Hostinger is a lot like the Starbucks of hosting. It’s a giant company, currently serving almost 30 million customers around the world. It’s got shared, cloud, and VPS solutions, and data centers on four different continents.
All this sounds great, but what’s really interesting is those super-low prices.
If you’re like me, those prices make you raise an eyebrow. Let’s face it – your website is going to need its daily dose of energy. You don’t want to commit to a cheap, long-term plan, only to be stuck with a big cup of lukewarm decaf..
I decided to check if Hostinger can really provide quality hosting for such low prices, or if this is yet another case of “you get what you pay for.”
Now, when I say quality, I mean quality. I wouldn’t want you to sign up for a host that doesn’t meet my standards as far as speed, performance, features, ease of use, and customer support are concerned.
Don’t take any risks. Read on to find out if Hostinger is the right host for you.
Powerful Features Give You Absolute Control
Some web hosts force you to build a site that plays nicely with their own limitations. They make you think small and dream small, leading to a final product that’s miles away from what you’d originally envisioned.
A few years back, it happened to me. A low-cost plan lured me in, and after setting up my blog, I realized that not only was my drive limited to a measly 200MB, but that the company didn’t offer email hosting. Cue purchasing additional hosting and paying double.
Hostinger is the exact opposite of these hosts. Instead of limiting you, it provides a canvas to your imagination.
With Hostinger you’ll enjoy an excellent mix of beginner-friendly and advanced features. If this is your first time using a web host, worry not – Hostinger does most of the heavy lifting for you. One-click installations can get your new blog up in seconds, and the company has its servers optimized especially for WordPress.
If you have some experience in web development, you’ll appreciate the many extra features the platform offers. Among them are integrations with CloudFlare CDN, daily and weekly website backups, and website caching to speed up loading for your visitors.
Hostinger’s plans are divided into shared, cloud, and VPS categories, with each plan offering a slightly different mix of features and options. As such, it’s important to identify your needs and choose accordingly. Small to medium websites, whether personal blogs or local business pages, will be very comfortable with the shared hosting plans.
International e-commerce brands and big businesses, on the other hand, require customized solutions that include custom backups and restore points, staging environments, development frameworks, and much more.
Such advanced needs are usually met by VPS hosting or dedicated servers. While it doesn’t offer dedicated hardware, Hostinger does provide a nice variety of VPS configurations to choose from.
Now, let’s take a look at some of the most interesting features Hostinger has to offer.
The hPanel Control Panel Makes Managing Your Hosting a Cinch
I’ve encountered quite a few control panels during my online travels, all aiming to provide the most feature-rich user experience. Surprisingly, I never had the pleasure of using hPanel. Never even heard of it. But it sure sounded familiar.
It turns out that Hostinger took cPanel, the industry standard for hosting control panels, and slyly switched the “c” with an “h”. Clever devils.
At its core, this the same old lovable cPanel, and anybody who’s ever used it before will feel right at home. It offers all the usual hosting features, although Hostinger did revamp the technology behind it.
Like cPanel, Hostinger’s panel lets you easily install a CMS and set up your account information, email accounts and integrations, domain configurations, databases, files, permissions, and more.
One of the interesting things I found was that Hostinger moved the computing load off the server and on to a cloud infrastructure. I’m happy to report that compared to regular cPanel hosting, my response times with hPanel were significantly faster.
Generous Resource Allocation Gives You Peace of Mind
Your website is going to have text, obviously, but it’s the images, videos, and various media files that are going to give it real personality. Those files can weigh quite a bit, and to host them all, you’re going to need sufficient hosting space and sufficient bandwidth.
On the most basic shared hosting plan, Hostinger provides you with 10GB of SSD space. An optimized HD image weighs less than 1MB, so things are looking good!
That same basic plan gives you 100GB of bandwidth a month, which is roughly 25,000 monthly visitors. One plan up and you’ll be treated to an unlimited bandwidth buffet.
However, I think it’s a shame no Hostinger plan offers unlimited hosting space. There are web hosts that do (within “fair use” terms), and it would’ve been great if Hostinger was one them.
Easy One-Click Installs
Back in the old days of the early 2010s, when dinosaurs ruled the earth, installing a Content Management Platform (or CMS for short) was quite the challenge. You had to open up databases, set user privileges, configure access… don’t even get me started.
Softaculous changed all that, automating installations for popular platforms like WordPress, Joomla, and Magento. Today, it provides one-click installations for hundreds of different CMS, and Hostinger’s hPanel lets your harness all that power with a nifty “Auto Installer” button.
Unlimited Features
The basic shared hosting plan, Single, is a great place to get started and stretch your web muscles, but you’ll eventually outgrow it. For example, when I first opened my online store, I made do with two email addresses. After I started picking up some traffic, I needed separate addresses for sales, support, and for each of my employees.
When that time comes for you, your hosting provider has to be able to grow with you. Advanced plans need to provide an immediate increase in resources and options, without any downtime to your website.
With the Premium and Business plans, that’s exactly what happens. Your site will stay live, and you’ll get unlimited bandwidth, unlimited domains (that’s an unlimited number of websites!), unlimited databases, unlimited email accounts, and much more. The future looks bright for you, young webmaster.