Hostinger Review (May 2023) – After 4 Years & 7 Websites

In-built Cache Manager

Hostinger has an in-built cache manager that can be enabled from the user dashboard. 

It boosts the speed of your website, thus, providing a better experience to your viewers!

Cache Plugin

Hostinger uses the LiteSpeed Servers, which also gives you access to the LiteSpeed Cache plugin. It is a free plugin that you can use to improve your website speeds. 

To know more about it, check out my video on LiteSpeed Cache Settings.

Hostinger Data Centers

The Data Centers of Hostinger are housed in 7 locations including the UK, USA, Singapore, India, Netherlands, Indonesia, and Lithuania.

Recently in February 2022, they announced the launch of a new Hostinger Data Center in Mumbai, India. That’s great news if you are targeting the Indian audience. It will drastically improve the speed of your website.

Hostinger Domains

Apart from web hosting, a relevant domain name is essential for running your blog or online business. Let’s take a look at Hostinger’s domain features.

Free Domains

Hostinger provides a free .com domain to its new hosting users for a year. However, it is only available on the Premium and Business Shared Hosting plans. The Starter plan does not offer a free domain.

In the case of WordPress hosting, all plans except the Single WordPress plan come with a free domain. If you want a lifetime free domain, you can check out ChemiCloud hosting.

New Domain Pricing

Hostinger also offers new domain registrations at quite affordable rates. For instance, these are the new lower prices for some popular domain extensions:

These are the prices applicable for the first year when you purchase these domain names for a period of two or more years. After the 1st year, standard charges will apply to your domain.

Preview URL

A Preview URL (also called Temporary Domain Name) is a feature in Hostinger that lets you view your website without connecting your domain name. It is helpful for testing out your website if you haven’t yet pointed your nameservers to your web host.

However, the Preview URL is only available for up to 120 hours. It is only applicable to the main domain that you have registered. But with an easy trick, you can get preview URLs for your sub-domains and add-on domains as well.

Check out my Hostinger Training Program to know more!

Hostinger Domains

Hostinger Security

Hostinger provides its users with a variety of security features. Let us check them out in detail.

SSL Certificate

An SSL Certificate is essential for your website’s security. You get unlimited free SSL Certificates for your websites with a hosting plan on Hostinger. 

Thus, every website that you add to your Hostinger account can be protected with a free SSL certificate!

Apart from that, you can also activate a free SSL certificate through Cloudflare. The process to do that is discussed in my Hostinger Training Program! So, keep reading to know more about it.

Visit Hostinger Training Program

Patchstack Security

Hostinger recently collaborated with Patchstack, a powerful WordPress security plugin. 

Through this plugin, WordPress users will be notified of vulnerabilities arising in any of their plugins. This is a powerful security tool to safeguard your website.

2FA

2FA (Two Factor Authentication) is a method of verifying a person’s identity by requesting an extra factor like an OTP code, biometric recognition, hardware key, etc at the time of login. 

2FA adds another layer of security by preventing unauthorized users from accessing your online accounts.

Hostinger provides email and software-based 2FA to secure your hosting account. So, you can use authentication apps like Authy, LastPass, Google Authenticator, etc to secure your accounts. 

Cloudflare DNS Firewall

All the plans of Hostinger support Cloudflare DNS. You can activate it from the Hostinger dashboard. 

Cloudflare DNS effectively protects your website from all types of malicious traffic and DDoS attacks. 

Bitninja Security

Hostinger applies Bitninja security by default on all its servers. It is a powerful security feature that detects suspicious logins and then blocks them until they verify themselves.

Bitninja also provides protection against malware, DDoS attacks, brute force attacks, etc. 

Malware Scanner

Recently, Hostinger has launched its Malware Scanner tool that can be accessed from its dashboard Security features.

It automatically scans through all the files and data uploaded by the users and cleans corrupted and malicious files. Thus, it’s a very useful security tool for all website owners.

Overall, the security features in Hostinger are quite good.

Hostinger Backups and Restoration

The Backup and Restoration features of Hostinger have seen a lot of improvements in the past few years. Hostinger provides free weekly backups on all its hosting plans.

Apart from that, their Business Shared Hosting plan also comes with free daily backups. You can back up your website files, databases, or everything on your hosting account. It also allows you to generate manual backups.

Your data is backed-up on a different server location for a period of 30 days. It also supports one-click backups and restorations. Thus, you can easily restore your data from the previous 30 days with a single click.

If you need free daily backups on other hosting plans, you need to pay additional charges to avail of this feature.

An interesting feature of Hostinger is that you get to selectively restore your website files. You can select which files you wish to restore, which is quite a convenient option.

Hostinger Customer Support

Hostinger offers customer support through email, live chat, and a knowledge base. Talking about their live chat support, I received replies to my queries pretty quickly. The live chat was initiated swiftly, but it took slightly more time to solve the queries.

I personally liked their extensive knowledge base of articles. You can find answers to a lot of your queries through their articles, which is great for beginners. They also have free tutorials on WordPress, Website Development, VPS Hosting, etc to help newbies.

Overall, the quality of their support has seen a huge improvement since the last year. But I think they can improve their support speeds and reply frequencies.

Hostinger Plans & Pricing

Hostinger offers 3 plans under its Shared Web Hosting. Let us take a quick look at their significant features. 

The maximum discounts are applied if you purchase these plans for 4 years. Opting for smaller time durations results in lesser discounts. Well, isn’t this an excellent strategy by Hostinger to gather users for the long term?

You can also find other hosting plans like WordPress Hosting plans, Cloud Hosting plans, VPS Hosting plans, etc.

Hostinger Payment Methods

Planning to get a Hostinger hosting plan? It supports a variety of payment methods.

These include Net Banking, PayPal, International Credit and Debit Cards, Cryptocurrency, and Hostinger Balance. Apart from that, it also supports UPI Payments, Paytm, and Google Pay for Indian customers.

The UPI Payments feature is very useful for Indian users who do not have International debit and credit cards.

Hostinger Refund Policy

Hostinger offers a 30-day money-back guarantee on all its plans. So, you can purchase a hosting plan, try it out for a month and then get a 100% refund if you are not satisfied with it!

However, there are a few terms and conditions in their Refund Policy. I have explained them in layman’s terms in my Hostinger Training Program.

If you want an extended period of refund policy, you can consider A2 Hosting which charges you on a pro-rata basis!

Hostinger Coupon Code

If you wish to buy web hosting, here’s an exciting offer that will get you your favorite hosting plan at the cheapest rates possible. 

All you need to do is follow this simple process:

• Use my link and select a hosting plan of your choice.
• Enter the coupon code KRIPESH at checkout.

That’s it! An additional 10% discount will be applied to your hosting plan!

Hostinger Discount Link

Which is the Best Hostinger Plan and Server?

Now that we’ve discussed all the significant features of Hostinger, it’s time to decide on the best plan and server. First, let us talk about the plan you should avoid at all costs.

In my recommendation, you can safely avoid going with the Single Web Hosting plan. It offers less RAM, which is not suitable even for operating normal websites and blogs. 

In some rare scenarios, if you have a simple website comprising 5-10 static HTML pages, the single shared hosting plan can be a good option. It’s only suitable for HTML or PHP websites.

However, if you need to work with WordPress, the Premium or Business Web Hosting plans would be the best for you. 

Both these plans have enough features to give you a smooth and hassle-free experience. Along with a higher RAM, you’ll also get a free domain for 1 year with these plans. But the Business Web Hosting plan would be ideal as it also offers daily backup options.

Talking about the best servers, I found the speeds of their US and Singapore-based Servers much faster than the Indian servers. So, you can go with either of them depending on your target audience.

Hostinger Training Program

If you are planning to get a hosting plan from Hostinger, I’m sure my training program would be of great help to you. This Training Program is for those users who have purchased plans from Hostinger using my links.

In this program, I have provided in-depth tutorials on how to use Hostinger, including

• How to purchase hosting from Hostinger
• Setting up your hosting
• Connecting hosting to your domain
• Installing WordPress
• Taking and restoring backups
• Contacting customer support
• Enabling cache plugins

and a lot more! 

These video tutorials are uploaded on the Thinkific Course Creator. I have enabled free previews of some of the video tutorials along with the step-by-step process of purchasing a plan.

All you have to do is sign up through my link and purchase your favorite plan. Once you mail me the receipt, you’ll get access to the training program within 7 working days. This course will be highly beneficial for beginners in getting equipped with the basics of Hostinger. 

Hostinger Training Program

Hostinger Migrations

Hostinger provides unlimited free website migrations on its hosting plans just like Rocket.net. 

To request a website migration, you need to select your website control panel (WordPress, cPanel, WHM) and mention your:

• Domain name
• Admin login page URL
• Username and password
• Previous web hosting service

After you make the migration request, someone from their team will personally transfer your website from your previous hosting provider to Hostinger free of cost! It might take anywhere between 2 to 4 days to complete the process.

Hostinger Staging

If you wish to test new themes, plugins, or design updates on your website, the Staging functionality of Hostinger might be helpful. With the Staging feature, you can create a copy of your live website and test out changes to it.

The Staging feature can be found under the Dashboard tab. All you need to do is create a subdomain and publish your staging environment over it.

Then, you can make edits to the site and test them out. If you are satisfied with the changes, you can simply push the test version to the live website by hitting the ‘Publish’ button under the list of staging sites.

In my opinion, this is a great feature for developers and professionals. It lets you update your website with the latest developments without suffering any downtime!

Additional Hostinger Features

Hostinger Inode Count 

Inode Count refers to the total number of files on your website, including your files, folders, emails, and everything else stored on the servers. 

Hostinger offers generous inode count even for its shared hosting plans.

• Single Web Hosting – 200k
• Premium Web Hosting- 400k
• Business Web Hosting – 600k

If you wish to have unlimited inodes on your account, check out Rocket.net!

Account Sharing

If you want to share your hosting account with your team, the Account Sharing feature of Hostinger makes it possible.

The interesting thing about this feature is that you can can selectively share access with your developers and team members. Instead of providing them complete access to your account, you can grant them access to specific websites, services, or hosting plans.

Email Hosting

With your Hostinger plan, you get to create up to 100 email accounts with a 1 GB storage limit for every email account. (1 email account for Single Web Hosting)

However, there are a few limitations to the email service as well. You can only have 15k messages in every email account and send up to 500 emails each day. Overall, the email service is good.

Technology Used in Hostinger

Similar to ChemiCloud, A2 Hosting, and Rocket.net, Hostinger uses fast and efficient LiteSpeed servers, so your website loads at lightning-fast speeds every single time!

Along with that, they also have in-built caching technology so you can enable ‘Automatic Cache’ and speed up your websites.

Hostinger Website Builder

A website builder is especially helpful for those who want a quick website without getting into WordPress or other CMS platforms.

Hostinger doesn’t have its in-house website builder. However, it offers the Zyro Website Builder on all its hosting plans. It has lots of templates for creating an attractive website.

But honestly, I was not very impressed with it. Why? Because you need to pay an extra amount to use the Zyro Website Builder. This is one reason for Hostinger’s plans being surprisingly low-priced! (More on this in the next topic!)

In my opinion, if you’re looking for a website builder, it would be best to purchase a plan separately from Zyro or other site builders. You don’t need to purchase a Hostinger plan in that case.

I personally found the website builders offered by HostArmada, Cloudways, and ChemiCloud to be more user-friendly and easy to use!

 

How Is Hostinger So Cheap?

Now, we have come to the main question! I’m sure you must have thought about it, too. How is Hostinger surviving at such cheap hosting prices? What’s the catch?

Well, I dived into the details, and after much research and analysis, I found that they recover their costs through Affiliate Marketing. 

Hostinger keeps on collaborating with other companies like Patchstack, Fiverr, etc. These companies then promote their products and services through Hostinger.

Visit Hostinger

 

Hostinger Pros

1. Friendly Interface

The hPanel provided by Hostinger is modern and user-friendly. It lets you easily manage your websites and is ideal for beginners. 

2. Good Speeds

Hostinger uses LiteSpeed servers, which ensure that your websites load at lightning-fast speeds on all times.

3. Affordable Pricing

Hostinger offers pocket-friendly hosting plans when purchased for longer durations. For instance, its Single Shared Hosting plan when purchased for 48 months costs just ₹69/month!

4. Exceptional US Servers

The performance of Hostinger’s US-based servers was exceptional. They offered a quicker response time, better speeds, remarkable uptime, and displayed excellent load management.

5. Unlimited Free Migrations

Hostinger provides free migrations of unlimited websites. All you need to do is enter your hosting details and credentials, and their support team manually migrates your website to Hostinger.

6. Staging Functionality

You can test new themes, plugins, and updates by creating a copy of your live website. When you’re satisfied with the changes, you can push them to your live site. This helps reduce any downtime suffered by your website.

7. Excellent Security

Hostinger provides a 2FA option for safer logins. You also get free SSL Certificates with all its hosting plans to ensure the complete security of your website.

Its recent introduction of the Malware Scanner automatically destroys any bugs or malware found in your website files. 

8. UPI Payments

You get a bunch of payment options with Hostinger India. Integrating UPI Payments is a significant advantage for Indian users as it reduces the hassle of entering card or bank details.

9. Good Backup Options

Hostinger offers good backup and restoration options. All plans support weekly backups, and the Business hosting supports daily backups as well. You can create manual backups and also selectively restore specific files, which is highly convenient.

10. Free Domain Name

You also get a free domain name for the first year with Hostinger plans. However, it’s not applicable to the Single Web Hosting plan.

11. Hostinger Training Program

On purchasing a hosting plan using my link, you also get access to my comprehensive Hostinger Training Program. It is designed to help beginners understand how to work with the Hostinger hPanel and its features.

Hostinger Cons

1. Average Indian Servers

The performance of the Indian servers in terms of speeds, uptime, and load management was quite average. I hope they try to improve it in the future.

2. Slow Support Speeds

Their live chat support is helpful and knowledgeable. However, they can try to speed up their pace of replying to queries.

3. Bloatware

Because Hostinger frequently collaborates with many services, Bloatware (pre-installed plugins) is their way of promoting the services of these partner companies. However, these plugins can be disabled with one click!

4. Only 1 SSL Certificate

Hostinger only provides one SSL Certificate per hosting plan. However, you can protect all your sub-domains and add-ons with a free Cloudflare SSL. 

I have discussed the step-by-step process of getting a free SSL from CloudFlare in my Hostinger Training Program. So make sure you check it out!

Who Should Buy Hostinger?

This is the fourth consecutive year of me reviewing Hostinger. I still feel that it’s an excellent hosting provider for beginners on a budget. 

They have improved to a large extent in terms of their interface, backup options, speeds, and ease of use. Though they can work on improving their customer support speeds and the performance of Indian servers, I was satisfied with the overall performance of Hostinger. 

So, if you have a US-based audience, you should go with a Hostinger plan with the US servers. They are offering exceptional speeds and performance. The performance of Hostinger’s Shared hosting plans on the US servers is easily comparable to the performance of Cloud hosting plans!

However, if you have an Indian audience, I won’t be able to recommend their Indian servers. This is because the uptime and speeds that I observed on them were quite average. You can instead go with their Singapore servers that offer swift speeds and performance.

Overall, if you are a beginner who needs shared hosting that’s reliable, affordable, and easy to use, Hostinger is the best option for 2023. I have hosted dozens of my micro-niche blogs and websites on Hostinger and have faced no problems with it yet!

However, if you can increase your budget, then Chemicloud, FastComet, and Cloudways can be powerful hosting solutions as well.

Hostinger Alternatives

For beginners, Hostinger is definitely the go-to hosting solution. But, if you can hike up your budget, these are the best alternatives to Hostinger service.

ChemiCloud

ChemiCloud is an American web hosting provider launched in 2016. Similar to Hostinger, it comes with Litespeed servers that guarantee swift speeds and better performance.

It also offers reliable load management and excellent customer support. Some unique features of Chemicloud include a 45-day refund policy and up to 200 cPanel migrations! Its pricing plans start at $3.95/month.

You can use my link and enter the coupon code CCKRIPESHYT for availing additional discounts.

FastComet

FastComet is another renowned web host launched in 2013 with its headquarters in San Francisco. Just like Hostinger, it comes with lightning fast speeds, good support, affordable pricing, and a good uptime.

Its distinguishing features include a 45-day refund policy and a fixed discount percentage on all durations. Their pricing plans start from $2.95/month.

Cloudways

Cloudways is a popular managed hosting built upon unmanaged hosting providers like Google Cloud, Linode, Digital Ocean, Vultr, and AWS.

Cloudways offers lightning-fast speeds, excellent uptime and load management, global servers, easy options for scalability, and good customer support.

However, unlike Hostinger, it lacks email hosting and offers an impressive pay-as-you-go payment model. It also comes with a slight learning curve. The pricing plans of Cloudways start from $10/month (For Digital Ocean servers).

For additional discounts, you can use my link and enter the coupon code KRIPESH to get a 20% discount on your hosting plan for the first 3 months.

 

Conclusion

Hostinger is a user-friendly, secure, reliable, and affordable hosting option, especially if you are just starting out with your website.

If you are planning to buy a budget-friendly hosting service for your website, you can get an additional 10% off by using my link and coupon code “KRIPESH“.

Purchasing from my link would also give you free entry into my Hostinger Training Program, which is a helpful guide for beginners to get started with Hostinger.  

Anyway, I hope you found this Hostinger Review informative. Want more detailed and honest reviews on this blog? Subscribe to my Newsletter to never miss out on the latest articles!