Overview

If our primary concern was budget, we’d consider Hostinger as our web host. Hostinger consistently maintains an uptime of above 99.98%; however, it did fall to 99.78% in February 2018 and 99.85% in March 2018 (the latter amounts to roughly one hour of downtime). It’s also rarely posts a response time longer than 600 milliseconds (the lower the better – Google recommends attempting to maintain a response time of less than 200 milliseconds). Then there’s price - compared across two years i.e. comparing the cost of purchasing two annual hosting packages one year after the other, it’s among one of the cheapest web hosts we’ve analyzed. Last important positive: their admin panel is the best we’ve encountered. That said there are downsides, notably their bandwidth restrictions, lack of support for HTTP/2, uptime guarantee, restriction on hosting one website and no free domain name or support for website migrations.

Pricing

Across renewal fees, introductory fees, domain pricing and domain privacy fees, Hostinger is one of the cheapest hosts we’ve reviewed. That said, many hosts at this price range offer a free domain (Hostinger doesn’t); that said, even when you factor in the cost of domain ($8.99), their introductory prices are still about $10 cheaper than many of their closest competitors (e.g. Bluehost). Like a lot of hosts they advertise monthly rates without allowing users to pay monthly. Their ‘Single’ package is advertised at $2.15 per month however to qualify for this rate you must pay 36 months in advance. Hostinger charges you the same rate for both your first and second year of hosting ($39). This is highly unusual for web hosts; some are known to impose price increases of hundreds of percent for customers who renew their packages for a second year. Their domain prices are among the cheapest we’ve found – you can register a .com domain for just $8.99 (Web.com charges an absurd $37.99, Siteground charges $14.95 and iPage charges $10.99 but $16.99 for renewals). Domain privacy at Hostinger.com is also remarkably cheap relative to other web hosts – they only charge $5 per year. Siteground charges $12 and Bluehost charges $14.88. Hostinger requested information on our domain after checkout. Immediately following checkout, and after we’d paid for our hosting package, we were given nameservers to point our domain to. It may seem insignificant, but Hostinger made it easier than every other company we host with to set-up an externally registered domain (we don’t want to repeat how long it took us to find GoDaddy’s nameservers). All in all, it took about 6 hours till we went live.

Technical

The most important technical consideration regarding Hostinger is it restricts bandwidth to 100GB. That’s a rare occurrence in the hosting sector these days, with other hosts relying predominantly on restricting resource usage that will impact the amount of data that can be transferred without limiting bandwidth directly (most hosts offer “unlimited” or “unmetered” bandwidth). Estimating bandwidth usage can be challenging because it’s impacted by many factors and requests from user-agents, e.g. browsers, won’t always result in the same amount of data being transferred, particularly if factors like browser caching or a content delivery network are in play. However, according to HTTP Archive, the average page size is roughly 3.4MB - with Hostinger’s restrictions in place, that page could be downloaded approximately 30,000 times before a customer exceeds their bandwidth quota. In other words, it is more than enough for the average user. I/O is also limited to 1MB/s. I/O is simply input/output or read/write speed to storage. The outcome from exceeding this limit is usually a ‘lag’ in performance until usage returns to ‘normal’. GreenGeeks offers 4MB/s, InMotion offers 2MB/s and A2 Hosting offers 1MB/s (all of these limits apply to their entry-level packages) Importantly, Hostinger also limits users on its “Single” package to hosting one website – this contrasts with many other web hosts, e.g. GreenGeeks, that allow users to host an unlimited number of websites from a single shared hosting account. Impressively, they restrict entry processes to 100 – this is on par or significantly better than other more expensive web hosts. An entry process limits the number of simultaneous script executions that can take place (it’s highly unlikely starter websites will ever surpass 100 simultaneous script executions).

Service

All Hostinger accounts come with a 30 day money back guarantee and a 99.00% or 99.90% uptime guarantee. The uptime guarantee for the ‘Single’ package is 99.00% (advertised as 99%) while the uptime guarantee for the ‘Premium’ and ‘Business’ packages is 99.90% (advertised as 99.9%). What’s the difference between 99.90% uptime and 99.00% uptime? A 99.9% uptime guarantee allows for about 43 minutes of downtime per month while a 99.00% uptime guarantee allows for about 7 hours 18 minutes of downtime per month.   If they fail to honour the guarantee – if they fail to provide less than 7 hours of downtime each month they are the worst host ever – they’ll give you 5% off the cost of one month of hosting (which contrasts to, for example, Hostgator, which offers one month of free web hosting). It’s also worth noting that what constitute downtime or uptime is solely determined by Hostinger (ie you can’t provide your own performance data). Hostinger provides both live and ticketing support – and, from our experience, both are poorly maintained. We submitted a customer ticket earlier this year and waited at least 15 hours for a response. Likewise, on the same day, we gave up on live chat after waiting over 10 minutes for a customer service representative to respond. Finally, it’s the best admin panel we’ve reviewed. The majority of web hosts utilise cPanel – as does Hostinger – however most installations are quite slow and clunky; Hostinger’s admin panel is lightning fast, usable and aesthetically pleasing.