If you are looking for a managed web hosting, then this Hostinger review will help you make a decision if Hostinger is a service that meets your requirement or, not.
Okay! So I have had quite a journey when it comes to hosting service providers and I have moved across web hosts.
As my portfolio grew, I also had the opportunity of checking out multiple web hosts and almost all the reviews that you see on this website are coming from a real-world experience.
I started off with a cheap hosting, back in 2002 which resulted in us losing all of our data and files. Since then we have never gone for “CHEAP” when it comes to hosting providers.
Our quest has always been for quality, reliability, and support which is possibly why we let go of some of the hosting providers.
I still continue to use Hostgator and Bluehost for Shared hosting and Godaddy for Managed WordPress. Greengeeks is something that I used for WordPress hosting for a few of my websites and they too are really good with their services and support.
But like they say,
Never put all your eggs in one basket.
I too didn’t want to take that risk. That is one of the reasons why I decided to host with multiple hosts. Also, I have clients for whom we build websites and host them.
Back, to the topic of the post – Hostinger review.
I recently moved some of my primary websites to Hostinger. In fact, I was looking for a faster Managed WordPress solution which also gave me the flexibility to control things when it came to the server.
While Hostgator Managed WordPress was a good solution, the problem was that their control panel gave you little control over how to run your websites.
Godaddy Managed WordPress too was good but the problem was they had configured their server timeouts at a little low, because of which some plugins like Thrive Architect, which took slightly higher server resources, had problems updating. Hence you would very frequently see a “server timed out” error.
This was why we had to look for other options. And most other managed WordPress hosting services were priced exorbitantly which I felt was a little unfair.
That’s when I came across Hostinger and I decided to check them out.
It’s been about 6 months that I am using them and I should say that I was pleasantly surprised with their service.
Anyways, let us move into a detailed review of Hostinger Managed WordPress hosting.
Hostinger Review – The Good and the Bad
I am a little too obsessed with customer support. And you will see this in most of my reviews. You can compromise on some of the things if you get a support team who is willing to help, stretch themselves and make you feel comfortable and in safe hands.
I learned this through experience. We often, overlook this critical part to find ourselves in the middle of a mess of a support team who are either rude and often surprise you with “my way or, the highway” statements or, will act out one of Christopher Nolan’s movies – difficult to understand and decipher (Disclaimer – No offenses to Nolan and I am a fan of his movies)
Hence, this review too will have customer support as the most important part. But at the same time, we will also be covering other aspects.
But I didn’t want to go into the details of the company, their start, etc. because for me so much of details of the company history really don’t matter. If they have been in the market for about 10+ years and have only grown since then there definitely is some amount of reliability on the company.
Anyways, Here’s what I will be covering in this review –
- Pricing and Cost to Benefit Evaluation
- Server Control and Options
- Speed and Flexibility
- Ease of use
- Customer Support
I will keep the review simple so that you can easily make a decision.
With that let’s get straight onto the Hosting Review then.
Pricing and Cost-Benefit – Hostinger Managed WordPress Hosting
One of the first things that anybody looks for is affordability. I know how it feels when you have to shell out a lot of money and you haven’t even started.
Hostinger is probably the lowest-priced web hosting service around. I can safely say that you won’t find an even more economical and affordable Managed WordPress hosting service provider anywhere.
Hostinger’s plans are the lowest of any hosting plans in India. The WordPress starter plan where you can host about 100 websites with a decent 100GB storage barely costs about Rs.199 per month.
For that matter, even the plans available at Hostinger USA are also the lowest when compared to some of the other hosting service providers.
Plans start at $1.99 per month and the best valued WordPress Starter plan where you can host about 100 websites is priced at $2.99 per month.
While these managed WordPress plans might not be as comparable to the managed WordPress services provided by some of the bigger names in Managed WordPress Hosting like WP Engine etc., they still take care of most things that you would expect them to, in a WordPress blog.
If you look at it, there isn’t truly anything more than what they manage, that you will need help with. For anything else, you have their support team which has the capability to answer and resolve any kind of issue.
Let us look at some of the features that these plans provide –
- Unlimited bandwidth
- WordPress Optimized Servers
- FREE SSL from Let’s Encrypt
- FREE Domain name
- FREE CDN
- Cloudflare Protected servers
- A beautiful and easy to manage server dashboard
- Unlimited databases
- Unlimited subdomains
- Unlimited FTP accounts
- An excellent caching service at the servers
So if you are looking at all the bells and whistles, then you have it and a little more on Hostinger. And for the price that they charge, the cost-benefit is immense. You can so much more for every dollar that you spend.
Server Control and Options
One of the biggest drawbacks with most Managed WordPress hosting solutions is the minimal control that the hosting providers give you. This is the case with Hostgator (my review here) and similarly with Godaddy (read the Godaddy review here) as well.
While this might not seem to be a big problem at the face of it, the fact is that the lack of control comes in as a pain many a time, for eg: if you want to change the PHP settings.
Another problem that I faced with Godaddy was the inability to install my SSL certificates. Godaddy mandates installing SSL certificates that you have bought from them only, which isn’t something that I liked.
This is exactly what I loved with Hostinger.
You get control over pretty much everything in Hostinger. You can change PHP settings, install your own SSL certificates (but you would not do that because SSL certificates are available for FREE), have complete control over your database and files, etc.
In addition to all this, you even get SSH access and WP CLI access as well. So if you have trouble installing files that are a little on the heavier side, you could easily do it by logging into the server using your SSH access.
Speed and Flexibility
This is one of the most important parts of the service provided by Hostinger and which I just cannot stop admiring. The servers are amazing, blazingly fast, and show a huge improvement in your page load times.
Litespeed Caching
Hostinger uses Litespeed on their servers. Litespeed is much ahead in terms of technology in comparison to Apache which is what most other web hosts use.
In addition to the server configuration, some of the other aspects like the default availability and installation of Litespeed Cache help speed up your website tremendously. And since the servers run on Litespeed, it syncs really well with the Litespeed Caching plugin. Combined together they offer excellent speeds.
PHP7 and PHP8 Support
Hostinger supports PHP7 and this is a huge benefit. PHP 7 is the latest fully compatible with WordPress version in PHP releases and it is much ahead of its predecessor, PHP5 when it comes to speed.
Some benchmark tests show that PHP7 is twice as fast as PHP5, which in turn translates to a faster website loading speed.
While PHP 8 is also available for an upgrade, it isn’t really recommended as of now as there could be compatibility issues with various plugins and themes.
Cutting Edge NGINX Caching
Hostinger’s Managed WordPress plans come with support for NGINX caching. This results in a significant boost in WordPress performance. This is done by turbocharging the loading of static content via streamlining of data. It is said that when it comes to serving static content, Nginx is the king!
NGINX has surpassed Apache in popularity as well, thanks to the better performance and speed that it offers.
HTTP/2 Support
HTTP/2, also called HTTP 2.0 is the successor to HTTP 1.0 and it is much faster, secure, and a lot easier to use in comparison to its predecessor.
HTTP/2 has a lot of features which eventually results in faster page load times. It loads multiples resources together which helps in faster page load times.
Also, HTTP/2 is binary and not textual. This means that it is more compact and hence travels faster and is much more secure than HTTP 1.0.
Overall all of this leads to a faster loading WordPress website.
Ease of use
Dashboards can at times be extremely overwhelming and sometimes confusing. I have even come across dashboards where you need to click here and there to go from one thing to the other.
Add to it the difficulty of accessing the file manager, the database, etc. and you have a disastrous day waiting to happen.
Godaddy’s Managed WordPress hosting has one such confusing dashboard.
Some of the others too have similar dashboards which at times becomes a little difficult to handle.
Hostinger is a lot different when it comes to ease of use. The dashboard is a nice and clean one with all the important information neatly laid out.
Everything that you need is nicely laid out in blocks and is easily accessible. And the interface is the cleanest that you will find.
And you still have all of the things that you look for in a Managed WordPress solution.
1-Click installer
The 1-Click installer in Hostinger gives you access to install numerous different applications in addition to WordPress of course.
But where they are different is in the way you install it and manage your WordPress blog. The installation process is simple and easy.
And once you have installed the WordPress site, you can easily manage it from the hPanel dashboard itself. You can install plugins and manage them by activating and deactivating them from the dashboard itself.
User Friendly Dashboard
We already spoke about the dashboard and its user-friendliness. Hostinger has one of the easiest and cleanest dashboards that I have seen in any hosting provider.
Zyro Website Builder
Zyro is a powerful website builder that comes with an AI writer that writes the basic content for you. Zyro is owned by Hostinger and you get access to this application with your hosting plans.
So if you do not need WordPress or, if you do not want to code your website from scratch, then use Zyro and build a fully functional and feature-rich website and that too using the simple drag and drop plus click and edit feature.
Daily Backups with a Restore Option
What good is a web hosting if they do not take backups of your websites?
Since our first experience when we lost all of our business just because our hosting company did not have a good backup mechanism, we have always ensured that we find hosts that treat backups are a critical aspect of their business.
Also we always keep a secondary backup option for that unforeseen situation. We prefer using Jetpack for that.
Hostinger has an excellent backup solution. They do a daily backup of all your website files and databases.
The best part is their restore option. I should rather say, one-click restore option. It is comparable to that of Godaddy who has the best backup and restore option of all the hosting providers that we have used until now.
Customer Support
And that brings us to the final part – customer support.
Like I said in the beginning, I am a fan of good customer support. I love a support agent coming to me and telling me why it is taking time even if that is because they goofed up, instead of somebody who prefers putting me on hold for minutes together without telling me what is happening.
Hostinger has one of the best customer support around. They are friendly, knowledgeable, understand what real customer service is all about, and cares for their customers.
I reached out to their support multiple times. Many of those were for issues that weren’t really related to the hosting and their support team could have just shooed me away like other hosting providers saying, “it is not our fault”.
But Hostinger support agents patiently listen to me and check if there is anything that they can do to help me. If there is nothing, then they would politely tell me what I need to do and how I need to proceed.
That is what real “going out of the way” to help a customer means. And I am super impressed.
I would recommend Hostinger to anyone, just because of their amazing support. I would say that the excellent services are just a byproduct.
What’s Not Good in Hostinger – The Cons
When I am doing a review, it becomes imperative that I also talk about the cons. Else it will sound as if I am advertising the product. Isn’t it?
But the fact is that there could be situations where you come across a product or, service in which you really aren’t able to find any negatives.
In that case, trying to find a negative would be nit-picking.
It’s the same with Hostinger as well. Though there weren’t really anything negative about their service, I did some nit-picking to find some negatives. But keep in mind that there are really something that you should be concerned about.
Cloudflare Support
Hostinger has Cloudflare support built in their plans. So enabling a CDN for your blog is like clicking an on-off switch.
If you have known how Cloudflare activation works, you would know that it involves changes nameservers and doing some maintenance with DNS etc. All of this is a little pain.
But Hostinger makes it easy by providing you an option in their site management tools. You just click it and Cloudflare can be enabled or, disabled.
Now that’s not a con. Isn’t it?
That’s right!
The con is that, this support is free only for one domain. For every additional domain, you need to pay a small fee.
While I am ok with paying that amount in order to get over that pain of enabling Cloudflare the alternate way, that still pinches.
The only thing I wish is, that the Cloudflare plan could have had a few additional features like their “Auto Content Optimization”, which is otherwise charged at $5.00 per month extra.
Hostinger could always enter into an agreement with Cloudflare and provide some additional features for that extra amount.
But then again, this is more of a nit-picking that a negative about their support.
Lack of On-Demand backup
This is something I wished Hostinger had.
Their plans come with a daily backup option but they do not provide you with an on-demand backup option. This is a feature that GoDaddy offers and comes in real handy when you are doing critical updates to your plugins, themes or, even when you are upgrading your WordPress install to a major release.
Again, this isn’t really a deal breaker. But it would have been a welcome addition, if it was there.
Conclusion – Over to You
Hostinger is the best hosting provider that I have come across until now. Their amazing support coupled with the exceptional services and affordable pricing makes it an ideal solution for both people who are starting out or, are already using other hosting providers.
I would recommend that you check out Hostinger and you will not be disappointed.
You can check out Hostinger here.
How Good is Hostinger?
Hostinger is an excellent solution for your web hosting needs. Their plans are economical in comparison to many of the other hosting providers. The best part is that their servers are extremely fast and helps in your page load speeds.
Overall, you get better value per dollar spent on your hosting services, and hence they are a very good and affordable solution when it comes to web hosting.
Why is Hostinger so Cheap?
The pricing of a web hosting plan depends on a lot of factors. Web hosting providers who have huge infrastructure will have the advantage of volumes. Since the economies of scale kick in, their overall costing for the services tends to be pretty low.
There is still a considerable margin that these companies keep for-profits, to arrive at their final pricing.
Hostinger too might be having these advantages. But they are probably undercutting their profits to provide lower costs to their customers. After all the competition is about customer acquisition.
Is Hostinger safe and legit?
Hostinger is a web hosting company that was established in 2004. So they have been in the business for about 17 years now. They have about 29 million users worldwide and have their subsidiaries in about 178 countries.
They might not be the oldest web hosting provider, yet they have a solid infrastructure, an enthusiastic and energetic team, a solid business goal, and above all a logical and understanding head on their shoulders. These things for sure make them a safe and legit company.
Which is better – Hostinger or, Godaddy?
Hostinger Vs Godaddy – It is Hostinger for me.
But this could be a subjective question and it entirely depends upon what you are looking for. If your requirements are a solid web hosting provider that gives you more value per dollar that you spend, a hosting provider who considers you as an important part of their business, and who values you by providing exceptional customer support, then Hostinger is the answer.
Is Hostinger good for beginners?
Hostinger is the best web hosting solution for beginners. They are affordable, extremely easy to use, have a simple dashboard and interface, and an excellent support team that will handhold you whenever you are stuck with a problem.
Hostinger WordPress Hosting
$2.99/Month
Pros
- Pricing of various plans
- Hosting Features, Server Control and Options
- Excellent Infrastructure with blazing fast page load times
- Amazing Customer Support
- Simple and Easy to Use Dashboard
Cons
- Lack of on-demand Backup
- Cloudflare support is paid