Hostinger Review: fake Trustpilot reviews, false impersonation, banned from Facebook Groups, and voting for themselves in polls

I wrote this Hostinger review as a warning.

Please, for the love of god, never ever use Hostinger.

Hostinger has an army of employees who manipulate people into buying their hosting: posing as customers, writing fake TrustPilot reviews, and voting for themselves in Facebook polls are just a few ways this unethical hosting company gets customers. Worst of all, the CEO encourages it.

This has been reported by Review Signal but I wanted to expand on it, especially since they copied my entire onlinemediamasters.com website and replaced my hosting recommendations with Hostinger. Copyright infringement and false impersonation anyone? If you want an honest Hostinger review, it would be to stay as far away from this host as possible. They’re total scams.

 

1. Fake TrustPilot reviews and posing as customers

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+ employee 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 buying hosting from Hostinger. You can see this pattern in Facebook Groups, Twitter, and on almost every social media platform.

Since they have 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.

 

2. They vote for themselves in Facebook polls

Whenever there is a Facebook poll on “the best hosting” Hostinger sends their army of employees to vote for themselves.

Click on the Facebook profiles of people who voted for Hostinger and you’ll see a pattern. They either work for Hostinger or their Facebook profile is clearly not real. Facebook polls are used by many affiliates (including me) to promote the best hosting companies. So when Hostinger manipulates their ratings and other affiliates take screenshots, these affiliates are supporting Hostinger without realizing it. It affects average people, but also who the affiliates recommend.

Back when their employees had “works at Hostinger” in their Facebook profile, this was more obviously and the admins caught on. But now, they have fake profiles and vote more discretely.

They got caught red handed:

But in groups that aren’t moderated closely, this is still a problem:

 

3. Hostinger gets banned from Facebook Groups

Many Facebook Groups have caught on to Hostinger’s strategy.

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.

 

4. Another host with an average TTFB

As much as I hate Hostinger, their TTFB was average for shared hosting (around .5s).

I set up Hostinger’s WordPress Premium plan on a test server (hstngerserver.com) to measure TTFB and speeds (I did the same thing for 15+ other different hosting accounts too). Data center locations are different, but all use the exact same environment: same Astra Starter Site, plugins, SSL, no cache plugin, no CDN. The website isn’t live anymore because I refused to give Hostinger any money and cancelled immediately, but I at least wanted to show you the results.

Hostinger Reports

 
The Pingdom tests also tell a story (1 month period with 30 min check intervals):

 

5. Support is probably the worst out there

Hostinger advertises 24/7/365 support, but it’s a lie.

Just look at look at TrustPilot reviews from around July 24, 2020 (now page 4 on their Trustpilot profile). You know, the ones not written by Hostinger employees. Everything Hostinger does is suppose to look good on paper, but they obviously don’t follow through.

 

6. 2019 security incident affects 14M Hostinger customers

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.

 

7. Hostinger duplicated my blog and changed my hosting recommendations

They have since taken it down, but it used to be here: https://onlinemediamasters.fr

A lot of people come to my blog for hosting recommendations. So a Hostinger employee thought it would be clever to buy a similar domain, copy my blog, then replace all hosting recommendations with Hostinger. I sent a DCMA notice and they changed the design/content, but left the domain up. It’s still named “Online Media Masters” and the guy’s name is still Tom.

Hostinger is based out of Lithuania, Indonesia, and Brazil where there things are obviously not enforced. If this company was based in the United States, you bet I would 100% hire a lawyer to squeeze every penny out of them. This is the only hosting company I would expect this from.

 

8. They are very expensive

Hostinger offers an entry level price of $7.45/month for their most popular WordPress Premium plan, but it jumps to $15.90/month once you renew.

This is just like SiteGround and I am personally tired of having to switch hosts every couple hears because my renewal prices kick in. One of the main reasons I stopped promoting SiteGround is because their ridiculous renewal prices, and Hostinger is doing the same thing.

 

9. An inside look at Hostinger’s cPanel

This is what the Hostinger cPanel looks like.

If you’re already using Hostinger, migrate to a new host, then scroll down to the bottom and click this button:

 

10. Conclusion: don’t get scammed by this hosting company

These are just some of the few shady tactics I have found. God knows what else they’re doing. For all we know, they are paying people to write reviews, setting up more fake Facebook profiles, and doing anything they can to build an unethical hosting company. It is completely fake and I am genuinely surprised they were able to trick so many people into buying Hostinger, that even my owner readers are asking opinions about them. Now, you don’t have to ask again.

The host I do recommend: it’s DigitalOcean on Cloudways, here’s my review about them.

I hope this Hostinger review helped shed some light on how terrible this company is.

Cheers,
Tom