Hostinger Review: A slice of its History, Business Model and Overview

Hostinger is presumably one of the most price-effective web hosting companies out there. With Hostinger you enjoy the advantage of experience. Hostinger has grown a lot over the years. 

It started out as Hosting Media in 2004 and three years later in 2007, they launched 000WebHost- a free web hosting service provider. And finally, in 2011, the brand name Hostinger came into existence.

Hostinger started this free unlimited web hosting company with the sole aim to lure customers and gain popularity among millennials. But their principal business model focuses on selling premium hosting to the free hosting customers. 

You may have taken a free ride with the said web hosting portal, but are their premium services worth a penny, or are you better off with hosting providers like YouStable or Interserver? 

This Hostinger review will assist the audience in making an educated decision on their premium packages.

For the purpose of this Hostinger review, we hosted a website with the company and set our team of experts to monitor and continuously analyze the various performance-based aspects.

Our experts then presented us with a 4S analysis for Hostinger review. (We will tell you all about the 4S analysis later in this review).

Now that we have got that sorted and hopefully established our authenticity in front of you, let’s get started with the Hostinger review.

Hostinger Review 2020

Hostinger has created a hype in the web hosting industry due to its insanely cheap web hosting plans and presumably above par services. 

In this Hostinger review, we will address and verify if the company actually matches up the claims head-on-head through our popular 4S analysis.

The 4S are the key deciding elements of whether you should go for a hosting company or not.

They are:

1. Speed
2. Security
3. Support
4. Server Uptime

Speed Test for Hostinger Review

Hostinger claims to be one of the fastest hosting providers.

To verify this fact, we conducted various defining speed tests on the website we hosted with Hostinger.

Traceroute test for Hostinger Review

We started with the fundamental Traceroute test for the Hostinger Review. Through the Traceroute test, a path that the signal took as it traveled around the internet to the destination website is displayed. 

It also shows the response times that occurred at each stop along the route. 

Long story short- Using a traceroute test, any connection problem or latency connecting to a site can be detected. 

We found the following results:

When we conducted the traceroute test for the Hostinger’s website itself, the maximum response time from data centers near us is 473 ms, which could have been a bit better.

On the other hand, we marked 30 ms as the lowest response time, which is adequate but nothing phenomenal.

However, we also noticed that at a particular destination, the router did not respond to the packets sent within a timeout period. Keep reading to know what can be the reason behind it.

We then tested our own website, the same one which we hosted for this Hostinger review.

The result we found when we tried the traceroute test with our website was a bit more disappointing than we anticipated.

The maximum response time was around 300 ms, which was what we expected with any top hosting provider such as Hostinger.

The minimum response time was recorded at 14 ms, which is remarkably fast. And just like the above results, we also recorded a no response within the timeout period from one of the destinations, which indicates that at a certain location, the website performed poorly.

So to say that Hostinger is phenomenally fast is stretching the truth. At maximum, Hostinger provides average site speed. 

That brings us to our next test of the Hostinger Review.

Pingdom Speed test for Hostinger review

After the basic Traceroute test, we tracked and analyzed the load time of our website, using Pingdom’s Page Speed Monitoring tool. We checked the speed from five different locations viz: 

• Europe – Germany – Frankfurt
• Asia – Japan – Tokyo
• Pacific – Australia – Sydney
• Europe – United Kingdom – London
• South America – Brazil – Sao Paulo

From the images above it is quite clear that if you want the speed, Hostinger might not be for you.

In Europe, the speed we witnessed is still better than the other regions.

When it comes to speed in South America and Asia, we see a bit decline in the overall loading speed. The speed further falls down in Australia, which in our opinion is although not fast is still adequate, given the number of requests.

Next, in this Hostinger review, we will see how Hostinger is able to deliver the speed which is better than most of the hosting providers.

What makes Hostinger Fast?

Hostinger has over the years developed and optimized its internal hosting system to keep up with the on growing competition and to keep providing cheap hosting services. 

#1 LiteSpeed

The main reason Hostinger has improved in terms of speed is that last year Hostinger started using LiteSpeed Web servers (LSWS) as the main web server in place of Apache.

LiteSpeed has the following advantages over traditional Apache server:

• Event-driven architecture
• Advanced cache engine
• HTTP/2, QUIC support
• Built-in security features

#2 Cloudflare CDN

Hostinger provides its users the option to use Cloudflare CDN on their website. However, you must note that they offer ‘free’ and not ‘premium’ CloudFlare that is accessible by any user no matter which hosting company they choose.

Security Analysis for Hostinger Review

Security provided by Hostinger is nothing special and something you would expect from such a budget-friendly hosting provider 

#1 Free SSL: Only with Business Plan

Hostinger provides free SSL but only to the users who opt for their business plan. Those with a regular plan can install free Let’s Encrypt SSL, however, the users will have to install the SSL by themself, don’t expect any help from Hostinger.

#2 DDoS Protection

Hostinger protects its users from DDoS attacks on multiple layers through the following- 

1. Wanguard anti-DDoS traffic analyzer along with intelligent firewall rules on the switch level.
2. Bitninja/Imunify360 (Web Application Firewall) on each and every server.
3. Cloudflare (optional) for each account, as well as custom web server rules to make sure your site is well protected from any kind of attack.
4. Cloudflare in its free pack offers free DDoS protection as well, and since Hostinger has partnered with them, they provide DDoS protection as well, at least up to some extent.

But is Hostinger secure enough?

We will let you be the judge of it after we tell you that in August 2019, almost 14 million customers’ data was breached when an unauthorized party hacked into one of the Hostinger’s servers. 

Even we didn’t expect this to be the case, but it tells much more about how ‘secure’ Hostinger is than any other claims they make.

Support Analysis for Hostinger Review

Support is yet another decisive factor of whether you will go for a web hosting company or not. 

The better the overall support is, be it technical or general, the more is user satisfaction and ease of use.

Because we are sure, you might have faced numerous site related issues like slow loading times, caching issues, browser issues like plugin malfunctioning, or database connectivity issues.

So fast and quick assistance can make a whole lot of difference in overall user experience. 

That said, Hostinger has quite an efficient support system. The hosting company provides 24/7/365 support via live chat or by opening a new support ticket. 

For this Hostinger review, we tried both the methods and found the following results:

#1 Live Chat:

Hostinger’s live chat is not necessarily your typical live chat, instead, you have to provide your contact details along with your query and then they will reach you through your email.

When we tried to reach them through ‘live chat’, they responded within a couple of hours. Please note that we didn’t ask for any technical support, we asked a very general/basic question.

#2 Ticket Support: 

The average response time on the ticket is about the same as live chat- 60-120 minutes. 

For any technical query, their support team provided the link to one of their appropriate tutorials. So if you are expecting that a team of experts will solve your technical issue for you, you are unfortunately mistaken. 

The only hosting providers that will fix your technical problem for you is WPX Hosting and Youstable.

For this Hostinger review, we raised a support ticket with the hosting company, and our issue was addressed within 75 minutes. 

They guided us to their knowledge base articles and when we asked to solve the problem for us, one of their support executives walked us through the steps.

What support Hostinger doesn’t provide?

One of the key support types that Hostinger doesn’t provide is Call Support.

For this Hostinger review, we asked a Hostinger support executive to provide us a contact number for telephonic support, unfortunately, they do not offer this service.

Server Uptime Test for Hostinger Review

Server Uptime of a hosting provider is one of the first things you should check when going for a hosting company.

No matter what kind of website you run, it is always for the best that your website is up and running. 

Hostinger claims to have an uptime of 99.95 percent, which, in a sense, is a great figure. And since they have six data centers- UK, US, Brazil, Netherlands, Singapore, Indonesia; you can expect those numbers to be accurate.

For this Hostinger review, we used tools like Uptime Robot to check the server uptime. 

We found the following results:

As it is quite evident from the image above, the average response time was recorded at 304.68 ms, which is an adequate speed given it is of their official website

Apart from that, we also recorded a 10 minutes long downtime, making the overall uptime of the website at 99.892% in the past 7 days.

So their claim for 99.95 percent uptime might not always match the actual data.

This is yet again something that matches the standard of Hostinger, as we mentioned earlier in the Hostinger review.

Findings for the above image:

To give you the correct idea and figures for this Hostinger review, we have provided you the list of all the downtimes we have recorded in the past 4 months.

Now that we have covered the 4S analysis of the Hostinger review, let’s look at what types of hosting Hostinger offers to its users. 

We will later in the Hostinger review tell you about the price and plans. Then finally we will proceed with the pros and cons of Hostinger so that you can make your final verdict about Hostinger.

Type of Hosting provided by Hostinger

Hostinger provides almost all kinds of mainstream as well as a few unpopular hosting solutions. Here is the complete list of all of the web hosting Hostinger provides:

• Shared Hosting
• WordPress Hosting
• Email Hosting
• Cloud Hosting
• VPS Hosting
• Minecraft Hosting
• Windows VPS

Price and Plans of Hostinger

Since you already know that Hostinger is budget-friendly so you can expect the prices to be on the lower side of the average.

Hostinger Shared Hosting Plans

Hostinger offers three types of shared plans, viz,- 

Single Shared Plan- The plan originally starts at $2.15 per month. The cheapest available plan. You’ll pay as little as $0.99 per month (discounted) for 48-months. After that period, it renews at 2.15$/month.

• 1 Website
• 10 GB Disk Space
• 100 GB Bandwidth
• 1 MySQL Database
• 1 FTP User
• 1 Email Account
• Easy Website Builder
• Auto Installer

Premium Shared Plan- The plan originally starts at $3.49 per month, This plan is the middle of the line. You’ll pay as little as $2.89 (discounted) per month for 48 months.

• Unlimited Number of Websites
• Unlimited SSD Disk Space
• Unlimited Bandwidth
• Unlimited MySQL Databases
• Unlimited FTP Users
• Unlimited Email Accounts
• Easy Website Builder
• 3X WordPress Optimized Speed
• Free Domain Name (with annual plan)

Business Shared Plan- The plan originally starts at $7.95 per month. This plan is the top of the line. You’ll pay as little as $3.99 per month (discounted) for 48 months.

• With this plan, you’ll get everything from Premium Shared Hosting as well as:
• Daily Backups
• Deluxe Live Support
• 2X Processing Power & Memory
• Free SSL Certificate to secure customer data & increase SEO rankings

Please note that these are original rates, that is without any discount.

We have added their plans and what they entail in the image below.

Hostinger coupon codes and offers are one of the most in-demand and popular product options.

New customers can get shared web hosting services at $0.80 per month, which is the lowest for single domain hosting.

Hostinger Cloud Hosting Plan

The Hostinger cloud starts from $7.45 per month, and it is again the lowest in the online market.

Hostinger VPS Hosting Plan

The VPS hosting starts at $9.95 per month ($3.95 after a one-time discount) which comes with 1 GB RAM, 2.4Ghz processor, Single-core processor, 20 GB storage, and more.

Domains Provided by Hostinger

Other than providing hosting services, Hostinger also provides several to the users, with free WHOIS Privacy for domains. The most inexpensive domain Hostinger provides is for $0.99.
The .com domain will cost you $8.99 per year, and the most expensive domain is priced at $23.99.

It is quite evident that Hostinger cannot offer cheap pricing in domain registration. In our opinion, the domain registration services of Hostinger are a bit on the expensive side.

Moving onwards with this Hostinger review now is the time you know the pros and cons of Hostinger.

Hostinger Review: Pros of Hostinger

No one can compare the product or service as the requirements differ from individual to individual. We are going to take the PROS and CONS approach to conclude the Hostinger review 2020.

1. Okayish Uptime

In premium, expensive packages there are distinguished maintained servers for the customers. The servers have dedicated engineers working in the backend to maintain the uptime. Thus, you can expect a moderately good server uptime. 

Free hosting offered by the company does not have good uptime, but the premium packages ensure 99.91% server uptime, however, other hosting providers offer better.

2. Fast Loading Speed as Compared to Free Web Hosting

Do you know that 47% of users expect sites to load within 2 seconds? 

Do you know that 40% of users leave the website that takes more than 3 seconds to load?

Do you know that even 1 Second delay in your site loading time, reduces the conversion rate by 7%?

Do you know that 53% of mobile visits are abandoned if the page takes more than 3 seconds to load?

Search Engine favors the websites with blazing loading speed so that the searchers can have quicker results. Meaning, the appearance of your website in SERPs is greatly affected by the loading speed. No one can achieve blazing loading speed without optimizing the site files itself.

The combination of website design optimization + Hostinger cloud services is although expensive, but still one of the best services they offer. However, do not expect high-level performance from their cheap, shared unlimited web hosting because it is definitely not optimized to match premium services.

Hostinger Singapore gets an A- ranking if you intend to cater to audiences in Asia, New Zealand, and Australia. You’ll be happy to know that Hostinger returned a stupid fast response of 15ms from Singapore, with an average speed of 176ms around the world.

For those of you targeting European markets, Hostinger would be one of the fastest web hosts (although last among the fast) which means that they’re ranked A+. Hostinger Europe is equally speedy like their Singapore and American counterparts, and they returned decent worldwide average speeds of 205ms.

3. Confidence | 30 Days Money Back Guarantee

Nowadays almost every company offers a money-back guarantee to lure the customers in. Hostinger too provides the money-back guarantee, but like always the devil lies in the detail.

So we advise you to go through the Hostinger terms and conditions because POLICIES are subject to changes.

4. Multiple Language Customer Support

Hostinger review does not end without mentioning customer care support. Web hosting consists of a combination of Server + Operating system + Software, and anything can go wrong in an instant. 

A dedicated support team is a must in this field and should fall in non-compromisable zones. A bad technical support team can cost days of shutdown and non-responsive performance.

Through this Hostinger Review 2020, we would like to inform the customers around the globe that they have a multi-language customer support team. A very responsive team for premium package users, but do not expect much support for free/cheap web hosting customers.

5. Free Website Builder

The company equipped a free website builder for the beginners to set-up the site without coding knowledge and technical knowledge. Nowadays, free unlimited web hosting companies integrating free website builders to attract the audience. The builder interface is extremely easy to master, and it should not take more than an hour to master the controls.

6. Easy to Use

Hostinger has come a long way, and they have collected plenty of information about the audience & existing customers. The in-house developers are always working to improve the interface, so the new customers with no knowledge can operate it. The backend developer team maintains the interface project working to make it easier for the newbies to add, create, edit, and delete in a few clicks.

7. Mainstream features 

To be very honest, the features Hostinger provides to its users are pretty mainstream. Sure you will get every basic factor covered but there is no uniqueness to Hostinger. It is just for beginners, and even they have to switch their hosting provider after a while.

Talking about basic features, we found its live chat representatives to be responsive, experienced, and quite co-operative. 

Hostinger’s storehouse of classes runs the gamut from basic commands for helping beginners commence a blog on WordPress, to helping knowledgeable creators organize Docker and use the WordPress API. Clienteles can find even more info in the business’s well-organized knowledge base or via acquiescing an online ticket.

8. Affordable Pricing

Most of the web hosting providers promote their prices in a false light. Unfortunately, Hostinger is one of them, but they are more a bit more transparent about it than many others.

For example, if you want to take the benefit of their discounted price of $0.99 per month deal for Single Shared hosting, you’ll have to commit to Hostinger for 48 months, which is our opinion is like a non-negotiable contract. After those 4 years, your renewal cost will jump up to $2.15/month.

Hostinger long term pricing

A low price usually means some compromises have been made in quality, and the same is the case with Hostinger, the service they offer is parallel to what you pay. 

The company is focusing on building in-house infrastructure so that they can control Hardware, Software, Expenses, and Pricing.

• Shared Hosting Plan: You can start working on the dream project at $0.80 per month deal for Single Shared hosting. Your renewal cost will jump up to $2.15 per month.
• Cloud Hosting Plan: By spending $7.45 per month Your renewal cost will jump up to $15.90 per month, you can get a dedicated IP address with 3 GB RAM, 2 CPU Cores, Unlimited Bandwidth, and more.
• VPS Hosting Plan: Get a 30X faster VPS server for just $3.95 per month.

This is the limit of everything positive we made ourselves see for the sake of this Hostinger review.

Hostinger Review: Cons of Hostinger 

CONS stands for flaws of the services or a product, and it is an important aspect of the final decision-making process. No one should buy a product without learning about the drawbacks, which can end up saving plenty of money. 

Unfortunately, there is nothing like a perfect web host and Hostinger, has plenty of flaws. The trick is figuring out which flaws you can live with and which ones are the deal-breakers.

Here’s an overview of everything that’s not so perfect about Hostinger:

1. Must be Logged in to Access Live Chat

Gaining information from the web hosting company doesn’t seem to bother the customer care of reputed companies. However, Hostinger doesn’t offer live chat to potential customers or new customers Live Chat without logging into the account.

It might not seem like a big deal, but it is something to consider first hand.

Can you remember the credentials of the account at the nick of time? 

You might be in the worst situation, and the client is on another line? 

Do you have the time to start a Live Chat after logging into the account every time?

What if you forget the credentials?

No one can memorize the credentials of an account created several months ago, and it can end up in a disaster. I save the credentials in Notepad, but I have to open Notepad, Copy, Login to the account, then start the conversation.

2. No Traditional cPanel

Hostinger is offering cPanel as a premium web hosting control panel, but the interface is altered by the in-house team. In short, you won’t get the official interface offered by the company whatsoever. It is a major drawback in our frank opinion because the new customers have to spend a few days learning the functions. An old player might take a few moments to figure out the functions and operations, but a newbie has to struggle a bit.

3. No Free Domain

The affordable web hosting company Hostinger doesn’t include domains in its packages.

Hostinger coupon codes are popular, but there are no options to purchase Hosting space + Domain at affordable prices. The new customers have to spend plenty of money on domain registration, and it might put a stone on a budget-tight user.

Perhaps, we are asking too much of the official Hostinger management to provide.

4. Non-Standard Payment Terms

Hostinger’s Refund Policy reveals a few exceptions to their money-back guarantee.

What’s refundable under standard terms:

• Hosting (all plans, except first payment after Free Trial)
• Domain Transfers (.eu transfers are an exception. EURid charges a non-refundable transfer fee. If the transfer fails for any reason, the customer must start over and pay the transfer fee again. .es transfers are also non-refundable.)
• SSL Certificates

What’s not refundable:

• Redemption fees 
• Domain name renewals 
• Privacy protection 
• Most new domain name registrations are only refundable if canceled and processed within four days of registration, not 30 days.

Keep these exceptions in mind before moving onward.

Hostinger Review: Our Final Thoughts

In this Hostinger review, we tried to include almost everything you would like to know in detail. 

We did our 4S analysis after genuinely trying their services. 

But do we recommend Hostinger? 

The answer would be a big, fat NO!

We have already mentioned many times in this Hostinger review that their services, at best, are mediocre.

There are several better hosting providers like YouStable, Interserver, Hostgator we would recommend.

If you go for Hostinger, you will soon have to switch to other hosting providers so we suggest you choose wisely.