Hostinger Review: Dissected by 3 Members of the Themeisle Team

The internet is filled with a lot of Hostinger reviews. Unfortunately, the large majority of them are not based on any sort of firsthand experience. Instead, they’re composed of regurgitated information taken from the Hostinger website mixed with some generic text to make them “original.” The worst ones even scrape existing reviews and just remix them with AI. The end result is mediocre reviews that don’t give any sort of real world insight into what it’s like to actually be a Hostinger customer.

This review aims to be different. Very different. I recently conducted an in-house survey among my colleagues, where I asked them which hosting company they used for their personal websites. It turns out that quite a number of them, including our support team manager, responded with Hostinger.

So I decided to interview him and two of my other colleagues about their personal experiences as Hostinger customers. I asked them their opinions on Hostinger’s pricing, what it’s like to navigate the interface, whether or not they’ve reached out to customer support, and finally, their thoughts on their sites’ performance. In addition, a fourth colleague, who also has a Hostinger account, let me access it so that I could get a feel for using their service.

The end result of my personal experimentation combined with interviewing my co-workers is below.

Meet the Themeisle Hostinger crew

Before we get started, I wanted to do a quick meet-and-greet with my colleagues. This way you’ll understand what they do, how long they’ve been using Hostinger, and why they signed up for the service in the first place. Part of their opinion will be influenced by these factors so it’s good to keep them in mind as you’re reading.

Show me the money! (plans and pricing) 💸

I know conventional sales wisdom says to talk about features before you discuss money, but I don’t work for Hostinger and I’m not here to sell you anything.

The way I see it is that you probably have a budget or a ballpark idea of how much you’d like to spend on your hosting plan. So, you might as well see if Hostinger fits into your price range before you do anything else.

If it does, then great! If it doesn’t, then you don’t need to spend anymore time here. Instead you can head over to our roundup of the cheapest hosting companies for some alternative options. However, keep in mind that Hostinger is already considered one of the cheapest hosts out there. It’s even featured in that aforementioned article, and while it might not be thee cheapest, it’s not too far off either.

Types of hosting available with Hostinger

Hostinger has a very attractive lineup of hosting options, including:

Web hosting: starting from $2.69 per month
Cloud hosting: from $9.99 per month
VPS hosting: from $4.49 per month
Managed WordPress hosting: from $2.69 per month
AI-powered website builder (for beginners): from $2.69 per month
Email hosting: from $1.59 per month

All plans above reflect annual billing and promotional rates. They renew at their normal (higher) rate.

My two cents:

Obviously you can see the numbers above for yourself, but in my opinion, I’d say that Hostinger’s pricing is overall very competitive. Especially with respect to what they include in their plans and how much they charge.

To give you some data-backed perspective on why I feel this way, take a look at this comparison table of Hostinger’s entry-level plans versus a few popular competitors:

HostPrice per monthNumber of sitesFree domainDisk spaceBandwidthHostinger$2.69100✅100 GBUnmeteredBluehost$2.751✅10 GB15,000 / monthNamecheap$1.583✅20 GBUnmeteredA2 Hosting$2.991❌100 GBUnmeteredSiteGround$2.991❌10 GB10,000 / month

Hostinger clearly wins in the number of sites you can build, and it ties for first in disk space. It also offers a free domain in your first year and provides unmetered bandwidth, which is not the case across the board.

Let’s see what my colleagues think about it.

What the Themeisle crew says:

How satisfied are you with Hostinger’s pricing and overall do you feel like you are getting your money’s worth?

Overall, my opinion was generally validated by all three of them. They agreed that Hostinger offers good value for the money and they are satisfied with their plans.

Behind the steering wheel (user interface) 🎛️

If you are okay with the pricing and you were sold on my and my colleagues’ testaments to Hostinger being worth the money, then you’re probably interested in what it’s like to actually use their website. Let’s talk about it!

My two cents:

As I mentioned in the intro, a fourth co-worker of mine also has a Hostinger account and she let me use it for the purposes of conducting this review. Using her email and password, I logged in, and was greeted with Hostinger’s take on the cPanel, which they call the hPanel:

If I’m being blunt, the hPanel bares little resemblance to cPanel. I think they chose the name as more of a marketing tactic rather than an accurate representation of the interface. This isn’t necessarily a huge problem, but if you’re expecting a cPanel experience then you should leave your expectation at the door.

The hPanel is much more of a beginner’s style control panel with way less options.

On the positive side, I did find it easy to navigate, with the top menu bar being labeled in a very straightforward fashion. My only gripe with it is that it doesn’t really make the best use of space.

For example, there is a menu item named Emails and another named VPS, but the plan my coworker is on doesn’t have email included and it’s not a VPS plan. So when I clicked on each of those menu items, I was led to upsell pages for those products. I found that annoying. In my humble opinion, the navigation menu should be reserved for practical use. It should make it easy for me to get to different sections – sections that are available to me – and not as a placeholder to try to sell me stuff.

Overall though, I think it’s easy to use, but if you do get stuck, you can tap the little icon on the bottom right to get help. This will lead you to their knowledge base where you can (hopefully) find your solution. If you can’t, then you can contact their live chat (more on that soon).

If you find the hPanel limiting and do in fact want a cPanel experience, then you can always switch to one of Hostinger’s cPanel hosting plans.

What the Themeisle crew says:

Talk to me about Hostinger’s user interface. What do you like about it? Is there anything you don’t like about it or that could be better?

Roadside assistance (customer support) 🤝

One of the most overlooked features that people nearly forget about when they’re signing up for a hosting plan is customer support. I think it’s partially because it doesn’t have the “excitement factor” behind it.

With pricing, you can get excited about it if you think you’re getting a great deal. Similarly, you can feel enthusiastic about the user interface because you can visualize yourself using it. But who wants to visualize themselves talking to customer support?

Nobody.

Because talking to customer support means that something has gone wrong or you’re stuck in some way.

But, as much as we don’t want to think about that situation, it may very well happen, and if it does, you want to make sure that the support is reliable. So how does Hostinger fare? Let’s take a look.

Hostinger support options

Whether you prefer self-help options or need more of a personal touch, Hostinger has you covered.

✅ For self help, they have numerous tutorials – including video tutorials and webinars. They also offer a knowledge base, neatly categorized by subject, and an AI-powered “personal assistant.”
✅ For more of a personal touch, you can reach them via live chat or email.
❌ Unfortunately, for those of you who like to talk on the phone, there’s no phone support.

My two cents:

I decided to test Hostinger’s live chat for myself and I quickly realized that actually finding where it is, is a challenge in and of itself. Hostinger really wants you to solve your own problem before attempting to contact them, and their support funnel is set up precisely in a way to encourage that.

Remember that little icon on the bottom right I mentioned in the previous section?

Based on its appearance, most people would identify that as a “chat icon.” But as I mentioned earlier, it doesn’t open up to a live chat. Instead, it takes you to Hostinger’s knowledge base where they greet with you with endless resources. But depending on your perspective and how frustrated you are, you could interpret those resources as speed bumps on the road to reaching someone.

If none of the resources help you (or you’re just determined to use the live chat), you can scroll to the bottom of the page. There you’ll find the “Chat now” button.

I did precisely that, and ended up having a conversation with an AI bot. To my surprise, it was actually really good. I’ve interacted with a few of these AI chatbots in the past and never have I been as impressed as I was with Hostinger’s.

I asked it a few questions about installing WordPress. In between each question there was a bit of a pause for it to process what I was asking and then it gave me a solid answer.

Hostinger also made it clear that if somehow the AI couldn’t help me, that there were humans available as the next line of support. What wasn’t clear is how exactly I could talk to these agents. I assume that if the AI gets stuck on something, then it will ping a human to step in and take over. For what it’s worth, I did notice in the chat history that my colleague had previously interacted with a human so that gives some validation to my theory.

What the Themeisle crew says:

Have you ever reached out to Hostinger’s customer support, and if so, via what channel(s)? How would you describe your interaction(s)?

Vroom-vroom-vroom! (website performance) 🚀

Let’s wrap this up by examining how your website might perform if you decide to sign up for one of Hostinger’s plans.

It’s important to note that your performance will be affected by the plan you choose. This is because higher level plans are naturally designed to support more resource intensive websites.

If someone has a large ecommerce store with a lot of customer data and heavy traffic, and they sign up for Hostinger’s entry-level plan but then find their performance isn’t up to par – that’s not really Hostinger’s fault. That’s on the person for trying to cut corners.

The message here is: don’t be that guy (or gal). Sign up for a plan that appropriately matches the needs of your site and you’ll find that Hostinger’s performance will generally be good.

My two cents:

For this particular section, I decided to tap into our company’s resource bank to provide you with some real performance and uptime data. If you’ve read any of our other hosting articles then you might already be aware of this. In case you’re not though, here’s the breakdown of our process:

A while back we decided to sign up for the entry-level plan with several major hosting companies for the purposes of running performance tests. To do this, we set up identical dummy websites with some simple content and a few plugins that a “basic” website would have. We then tested how fast those sites loaded from several locations around the world.

The rationale behind this is that we wanted to make sure that when we talk about any given hosting company, that we have real world data to both assess and validate our conclusions.

We gradually grew this portfolio, and as of the time of this writing, we have 20 subscription plans that we run monthly tests on. One of them, unsurprisingly, is Hostinger.

What you’re looking at below is the result of last month’s test results for loading time. We use a shortcode mechanism to update the results, which allows you, the reader, to always see the most recent data:

In addition to the loading times, we also monitor the uptime of Hostinger’s service. The three most recent months are below:

I’ll finish my two cents here by adding that one really nice feature that I like about Hostinger with regards to performance is that they have servers in multiple locations around the world. This means that if the majority of your audience or customers are coming from a particular region, then you can change your server location to that region (or whatever server is closest to it) to boost your performance.

What the Themeisle crew says:

In terms of performance, has Hostinger met, not met, or exceeded your expectations? Can you provide any more detail or an example?

My final two cents on Hostinger 🏁

First, I hope your expectations were met and that you got some insight out of this.

Second, if you’re still not completely over the fence in either direction, then my final bit of advice is this:

Hostinger has been a trustworthy, reliable mainstay in the hosting space for many years now. Their pricing, relative to the features they offer, is very attractive compared to popular alternatives. As long as you choose a hosting plan that aligns with your site’s resource demands, you’ll be in good hands.

The last question I asked all three of my colleagues was whether or not they were planning on transferring out of Hostinger to another hosting company. All three of them answered “no.”

‘Nuff said.

👉 Go to Hostinger

* Some of my colleagues’ responses were gently edited by me for clarity.

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