You need the right web hosting service to run your website and keep it alive even as your business grows. This Hostinger review will show you the options and features you’ll get from this popular hosting provider that serves over 29 million users across the world, including Australia.
While Hostinger doesn’t provide dedicated hosting or telephone support—and it does have its drawbacks—it still may be the right fit for your small business website. Key features include a hosting plan, domain name, website builder, secure sockets layer (SSL) certificates and an intuitive hPanel.
Pros
- Website builder available for all plans
- Optional Hostinger Minecraft server
- Multilingual customer support
- High user ratings on Trustpilot and HostAdvice
Cons
- No cPanel
- No servers in Australia
- No telephone support
- Nonstandard refund terms
- Only one email account on the single shared hosting plan
Table of Contents
What Is Hostinger?
Hostinger is a cheap web hosting service available on a custom-built hPanel, as opposed to cPanel, with advanced features. It is suitable for beginners and professionals, and you can build your website from scratch using Hostinger’s Zyro website builder.
It offers its users a 99.9% uptime guarantee. Also, it will keep you connected with its quick loading speed, dedicated IPs and servers operating on leading CloudLinux from 10 data centres. You’ll also gain complete control of your server thanks to Hostinger’s full root access.
Featured Partners
1
Bluehost
Starting price
$2.95 per month
Standout Features
Free domain name & SSL for a year
Money Back Guarantee
30 Day
2
HostGator
Starting price
$US3.75 ($5.62 AUD) per month
Storage and Bandwidth
Unmetered
Extras and inclusions
Free domain registration for a year, free website and domain transfer, free SSL certificate, free email
3
Ionos
Starting price
$US1 ($1.50 AUD) per month for the first six months
Storage and bandwidth
10GB of storage and unlimited traffic
Extras and inclusions
Free domain, free SSL certificate, daily backups, one email account
Hostinger Web Hosting Services
Hostinger offers three plans for hosting your website, each with specific features so you can choose the one suited to your needs. For example, the Single web hosting plan is fine if you want to build a simple website. For more capacity and functionality, such as a WordPress staging tool, unlimited databases and daily backups, your best option is Hostinger’s business plan.
Regardless of your chosen plan, you can always upgrade it as your business grows. Also, Hostinger is flexible, providing a wide range of specialised hosting services. These services include VPS hosting, cloud hosting, WordPress hosting, email hosting and the Hostinger Minecraft server. Hostinger’s range of use cases allows you to scale your website with the specific features you need.
Hostinger also offers a generous suite of resources including email accounts, custom domains, unlimited free SSL certificates and regular backups at low rates.
How Does It Work?
A website requires specific services to go live on the web. A web hosting platform provides the storage space, security and connectivity your website needs. It also offers features such as email hosting, domain registration, regular backups and DDoS monitoring.
Investing in a web hosting platform means you will enjoy the benefits of building an online presence without having to manage numerous servers or deal with backend issues.
Key Features
A web host typically provides reliable hosting with adequate storage and uptime, quick speed, scalability, security features such as DDoS monitoring and regular backup frequency, as well as support options and cost-saving extras like unlimited SSL certificates.
Below are the most important features a web host should have:
- Reliable uptime: At least 99.9% uptime guarantee per month
- Adequate storage: Enough to handle your website traffic
- Regular backup: Consistent backups every day or week
- Support: With different contact options—especially important for Australian-based businesses
- Security: SSL certificates and DDoS monitoring
- High bandwidth: Sufficient bandwidth to handle your website traffic
- Email: Business -grade email addresses or the ability to connect with your domain
- Domains: Customised domains available for free or at subsidised costs on long-term commitments
Hostinger provides these necessary resources to support and keep your content secure, and make visitors trust your website.
Hostinger Pricing
Hostinger offers three shared web hosting plans, ranging from $US2.99 ($4.53 AUD) to $US9.99 ($15.15 AUD) per month. As Hostinger doesn’t have a separate Australian entity or web site, all prices are listed in US dollars rather than AUD.
There are four VPS plans with pricing between $US4.49 ($6.82 AUD) per month to $US19.99 ($30.35 AUD) per month. Hostinger also provides cloud hosting for those who want to host websites with large-scale projects. For cloud hosting plans, you’ll see rates between $US9.99 ($15.15 AUD) and $US29.99 ($45.52 AUD) per month.
Remember that these advertised per-month rates on Hostinger’s website are for those willing to commit for long-term plans and are introductory rates. The longer you commit, the greater discount you’ll get—as much as 70% off the stipulated month-to-month price. Users can commit to as long as a year, two years or four years (you should note that you won’t be getting discounted rates when you renew).
Premium Web Hosting
Hostinger has revamped its plans and no longer offers single web hosting. Instead, its Premium web hosting plan is now its most basic plan for shared hosting. It is still ideal for beginners and comes cheap at $US2.99 ($4.53 AUD) per month. The plan offers 100 websites, 100GB of allocated Solid-State Drive (SSD) storage, unlimited bandwidth, and a free email and free domain. It also provides unlimited SSL certificates, a file manager and a cache manager.
The Premium web hosting plan offers 24/7 customer service. Also, it has a low cost since it exists on a shared server, and you’ll be sharing the cost with other users, but keep in mind that sharing a server with several other users compromises your site speed.
Its low rate is only available with a 48-month commitment, jumping as high as $US9.99 ($12.13 AUD) on a monthly commitment. The plan also lacks daily backups, and instead your site is backed up weekly.
Business Web Hosting
Hostinger Business web hosting plan is the best option for businesses looking to level up their web hosting. The plan is optimised for small and medium businesses. It packs all the features of the Hostinger Premium plan and adds extra capacity and functionality. The extra features include 200GB SSD storage, daily backups separate from its website storage, two CPU cores and 600,000 inodes.
Subscribing to this plan means that you will also get 30 entry processes and 60 active processes, 128 input/output operations per second and 100,000 visits per month. Hostinger Business web hosting plan starts at $US3.99 ($6.06 AUD) per month, which becomes $US8.99 or $13.65 AUD when you renew.
Cloud Startup
Hostinger now offers a Cloud Startup plan as its top-tier offer, with 300 websites, 200 GB NVMe Storage, daily backups, unlimited Free SSL and unlimited bandwidth. There is also a free email, domain , CDN and dedicated IP address, plus priority support—something the other plans lack.
Promotional Pricing, Renewals and Refunds
Hostinger has various pricing tiers for its shared web hosting and specialised hosting features. The plans are prepaid and not divisible by instalments. These plans can be as low as $US2.99 ($4.53 AUD) per month. However, you’ll need to commit to a four-year plan to enjoy such discounted rates.
Hostinger also offers a 30-day money-back guarantee, so you’ll get a refund if you don’t get what you signed up for. However, you should note that the money-back guarantee doesn’t cover payments for SEO Toolkit, SEO marketing panel, privacy protection, domain name renewals, VPS license and a few other products. Also, Hostinger won’t refund any product you purchase with digital assets, cryptocurrencies or tokens.
Hostinger Specialised Hosting Services
Hostinger offers more hosting services, including VPS hosting, Cloud hosting, WordPress hosting, Email hosting and Minecraft server hosting. These specialised hosting services enable users with specific needs to host their websites on Hostinger. For example, you can pay for any of its four VPS hosting plans if you need a private server or want to integrate website design features such as Python and Node.js.
VPS Hosting
If you’re looking for a choice of VPS hosting packages, you will like Hostinger. There are four VPS plans, giving you plenty of choice for your dedicated server hosting. It has multiple virtual private servers (VPS) across the United States, United Kingdom, Singapore, Lithuania, Brazil and the Netherlands to provide you with close servers and optimum website performance—however there are no servers in Australia. You can also access data through its Network File System (NFS) and expand your server space with additional remote NFS.
Hostinger’s VPS plans will provide you with your own server, the latest Intel Xeon processors and terabytes of NVMe SSD storage, 512GB RAM and CPU power all within your control. You’ll also get full root access to install supported operating systems (OS), track your resources in real time and configure your server settings. You can also work on resource-heavy projects since you’re not sharing server hosting.
Apart from the speed advantage you’ll get from Hostinger VPS hosting, there is BitNinja’s full-stack server protection, built-in advanced DDoS protection and dedicated IP to keep your server secure. You’ll also get automated backups and manual live snapshots to restore your site if there’s ever a glitch.
Cloud Hosting
Hostinger offers cloud hosting for larger-scale projects that require more flexibility and speed. All Hostinger cloud hosting packages run on isolated virtual servers, and you can change to any of the online cloud server systems across the world. With instant activation, you will access features on any of Hostinger’s three plans since they all come with a free domain name, automated backups and unlimited free SSL certificates for security.
With Hostinger cloud hosting plans offering you high-speed CPUs, large RAM and a built-in cache manager, you’ll enjoy fast website load speeds that improve user experience. Also, Hostinger takes care of the backend, including site monitoring, maintenance and server uptime 24/7, so you can better focus on getting your website running.
WordPress Hosting
WordPress is a content management system (CMS) for building and managing websites. Hostinger offers managed WordPress hosting and support from WordPress experts through its plans, which all include free SSL certificates and access management. They also enable eCommerce Optimisation, Git integration and free migration from other web hosting services.
Hostinger WordPress hosting is powered by LiteSpeed, the fastest web server, which combines with the LiteSpeed Cache plugin to give you speed optimisation.
Email Hosting
For as low as $US1.59 ($2.41 AUD) per month, Hostinger provides email hosting for users. This service functions separately from website hosting, meaning you can operate the email servers while setting up your website. You’ll enjoy features such as a built-in calendar and contacts, scheduling, follow-up reminders, mail filtering and email and contact imports.
Hostinger also provides email templates, multi-account support, read receipts, and up to 50GB of email storage. Businesses can send messages using as many as 50 different aliases. They can also call for support at any time of the day.
Hostinger also integrates with Google Workspace to collaborate your messages, documents, meetings and tasks. Access basic emailing features, a custom email address, smart compose and reply, grammar suggestions, unlimited mail filters and advanced security measures that protect your account from cybersecurity threats. Also, access chat messages, emails and voice and video calls on the same platform. Video meetings can have as many as 100 participants, but you won’t be able to record.
For your email hosting, Hostinger also integrates with Titan to provide the necessary tools for maintaining communication and collaborating with your teams and customers. Besides usual email hosting functionality, this hosting service includes a one-click import of existing emails and contacts from a previous email hosting provider. It also enables custom DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM), which authenticates your domain ownership.
Hostinger Ease of Use
Hostinger was designed with exceptional ease of use in mind, so you don’t need to be an expert to use it. From the point of signing up right into the actual web hosting, you will find it easy to navigate its features. Also, Hostinger wizard and its 24/7 customer service are available to walk you through any help you might need.
User Experience
Hostinger offers a smooth user experience. Its custom-created hPanel is organised, making it easy for users to navigate. Hostinger’s intuitive interface and drag-and-drop feature make customising websites easy, even for beginners.
Also, Hostinger’s hPanel is localised in 15 languages, allowing anyone to set it up without help.
Installation and Set Up
Hostinger ranks high when it comes to how easy it is to install and set up. The Hostinger wizard gives users a guided setup, walking them through every step to install and set up their dream website. The dashboard is also user-friendly, with easy-to-read fonts, powerful tools and reliable servers.
Also, you can access the searchable Hostinger knowledge base, with several articles and answers to frequently asked questions.
Customer Support
Hostinger’s support team is available 24/7 to navigate you through any inquiries or issues you might have working on your website. The team is available via live chat, but you’ll need to be logged in to your account to communicate with them. There’s also a complete knowledge base of guides, tutorials and video walk-throughs on topics such as site migration, site maintenance and performance. The knowledge base is there to help you answer questions while you await a vetted professional. However, you won’t get phone support on Hostinger.
Hostinger Performance
We can’t do a Hostinger review without telling you about Hostinger’s performance, so let’s do that next. Site tests on Hostinger revealed to us that Hostinger keeps its promise of high speed, advanced security, 99.9% uptime and smooth integration with WordPress. For example, it pulled a solid 100% uptime record in over seven weeks of monitoring.
Speed
It’s easy to think that Hostinger’s shared hosting packages will falter in speed since you’re sharing resources with other users, but that’s not the case. Hosting your website on any of Hostinger’s plans will give you the speed you need to host your website, thanks to its technology.
Hostinger has data centres in Europe, Asia, North America and South America (but not Australia) to make sure there is a server close to your audience, keeping the overall loading times fast. These servers operate on CloudLinux, the leading operating system (OS) for web hosting providers. Also, Hostinger uses the LiteSpeed web server, which ranks as one of the fastest web servers. You’ll also get a cache manager for quicker load times and improved speed.
We love that Hostinger keeps renewing its systems with the latest LiteSpeed technologies to ensure users get improved speed and quick site loads.
Uptime
You need your website to stay up as much as possible, as downtimes mean loss of potential sales and bad ranking on search engines. Hostinger promises users a 99.9% uptime guarantee. It uses the leading operating systems to host your website. Also, Hostinger strives to maintain an almost-perfect uptime by regularly renewing its systems against DDoS attacks.
If Hostinger fails to meet its 99.9% guaranteed uptime for any month, you can request for a credit of 5% of your hosting fee for that month. You can use the credit to buy other products without any applicable taxes.
Security
You need adequate security to protect your website content and visitor data from cyberattacks. Thankfully, Hostinger takes security seriously by protecting your website on multiple security levels. For instance, Hostinger protects websites from malware and malicious activities by combining BitNinja with complete DDoS protection, Cloudflare and an in-house firewall.
Hostinger also provides SSL certificates with all website hosting plans to protect your website and encrypt visitor information, thereby protecting them from being compromised. Also, daily or weekly backups are available to ensure the safekeeping of your files and databases.
Integrations and WordPress Optimisation
Hostinger has everything you need for WordPress, ranging from LiteSpeed-powered servers, which provide faster load times for better search engine optimisation and user experience and higher conversion rates, to an LSCWP cache plugin for improving your website performance. Hostinger has custom-built advanced WordPress optimisation tools. For example, all its shared plans come with adequate SSD storage, automatic WordPress updates, expert support and one-click installation for building your website right away.
Featured Partners
1
Bluehost
Starting price
$2.95 per month
Standout Features
Free domain name & SSL for a year
Money Back Guarantee
30 Day
2
HostGator
Starting price
$US3.75 ($5.62 AUD) per month
Storage and Bandwidth
Unmetered
Extras and inclusions
Free domain registration for a year, free website and domain transfer, free SSL certificate, free email
3
Ionos
Starting price
$US1 ($1.50 AUD) per month for the first six months
Storage and bandwidth
10GB of storage and unlimited traffic
Extras and inclusions
Free domain, free SSL certificate, daily backups, one email account
Summary: Is Hostinger Right for You?
Whether you’re just starting your blog, want to shift your business online or swap your web hosting provider for a better one, it is important that you choose the right hosting service. While Hostinger provides good hosting functionality at affordable rates, you need to decide if it is the right fit for your specific needs.
When To Choose Hostinger
Hostinger is a great choice if you’re looking to migrate your site from an underperforming or overpriced hosting provider or want to host your new website with a quality yet affordable web hosting service. We also recommend Hostinger for anyone seeking a hosting platform that accommodates beginners.
Also, if you want to build and host your website in one place, Hostinger is a good option since it has website building plans bundled with its web hosting services.
When To Consider Another Hosting Service
While Hostinger is easy to use, if you require phone conversations to resolve complex issues, you might want to try another website hosting platform. Also, if you’re not ready to commit to four years, it’s better to stay clear of Hostinger’s plans, which become costlier as your commitment reduces.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Is Hostinger a good web hosting service?
While Hostinger might not be the top-rated web hosting service on our list, it offers website hosting for simple websites and e-commerce stores that are still growing. Its features are available at affordable rates, with discounts for longer commitments.
Is Hostinger fast?
Yes, Hostinger is fast. It uses leading operating systems to host websites and the company keeps renewing its systems to give you advanced speed from data centers located around the world.
Is Hostinger free?
No, Hostinger is not a free web hosting service. However, its web hosting packages, including shared web hosting and specialised VPS hosting, cloud hosting, email hosting and WordPress hosting, are all available in different tiers, allowing you to choose the one you can afford. You can also change between tiers as your needs change.
Is Hostinger good for blogging?
Yes, Hostinger is good for blogging, thanks to its high-level uptime, security and speed. Also, its web hosting and building package, which embeds Zyro, will provide you with artificial intelligence features and analytics that can help you run a relevant blog that drives traffics and engages readers.
Is Hostinger good for e-commerce?
Yes, Hostinger is good for e-commerce, but you will need to pay for Hostinger’s website builder, Zyro. You can do that via its Business plan. Running your e-commerce with Hostinger’s Zyro offers benefits such as inventory management, delivery management and multiple payment options. However, remember that you cannot sell more than 500 products on Zyro.
How do I transfer a domain to Hostinger?
If you’ve purchased a domain name from a domain registrar, there is no need to worry. Hostinger makes it easy to connect web hosting to an existing domain. All you need to do is copy and paste your name server information into your domain panel on Hostinger.
Does Hostinger have a website builder?
Yes, Hostinger has a web builder, Zyro, in its hosting plans. The web hosting and building package is an all-in-one website solution with the tools and functionality you need to create a personal website or e-commerce site. It includes over a hundred customisable templates, unmetered traffic, unlimited free SSL certificates and more, allowing you to build up to 100 websites.
Does Hostinger have cPanel?
No, Hostinger does not have cPanel. Instead, it has hPanel, which enables automatic installations and DNS zone configuration. It also allows you to manage hosting and FTP features and utilise MySQL databases and Hostinger File Manager. With Hostinger hPanel, you can monitor bandwidth, disk storage and park domains and seamlessly install software such as WordPress and Joomla.
Does Hostinger support Node.js?
Hostinger does not support this runtime environment on its shared and cloud hosting packages, but you can install the Node.js feature on any of Hostinger’s VPS plans.
Does Hostinger support Python?
Yes, you can use Python on any of the Hostinger VPS packages. However, the shared hosting packages do not support using Python for your project.
Does Hostinger support WordPress?
Yes, Hostinger supports websites built on WordPress.
Forbes Advisor adheres to strict editorial integrity standards. To the best of our knowledge, all content is accurate as of the date posted, though offers contained herein may no longer be available. The opinions expressed are the author’s alone and have not been provided, approved, or otherwise endorsed by our partners.
