Hostinger Review 2024: Is it Good or Just a Hype?

If you are looking to start a blog, an eCommerce store, or any other online business, you will frequently come across this term: Web hosting.

And most people fret when it comes to finding and investing in reasonable web hosting.

I agree that it is somehow challenging to find cheap web hosting that offers all the features.

If you are facing the same issue, then you are definitely not alone.

If you are finding it difficult to come up with a great web hosting that offers a free domain name, then this review guide is just for you.

In this Hostinger review, I will tell you exactly what it is and walk you through each important element of this miraculous web hosting.

After using this hosting for over 2 years, this is our ultimate analysis of the same.

Keep Reading.

Pros and Cons of Hostinger Hosting

Pros	Cons
Best and cheapest hosting for beginner bloggers and website owners.	Live chat support is great but email support and frequency of updating articles can be improved.
Offers free domain name when purchased hosting for at least 1 year.	A complete newbie may find it initially difficult to use the interface.
Serves advanced features such as Litespeed caching, free business Gmail, free SSL, Cloudflare, etc.	The daily backup needs an additional payment/investment if you choose to go with the shared hosting plan.
Best user interface among all the hosting companies in the world.	–
One-click WordPress install.	–
Goldmine customer support.	–
99.9% uptime.	–
Benefits > price.	–

Hostinger Review Table Overview

Features	Use
Speed	Hostinger uses Litespeed servers which makes it load super fast. If you are a WordPress user, they recommend using the Litespeed Cache plugin (it’s free) for maximum speed benefits.
Uptime	They guarantee 99.9 percent uptime which is true. With proof, I will explain more of it later in this review.
Support	Hostinger uses Litespeed servers which makes it ultimately faster than flash. If you are a WordPress user, they recommend using the Litespeed Cache plugin (it’s free) for maximum speed benefits.
Apps	Comes with four popular options: Shared hosting, cloud hosting, VPS hosting, and WordPress hosting.
Features	From free SSL to unlimited free business email addresses, the opportunities are endless in Hostinger.
Hosting Plans	Their HELP section is a boon for all. They have an active support forum, blog tutorials FAQ section, and email support along with my favorite Live Chat feature.
Site Transfer	Luckily, Hostinger offers free site migration within a few clicks.
Pricing	Hostinger has a competitive pricing plan with almost every feature. The single shared plan starts from as low as $1.39 which is remarkable.

What is Hostinger?

Starting in 2004 as a bootstrapped company, Hostinger is currently one of the top web hosting companies powering more than 29 million website owners.

Along with that, it is also a parent company to Weblink, 000Webhost, Niagahoster, and many others.

This European web host company has attracted millions of users by solving one of the biggest pain points of their audience: providing a great web hosting service at a highly inexpensive price.

It provides numerous features such as high-speed servers, technical support, free SSL, business email, personal website builder, elegant and easy-to-use interface, and much more.

With that, let’s practically measure the speed and performance of Hostinger.

Hostinger Performance Check

By now, even if you find some conviction to invest in Hosting, you may have this common question – Is Hostinger fast?

Let’s answer this question the right way.

Hostinger page speed tests

As this website (i.e. key2blogging) is hosted on Hostinger, I will test the speed of this website on two famous sources:

• Google page speed insights.
• GTMetrix.

Let’s start with yours truly: Google.

Quite impressive.

Here’s the result from GTMetrix:

Not bad.

So, as you saw, my site runs pretty well and smoothly on this hosting without any issues.

If we summarise the results:

Google Speed Insights	99 on mobile and 100 on desktop.
GTMetrix	Homepage loads within a second.

Pretty convincing. Right?

There’s more to it.

Let’s confirm the results with Google’s advanced lab testing tool i.e. Lighthouse.

I think this is adequate to confirm that Hostinger walks the walk.

Tip: This website is hosted on Hostinger. But a good theme also plays a critical role in the website speed.

That’s why we chose the single best combination – Hostinger+ Kadence Pro Theme.

For full customization of the Kadence theme, have a look at this definitive article.

Uptime guarantee

Since I moved to Hostinger, I haven’t had any larger problems in terms of Uptime.

Most of the time, my site was live and running 24*7.

There were days when it was down for a moment but nothing substantially disastrous to worry about.

One of the best parts about Hostinger is that whenever the servers are being repaired and upgraded, you get notified on their status page so that you don’t freak out and bombard them with emails.

Note: Most web hosts promise a high 99.9 % uptime guarantee but only a few of them can keep up with the promise. Fortunately, Hostinger is one of them.

Litespeed server

Another reason why it can provide satisfying speed to its users is through the Litespeed servers.

Litespeed web servers can serve thousands of visitors at the same time, consuming minimal memory power and CPU usage.

In fact, this makes them at least 5 times faster than Apache and at least 67% faster than Nginx.

This is due to the highly optimized codes that reduce the fluff on the servers.

In short, if you buy Hostinger web hosting, you do not need to worry about Google’s core web vitals.

Server locations

Hostinger servers are located in more than 7 countries including some of the top-tier countries.

Some of them include:

• United States
• United Kingdom
• Brazil
• Netherlands
• Singapore
• Indonesia
• Etc.

Good news: As they are growing at lightning speed, they are planning to scale it to more and more countries.

Pro Tip: If you connect Cloudflare to Hostinger which is what they recommend – you get access to all additional speed benefits as it sends your cached website to all the potential servers.

SSD Support

SSD aka Solid-State Drive is used as a modern generation storage device. Hostinger plans offer SSD that is enough for anything you do or want to store.

Their cheapest single shared hosting plan, for example, offers 30 GB SSD storage.

Even 5 GB storage is enough for hosting 1000 pages. Thus, you can imagine what 30 GB can do for you.

Premium shared hosting offers 100 GB SSD storage. No wonder you can host unlimited websites in this plan.

Therefore, if anyone tells you that a 30 GB SSD isn’t enough for a single website, slap them as hard as you can.

HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 (Quic)

Hostinger does a great job in incorporating HTTP2 and HTTP3 cloud enhancements in their servers and database.

In simple terms, they are advanced or upgraded versions of HTTP (HyperText Transfer Protocol) initially developed by Google.

They help servers send files safely, easily, quickly, and efficiently to the client without compromising on the security part.

Not only that, Google puts more weight on HTTP2 and HTTP3 as they help websites get indexed and crawled much faster than the typical HTTP.

So it’s a win-win situation for both Google and great website owners like you.

GZIP compression in Hostinger

In one of the questions answered on their forum, Hostinger confirmed that they support GZIP compression in all of their packages.

Even better, it is enabled by default meaning you do not need to tweak any changes for this to happen.

Note: However, if it is not enabled on your site by any chance, have a look at this article to solve your problem.

To check whether GZIP is enabled on your website, you can head over to this tool by SmallSEOTools to check and confirm it.

GZIP compression helps reduce the size of almost all web files. It includes HTML, CSS, PHP, and JavaScript.

In short, it does half of the work of code minimization that your caching plugin does.

This eventually reduces the file sizes in general and improves the page speed without any effort.

Hostinger is created keeping in mind the daily hindrances of the common internet user.

These were some of the speed features of Hostinger that will significantly improve your site speed on your behalf.

But this is not the end of the tunnel, there is more to it that you cannot even imagine.

Once you start using their hosting, you will come to know that the possibilities for improving your website speed are endless.

With that out of the way, let’s discuss how it has some amazing optimization for WordPress users to make their online journey cherishing.

WordPress Optimization in Hostinger

WordPress is the largest CMS (Content Management System) in the world powering over 64 million websites.

With a wide variety of options to choose from and customize, WordPress has become the go-to hub for almost all non-techie website owners.

It makes everything so much easier and fast.

If you want to enhance security on your WordPress site, for example, you will get many great malware removal plugins in the free WordPress marketplace.

The same goes for social sharing plugins, image optimization plugins, and so on.

Along with this, there are many features that a good web hosting company provides to better get along with WordPress and its associations.

It has some amazing features exclusively created for WordPress.

The latest PHP version is available

If your site is still running on PHP version 5 or below, you need to change it as soon as possible.

WordPress allows and recommends shifting to the PHP version of at least 7.

PHP version 8.0.8 was released a few days back (1^st July, 2021to be specific) but is still under development as per Wikipedia.

Thus, the best bet is to stay on 7.

But, here’s the deal:

Many web host does not support the newer and stable PHP versions.

And most of those that support the latest version have hidden the option to enable it in the unsolvable maze.

In simple terms, many web hosts make it very difficult to find the PHP configuration settings.

Favorably, Hostinger has settled it all very firmly.

In their hosting dashboard, once you search for the term PHP configuration, you will easily get the option to meddle with the PHP versions.

Currently, as I write this review, Hostinger supports versions, 7.3, 7.4, and 8.0.

Note: It is advisable to stick either with 7.3 or 7.4 to avoid any technical conflicts.

However, if you are a risk-taker and want to check the latest version, you are free to do so at your own risk.

In 99.9% of the cases, you will not face any issues. Just proceed with caution.

HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 (Quic)

As discussed earlier, Hostinger assists WordPress in terms of sending users to the servers maintaining safety, security, and speed.

With HTTP2 and HTTP3, it will be very feasible for the Google bot crawler to crawl your newly published pages and posts quickly.

Therefore, it is beneficial in terms of technical SEO perspectives too.

This is what it does automatically for you. You do not need to make any changes.

Powerful Caching

Again, as discussed earlier, Hostinger runs on Litespeed servers – and therefore they recommend using the free Litespeed cache plugin in WordPress to avail of maximum caching and speed benefits.

Along with the plugin, it has the cache purge feature in its hosting dashboard itself.

Here, you can set the automatic caching interval and cache-specific pages also.

Great.

IPv6 is enabled

Internet Protocol Version 6, also popularly known as IPv6 is the most recent version of Internet Protocol (IP).

IPv6 has numerous benefits.

Some of them are:

• Privacy and authentication support.
• Automatic Network Address Translation (NAT).
• The true quality of service.
• Etc.

Besides all of these, IPv6 provides a substantial amount of security and performance benefits to WordPress users due to Hostinger.

As Hostinger has shifted its gears from the old IPv4 to the latest and the safest IPv6, you are on the safer side of the internet if you use this hosting.

It is truly created for WordPress and it keeps optimizing more and more stuff for WordPress.

In fact, it is one of the main reasons why there is a one-click WordPress installation feature here.

Till now, we discussed some of the important speed features, performance checks, and WordPress features in Hostinger hosting.

Now is the time to talk about the types of Hostinger hosting.

Types of Hostinger Hosting

It offers various types of hosting ranging from some common ones like shared hosting to some weird ones like Minecraft hosting.

Here, I will list all the types that are frequently used and popular in Hostinger.

1. Shared hosting

Shared hosting is the most widely used hosting by most – mainly due to its price benefits.

As a beginner blogger, for example, you do not need to invest in a cloud or VPS hosting, until you start getting enough traffic that generates revenue for you.

That’s why shared hosting is ample for most internet marketers and website owners.

Hostinger offers three types of shared hosting:

1. Single Shared Hosting
2. Premium Shared Hosting (Most Popular)
3. Business Shared Hosting

Single shared hosting is suitable for you if you want to host only one website and want only 30 GB of SSD storage.

Single shared hosting can handle 10000 monthly visitors easily.

Premium shared hosting, on the other hand, is the best option if you want to host multiple websites (allows 100 websites), want a free domain name, 100 GB SSD storage, unlimited bandwidth, and so on.

Premium shared hosting handles up to 25000 recurrent visitors.

These two options are the best – if you are just starting out.

Once your traffic reaches above 25000, you can choose to upgrade to the third shared hosting option.

Business shared hosting is for you if your traffic exceeds 25000. It handles up to 100000 monthly visits.

Along with that, you get additional features such as Free CDN, daily automatic backups, and much more.

Pro Tip: If confused, you can try our favorite premium shared hosting. You will never regret the decision.

As it allows hosting up to 100 websites, the price can be worth the benefit if you are a blogger who blogs on multiple niches.

However, if you somehow want to shift back to the single shared hosting option or any other plans, Hostinger has got you covered with their 30-day money-back guarantee.

You can always count on them 🙂

2. WordPress hosting

The only difference between shared and WordPress hosting is that shared hosting shares resources among multiple users while maintaining the security and safety of the users.

Conversely, WordPress hosting adds a few add-ons to enhance the WordPress experience.

WordPress hosting, for example, provides users with the popular Jetpack plugin.

Nothing much different.

To summarise, there are four types of WordPress hosting:

1. Single WordPress
2. WordPress starter
3. Business WordPress
4. WordPress pro

Again, most of the features are similar to shared hosting plans – except that the price of shared hosting plans is cheaper.

If you are WordPress savvy and deal with handling a lot of plugins without any conflict, then WordPress hosting is just for you.

3. Cloud hosting

The main objective of cloud hosting is to speed up your website with the help of their cloud technology and by sharing a copy of your website to their global data centers faster than ever.

Cloud hosting can handle traffic worth 30K/day which is equivalent to millions of users every month.

This is useful for you only if you want to handle a lot of traffic every day without crashing the server and keep your site uptime 100%.

It is specially created for small and medium-sized businesses that deal with day-to-day online transactions through their websites and those that are already popular in the market.

Hostinger offers three types of cloud hosting plans:

1. Cloud start-up
2. Cloud professional
3. Cloud enterprise.

Here are some of the major benefits of choosing cloud hosting:

In cloud hosting, you get a personal cloud server unlike shared or WordPress hosting.

When shared hosting is not enough, it’s time to move to the cloud hosting options.

As simple as that.

Hostinger offers a one-click upgrade from shared hosting to cloud hosting.

Once you upgrade, they take over all the hard parts of transferring and complete the process automatically.

4. VPS hosting

VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. It simply means that it is truly yours.

In cloud hosting, the resources are spread between different machines whereas VPS hosting has a single unit of database where everything is yours.

If we look at it this way, VPS is less efficient than the cloud as it uses one machine to handle all the resources.

But VPS is useful as you do not need to share CPU power, RAM usage, disk space, etc.

As shared hosting is for growing bloggers and website owners, VPS is for extremely larger websites such as news websites with millions of users every single day.

Hostinger offers 6 VPS plans from VPS1 to VPS6 as per your needs and wants.

We will look at the pricing of some of these popular plans in the latter part of this review.

Meanwhile, these were the major types of hosting plans that Hostinger has to offer.

Takeaways: If you are starting out as a niche blogger who does not know where to look for, go with shared hosting plans.

If you are an emerging blogger and your traffic is growing constantly, then it is time to move to cloud hosting plans.

Unless you get lakhs of visitors every day, you will not require VPS hosting, I promise.

This was all about the types of Hostinger hosting.

Hopefully, you have chosen the one that fits your goals.

Let’s move forward to the thing I am most excited about.

Hostinger Interface: Is Hostinger Easy to Use?

Unlike many other so-called hosting companies, Hostinger has taken its cPanel interface one step forward.

Instead of keeping it old-schooled and messed up, they have built a distinct interface that is:

• Easy-to-access and use
• Beginner-friendly
• Safe and secured (with password protection and 2FA)
• Etc.

Hostinger’s interface is one of the few things that makes me feel like opening a cPanel time and again.

They call it Hpanel.

And the best part:

It’s easy to learn though it takes some effort.

There’s this search button where you can find anything you want.

Once you get your hands on it, you will start hating CPanel of other hosting companies, I am not kidding.

Want to connect a domain name and install WordPress?

It can be done within a minute. Thanks to its easy-to-use dashboard.

The same goes for locating and opening your file manager database.

Overall, the interface is faster and easier to operate.

Now, let’s move on to the things that concern them most.

Security in Hostinger

In one sentence – security in Hostinger is robust.

Let’s learn why.

1. Free SSL certificate

Irrespective of any hosting you choose, Hostinger makes sure that you get a free SSL certificate so that your website looks something like this:

Google does not trust and like domains without HTTPS. In fact, it is a part of your technical SEO checklist.

2. DDoS protection

DDoS Protection is protecting a certain server and its network from denial-of-service attacks.

A clean bandwidth mitigates the risk of DOS attacks and secures your site from the same.

It provides DDoS to every user once they start using any of their hosting plans.

3. Internal server security

Hostinger has some essential security modules implemented on servers like mod_security and PHP open_basedir with 24*7 monitoring so that your site and the CPanel remain protected from upcoming threats.

Constant tracking allows the team to point out unwanted attacks and prevent them from happening.

4. Daily or weekly website backups

Depending on the plan you choose to go with, Hosting provides its users with automatic backup options.

Though you can back up your files with free WordPress plugins like Updraft Plus, you cannot automate it.

Hostinger does it for you whether you are awake or asleep.

5. Two-factor authentication

Once you set up the two-factor authentication from the security setting, you will be required to fill in the OTP every time you log in to the dashboard.

You can either choose the app method or the email authentication method (my preference).

Once you log in through your email id, you will be asked to fill in the OTP from your email, and only then can you log in.

Simple yet satisfying. Besides all these features, the Support team constantly keeps checking for bugs and fixes them ASAP.

With all the features discussed, let’s talk money.

Hostinger Pricing

Despite choosing any hosting plan, you get a 30-day money-back guarantee.

I assume that if you are reading this Hostinger review, then you are probably a complete beginner or a somewhat amateur.

So, below is the easy breakdown of the price of two popular hosting plans i.e. shared and cloud hosting that can benefit you the most:

Hosting Type	Price (Billed Annually)
Single shared hosting	$1.39/month
Premium shared hosting	$ 2.59/month
Business shared hosting	$ 3.99/month
Cloud start-up	$9.99/month
Cloud professional	$18.99/month
Cloud enterprise	$69.99/month

Choosing a perfect plan should not be a great hurdle.

Pro Tip: Irrespective of what plan you are going with, buy in bulk meaning buy for 2 to 3 years upfront.

By doing so, you are not only saving a huge chunk of money in the future but also decreasing the current monthly amount (when billed annually).

In fact, this has helped me get a discount of ₹ 13,497.20 or $180.

Pretty neat.

Customer Support

Customer support is one of the most underrated rudiments of any business.

Unfortunately, many hosting companies that I have tried have a negative response ratio when it comes to customer support.

Hostinger is different.

They not only reply faster but do not leave you until your problem is solved.

They provide support in various forms:

• Email support.
• Direct Live chat.
• Blog tutorials.
• Etc.

Among all, I use Live Chat most often.

Their estimated reply time through Live Chat is under 1 hour.

But most often, you will get a reply and an email within 20 minutes which is worth appreciating.

Overall, Hostinger customer support is better than many out there.

However, they can improve by adding more features in the live chat and trying to write regular blog articles on the major pain points of their customers.

This is it but it isn’t.

I uncovered almost every important thing that they needed to know about Hostinger.

But it is still not enough.

There is a business email feature for example, where they allow you to create a free business email amount and make it live within seconds.

Similarly, there are various other features that you and I need to discover.

And this is possible only by using it.

This is possibly all you need to know about Hostinger.

If you are still in doubt, I have listed an FAQ with all the common questions below.

Do check it out.

FAQs on Hostinger Review

Concluding Hostinger Review

This was all about the definitive Hostinger review.

Hopefully, you learned everything you needed to know about this hosting and can now make a better decision about whether to invest in it or not.

Our final take: If you go with Hostinger, you have nothing to lose.

Besides being popular among bloggers, they offer profound features for half the price.

What else do you want?

In the end, it is not the hosting company that creates the larger difference. You are the maker or the breaker of your final product.

Now, I leave it up to you.

After reading this review guide, what do you think of Hostinger?

If you like it, which hosting plan are you planning to invest in?

Either way. Let me know by leaving a comment below right now.