Hostinger is a well-established European web host, known for offering balanced web hosting at very affordable prices. We’ve been testing and monitoring Hostinger for years, and they’ve continued to impress us. All our Hostinger test sites report consistent and impressive server speeds across their many data center locations.
Today, we’re diving into the details of the types of hosting Hostinger offers, their pricing and plans, their global data center locations and their server performance. We’ll also examine the features they offer, including their control panels, security measures, developer-friendly tools, and customer support. Finally, we’ll discuss some close alternative web hosts to see how Hostinger measures up. Let’s dive in!
Who Is Hostinger?
Hostinger is a leading European web hosting provider. It launched as “Hosting Media” in 2004 and hasn’t stopped growing since. Today, Hostinger serves over 2 million customers across 50+ countries.
Where is Hostinger located?
Hostinger has its headquarters located in Kaunas, Lithuania but has expanded to become one of the most international hosts in the market, both in terms of employees and infrastructure. They currently employ over 1000 employees in 54 countries and operate 10 data centers across Europe, Asia, North America and South America. They also own several subsidiary brands around the world including Niagahoster in Indonesia, and Weblink in Brazil.
What Are The Types Of Hosting Do Hostinger Offer?
Hostinger offers 4 web hosting types: Shared, VPS, WordPress and Cloud hosting. Each hosting type is available in multiple tiers that cater for the resources required by individuals, businesses, and large enterprises. Understanding the features and limitations of these types of hosting is a good place to start.
Shared Hosting is Hostinger’s most affordable web hosting range. Each plan provides all the essentials you need to create a simple website and comes in 3 tiers: Single, Premium, and Business. Their Single Shared Hosting is their cheapest and starts from just $1.99 per month (for a 4-year subscription).
Shared hosting involves sharing resources with other websites on the same server, and is an ideal budget option for smaller websites or those starting their first website.
WordPress Hosting – Best for WordPress-heavy websites
Hostinger’s WordPress hosting plans are ideal for site owners looking to host their WordPress site. These plans are similar to Shared Hosting but optimized especially for WordPress. They come in 4 plans: Single WordPress, WordPress Starter, Business WordPress, and WordPress Pro.
This range is suitable for small to medium sized businesses on WordPress, as you’ll be sharing one server with other websites.
Cloud Hosting – Best for fast growing businesses
Hostinger’s Cloud Hosting is ideal for large or fast-growing websites. Hostinger offers 3 cloud hosting plans: Cloud Startup, Cloud Professional, and Cloud Enterprise. All plans offer free email and domain, daily backups, unlimited bandwidth and have the same WordPress tools.
Hostinger Cloud plans are fully managed & comes with hPanel. Users benefit from a cluster of networked servers that work together to keep your site online, giving users the power and reliability of VPS while maintaining the simplicity of Shared Hosting.
Where Are Hostinger’s Data Centers?
Hostinger operates a total of 10 Tier-3 data centers across the globe with locations that include the USA, EU, Brazil, Netherlands, Lithuania, Singapore, Indonesia, and Mumbai. Their wide global spread gives you a lot of choice so that you can easily pick the data center closest to your target audience and host your site from there. Minimising the distance between your audience and your data center will help reduce latency and give visitors the fastest loading speeds.
The Hostinger data centers you have access to depends on the type of web hosting plan you choose. For example, Hostinger’s Shared Hosting users have access to the most locations (France, the the Netherlands, Lithuania, the United Kingdom, Singapore, India, the USA and Brazil).
What Is Hostinger’s Performance Like?
Hostinger’s performance proved to be excellent. We confirmed this through setting up 17 test sites and hosting them on their servers in different locations around the world.
We started by putting our Hostinger US test site through a speed stress test using our proprietary Server Speed Checker, benchmarking it against Google’s recommendation of 200 ms. The speed test results of our Hostinger US test site came back with a worldwide average of a blazing fast 136 ms, which ranks them as one of our A+ top tier hosts!
Next, we tested our Hostinger Singapore site to see how it responds to pings from all over the world. Again, Hostinger Singapore gets an A+ ranking from us.
Hostinger returned an insanely fast response of 3 ms from Singapore, and an average speed of 168.9 ms around the world. This makes Hostinger another great choice if you intend to cater to audiences in Asia (and Australia / New Zealand).
Hostinger is one of the fastest web hosts we’ve tested for European regions, which makes it perfect for anyone targeting a European market. With 9 ms from London, these speeds are hard to beat. Hostinger Europe reported great worldwide average speeds of 141.3 ms, which means that they’re ranked a solid A+!
Hostinger’s fast performance is explained by their combination of speed-optimized hardware and software, including SSD drives, a Cache Manager and free CDN for certain plans.
What Is Hostinger’s Uptime Like?
Hostinger offers a 99.9% uptime guarantee. This is industry-standard, but some web hosting companies can be rather sketchy and slide in terms in their uptime guarantees like “release of payment is up to our due discretion” which means that they can choose not to reimburse whatever they guarantee.
If your site’s downtime dips below 99.9% due to Hostinger’s faults, just contact them to get 5% of your monthly fee back. Our own test sites for Hostinger have reported an uptime we’re very happy with.
What Control Panel Is Hostinger On?
Hostinger uses its own custom web-based control panel called hPanel for most of its web hosting plans (except for its VPS plans). hPanel was launched in 2011 and is one of the most user-friendly and intuitive control panels we’ve tested amongst web hosts. The dashboard is clean, with features sorted by categories and using minimalistic icons.
hPanel is a variation on the traditional industry standard cPanel. Like cPanel, hPanel is built for Ubuntu Linux (or X) users, but performs better thanks to lightweight API endpoints. A second difference is that hPanel is fully integrated with Hostinger’s other services, which means you can manage your entire website from one place without switching between different control panels.
Lastly, hPanel also includes some features that cPanel doesn’t have, such as automatic backups and restore and one-click WordPress installation. That said, Hostinger does allow users to select alternative control panels to hPanel if they wish.
Does Hostinger have cPanel?
Yes, Hostinger actually offers the option of cPanel for users who prefer to use this instead of their custom hPanel dashboard. To access your cPanel dashboard, check your welcome email, or log into your cPanel account via the address bar of your browser. If your site address begins with HTTP, simply add :2082 at the end of the URL. For a site address that starts with HTTPS, write :2083. You’ll then be able to log into cPanel.
What is CyberPanel?
CyberPanel, powered by OpenLiteSpeed, is another cutting-edge web hosting control panel. It offers features such as one-click installations, GIT deployment, LSCache integration, easy backups, and HTTP/3 & QUIC support.
You have the option to use CyberPanel as your control panel if you are using Hostinger’s VPS Hosting plans. With its intuitive setup, using Cyberpanel is a great and easy way to have total control of your website.
Does Hostinger Come With A Free Website Builder?
Yes, all Hostinger plans come with free access to its proprietary website builder called Hostinger Website Builder (formerly known as Zyro).
This site builder is aimed at the real beginners among users and takes simplicity to a whole new level through its drag-and-drop interface, and large variety of templates.
Hostinger has simplified the basic website builder and added on external features that will help users build complete websites quickly. These include the ability to auto-generate content and streamline design with nifty features
How Much Is A Domain Name With Hostinger?
Expect to pay between $0-$9.99 for a domain name with Hostinger when you sign up for an account. Whilst many domains are offered for free when you sign up with Hostinger, upon renewal, expect to spend between $0.99-$12.99/year for extensions like .com and .net.
Hostinger is an ICANN-accredited registrar and partners with multiple large domain registrars to get users decent deals.
Is Hostinger Good For WordPress?
Yes, Hostinger is very good for WordPress, particularly if you have chosen one of their WordPress hosting plans, which are optimized for this CMS.
Installing WordPress is extremely simple with their 1-click installer. They also help you ensure you’re always up-to-date with WordPress, and benefiting from the latest patches.
Performance is also boosted thanks to NGINX caching, and they also offer LiteSpeed cache, a plugin that improves site performance for WordPress. Lastly, they support the latest PHP versions to make sure that WordPress runs like a dream.
Hostinger is a good option for online businesses using the WooCommerce CMS. With impressive uptime and security features, Hostinger will help you ensure your online store stays accessible to customers at all times.
Hostinger’s advanced caching mechanisms ensure faster page loading times, delivering a seamless shopping experience for your visitors and helping with cart conversions. And whenever you need assistance, their responsive customer support team is available around the clock, to help make sure your site stays open for business.
Is Hostinger Secure? Has It Been Hacked Before?
Yes, Hostinger is very secure. It offers a strong combination of basic and advanced security tools to help keep customers’ websites and data safe from hackers and other cyberthreats.
Basic security features include SSL certificates, backups and two-factor authentication (2FA) to help secure access to your site.
Yes, Hostinger added Let’s Encrypt a couple of years back, which makes your website eligible for a free SSL certificate on any Hostinger plan. SSL provides an extra layer of security by establishing an encrypted link between you and your visitors, ensuring that any data passed between both parties stays private and cannot be intercepted by attackers. It’s an important part of building visitor trust, and has SEO benefits.
Is Hostinger Recommended?
Our tests confirmed Hostinger as a very solid host for building and growing websites. Their speed and performance is on par with premium web hosting services, yet comes at a fraction of the price. Given their global coverage, Hostinger also emerged as our top recommendation for websites across several countries like India, Singapore, and Australia. Their server response times are incredible, their user interface is easy to use and we found their service to be incredibly beginner friendly, thanks to their outstanding support team.
Whether you’re a new website owner, business or enterprise, Hostinger has a wide range of hosting plans to suit your needs. Their excellent service combined with their insanely low price points makes them the host with the best value for money.