Hostinger Review: You’re Paying About $2/mo Less For Half The CPU Cores/RAM (With Outages, 4-Year Traps, Fake Reviews)

If ethics mean anything to you, don’t use Hostinger. Plus, they’re only cheap because their plans have less resources.

They built their company on fake reviews which the CEO (Arnas Stuopelis) openly admitted to, they trick people into buying their hosting by posing as customers without disclosing they’re employees, and got banned from Facebook Groups for voting for themselves in Facebook polls.

Hostinger is known for cheap LiteSpeed hosting, but this comes at a cost. The only reason Hostinger is cheap is because they give you less CPU/RAM (and cut costs in other areas like awful support, unreliable servers, and low capacity email accounts). Their uptime status page has constant server maintenance and degraded performance, and Hostinger’s support is known for being one of the worst. Search for “Hostinger scam Reddit” and you’ll find plenty of threads.

There are only a handful of companies I refuse to support because of shady practices, and Hostinger is #1 on the list (then SiteGround). Do better and choose a different WordPress host.

 

1. Expensive CPU Cores + RAM

Hostinger only looks cheap because their plans have less CPU cores, RAM, and other server resources.

But if you do the math and learn the average cost of 1 CPU core + 1 GB RAM between all their WordPress hosting plans, Hostinger is actually the most expensive out of any of these hosts.

Most hosts have a “specs page” showing you how many CPU cores, RAM, inodes, and other resources you get with each plan. You can divide the price but how much CPU/RAM you’re getting. All these hosts use LiteSpeed except A2 which only uses it on their higher two plans.

 

2. Frequent Downtimes + Degraded Performance

Advertising 99.9% uptimes (and most uptimes tests) usually don’t mean anything.

Hostinger’s hosting agreement page clearly says “the service uptime guarantee does not apply to service interruptions caused by periodic maintenance.” While this is standard with hosting companies, Hostinger’s status page is usually filled with maintenance and degraded performance notifications. This is also one of the biggest complaints in their TrustPilot reviews. Don’t listen to affiliate uptimes tests because it all depends on which server/node you’re using.

There’s too much scheduled maintenance, degraded performance, and interruptions for anyone to think Hostinger actually has 99.9% uptimes.

 

3. 4-Year Price Trap

Most hosts make you sign up for 3 years to get the best price, but 4 years? You could put a kid through high school in that time.

Do not commit to this. Honestly, you could probably buy 1 month using a separate name, primary domain, and credit card. Then if you actually like the service, you sign up for a new account with different info. But don’t do this without trying them for at least a month first.

 

4. Support Is One Of The Worst

Cheap hosting rarely has good support, but Hostinger’s is borderline incompetent.

Maybe if Hostinger stopped soliciting customers to write TrustPilot reviews (or stopped writing reviews themselves), maybe they would have more time dedicated to actually helping people. Support is usually something you have to experience. You can take my word though, it’s awful.

 

5. Emails Only Have 1GB Storage

Is 1GB really enough storage for email? Because that’s all Hostinger offers for free, otherwise it’s $.99/account per month with 10GB.

Of course, I always recommend keeping web/email hosting separate to avoid exceeding inode/storage limits, and because you don’t have to constantly move email if you switch hosts.

 

6. Fake Reviews & Unethical

Hostinger CEO Arnas Stuopelis openly said “it is their right” to write reviews of themselves.

But in Facebook Groups, they say these are “customer” reviews.

This is exactly what’s happening on their TrustPilot profile. It’s been happening for years. Hosting reviews are already super biased especially with affiliates, and this makes it worse.

Warning: Don’t trust Hostinger’s reviews from webhosting

Hostinger ruthlessly monitors the web when people ask for hosting recommendations.

When someone asks, one of their 250+ employees will jump in and say something like “I use Hostinger and couldn’t be happier” with a link to the Hostinger website. Their other 250+ employees will like the comment so people are fooled into thinking Hostinger is an amazing choice. You can see this pattern in Facebook groups, Twitter, and almost every social platform.

Since they’ve been called out by Review Signal and banned from Facebook groups, Hostinger employees no longer list “works at Hostinger” on their Facebook profile. They also created hundreds of fake Facebook profiles to keep the scam going and be more sneaky. Very clever!

You can see the screenshots on Review Signal and Emit.Reviews covered it well:

They were also banned from Facebook groups for voting for themselves in polls.

Other groups continue to be infiltrated by Hostinger especially those not moderated well. If you are a member of these types of Facebook groups, please report Hostinger to the admins. Or at least when you see them promoting themselves and pose as customers, please warn the others.

 

7. 14M Hostinger Customers Affected By 2019 Data Breach

Back in 2019, 14 million Hostinger accounts were compromised.

The server contained customer usernames, email addresses, first names, IP addresses, and hashed passwords. Hostinger claimed no financial data was compromised but then again, they lie about everything and I wouldn’t take their word. If you value security, don’t use Hostinger.

 

8. Inside Hostinger’s hPanel

This is what Hostinger’s hPanel looks like (it’s honestly not bad).

Here’s a walkthrough of Hostinger’s dashboard:

 

9. Speed Features

• LiteSpeed  – Hostinger uses LiteSpeed servers on all plans which is faster than Apache/NGINX. But there are plenty of LiteSpeed WordPress hosts besides Hostinger. Make sure you’re using the LiteSpeed Cache plugin and configure it with ideal settings.
• QUIC.cloud CDN – integrates with LiteSpeed Cache (the free plan only uses 6 PoPs and doesn’t have DDoS protection, so use the standard plan if possible). Also comes with HTML caching which is similar to Cloudflare APO. This is definitely a great CDN choice.
• Use latest PHP versions (i.e. PHP 8.0) – Hostinger is good with keeping up with this.
• Hotlink protection – this can be activated in your Hostinger account or use Cloudflare.
• Use Cloudflare for your DNS – if you bought your domain from Hostinger, you’re using their DNS by default. While Hostinger isn’t listed on dnsperf.com, you can assume it’s slower than Cloudflare’s. Even if you don’t use Cloudflare for anything else and are using QUIC for your CDN, Cloudflare’s DNS is fast/reliable on dnsperf.com and prevents latency.
• Keep an eye on CPU usage and inode limits – monitor these in your Hostinger account. It’s less stressful to deal with it before it’s a problem. See my guide on reducing CPU usage.
• Replace WP-Cron with a real cron job – follow Hostinger’s tutorial which can reduce CPU usage since cron jobs control when tasks are scheduled instead of loading every pageview.

 

10. What People Say About Hostinger In Facebook Groups

The WP Speed Matters Facebook Group is a good place to get less biased feedback.

SiteGround and their brand ambassadors are admins for the WordPress Hosting, WordPress Speed Up, and many other Facebook Groups and censor posts, but WP Speed Matters is run by Gijo who has a great community and doesn’t censor things like companies do in other groups.

 

11. There Are Better LiteSpeed Hosts Out There

Rocket.net is who I recommend and while they don’t use LiteSpeed, one look at their specs and a conversation with Ben Gabler (CEO) and I bet you’ll use them too (read my Rocket.net review).

	Hostinger Business WordPress Plan	A2 Hosting Turbo Plan	NameHero Turbo Cloud Plan
Server	LiteSpeed	LiteSpeed	LiteSpeed
CPU cores	1-2	2	3
RAM (GB)	.768 – 3.072	2	3
Storage	SATA	NVMe	NVMe
Object cache	x	✓	✓
Compression	Brotli	GZIP	Brotli
Email hosting	Limited	✓	✓
Previous incidents	Security breach impacting 14M customers	2 week ransomware attack	2 day outage
Migration	Free	Free	Free
Renewals	About 3x intros	About 2.5x intros	About 2.5x intros
TrustPilot rating	4.5/5 (fake)	4.5/5	4.7/5
Specs	View specs	View specs	View specs

I hope this Hostinger review sheds light on how terrible this company is. Please don’t support them or their affiliates. Most affiliates know about this but fail to mention anything about this.

Cheers,
Tom