Hostinger Review – Best Budget Hosting Provider?

Hostinger is a renowned provider in today’s market due to the cheap shared hosting services it offers. It was launched in the year 2007 and was branded ‘000webhost.com.’ By this, its popularity increased even more as it was the only free web hosting around. 

In the year 2011, 000webhost.com was rebranded, and Hostinger came to life. This was the dawn of a new day. Hostinger began to show impressive growth by attracting a massive number of subscribers, who later on became their fans. 

And yes, people were lured for nothing – it offers tons of unlimited features along with free features. But, are the features free as they claim? 

We confirmed this to be right; however, we had to clear our doubts by checking its performance in about a year with our set up website.

Are you curious to know about its functionality? Read on its advantages and disadvantages, which we’ve discussed in detail.   

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Advantages of Using Hostinger

Most people would expect poor performance with the free services offered as well as the unlimited features. However, we’re sorry to disappoint you this time around because, with Hostinger, you’re assured of excellent uptimes, reliable customer service, and super-fast speeds. 

1. Excellent Uptime

Experiencing poor speeds can be a daunting prospect; therefore, you must check out for the uptime before settling on a web host. 

To analyze Hostinger’s uptime, we ran a couple of speed tests on different servers, and the results were quite impressive even though the last test guaranteed uptime of 99.04 percent. 

This is approximately seven hours of downtime a month, which is not right, especially if you’re running a business site. 

2. Fast Load Time 

How fast a page load says more about your service provider. According to Neil Patel, most sites that take time to load, tend to be abandoned as people get frustrated waiting. 

Hostinger has servers strategically located in the USA, UK (Europe), and Asia. Each of these servers is connected to a 1000 Mbps connections that ensure rare chances of your site going down. The average load time came in at 363ms on all the servers.  

3. 30-Day Money-Back Guarantee

Despite the cheap services Hostinger offers, you’re assured of money-refund in case you find their services unsuitable. It accepts different modes of payment, including PayPal, Bitcoin, Mastercard, Visa, Maestro, among others. 

Note that not all services are refundable, while some also have special refund terms. Make sure you understand their refund policy before subscribing to their services. 

4. Multilingual Customer Support

Most service providers offer customer service channels on their websites. Besides, they have a support team to help you out with technical issues that need experts. 

Imagine what would happen if your site goes down for reasons not known to you, yet you’re unable to contact the support team?

You’re probably going to lose tons of customers. That’s why customer support is a must-have in any service provider regardless of the type of your site. 

That said, Hostinger offers reliable support to its customers with a multilingual team and live chat support. However, you can contact them via live chat only if you’re registered to a Hostinger account, causing a little inconvenience.  

5. Free Website Builder and Domain Name

When we talked about the free features, Hostringer offers, we meant it. With all their plans, you get a free website builder and several templates to choose from for your website customization.

And on top of that, you get free domains but only with the premium and Business web hosting plans. These will equally translate to cheaper plans, thus better value for money. Also, you can purchase more than one domain but at an extra fee.   

6. Easy to Use Interface

Hostinger offers a beginner-friendly interface to its users for more straightforward navigation. Everything you need to customize your site all placed in one location. 

Managing your website becomes even simpler because you can track logins, manage domains and emails, update features, at the comfort of your dashboard.  

Hostinger also offers an advanced cPanel with large icons that are easy to locate. This is a plus for beginners who are still green with the cPanel. 

Limitations of Using Hostinger

There are tons of exemplary things you’ll enjoy with Hostinger; from excellent uptimes, dependable customer service, fast load time, robust features, you name it!

Sadly, you can never find a perfect hosting, and as such, Hostinger has some flaws too. We’ve discussed a few of them in detail. 

1. Must Be Logged in to Access Live Chat

As discussed earlier in the pros section, you need to be logged in to the Hostinger account to live chat with their support team. This means that they can never attend to issues to non-Hostinger subscribers even if you want to migrate your current hosting to them.  

However, to contact them, click the “Contact Us” button at the bottom of their site, and they’ll gladly reply to you even if you don’t have their Hostinger account. 

Afterward, you’ll be redirected to a page with options of support. For example, if you want to report something or inquire about a general subject, just click on the appropriate option. Make sure that you include your email address, name on your submitted message.

2. Lack of Traditional cPanel

While other providers use traditional control panels to manage their sites, Hostinger has its customized cPanel. Managing your website using their dashboard can be quite frustrating, especially if you’re accustomed to cPanel.

This might only work well for beginners who are still trying their way around to familiarize themselves with the Hostinger dashboard.   

3. Non-Standard Payment Terms

Hostinger offers a 30-day money refund but not for all their services. Some of the refundable services, according to their review, include:

  • All hosting plans except for the first payment after free trial.
  • Domain Transfers: You’ll have to start over and pay once more in case of transfer failures.
  • SSL Certificates

What’s not refundable:

Some of the non-refundable services include privacy protection, domain names renewal, and redemption fees. However, you can get a refund for the domain registrations only if canceled on time and reprocessed within four days. 

Keeping these in mind before choosing a web host will save you from incurring unnecessary losses, which would have been avoided.  

4. Must Pay for Extra Domains

If you happen to sign up under the Premium or Business shared hosting packages, you should get a free domain name. 

However, you will have to dig deep into your pocket if you need more domain names. Don’t fret, though. Domain registration at Hostinger is quite affordable. You can acquire a .com and .net domain extensions below $10 every year. Some domain extensions like .tech go as low as $0.99 every year. 

If you need a .asia domain extension, you will have to pay $12.99 every year. Another thing to note is that if you go by their Premium or Business packages, you’ll get unlimited subdomains, but only a single domain name. 

You also have the freedom to renew your expired domain without having to pay a cent. You can do this within 36 days of the deadline. Just make sure that you check Hostinger’s Expired Domain Recovery Policy. 

In Conclusion

We can’t deny it – Hostinger offers excellent speed even though it had some issues with its uptime over the past twenty-three months.

Its entry-level package – Single Web Hosting package does not provide users with free perks. Its Premium package – Cloud and Business Hosting packages offer users with a lot more. 

What’s more, Hostinger has a 30-day money refund for all its users who are not pleased with its services. This means that you can sign up and test for 30 days before you can commit yourself. 

So, yes, we recommend Hostinger. You have to know your priorities, though. 

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