Hostinger is a web hosting company which was founded in 2004 with almost 2 million customers worldwide.
Normally I’m a bit cautious of “cheap” hosting providers, purely because you often get what you pay for, however with Hostinger, this definitely isn’t the case.
Hostinger has grown rapidly over the years, which is one of the reasons I wanted to review this web host. The company boasts lots of interesting and exciting features, with a wide variety of unlimited options.
Hostinger has a real connection with their users. Their social media pages are full of actual photos, information, and customer engagement. It’s so refreshing to come across a company that doesn’t hide behind their ‘four walls’.
Their Twitter feed shows some positive reactions from current users:
Uptime should be a big factor when considering which web host to sign up for. Why? Because uptime determines how long your website stays online for, and this is important regardless of the type of website your hosting.
Bloggers will want to regularly engage with their readers, online stores need to be available so customers can purchase products, and businesses need their customers to be able to access relevant information.
Search engines like Google crawl your website so it can index it for search purposes. If your website experiences extended periods of downtime, this can severely damage your SEO efforts.
Although some web hosts can be a little weird about their uptime guarantees, Hostinger are an open book and confirm that if they fail to maintain their SLA of 99.9%, they will apply a credit of 5% of your monthly hosting fee for the month that you encountered issues.
What I really respect about Hostinger is that they publicly display their server status. They list all of their available servers and show their customers (and potential customers) if there’s been any downtime and how long this went on for.
My experience with Hostinger’s shared hosting has been nothing but awesome. Honestly, I can show you the results! I signed up to UptimeRobot which is a free website uptime monitor.
So far, my WordPress website has not had a single moment of downtime. I signed up for their Single shared hosting plan and installed WordPress from their easy-to-use hosting dashboard (more on that later).
It’s vital for any kind of website to promote fast loading times. No one wants to visit a site that takes ages to load, so yours shouldn’t fall short either. I’m sure you can remember a time where you’ve been waiting for a website to load and have eventually abandoned it.
On average, if a website takes longer than 3 seconds to load, people will start losing interest. In fact, almost half (40%) of people will abandon a site if it doesn’t load quickly. Not only will this affect visitors to your website, but it will also damage your SEO score too.
Hostinger has web hosting servers in the UK, Europe, USA, and Asia. According to Hostinger, these servers are on a 1000 Mbps connection speed to adhere to their loading time SLAs. Naturally, I wanted to check this out for myself and see how long it took for my unoptimised website to load.
I use Bitcatcha to monitor all of my website’s hosting speeds. Google’s recommendation is that a website’s server speed should be no more than 200ms.
After calculating the average server speed from my results above, I am pleased to confirm that my sites worldwide average is 131.8ms which is INCREDIBLY fast! Bitcatcha ranked my website’s performance with an A+ (I feel like I’m back in school)!
These results were tested on Hostinger’s European server, offering superfast speeds across the globe. Whether you host your website in the U.K, U.S., or Asia, Hostinger really do perform well, and you can see from the results this isn’t a bias opinion, it’s a FACT!
Do you remember when I told you that Hostinger really focuses on their customers? Well, it’s true, and here’s another example of how they do it.
Let’s say your website is hosted on Hostinger’s European servers, but you have lots of site visitors from overseas in the U.S. When they land on your website, content like HTML, Javascript, and images have to load, and they can take longer to do this because they have to ping a location from further away.
Hostinger’s Cache Manager means you can enable caching on your website to offer faster loading times and even faster speeds, regardless of where your website visitors are located. Here’s how it works.
Login to hPanel > select Manage on your website > scroll down to Advanced > select Cache Manager
Here you can toggle Automatic cache on or off which will clear your cache every 30 minutes. If you want to manually clear your site’s server cache, simply select Purge All and you’re ready to go!
When I run and monitor my test sites, they are very lightweight in terms of content and images, with a fresh WordPress install. In this case, Cache Manager won’t really offer too much as there’s not a lot of content to cache, however, with more content you’ll really see the benefit of Hostinger’s Cache Manager.
Customer service can often be the deciding point as to whether to sign up to a web host or not. Thankfully, Hostinger didn’t disappoint on this front and I’m going to tell you all about why their customer service is incredible.
Customer Success specialists provide support in 10+ languages.
In their 2018 roundup, Hostinger introduced Intercom (an instant messaging system for companies). Hostinger always listen to their customers and implement improvements and new features to resolve any issues.
When I tested Hostinger’s live chat system, I did so at around 7PM (GMT) when I figured their service may be at it’s busiest. I was really surprised to connect to an agent in less than 1 minute. Once the chat was connected, the support agent started typing and the conversation was underway almost immediately.
The support agent was polite, friendly, and most of all, helpful. His knowledge was astounding and it seemed like he actually cared about the company and its customers. Getting in touch with Hostinger just requires you to select ‘Contact Us‘ at the bottom of their site (really easy to navigate to).
So far, I’ve found Hostinger to be a really good contender in the hosting market. They offer a lot and create affordable web hosting opportunities for many users. Based on my experience, I’m going to outline all the things I love, and the things I don’t like as much, about Hostinger.
Hostinger seems to be one of the few hosting providers that have altered the standard cPanel interface, and honestly, they’ve done a fantastic job of it! It’s one of the easiest control panels I’ve ever come across, and it just works.
Hostinger’s hPanel is so simple to use; the interface is clean and modern, and everything you need is accessible within the click of a button. Each area has its own heading, making it easy to follow instructions, guides, or just intuitively navigate your way through the dashboard.
hPanel is suitable for advanced users who know what they’re doing, as well as beginners who may have never seen a control panel in their life. I’ve seen some absolutely terrible control panels in my lifetime, but thankfully Hostinger offers something unique and frankly beautiful!
When you sign up to Hostinger’s Premium or Business plans, you’ll get unlimited email accounts (absolutely free). These are all managed through the simple control panel that I showed you above.
You can manage all of your email accounts in one place. This also covers spam filters, your email usage, and… well, anything email related, to be honest! It’s really easy to set up email auto-responses, forward emails, and enable/disable accounts if you have more than one.
Price isn’t everything when it comes to web hosting (yes, affordable is nice) – there’s actually a lot to consider. However, Hostinger really set the bar when it comes to cheap web hosting, whilst offering great features and easy experience.
Factors that I take into consideration are:
Yes, you’re seeing the price correctly, £2.59 per month for web hosting. That’s incredibly affordable. It does annoy me when web hosts advertise their monthly costs based on a long-term contract (although this happens with nearly every provider).
Visit Hostinger.co.uk (£2.59/Month)
With the Premium plan, you’ll get the following included:
With Business plan (£3.99 per month) you get better features. The price difference is not huge and you get increased performance, 200 GB NVMe Storage and daily backups.
Get an additional 10% by using our code UKWEBHOST.
If the 9 other factors on this list weren’t enough, Hostinger’s Premium and Business plans offer unlimited features which will certainly be beneficial for small businesses.
It was quite tough finding things that weren’t great about Hostinger because they honestly are a fantastic host. However, it’s almost impossible to find a web hosting company without any flaws, so I spent a lot of time thinking about the things that frustrated me about this host.
I could only really muster up two things that disappointed me, but all-in-all, this didn’t change my opinion on Hostinger being one of my favourite web hosts on the market today.
As I mentioned in the Customer Support section of my review, live chat is only available if you’re logged in. You’ll need a Hostinger account to do this, so if you’re not a customer, you can’t make use of live chat.
This is frustrating for me (and I’m sure others) because if you have pre-sales questions, you can’t ask them quickly. This may put potential customers off from signing up to Hostinger. I’m pleased that live chat is available if you’re a customer, but it would be nice if the web host changed this to be available to all users sometime in the future.
This was a real stinger for me because so many other web hosts offer free daily backups with their hosting plans.
Daily backups are only available on Hostinger’s Business Shared Hosting plan which is £3.99 per month. Whilst it’s still not considered an expensive hosting plan, it is more expensive than their Premium Web Hosting plan.
However, if you have signed up for another shared hosting plan with Hostinger that isn’t their Business plan, you can add daily backups as an optional extra by going into hPanel, navigating to Files, then selecting Backups.
You can add daily backup for just £0.95 per month, which is actually fairly decent, but a little frustrating nonetheless. Saying that Hostinger’s introductory prices are a steal, and they need to make their money from somewhere.
It’s not all doom and gloom though, all of Hostinger’s plans include free weekly backups, so that’s something at least!
After reviewing and testing Hostinger, most definitely YES!
Hostinger is incredibly affordable, starting from just £2.59 per month. Hostinger’s performance records were solid when I reviewed them, and I think they’re a suitable choice for most users.
Their hPanel interface is one of the best on the market, with easy 1-click installs, additional features, and quick enabling of free features like their Cache Manager.
If you’re looking for a web host that offers fantastic web hosting, great website speeds, and incredible customer service, Hostinger is the right choice for you.
To be honest it’s incredible value for money and the first time in a long time that a host has come into the market with such an offering, both in performance and price.
Here’s a quick summary of Hostinger:
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Features:
Website: www.hostinger.co.uk
Price: £2.59/Month
| BANDWIDTH | Unlimited |
| STORAGE | 100GB |
| DOMAIN NAME | FREE |
| MySQL | 1 |
| FTP | Unlimited |
| DASHBOARD | CUSTOM |
Yes, with the yearly subscription of their Premium and Business plans
Yes, Hostinger will transfer and migrate your website from another host to their platform, free of charge. If you use a common platform like WordPress then it’s usually a quicker process, but if not, they’ll still help you transfer your site.
Hostinger can’t directly help you build a website, but they do have an expert team of support agents that specialise in web hosting. Their hosting plans include a free website builder, so it’s easy to create your website from scratch. Alternatively, they have plenty of auto-installers like WordPress, so the world is pretty much your oyster.