Hostinger

Hostinger

Hostinger reviews are based on the information taken from their website, real user experience and expert insights. As stated on Hostinger website, company is created in 2004, and is known as the best cheap web hosting provider. The idea behind Hostinger is simple – to empower everyone to unlock the world of WWW by providing the tools to do so. Back then, the company found a loophole in the market and made use of it. They started off by creating a free web hosting platform 000webhost.com and quickly became the most popular free web hosting provider. This then led them to perfect their paid services, therefore, now, I can say that their shared hosting platform is made of high-quality features at the lowest price in the industry.

Their vision is to create a reliable, developer-friendly web hosting service with top-notch features, fast speed and effective Customer Support for the price affordable to everyone.

The minimum amount of money spent on marketing and staffing, allows the company to easily perfect the product and services. The company currently has over 200 employees around the world and 8 data centers.

Let’s see if any of this is true.

Hostinger Services

Hostinger essentially has 4 main web hosting services:

• Shared web hosting
• VPS hosting
• Domain registration
• SSL certificates

Hostinger shared hosting is designed to suit intermediate web hosting users who don’t feel like investing all of the budget into hosting solutions. Hostinger has their own unique cloud infrastructure which allows them to offer these services at very low prices without sacrificing any performance.

VPS Services

At first glance, Hostinger VPS hosting offers a reasonable variety of packages to choose from, each of them having a different set of features. I was hesitating right from the start because only 1 IPv4 address is provided on either one of VPS packages.

However, I must confess – I have been using Hostinger VPS user for quite some time now, and their performance has been on point right from the start.

Domain Registration

When it comes to their Domain Registrar evaluation, there is only one aspect you need to check – ICANN Accreditation list:

This list simply confirms whether or not the domain registrar is certified or is it simply ‘reselling’ domain names from other registrars. As you can see, Hostinger has been a fully certified domain registrar since early 2013.

While surfing Hostinger website and doing its analysis, I noticed a few added value features which don’t seem to require you to pay anything extra:

Hostinger Reviews & Tutorials

Custom written Hostinger reviews and tutorials seem like a nice tool to teach a new generation of web enthusiasts. Hostinger offers a massive list of over 500 tutorials about website development, server management, and various CMS guides. Most importantly – all of these tutorials come completely free, and you don’t even need to own a Hostinger account in order to read them.

Affiliate Program

Affiliate programs are quite common in today’s web hosting industry. Hostinger is no exception, and it seems to follow the most basic affiliate system – banners. The most distinct difference is that Hostinger offers full 100% commission for each shared web hosting purchase which definitely brings them up in the competition.

Website Builder

For such users who prefer their websites to be built with ease, custom website builder is a must. Luckily, all Hostinger packages have this feature included together with over 200 website templates. I’ve fooled around with Hostinger website builder for a bit, and while it does lack in customization options, it surely gets the job done.

Smart Domain Availability Checker

I know this may seem to be meaningless by today’s standards, but honestly – I have never seen such a great domain name suggestion tool. I was there just checking whether or not ‘awesome.com’ domain was available and it gave me a full list of even better and much more hilarious domain choices!

It’s quite clear that Hostinger designed its services for newcomers and intermediate website owners. All of the available features are perfectly suited for small project start-ups or local business owners who do not want to spend a fortune on hiring web developers separately.

It’s obvious that shared hosting service is the key product which defines Hostinger brand. This is why I’ve chosen to test one of Hostinger cheap web hosting services.

Hostinger Pricing

Hostinger offers some really good value for money. With plans starting at $1.45 a month, it’s cheaper than a lot of the competition, and it’s a great way to get online on a budget. And the most expensive, $3.95 package is perfectly suited for small businesses, as it includes a free SSL certificate for eCommerce, and loads of processing power and memory to withhold plenty of visitors.

These are the packages you can choose from:

• Single – Optimal package, designed for 1 small website.
• Premium – Intermediate package for multiple websites.
• Business – The ultimate package suited for multiple high-traffic websites.

And as you can see, the prices are seriously good. Using our link on the sidebar, you can still be one of the lucky ones to get Hostinger services starting from only $1.45 a month!

To fully understand each one of the mentioned packages and compare them, I’ve listed all the features in the table format:

On top of all that, all of the packages include Anti-theft security system (BitNinja) and email anti-spam tool (SpamAssassin).

Full Pricing Overview

The super low prices you see above and on the sidebar, however, are only genuine when buying hosting services for a longer period. This makes a lot of sense for both the company and the user – I mean seriously, 4 years of premium hosting for only a bit over $100 is a very good deal.

But what if you’re not interested in 4 years of hosting and want to commit for a shorter time? Well – here are the prices for all plans and all billing periods, in the table below.

In terms of features, you can clearly see that ‘Single’ web hosting package is the one which differs the most. It is quite limited considering that it was designed to be suited for only 1 website. That being said, it’s also the cheapest one they have, with the prices being on $1.45 a month.

You can pay less than $40 and don’t have to worry about hosting until it’s it’s LITERALLY year 2023.

The other two packages gave me some pleasant surprises, too. They are fully stocked with exclusive features like free Anti-theft and Malware Protection systems, free automated backups and free assisted website transfers. Not to mention a free top-level domain if you go for the yearly subscription.

Hostinger offers superior value

There are a lot of hosting providers who say that their package offers brilliant value for money.

However, as I found out in this review, Hostinger not only talks the talk – it also walks the walk.

As an example, let’s have a look at 12 months of Hostinger Premium.

In the picture right here, we see how much it costs to get a multiple-website hosting plan and a free .com domain for an entire year.

Pretty good, right?

Now, let’s have a look at how much a similar plan costs when buying it from the competition.

In this next example, it’s a very similar HostGator Baby package. For the same 12 months, and including a domain name (a crucial thing for every website, obviously!) Here’s how they compare.

That’s over 3 times more. Add automated backups to the package (included free in Hostinger), and the prices goes up further to nearly $153.

Hostinger might not be the cheapest provider ever – but given the value its packages gives, it’s a perfect option for your money.

You can clearly see that Hostinger has won me over with the full stack of features and added-value features. Now it’s time to forward and evaluate Hostinger customer service!

Hostinger Customer Success

Hostinger goes from strength to strength

Hostinger reviews show that Hostinger follows one of the latest trends of renaming their customer support department into Customer Success. Arguably, this makes customer service agents feel as if they could become your true ‘success ambassadors’. Cheesy, perhaps – but this is a good step for ensuring that customer service representatives get the respect they deserve. This validation and improvement method used by a large number of web-based companies and Hostinger is in the front of the pack.

Hostinger offers two communication channels with their clients and visitors:

• Live Chat Support
• Ticket/Email Support

From the looks of things, Hostinger seems to be lacking in phone support. This is definitely a disadvantage for many users who prefer direct phone contact over anything else. As for me, though, – I prefer the live chat communication since it’s much easier to share technical information (like lines of code or even a difficult domain name) without spelling each letter to the agent. Believe me, it can get quite frustrating! Try spelling “couturenecessity.se” on a phone and you’ll see what I mean.

Chat Service Evaluation

When evaluating the chat service, I prefer to check a few things: agents’ knowledge on various subjects, response time and of course, the human factor – writing manners and such. In order to get the best (or worst!) out of the customer service, I contacted the live chat about a technical issue that I had.

This is where I was pleasantly surprised. Hostinger’s live chat was very good, to begin with, but in mid-2018, a massive update was done, making it an even better experience.

The wait times were also really decent – I never had to wait more than 2 minutes to get someone to speak to me. And of course, I may be repeating myself, but I really like that now I can access all of the chats done in the past. If you get good advice from a chat service agent, it stays with you forever!In many ways, this reminds of chatting with a friend who knows loads about hosting. For registered users, the entire chat history is logged and can be accessed anytime. And you may want that, because Hostinger customer success agents may really give you a lot of good tips and encouragement. For instance, let’s see my chat with Heiko.

And overall, talking with other customer service agents, I got a feeling that Hostinger is doing a seriously good job of keeping them both knowledgeable and happy. In terms of a human factor, this is perhaps the best provider I have encountered. Overall – the way it is now, Hostinger live chat experience in 2018 is even better than it used to be.

However, not everything is ideal. As of January 2018, Hostinger has actually disabled the chat for unregistered users, meaning that likely clients will only be able to get answers via a support ticket.

Does this mean that Hostinger received so many new clients, they couldn’t possibly keep up with the demand? Looks very likely. As for now, it’s quite disappointing – I hope this step back in only temporary and soon we’ll see full live chat enabled for everyone who wants it.

First Impressions

“BitCoin acceptance is just another example of Hostinger being on top of their game”

Hostinger account activation procedure is quite simple. In the cart, all you’d need to do is choose your package (and domain name, if you’re getting one), then proceed to the payment submission step.

Hostinger billing system offers 3 payment options – Credit Card, PayPal and…BitCoin!

BitCoin is becoming increasingly popular in online purchases, but you don’t see a lot of companies embracing this as a payment method. BitCoin acceptance is just another example of Hostinger being on top of their game.

As soon as you choose the suitable payment option, an external payment API shows up. It allows you to enter your credit card, PayPal or Bitpay (payment processor, which allows you to submit payment using Bitcoin currency) details directly.

“My domain was already showing the default ‘index’ page within 5 minutes of entering my credit card details”

Once the payment was submitted, I was greeted with a ‘success’ window which later redirected me to the account’s setup page. There, I had to enter my contact details in order for the domain registration to complete. The last step conveniently displayed my options for setting up the initial website:

Considering the low price of this host, I was expecting to wait hours until the account became fully active. Once again, – I was greeted with a pleasant surprise.

Both, – the domain and hosting services were activated instantly and my domain was already showing the default ‘index’ page within 5 minutes of entering my credit card details. I know that even in the perfect circumstances newly-registered domains need to go through a full DNS propagation cycle before becoming active worldwide. With some registrars this could even take 24 hours! Surprisingly this wasn’t the case with Hostinger.

Now, instead of using any of the offered website building tools, I went on to check and evaluate Hostinger custom cPanel:

“Considering the fact that all the added value features were already included in the base package, there weren’t many upselling offers nagging me to buy something”

I must confess. I absolutely love the old-school cPanel structure. It seems that Hostinger took the classic cPanel layout and simply re-designed it to give more visually appealing and sophisticated look.kg

On the left side, you have the usual resource usage & specifications table which shows account’s real-time resource levels.

At the top of the panel lies navigational options for quickly accessing domain, VPS, SSL and affiliates control panels, also including the billing section where you could review the account’s current payment statuses and other related options.

In the base, you can see the hub for all the host’s features starting with email management panels, ending with ‘Git’ implementation system. All of the features are conveniently categorized and shown in order of popularity.

On the bottom-right corner, you can see Hostinger mascot – ‘the tiny dragon’, kindly offering help. At first, I thought that it was just a shortcut for accessing Hostinger live chat. But I was only partially correct:

This seems to be a separate guiding tool where you could search for informational articles about Hostinger service. If you can’t find the information you need, it offers you an option to open a chat window with one of Hostinger customer service agents.

I have to say that I was very surprised with all the sophistication and visual appeal of Hostinger control panels. They were slick, they didn’t give me any hard time of finding the things I needed, and most of all – everything was responsive and fast.

Considering the fact that all the added value features were already included in the base package, there weren’t many upselling offers nagging me to buy something. In fact, I only saw one which urged me to purchase an SSL certificate which, I think, is quite reasonable considering that websites without SSL certificates couldn’t do any marketing these days.

Performance Evaluation

“I must say, even I didn’t expect to see complete 100% uptime on a low-cost web hosting provider”

So far, Hostinger has won me over in almost every aspect with its easy-to-use & good-looking design, fast activation and responsive navigation, and most of all – best value I’ve seen in awhile.

Now it’s time for the most important Hostinger evaluation, – performance.

I shall test it all:

Some of the tests I will be performing will be ongoing over the course of few months, which means that this review will be updated every now and then in order to give you the latest results.

IMPORTANT NOTICE – the speed test tools I will be using in this paragraph can’t be 100% correct as they still depend on their own servers’ (access points) speeds. I have used Bitcatcha tool to check packet travel speeds all around the globe as their tool seems to be the most consistent. Furthermore, to acquire results as accurately as possible, I’ve tested the website at least 10 times in quick succession and then I’ve chosen the most average test result out of all of them to show in this review.

Host Speed During Low Upkeep

This part will consist of me, testing the website’s response time with a simple HTML website. Simple HTML websites do not require many of the host’s resources and theoretically should return the best speed results.

I’ve used Hostinger custom web-based File Manager (which frankly was quite convenient) to upload my sample html code, and here is my low-upkeep HTML website:

Now let’s see how it holds up in terms of speed:

I used the Bitcatcha tool to check packet travel speeds all around the globe. Here are the results:

Many hosting providers generally suffer from 2 or 3 locales underperforming so much, it ruins the overall worldwide performance by quite a bit. Most often, the locations include Bangalore and Singapore. Here, Hostinger servers are also the slowest to react to commands coming from these locations – but the times are not really bad.

Under 400 ms in all instances guarantees a smooth performance to all of your visitors, even without using a dedicated worldwide content delivery network (CDN). The speed across all locations around the globe is quite consistent. This means that the servers are powerful enough to give suitable access speeds even to the far-away visitors.

NOTE – This particular account was set up on Hostinger US servers. Keep in mind that Hostinger has 4 data center locations to choose from – UK, US, Singapore and Brazil. So these values would shift accordingly with each choice.

Speed with a website builder

Now I shall test how optimized are the websites which have been built with Hostinger own website builder.

Here is the website I’ve managed to create with the builder:

Now, let’s see how the speed of the website was affected by this amazing content:

As you can clearly see, the speed wasn’t affected too much. A small drop in performance was to be expected, but a couple milliseconds is definitely not too significant.

Hostinger website builder not only allows you to edit a website to a point of madness – it will also optimize the madness for all of your worldwide needs.

Server Overall Uptime

NOTE – This section of the review will constantly be updated with new and latest information.

It is incredibly important to make sure your website isn’t down often. After all, your visitors may be alright with the page loading a fraction of a second slower – not so much with it being offline all the time! Therefore, we set up our trust Uptime Robot tool and tracked a regular WordPress website’s performance once every minute.

In addition to measuring downtimes, this tool will also be a great help in seeing just how stable the response times are. If that interests you, also make sure to check out the Hostinger live status. 

Pictured below is the latest Hostinger performance from May-June 2018:

Downtimes: zero. None. Nada.

Since August, when we’ve descended on this server, there have been no noticeable downtimes. Naturally, there’s no better result than that. Although it has to be said – there have been reports of other Hostinger servers experiencing a hiccup or two, especially in the United States. Even then though, this hosting provider appears to be able to offer incredible reliability. We may have been lucky to be on a server like this but even then, it’s amazing.

Oh. Speaking of amazing – look at those response times! It looks like that speeds under 100 ms are a regular occurrence. For most of the time, in this tool, response times have been 200 ms or less. Even when the performance dips, response times still rarely exceed 1 second. It’s a great result that is by far the best between the hosts tested. Well done, Hostinger.

Click HERE to see Hostinger’s real-time performance, including server response times and downtimes.

Anti-Theft Protection Evaluation

This test was quite simple. I logged out of my account on Hostinger and simulated a break-in. Firstly, I’ve tried entering my password incorrectly 20 times to see if anything changes in terms of my accessibility to the account. After 20 incorrect attempts, I was no longer able to login to the account even with a correct password. It simply said that my password is incorrect. This is a very common security system which detects multiple incorrect login attempts and temporarily blocks the IP address of the user in order to protect the account against hackers. After 10 minutes of standing by, I was once again able to login to my account.

Now it’s time to see how Hostinger customer service handles sensitive security information. I have, once again, logged out of my account, and changed my own IP via VPN. I now intend to simulate an account stealing attempt by contacting Hostinger customer support and asking them to give me the account’s password without providing any valid proof of ownership.

And here we go, – I wasn’t able to steal my own account after all! Hostinger seems to have a strict policy of not giving away sensitive information unless you fully prove your account’s ownership using payment information.

NOTE – It would be a good idea to keep your payment information safe if you happen to lose your credentials and access to an email account.

In terms of overall performance, Hostinger has kept up with their promises and their servers seem to be capable of delivering an exceptional service. Both, the speed and uptime of this host are superb! It was extremely difficult to find any flaws about the host which also has the cheapest price tag I’ve seen in a while. I honestly never thought I’d ever say this, but Hostinger is the most honest, cheapest and reliable web hosting service. I would host my own website here.

Hostinger Reviews – Conclusion

Hostinger must be one of the biggest surprises I’ve had the pleasure of encountering. While reviewing it, I had to constantly ask myself why would anyone choose anything BUT Hostinger for their shared hosting needs. It’s the cheapest, fastest and most responsive shared web hosting platform I’ve ever tested

There are countless features which I absolutely loved. Hostinger custom-written information sources, like tutorials and knowledge base articles, were one of the highlights. The company seems to value its customers and want them to learn. Almost every tool or feature in Hostinger arsenal is custom-built, which leads me to believe that Hostinger itself was created out of pure passion. This feels like a family business, where you can meet the owner, shake his or her hand and buy some goods. Only, in this case, Hostinger actually manages to kick some butts of the big corporations. Long may it continue.

Pros and cons

App allows you to take your sales pipeline with you anywhere you go because of its mobile apps. If you are a tablet user anywhere in the world, you can use the app’s mobile web version using your favorite browser. Fusce ullamcorper neque eu porttitor porttitor. Morbi blandit, massa sit amet efficitur convallis, dolor orci aliquet urna, ac consequat turpis mi id velit. Phasellus sit amet nisl lacinia ex auctor molestie sit amet nec orci. Nulla rhoncus nulla nunc, ut scelerisque ex mollis at.

You can also take notes during a meeting or call using this application. What’s more, if you are a tablet user, you can access App mobile web version via your browser. All data is also backed up in real time to a separate server.

Hostinger Reviews – Conclusion

Hostinger must be one of the biggest surprises I’ve had the pleasure of encountering. While reviewing it, I had to constantly ask myself why would anyone choose anything BUT Hostinger for their shared hosting needs. It’s the cheapest, fastest and most responsive shared web hosting platform I’ve ever tested

There are countless features which I absolutely loved. Hostinger custom-written information sources, like tutorials and knowledge base articles, were one of the highlights. The company seems to value its customers and want them to learn. Almost every tool or feature in Hostinger arsenal is custom-built, which leads me to believe that Hostinger itself was created out of pure passion. This feels like a family business, where you can meet the owner, shake his or her hand and buy some goods. Only, in this case, Hostinger actually manages to kick some butts of the big corporations. Long may it continue.

Feedbacks

What can I say – after being with hostinger I don’t think that I will be able to use something else. I got used to the control panel so easily and the 24/7 live chat here is the quickest way to get help. Personally I hate phone support because sometimes I don’t understand what is said so thanks god that here I can just chat.

Reviewer2428426

This is the first sales type software that gets better as you discover more features. Many times I get a trial based on a cool pitch video I see, but as I dig into the program, I discover disappointing limitations or flaws.

Reviewer23532

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App is a sales management tool for small teams with big ambitions. It visualizes ones sales pipeline and helps to make sure important activities and conversations won’t get dropped. Salespeople really like it because its easy to use and intuitive. And managers like it because they don’t need to nag their team to use their CRM and it’s great at sales forecasting. It also sports integrations with other software such as Google Apps, MailChimp and Zapier.

FAQ