Hostinger was founded in 2004 and has its headquarters in Kaunas, Lithuania. Since then, the company has grown tremendously and has become one of the popular hosting providers. It offers both shared and dedicated web hosting plans, including managed WordPress hosting plans. This article will cover an in-depth review of Hostinger’s web hosting plans based on a comprehensive analysis of features and independent global uptime and speed tests from reputable third-party websites.
WordPress Web Hosting Plans:
- Premium Plan: 100 websites and 100 GB SSD storage.
- Business Plan: 100 websites and 200 GB NVMe storage.
- Cloud Startup Plan: 300 websites and 200 GB NVMe storage.
- Cloud Professional Plan: 300 websites and 250 GB NVMe storage.
- Cloud Enterprise Plan: 300 websites and 300 GB NVMe storage.
Key Features:
Website Dashboard
The website dashboard provides a quick overview of the overall status of a WordPress website, including the following:
- Performance score
- Security status, and
- Resources usage
It also provides links to access the WordPress admin panel, file manager, and databases. The dashboard also offers tips to improve the website’s performance, such as the suggested PHP version to install, any plugin or security issues, and possible solutions to these issues.
In summary, this dashboard provides a convenient way to perform the following:
- Track a website’s performance.
- Access the WordPress admin panel and website files.
- Track and resolve any critical issues affecting your website.
AI Troubleshooter
The AI Troubleshooter leverages artificial intelligence to detect any critical error on your website and provide possible solutions to fix it.
Core Tools
Hostinger also offers sevaral core tools for a website, which are listed below:
- Force HTTPS: The force HTTPs tool redirects all website requests over HTTPS. This tool helps make your website safe and secure for visitors.
- Maintenance mode: You can turn this mode on to restrict your website’s access to visitors. This feature is especially useful if you are making any major updates to your website.
- LiteSpeed: This tool increases the website’s performance by optimizing resource usage and load times.
- Object Cache (only for business and cloud startup plans): This tool increases the website’s performance by optimizing the query retrieval time.
- Flush Cache: This tool clears all the website’s cache data stored over the server to provide the most up-to-date version of a website to visitors.
- Speed and Security: This tool shows the SSL certificate status of a website, i.e., whether it is active or not.
- Staging (only for business and cloud startup plans): This tool lets you test changes made to your website in a staging environment before making them live. This feature is quite useful when you need to make sure the changes made look good and do not result in any errors on your website.
Security Dashboard
The security dashboard offers options to enable automatic updates for the WordPress core version, themes, and plugins. Please note that the automatic updates for themes and plugins are only available in the business and cloud startup plans. Furthermore, it also displays the security status of each installed theme and plugin. It is worth noting that this dashboard can be quite useful for troubleshooting, i.e., when you are not able to access the WordPress admin dashboard for any reason and you need to deactivate a plugin.
Resource Usage Dashboard
The resource usage dashboard provides a real-time update on disk usage, CPU usage, and other resource-related metrics. Various metrics are being reported, which makes it a very detailed dashboard for resource usage reporting.
Performance Dashboards
Hostinger also provides performance dashboards related to website speed and analytics.
Page Speed Dashboard: You can run the website speed test for both desktop and mobile to get your website’s performance score on a rating scale of 0-100. The test also provides insights about your website, indicating improvements that can be made to further enhance your website’s performance.
Analytics Dashboard: The analytics dashboard reports on metrics, such as:
- Total requests to access the website
- Unique IP addresses of the requestors, and
- Bandwidth.
It also provides an access log that reports the following:
- The IP address of the visitor
- Type of requests made by the visitor
- Device used by the visitor
- Country of the visitor, and
- Website’s response time to these requests.
Furthermore, it also provides error logs of 5xx and 4xx errors, which help identify website pages resulting in an error.
Security Tools
Hostinger offers two security tools: the Malware scanner and the SSL status checker.
- The malware scanner checks the website for any malicious activity.
- The SSL status checker shows whether the SSL certificate is active or not and the expiration date, if any.
Free Email Account
Hostinger also offers a free email account associated with your domain name for one year through the Titan Email service. After one year, you need to renew your plan, which costs under $2 per month for the basic plan.
Domain Tools
There are a variety of domain tools that you can use to accomplish a specific purpose. You can create subdomains for your website, park domains, and create 301 redirects for specific URLs.
Website Tools
There is a wide array of website tools available on the Hostinger dashboard, which are listed below:
Auto-Installer Tool: You can download popular CMS, such as WordPress and WooCommerce, directly from Hostinger’s hPanel dashboard.
Add Website Tool: You can add a website directly from the Hostinger internal dashboard with this tool.
Website Migration Tool: With this tool, you can submit the migration request. Hostinger’s internal team will take care of the process for free.
Copy Website Tool: With this tool, you can copy the content of one website to another domain.
Logo Maker: This tool offers two options to create a logo for your website: using AI or using the editor. You might need to buy credits if you are using AI prompts to create a logo.
File-Related Tools
There are various tools to manage your website files, which are listed below:
- File Manager Tool: You can access files of your WordPress website with this tool.
- Backups Tool: With this tool, you can restore your website, download a backup, and generate a custom backup (you can only generate custom backups on the Business or Cloud Startup plan).
- Import Website Tool: You can import a website with this tool.
Databases Tool
There are various database tools offered on the Hostinger dashboard, which are listed below:
- Management Tool: With the management tool, you can create new SQL databases.
- Remote MySQL: You can establish a remote database connection using this tool.
Advanced Tools
There are various advanced tools available in the Hostinger’s hPanel to manage your WordPress website. These are as follows:
- DNS Zone Editor Tool: This tool manages your WordPress website’s DNS records. You can add, delete, or modify DNS records using this tool.
- PHP Configuration Tool: You can change the PHP version of your WordPress website using this tool.
- Cron Jobs Tool: You can create cron job commands to be executed at a specific interval defined by you.
- SSH Access: This section provides the SSH access details that you can use in your preferred SSH client for secure file transfers and remote logins over the Internet.
- Cache Manager Tool: You can purge all cache or a specific URL’s cache with this tool.
- Password Protect Directories: This tool lets you password-protect any directory to restrict access to certain parts of your website.
- IP Manager Tool: This tool lets you block or unblock an IP address.
- Hotlink Protection Tool: With this tool, you can block direct access to a list of file extensions and can also redirect a blocked request to a specific URL.
- Fix File Ownership: This tool helps fix problems with editing files and restoring deleted folders.
- Activity Log: This log tracks all the activity in your Hostinger account.
Global Uptime Test
To provide an objective Hostinger web hosting review, a global uptime test was run for a website hosted on Hostinger using Uptrends.com.
The Global Uptime tests the load time across 42 global checkpoints. The ideal website load time is under 2 seconds. Based on the test, the following results were noted:
- The website’s load time was under 2 seconds for 40 global checkpoints and was above 2 seconds for the two global checkpoints, i.e., New Delhi and Beijing.
- The website load times are under 1 second for North American checkpoints and Japan, while they are above 1 second for the rest of the global checkpoints, indicating faster load times in the US and Canada compared to other locations.
Overall, the website performance is found to be satisfactory based on the independent global uptime test.
Speed Test
The speed test was performed for both desktop and mobile using the Google PageSpeed Insights tool. The tool assigned a score of 96 for desktop and 85 for mobile. These scores indicate satisfactory website performance. The mobile score tends to be lower for any website because a website needs to be specifically optimized for viewing on mobile.
Scalability
Hostinger’s top-tier plan, “Cloud Enterprise,” offers 300 GB NVMe storage and 12 GB of RAM, which is less compared to some of the other hosting providers, such as GoDaddy, which offers 400 GB NVMe storage and 32 GB of RAM. For extremely high-traffic and resource-intensive websites, you might need to consider custom solutions with Hostinger or switch to another hosting provider like Kinsta that offers much higher storage space.
Customer Service
Hostinger provides customer support only through the chat function. The wait times can vary and range from a few minutes to an hour, depending on the volume of inquiries and the day (usually the response time is slower on weekends). Based on my interaction, the customer support team can handle questions and provide a satisfactory response to the query.
Pros:
- Various inbuilt tools to monitor and optimize a website.
- Economical pricing and renewal price.
- Satisfactory website performance.
- 99.9% uptime guarantee.
- 100 websites are allowed in the basic plan compared to only 1 offered by most hosting providers.
- Complimentary SSL certificate offered for free for the entire duration of the subscription.
- Free domain for the first year.
- Free migration assistance by experts, unlike other hosting providers, such as GoDaddy and SiteGround, which charge a fee for personalized migration assistance.
Cons:
- No phone support.
- Resource constraints for high-traffic and resource-heavy websites.
Overall Conclusion:
Hostinger offers reliable speed and website performance with plans at economical prices compared to other hosting providers. If you are just starting out and have cost constraints, Hostinger is the best option for you. Hostinger provides a free lifetime SSL certificate even with their basic plan, priced at only $2.99 per month. The domain renewal price is $9.99, which is also reasonably priced compared to other hosting services. From a convenience perspective, it offers various tools to monitor and manage a website. Overall, Hostinger is one of the most cost-effective ways to make your website in 2024.