Hostinger Review: Affordable, But Is There a Hold? [2025]

When I initially learned about Hostinger's incredibly affordable hosting plans, I harbored skepticism, even believing it could be an affordable web hosting provider. However, I was pleasantly surprised by the results when I launched a test website on Hostinger's servers. Last Updated: March 03, 2025:

Things that could be better and Hostinger pros and cons

• Fast loading speed and reliable uptime

• LiteSpeed ​​servers for security and speed

• VPS hosting, cloud and low-cost shared

• Big discounts on long-term plans

• Free domain name with annual plans

• Free AI website builder with all plans

• Optimized managed WordPress hosting

• Support response time needs improvement

• Plan renewal rates more than double

• Need CDN for better global performance

Hostinger is the most affordable of the web hosting providers, starting at just ₹250 per month. You have to commit to its one-year plan (up to four years), which is the best deal and the only small catch. This ensures a fixed discounted rate for the entire period. It remains to be seen whether Hostinger can maintain the quality of its service over this period, given the long commitment it offers.

It probably can, our extensive and repeated testing shows. That makes it ideal for business landing pages, personal sites, and small-to-medium online stores, offering ample support for beginners, as it specializes in shared WordPress hosting.

For websites with more demanding requirements, Hostinger also offers very affordable self-managed VPS and managed cloud hosting. However, these plans do not offer what you get with higher-priced hosts, but they lack advanced technical support and flexibility.

Hostinger is best suited for migrating from more expensive providers or as an entry-level shared web hosting solution. Hostinger offers shared hosting performance that rivals almost all other budget hosts, thanks to its LiteSpeed-based server infrastructure, which our tests have shown is the most important thing about it.

Notably, its services are available in English and other languages ​​in many countries, including Spanish, Arabic, French, Portuguese (including Brazilian Portuguese), German, Indonesian, Thai, Lithuanian, Spanish (Argentina, Colombia, Mexico, and Chinese), Ukrainian, and Vietnamese. (All of these are available.) Hostinger serves a global audience.

Features

A highly optimized platform coupled with a lot of resources:

While Hostinger is probably trying to outdo me in two areas my anxious personality immediately identified, its prices are also low. Features and performance. I don’t want only what they offer, as I would surely prefer to pay less than the competition.

Hostinger offers all the important features you might need to get started, such as lots of built-in WordPress optimizations and a generous set of Hostinger resources, which, luckily, I discovered early on. Here are all the features I liked most, as I focused my testing efforts on Hostinger’s WordPress Starter (now Premium) plan very early on.

Optimized performance from LiteSpeed ​​Web Server

WordPress sites that are connected with Hostinger are pre-optimized for maximum speed, and those websites are still new.

Hostinger uses the fast LiteSpeed ​​web server, which is impressively fast – it’s software that runs on a physical server and delivers your website content to your visitors. LiteSpeed ​​performs better than the Apache web server that many other web hosts still rely on due to its open-source (i.e. free) license.

Delivers great performance; even with LiteSpeed, your visitors are delivered faster, as its LiteSpeed ​​Cache for WordPress plugin stores pre-loaded (cached) copies of your web pages. Hostinger uses MariaDB, and cloud plans and Hostinger Web are also included. It doesn’t use MySQL, so it performs faster overall.

There are many more features of Hostinger >>>

Generous in terms of number of sites, SSD storage, and bandwidth

I expected that with such affordable prices, Hostinger would keep a close eye on resources. Many budget web hosts reduce costs by allocating fewer resources per customer because adding more hosting accounts allows them to be more resourceful on each of their servers.

But Hostinger offers many resources, even for its low rates—the cheapest WordPress plans include unlimited bandwidth, 100 GB SSD storage, and 100 websites. This is more than many other top-budget hosts offer with the most expensive plans. You’ll be able to host multiple sites at once since you’ll have plenty of room to grow and expand your online presence.

Automatic backup with one-click restoration

Hostinger gives you a lot of control over your backups.

Data loss can be devastating to your online business. Losing data due to an honest mistake or a Wi-Fi glitch after spending hours working on your site can be frustrating. Thankfully, Hostinger offers a flexible automated backup tool when you sign up for any of the higher plans. It allows you to schedule, create, and download restores for free.

Hostinger offers free weekly automated backups if you’re on the entry-level Web and WordPress plan. Optionally, you can pay for the on-demand backup feature if you have the add-on.

A robust security suite and unlimited free SSL

You can’t go with a web host that can’t protect your site from DDoS or malware attacks, no matter how low your budget is. Fortunately, Hostinger offers protection from a range of online threats because Hostinger understands the importance of potential online threats and security.

Every plan includes an automated malware scanner for all your sites, an in-house-developed web application firewall, free SSL, and Cloudflare DDoS protection for Hostinger’s nameservers—not to be confused with Cloudflare’s content delivery network (CDN), which isn’t enabled by default. The plan will keep you protected from the most common threats, even if it may not have the most advanced security suite. It also offers more features than you’ll find with other budget hosts.

Ease of Use

My Hosting Experience with Hostinger

Overall, I feel like Hostinger provides a remarkably easy platform to use, from sign-up to managing your website. I had no trouble building my own website on the plans I tested with.

This is partly due to Hostinger’s proprietary control panel, hPanel, which I found effortless to navigate (more on this later).

The hPanel on Hostinger works really well, and I found it effortless to navigate (more on this later).

Create a new account with Hostinger.

Signing up was very easy with Hostinger. The hosting plans were clearly laid out, and I had no problem understanding what was included in each of them. The WordPress Starter (now Premium) plan offers a free domain name if you choose a longer billing cycle or yearly as I did, which was a nice addition. This feature is included with all Hostinger shared and WordPress plans.

What was especially great was that I only had to provide a minimal amount of information – there were no long, time-consuming forms that required me to fill out a lot of personal data. I was also given the nice option to sign up with a Google or Facebook account to simplify the process.

Accepted payment methods include all major UPI, AliPay, PayPal, and Google Pay gateways. For domain and hosting, you can buy via cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. Thankfully Hostinger didn’t try to oversell me or pre-select any paid add-ons during checkout. It was always clear how much I was paying for which services.

After completing the payment, I set up my account. I was able to install WordPress and connect my domain in less than 3.30 minutes.

Installing WordPress and Connecting a Domain

Once you create your account, Hostinger guides you through a few setup steps. I was given a short questionnaire as I needed to set up the hosting environment. This is where I also auto-configured LiteSpeed’s caching to maximise performance based on my particular needs. This section allowed me to take full advantage of LiteSpeed and also explained how to optimise the settings myself.

There I was asked if I would like WordPress to be installed automatically. This was really easy and quick, as I only had to know an admin email, enter a password, and optionally choose a starter theme.

With this done, the next step was to connect a domain name. Since I have a free domain name, I signed up for the WordPress Premium plan on an annual billing cycle. All domain extensions are available with Hostinger’s free domain name offer, though the popular .com is included.

All I had to do now was choose a data centre once I had chosen an extension and domain name. I chose a U.S.-based location, but you should choose the one that’s closest to your target audience. Once that was done, I was given a summary of all the information I entered, which I confirmed to register my domain name and install WordPress.

Five minutes later, the domain registration and WordPress installation were complete. The setup process automatically connected my domain to my site while I waited for DNS (Domain Name System) propagation. This is an inevitable process, as it happens whenever you connect a new domain. This can prevent you from accessing anything online, as the WordPress installation can take up to 24–48 hours to complete.

Surprisingly, after only waiting for three or six hours, my DNS propagation was complete. I was able to access my test website online and upload a custom WordPress theme. Overall, Hostinger sets up almost all of the basic WordPress framework and hosting for you.

Other Features That Make It Easy to Use

For beginners, hPanel makes managing your hosting a breeze.

Hostinger has developed its own proprietary control panel, called hPanel. You get access to all the basic functions you need to manage your sites: the design is clean, it’s easy to navigate, and it’s fun to use. Plus, unlike VPS, cloud plans, cPanel, or Plesk, it’s completely free. You can save time and money on the panel if you’re comfortable with the command line or SSH.

That said, hPanel can be a bit slow at times, depending on what settings you have set up. The file manager can take several seconds to load, for example. It can also take several seconds to access the WordPress admin area – although the fact that hPanel reduces the WordPress login process to a single click more than makes up for the loading time.

It's free and has a flexible drag-and-drop site builder.

The hosting plan includes a free AI site builder, which is a great angle if you want to quickly create a website with ease without having to learn WordPress design and build it. Like Hostinger’s CDN and hPanel, this is also developed in-house by Hostinger, and it allows you to create a website using a drag-and-drop interface or AI.

Keep in mind that this builder is not based on the WordPress platform. However, you can switch to the builder risk-free for 14 days, which is great if you already have a WordPress-based website. If you don’t like it, your original site will be restored for free.

A one-click auto- installer for all the most popular

Hostinger's auto-installer lets you easily install many other popular web applications, as well as a simple installation for WordPress. It includes alternative CMSs (content management systems) like Drupal and Joomla!, apps for pretty much anything, message boards, as well as database management.

The selection doesn't seem as extensive as some other auto installers, but it does offer the popular and most useful apps. Hostinger's cloud plans include SSH and WP-CLI access, so you get full root access on VPS plans, plus you can manually install your software. This facility is great for anyone who wants more advanced control.

Performance

One of the fastest budget web hosts

Despite being significantly cheaper than many popular entry-level hosting providers, Hostinger performed well and excellently in my performance tests. It was easily one of the best-performing shared hosting providers I've tested, and it wasn't far behind some of our top premium hosting providers.

We created a website that looked like a typical landing page, with custom fonts, high-quality images, text, and lots of complex code for interactive elements, to give Hostinger a fair test. I then monitored this website using several testing tools — namely, UptimeRobot, Sucuri Load Time Tester, and GTmetrix.

Over the course of a month, our test website hosted by Hostinger ran at 100% with a typical loading time of 0.8 seconds. Simply put, better performance can be hard to find at Hostinger’s prices – see the impressive results for yourself below.

GTmetrix

I tested the functionality of our website locally using GTmetrix. I chose a US source server that was close to the data centre of my test site to do this. Thereafter, I finished a performance analysis that included hourly speed testing for a week.

So, what did I find? My website achieved a typical full load time of just 0.8 seconds on Hostinger's servers, which I tested for a week. To put the results into perspective, most other budget hosts take between 3 and 6 seconds, but Hostinger is several times faster.

How does this system work? Well, one reason for this is that when I first installed WordPress, Hostinger enabled the default settings for LiteSpeed optimisation. For example, the default image compression reduced the total content size on my test page from about 1 MB to less than 800 KB, making the page load much faster.

There were some cases where my site took between 1.5 and 3.0 seconds to load. However, even these worst-case results are within acceptable guidelines for visitor retention. And notably, since each of our tests is performed from a “fresh” browser instance, certain cache settings won’t even affect these results—but a real website visitor should see the page load even faster on repeat visits.

Time to First Byte results were typically around 0.5 seconds—the amount of time it takes for the server to start sending website data. This is a pretty good speed, too—it’s not uncommon to see numbers of 0.7 seconds or higher from shared hosting services.

Sucuri Load Time Tester

Next, I wanted to see how Hostinger performed on a global scale. I used Sucuri’s load time tester when I did this. Hosting offers data centres located in South America, Asia, Europe, the US, etc. If your website aims to attract visitors from Australia, Africa, or the Middle East, it is advisable to select the accessible data centre closest to their respective locations to get the best loading speeds.

You will usually need to activate a CDN (content delivery network) if you want to get the best loading speeds internationally. This saves copies of your website content (for example, images and code) to servers around the world, so visitors far from your chosen data centre can access some of your content from a server closer to them. Many providers do not have a CDN enabled by default, so you may need to set it up yourself.

While Hostinger does support Cloudflare’s CDN, you’ll have to configure it yourself after signing up for an account, even if you’re only using the free Cloudflare plan. Since we test hosting plans in their default state “out of the box” so we can tell you how well they’ll work for first-time users, I didn’t enable Cloudflare’s CDN.

My test site got loading speeds of around 1 second in Europe and South America, so these results were surprising considering I hosted it on one of Hostinger’s US data centres.

While it was much slower in Australia and Singapore, reaching around 3 seconds, this is still within acceptable limits. The results are better than what some budget hosts in these regions can deliver on their home turf.

UptimeRobot

After all, it doesn't matter how fast a host can load your website if it's rarely online to begin with. That's because I measured Hostinger's reliability. I monitored our test website with UptimeRobot for a full month. Whenever a downtime event occurred, it was recorded. I found this out because I tested Hostinger's uptime.

Amazingly, there was no downtime to record. During the test period, our test site was accessible online. Hosting providers whose hosting is much more expensive sometimes struggle to match this result.

Hostinger offers a 99.9% uptime guarantee. You can request compensation in the form of service credits if Hostinger fails to achieve this uptime within a specific month. This scenario is not unique, as the 99.9% uptime guarantee is the industry standard.

Hostinger is stingy with credits if you are entitled to compensation. You get a 5% credit for the next monthly bill. Thankfully, you won't need to claim compensation often; it doesn't seem so from my tests, if ever.

Support

Support is polite but relies mainly on links to documentation.

While these budget hosts often say, “We provide 24/7 technical support,” they really mean they have a single agent who is able to work after hours, and excellent luck talking to them. Quality of support can vary; those who don’t understand hosting save money by outsourcing support to a third-party service.

So, how do the live chat and email assistance that Hostinger offers around the clock compare?

You will have access to help through your hPanel account on the condition that you are an existing customer. To initiate the procedure, you have the option of either typing your question into a search box or selecting a general topic from a selection list. Links to articles relevant to your keywords will appear when you type in a query. The knowledge base that Hostinger provides is rather substantial and is packed with clear and concise step-by-step explanations for all of the fundamentals; some of the tutorials even have accompanying video guides.
You can use Hostinger's new artificial intelligence assistant, Kodee (more on that will be announced shortly), or you can get in touch with support if none of the articles that were suggested are helpful. Currently that I accessed the live chat, a large banner informed me that the average response time for live chat agents is less than ten minutes, which is an excellently satisfactory response time. I inquired about ways I could enhance the performance of my website and then waited.

I received my response fifteen minutes later. Even when I attempted to request more specific advice for WordPress optimization plugins, the Hostinger support agent was cordial and promptly responded, providing links to the knowledge base. The response was satisfactory but not exceptional. Although the linked papers offered essential information, I preferred more individualized assistance.
I then attempted email support. I expected to hear back from Hostinger's email support within a single working day, so I braced myself for the wait. Unexpectedly, a few minutes later, I received a response from an agent saying they were investigating my question. Then, 22 minutes after sending my first email, I received a thorough response to my query—rapid for email support.

The quality of the email help was comparable to that of my prior live chat encounter. I received connections to further materials and instructions for setting up a CDN, which provided me with all the information I required.
I needed to assess the quality of Hostinger's recently released Kodee AI chatbot. The level of assistance I received truly astounded me. Just as useful as live assistance, but with considerably quicker response times, was Kodee's ability to help me with more common topics.

PRICING: New Customers Receive Giant Discounts (Some Plans Include a Free Domain Name)

Pricing is typically the initial factor that attracts clients to Hostinger. With monthly rates as low as ₹250, Hostinger is undoubtedly among the most reasonably priced choices for WordPress and shared hosting. You can purchase certain plans on a monthly, yearly, biannual, or even quadrennial (four-year) billing cycle.
Signing up for four years will yield the best deals, but it also entails the longest commitment. Although the yearly or biannual plans still offer reasonable value, the monthly plans are not very attractive. With Hostinger's risk-free 30-day money-back guarantee, you may cancel during the first month and receive a complete refund if you're not happy.

On your Hostinger package, you can save up to 75%!
Time-limited deal: Don't pass it up!

Get a Deal

Here's a little secret: if you maneuver effectively, you can secure an even more favorable deal. In fact, you will save more money with the higher-tier plan in your first year of hosting because annual and longer-term plans provide a free domain name, while monthly plans do not. You will also get access to Hostinger's CDN, on-demand backups, and premium WordPress tools if you choose a Business or above plan.
Plan for Hostinger Web Hosting Storage Bandwidth Name Free SSL The number of sites with price-free months Unlimited 100 GB SSD Premium Web Hosting + 100₹2503 More information NVMeunlimited 200 GB Business Web Hosting + 100₹3343 More information NVMeunlimited 200 GB Cloud Startup Web Hosting + 300₹6683 More information

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