already showed you the logo maker and the AI content creation tool. I tried out all the tools, and the most impressive one, in my opinion, is the background eraser. Upload any image to the AI background image eraser, and you’ll get back one with no background. I used this tool a few times, and while it isn’t perfect, it did a good job of erasing the background of most images. In some cases, white bits of an image that were in the foreground were also erased.

Creating a content plan for your website takes a lot of time, so having AI-generated content could help speed up the process. Hostinger means well with its free AI writer, but the results are less than desirable.

You can pick a category and then have the AI automatically write content for your site, but it won’t be specific to your brand — only your topic. So, the only benefit you might get here is accidental keyword targeting. Your other option is the wildcard content creator. Write a couple of sentences in the field and the AI content creator will “write” a couple of paragraphs for you that might work.

You can also use the tools to create a privacy policy, refund policy, and terms and conditions. Perhaps the best part of these AI tools is that they’re free for anyone to use. You don’t have to have a subscription to Hostinger to use any of them.

Custom hPanel

Most web hosting companies today use cPanel for their control pane, but, Hostinger created its own custom control panel called hPanel. I prefer the traditional cPanel, but hPanel is still an intuitive set of tools that makes it easy to manage your site. If you have never run a website before, you will quickly learn how to navigate hPanel and won’t run into any real issues. But if you have used cPanel in the past, it might take a bit to get used to the changes, though it isn’t a huge deal.

This hPanel is also where you reach out to the Hostinger customer support team or browse the store to add new features if needed.

Hostinger's custom hPanel

Lots of site add-ons

Once you have your hosting account set up, you can customize it using the included site add-on features. This includes a variety of templates and themes along with convenient backup options.

Domain-specific email addresses

You can add email hosting to your web hosting account or purchase it independently. This premium email hosting option will give you a lot of worthwhile features to help you make the most out of your email.

Once you set up your email accounts, you will have access to email templates, read receipts, follow-up reminders, and much more. Note that email hosting is not a free feature with Hostinger, so you will have to add it on or purchase it separately.

99.9% uptime guarantee

All hosting packages at Hostinger come with a 99.9% uptime guarantee. Your hosting servers will be available to serve traffic at least 99.9% of the time, which aligns with the industry standard. While the company only guarantees that your servers will be up 99.9% of the time, it is much more reliable than that in most situations.

CloudFlare CDN on many hosting packages

Starting with the Business Shared Hosting package, you will get free access to the CloudFlare CDN. This helps to speed up the loading times for your website by housing key site files in data centers around the world. The CloudFlare CDN boasts 152 separate locations, meaning your site will always be hosted in a location physically close to your visitors.

LiteSpeed technology

I love that Hostinger uses LiteSpeed on all of its hosting packages. This allows faster response times on the server compared to other technologies most hosting companies use. In addition, many web hosting packages will give you free access to the CloudFlare CDN, which can further speed up your site’s loading.

Advanced security features

Security is always important with web hosting, and Hostinger takes that responsibility seriously. In addition to offering a free SSL certificate and name server protection, it also scans all files regularly for viruses, offers effective backup options, and makes sure site add-ons are kept up-to-date.

Performance and Uptime

Hostinger has several important features to ensure your site performs well and remains up all the time. This is backed up with a 99.9% uptime guarantee.

Uptime and reliability

After running extensive tests on Hostinger’s environment, I found it had a 100% uptime over the past 30 days, which is very impressive. The all-time uptime percentage is 99.966%, which is wonderful. After performing these tests, I’m confident you’re not likely to experience significant unexpected outages for your website.

Hostinger's nearly perfect uptime over the last 30 days

Site response times

Site response times depend on the web hosting company’s servers and infrastructure, which in the case of Hostinger, are superior. After running multiple tests on the Hostinger side, the average response time was between 450ms and 625ms, which is very good. The response time is the delay from the moment you attempt to reach the servers until you get the first response back. It will include transit time between your computer and the Hostinger servers. Simply put, speed should not be an issue when using Hostinger.

Hostinger's response time over the last 30 days

Optimized WordPress hosting

Hostinger has several hosting packages designed specifically for WordPress hosting. If you are using the very popular WordPress CMS, it is recommended to look at these hosting options first. They are optimized to run WordPress-based sites as efficiently as possible.

Security

Hostinger offers a variety of important features to help keep your site safe, including SSL Certificates, CloudFlare DDoS mitigation, and data backup services.

On top of that, all Hostinger websites and online stores get a free SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt SSL. Hostinger’s e-commerce tools have Level 1 PCI compliance, so you can confidently add any payment processor from Hostinger’s approved list to safely accept payments.

SSL certificates

SSL certificates have become an essential part of any reputable website today, so it is good that Hostinger offers them for free on all its hosting packages. The free SSL certificates are shared certificates from Let’s Encrypt, one of the leaders in this technology.

In addition to allowing your site to use this standard encryption protocol, it also helps ensure your site can rank as well as possible with the search engines. Google has confirmed it prioritizes sites with SSL certificates over those without.

DDoS mitigation

DDoS attacks are one of the most common forms of cyberattacks, with countless incidents occurring every day. These types of attacks can take a website offline for extended periods if not properly handled. Hostinger has all its traffic flowing through CloudFlare’s DDoS mitigation system to protect your site from this attack.

Support

Hostinger offers 24/7 support to all its customers. You can reach out via live chat or email. Unfortunately, the company does not offer phone-based support. While most people today would prefer live chat anyway, it is disappointing that using the phone is not an option.

In addition to the live support team, there is a great self-help section that will give you answers to most types of questions and assist you through many difficulties. The help page also displays the system status, so you will know when a problem is on Hostinger’s end.

Recent Improvements

These are some of the recent product improvements made available by Hostinger:

  • Easy account sharing: Hostinger recently made it easier to share your account with friends, coworkers, employees, and others. This can make it a lot simpler to manage your site.
  • Plan boost: If you are expecting a day with high levels of traffic (such as if you are running a promotion or advertisement), you can engage plan boost, which doubles your hosting capabilities for 24 hours.
  • Improved WordPress migration: Hostinger has recently updated its WordPress site migration tools to make it faster and easier to move a WordPress-based site from another hosting company to Hostinger.
  • Updated WordPress security: Hostinger regularly updates security across the site, especially on its WordPress hosting environments since those are a primary target by cybercriminals.

Compare Hostinger Alternatives

Hostinger is an excellent hosting company that’s well suited for a ton of different use cases. However, it’s not the best choice for everyone, especially those with advanced needs (like unmanaged or dedicated servers) or scalability top of mind.

Use the comparison table below to see how Hostinger compares to its closest alternatives or check out our full list of the best web hosting services to see how it stacks up against other popular options.

Hosting Provider

Pricing + Basic Plan Features

Hostinger logo

Hostinger
You are here.

Starts at $1.99 per month

  • 1 website
  • 50 GB SSD storage
  • Custom themes
  • Built-in website builder
  • Free SSL certificate

Starts at $2.95 per month

  • 1 website
  • 10 GB storage space
  • Custom WordPress themes
  • Includes a CDN and SSL
  • Free domain

Consider Bluehost if: You’re interested in faster (and/or phone-based) customer service.

Starts at $3.75 per month

  • 1 website
  • 10 GB SSD storage
  • Unmetered bandwidth
  • Includes free email and SSL
  • Free domain registration

Consider HostGator if: You don’t need a website builder and value long-term scalability more than anything else.

Starts at $2.59 per month

  • 1 website
  • SSD storage
  • Unlimited traffic
  • Free domain
  • Free SSL certificate

Consider DreamHost if: You open-source, security, and privacy are top of mind.

Starts at $2.99 per month

  • 1 website
  • 10GB storage
  • Unlimited bandwidth
  • Free SSL certificate
  • Free email

Consider SiteGround if: You’re willing to pay a bit extra for superior customer service.

What You Need to Know

What are the cons of Hostinger?

Hostinger does not offer dedicated servers, so large companies may not be able to use this hosting provider. The company also does not offer phone support, which is disappointing. Finally, some features such as a free domain and CDN are not provided on entry-level hosting packages.

Can Hostinger be trusted?

Absolutely. Hostinger has been in business for nearly two decades and has helped thousands of people run millions of websites. As one of the most popular hosting providers in business today, there is no doubt that this company can be trusted.

What country is Hostinger located in?

Hostinger’s main offices are located in Kaunas, Lithuania. It has data centers located in Brazil, Indonesia, Lithuania, Singapore, India, the U.S., the U.K., and the Netherlands.

Can I connect to my Hostinger control panel from a mobile device?

Yes. While Hostinger does not have a mobile app for its hPanel control panel, you can log onto it from your phone if needed. Personally, I find trying to manage complex hosting tasks from a phone to be difficult, but it is a good option to have available in a pinch.

What is the difference between Hostinger’s website builder and WordPress?

The biggest difference between Hostinger and WordPress is that Hostinger is an easy-to-use website builder, while WordPress is a content management system (CMS). With Hostinger, you need no coding knowledge. With WordPress, you either need to know HTML to build a website or how to add a third-party app to help you build a website.

How do you contact Hostinger live support?

If you need help from the Hostinger team, log onto your account and click on the question mark to go to the help page. This will give you access to self-help information as well as easy buttons to email or reach out via live chat.

Who owns Hostinger?

Hostinger is a privately-held business under the parent company Hostinger (the web host). Its CEO is Arnas Stuopelis.

How We Reviewed Hostinger

I test web hosts based on the following factors:

  • Plan value: What plans are available, and do they offer a good value?
  • Ease of use: Is the dashboard easy to navigate?
  • Support: How fast can you get help when needed, and is support genuinely helpful?
  • Features: What features does the host offer, and how do they compare to similar competitors?
  • Security: Does the host offer SSL certificates, Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack protection, backup services, and scans for viruses and malware?
  • Templates: Are the templates attractive, updated, and generally high quality? Can you find many to choose from?
  • Speed and uptime: Does the provider offer a fast, stable environment for your website? How does it perform in tests, and what kind of servers does the hosting company use?
  • Recent improvements: What has the host done lately to update its technology and services?

Learn more about our review methodology.

Scroll to Top