Before you even think about using Hostinger, look at their scam reports from Reddit and TrustPilot.
Once you give Hostinger your credit card, don’t be surprised when you’re billed for unauthorized purchases and get phone calls from scammers. They’ve been repeatedly threatened with lawsuits and Hostinger’s CEO (Arnas Stuopelis) openly admitted to fake reviews. This company is only popular from deceptive marketing and dishonest affiliates.
Migrations are done by inexperienced support who don’t read notes, make mistakes, and scam/ignore you. Resources are far from “unlimited” with low cores/RAM, slow SSDs, and extremely low I/O limits (sometimes 10x less than GoDaddy). This leads to server crashes, 503 errors, and account suspensions then you’re prompted to upgrade. Downtimes and degraded performance are common, but they don’t always update the status page to reflect it. There are several scams/issues related to all 3 of Hostinger’s main services: hosting, domains, and email.
Do not believe the “glowing reviews” from Hostinger’s affiliates and the fake reviews. The “quality” is directly reflected in their dirt cheap prices. SiteGround is just as bad, so avoid both.
If you need cheap/fast hosting with LiteSpeed + cPanel, look into ChemiCloud. They’re faster, use NVMe storage, give you more CPU cores/RAM, and have a perfect 5/5 star TrustPilot rating.
- How Hostinger scams you
- CEO admitted to fake reviews
- Resources are extremely limited
- Downtimes + degraded performance
- 1GB email storage with various issues
- Support is slow, scammy, or non-existent
- Hostinger uses slower SATA SSDs
- hPanel is slow, limited, and has bugs
- Data breach affected 14M customers
- 4 LiteSpeed hosts that outperform Hostinger
1. How Hostinger Scams You
- Renewals process when set to manual.
- Charges for “free” SSL, backups, and support.
- Gives your information to other scammers who call you.
- Suspends your account for “abuse” without refunding you.
- Domain renewals increase to $100+/year with privacy protection.
- Domains and hosting plans don’t appear in the dashboard after payment.
- Advertises way more sites/storage/bandwidth than plans can actually handle.
You can find many complaints on Reddit and TrustPilot. There are probably others I missed (please let me know if I missed any in the comments), but these seem to be the common scams.
2. CEO Admitted To Fake Reviews
Hostinger CEO Arnas Stuopelis openly said “it is their right” to write reviews of themselves.
But in Facebook groups, they’ve always said these are “customer” reviews.
Hostinger got banned from Facebook groups for voting for themselves in polls and other unethical behavior. However, many groups are now run by SiteGround (WordPress Hosting, WordPress Speed Up, WP Rocket Users, and others) where admins censor posts and favor SiteGround. I recommend Gijo’s WP Speed Matters Facebook Group for less biased opinions.
Hostinger also monitors the internet prying on people asking 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. Then their other 250+ employees will like the comment so people are fooled into thinking how amazing Hostinger is.
Since they’ve been called out by Review Signal and banned from Facebook groups, their 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!
3. Resources Are Extremely Limited
Don’t believe the numbers Hostinger puts on their WordPress Hosting page. The 100s of websites, 100-200GB storage, and unlimited bandwidth are completely inaccurate numbers. Even Hostinger’s VPS 3 plan advertises 60GB NVMe storage for $7.99/mo which is unheard of.
If you compare resources to another bad host (GoDaddy), Hostinger has 10x less I/O (KB/s) on most plans with only 1-2 CPU cores. That’s why Hostinger lets you boost your account for 24 hours while you lower CPU/memory usage. But chances are, the low limits will hold you back.
4. Downtimes + Degraded Performance
Advertising 99.9% uptimes (and uptimes tests) usually don’t mean anything because your websites are running on different servers/nodes than other sites.
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.
Hostinger doesn’t come anywhere close to 99.9% uptimes.
5. 1GB Email Storage With Various Issues
Hostinger’s email includes 1GB for free, then it’s $.99/account per month for 10GB. However, there are many issues reported with their email service, including emails not going through.
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. Support Is Slow, Scammy, Or Non-Existent
Cheap hosting rarely has good support, but Hostinger’s is borderline incompetent.
Aside from scams, you may not get a response for hours, days, or ever at all. They upsell support for a monthly fee, and they’ve been caught logging into accounts without permission and changing things (including lowering the resource limits). Support is usually something you have to experience, but take my word, it’s one of the worst support teams you will come across.
7. Hostinger Uses Slower SATA SSDs
Hostinger uses SATA SSDs while other hosts (including shared hosts) are starting to move to faster NVMe SSDs. As I mentioned earlier, while Hostinger’s claims to use “terabytes of NVMe SSD storage” on their VPS plans, take it with a grain of salt since they lie all over their website.
8. hPanel Is Slow, Limited, And Has Bugs
Hostinger’s hPanel is basically a cPanel ripoff but worse.
Here’s a walkthrough of it:
9. Data Breach Affected 14M 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 they also lie about everything else, so I wouldn’t take their word. If you value security, don’t use Hostinger.
10. 4 LiteSpeed Hosts That Outperform Hostinger
Use ChemiCloud instead.
You get LiteSpeed, cPanel, faster NVMe storage, more email storage, scalable CPU cores/RAM, and free migrations from a reliable support team who has a perfect 5/5 star rating on TrustPilot.
NameHero is very similar to ChemiCloud but costs more and only uses NVMe on their US data center. FastComet is cheaper but uses slower SATA SSDs + MySQL. If you want more powerful shared/cloud hybrid plan, look at Scala’s Entry WP Cloud plan. All of these hosts use LiteSpeed.
| Hostinger Business WordPress Plan | FastComet FastCloud Extra Plan | ChemiCloud WordPress Turbo Plan | NameHero Plus WordPress Plan | Scala Entry WP Cloud Plan | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Type | Shared | Shared | Shared | Shared | Shared/cloud |
| Cores/RAM | 2 cores/1.5GB | 6 cores/6GB | 3 cores/3GB – scalable to 6/6 | 3 cores/3GB | No hard limit |
| Storage | 20GB SATA | 35GB SATA | 40GB NVMe – 10/11 locations | 10GB NVMe | 50GB NVMe |
| Database | MariaDB | MySQL | MariaDB | MariaDB | MariaDB |
| Object cache | Memcached | Memcached | Redis | Redis | Redis |
| Data centers | 8 | 11 | 11 | 1 (US) | 3 (US + EU) |
| Server | LiteSpeed | LiteSpeed | LiteSpeed | LiteSpeed | LiteSpeed |
| Cache plugin | LiteSpeed Cache | LiteSpeed Cache | LiteSpeed Cache | LiteSpeed Cache | LiteSpeed Cache |
| CDN | QUIC.cloud ($.02-.08/GB) | QUIC.cloud ($.02-.08/GB) | QUIC.cloud ($.02-.08/GB) | QUIC.cloud ($.02-.08/GB) | QUIC.cloud ($.02-.08/GB) |
| Control panel | hPanel | cPanel | cPanel | cPanel | sPanel |
| Email storage | 1GB | 2.048GB | Adjustable | Adjustable | Adjustable |
| Inodes | 600,000 | 500,000 | 500,000 | 500,000 | “Unlimited” |
| Major incidents | Scam reports, fake reviews, 2019 breach | 2022 DDoS attack on 3 data centers | None | 2011 2-day node outage | None |
| Migrations | Unlimited (but screws it up) | 3 free | 200 cPanel + 10 non-cPanel | 1 free | 1 free |
| Support | F | B | B | B | B |
| TrustPilot rating | 4.6/5 (fake) | 4.8/5 | 5/5 | 4.7/5 | 5/5 |
| Monthly price | $3.99 (1-4 years) | $4.39 (1-3 years) | $5.99 (3 years) | $8.98 (3 years) | $14.95 (3 years) |
| Renewals | $8.99/mo | $21.95/mo | $19.95/mo | $19.95/mo | $24.95/mo |
| Price for 3 years | $299.40 | $158.04 | $215.64 | $323.19 | $538.20 |
| View plan | View plan | View plan | View plan |
If you want a <100ms global TTFB, use Rocket.net.
A <100ms TTFB makes a huge improvement to core web vitals since TTFB is 40% of LCP and is also part of FCP/INP. The reason they average 100ms is because it’s cloud hosting with better specs like 32 CPU cores/128GB RAM, NVMe, Redis, and LiteSpeed’s PHP. And since hosting/CDN are 2 key TTFB factors, their free Cloudflare Enterprise is a powerhouse for reducing TTFB with features like full page caching, Argo Smart Routing, and Mirage + Polish for image optimization.
Rocket.net launched in 2020 and are getting popular in Facebook groups because their performance runs circles around other cloud hosts like SiteGround Cloud, Cloudways, Kinsta, and WP Engine. If you have a global audience or WooCommerce site, you’re not going to beat them. They cost more than shared hosting and are definitely worth it if passing core web vitals is important to you. You can read my full review or test my own TTFB/web vitals. When you’re ready to experience what <100ms is like, they do $1 your 1st month + unlimited free migrations.
| SiteGround Cloud Jump Start Plan | Kinsta Starter Plan | Cloudways Vultr HF (2GB) | Rocket.net Starter Plan | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Type | Cloud | Cloud (shared containers) | Cloud | Private cloud |
| Server | Apache + Nginx | Apache + Nginx | Apache + Nginx | Apache + Nginx |
| Nginx reverse proxy | ✓ | $50/mo | ✓ | ✓ |
| Cores/RAM | 4 cores/8GB | 12 cores/8GB | 1 core/2GB | 32 cores/128GB |
| Storage | 40GB SATA | 10GB SATA | 64GB NVMe | 10GB NVMe |
| Object cache | Memcached | $100/mo Redis | Redis Pro | Redis (Redis Pro on Business plan) |
| PHP processor | FastCGI | FastCGI | FPM | LiteSpeed |
| PHP workers | Not listed, but common CPU limits | 2 | No limit | No limit |
| Memory limit | Adjustable | 256MB | Adjustable | 1GB |
| Database | MySQL | MySQL | MariaDB | MariaDB |
| Bandwidth + visits | 5TB/mo | 25k/mo | 2TB/mo | 50GB + 250k/mo |
| CDN | $14.99/mo SiteGround CDN | Cloudflare APO + firewall rules (read) | $5/mo Cloudflare Enterprise + challenge pages | Free Cloudflare Enterprise (details) |
| CDN locations | 176 | 285 | 285 | 285 |
| Full page caching | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Smart routing | Anycast | x | Argo | Argo |
| Image optimization | Limited | x | Mirage/Polish | Mirage/Polish |
| DNS | Blocked by Google (4 days) | Amazon Route 53 | $5/mo DNS Made Easy | Cloudflare |
| Cache plugin | SG Optimizer | Use FlyingPress | Breeze | Use FlyingPress |
| Data centers | 10 | 35 | 44 | Served from Cloudflare’s edge |
| Control panel | Site Tools | MyKinsta | Custom (difficult) | Mission Control |
| Email hosting | ✓ | x | x | x |
| Support | C | B | C | A |
| Migrations | $30/site | Unlimited free | 1 free + $25/site | Unlimited free |
| TrustPilot rating | 4.8/5 | 4.2/5 | 4.5/5 | 4.9/5 |
| How it starts costing more | High initial price, CPU limits, CDN, price increases, internal incidents | PHP workers, add-ons, monthly visits, bandwidth, price increases | CPU limits, CDN, backups, price increases | Bandwidth |
| Monthly price | $100 + CDN | $29 when paying yearly + add-ons | $26 + CDN | $25 when paying yearly (no add-ons) |
Cheers,
Tom
I paid for a domain registration and after the payment was made the domain wasn’t registered and had “Reviewing” status. There wasn’t any information about any kind of reviewing before I paid. I wrote to the support and told to make a refund as I didn’t want to wait for the completion of a review. Support told me they can make a refund only to my account balance because I paid via crypto. And I don’t want it on my balance. It’s my money and I want it where it came from – on my crypto wallet. So if you pay with crypto they just steal your money, they won’t return it to your wallet if they refuse to provide you their services for some reason. Also they don’t inform customers about domain names reviewing before customers make payments
I made the terrible mistake by trying to save money and switch to Hostinger. What a mistake!
I signed up for the Cloud Hosting which they claimed was for “Large Scale Projects”.
Their team managed to migrate some of my websites but some I had to do manually, not a problem.
I managed to set it up quite fast.
However I bumped into a first problem!
I was trying to set up cron jobs and their control panel offered only limited version for some reason which was totally unflexible and I wasn’t able to set them up as I wanted. When I spoke to customer support they told me to upgrade to VPS hosting.
The nail on the coffin came when my write access to databases was blocked due to apparently DB size exceeding 6GB policy which was something they didn’t advertise! I’ve checked my DB sizes and they were only about 5GB (and I checked it correctly, trust me!) When I complained to customer support they only copy+pasted the same response, telling me to clear database but they never listened that their panel is broken and showing incorrect values, in some cases wrongly showing that my DB sizes were over 7GB in size, what a joke!
I tried to switch to the VPS hosting which was pretty buggy with the pre-installed admin panels. I wasn’t able to set up simple PHP mail() which I later learned they blocked.
The only good thing I did was to cancel the service and requested full refund!
What a terrible experience – total waste of time!
I can never recommend for any serious website! Stay away!!!
Thanks for summarizing this. This company is garbage. DO NOT LOCK YOURSELF INTO THIS GARBAGE COMPANY.
SCAMMERS. !!!! Took over my 17 websites including properties of 17 our clients with full data and everything and failed to provide access nor to us, nor to our clients, nor to the developer. We opened 3 Courts cases including GDPR DATA breach. Stay away if you could. Total scammers and useless who cant do anything. All you will hear from week and weeks “WE ARE TRYING TO FIX IT”
I can clearly say with experience that Hostinger is one of the worst hosting companies I have ever dealt with. I have been trying to install a wordpress theme on a brand new installation and and keep getting Server 503 error which is a busy server error. I engaged them in a chat and at first I was told that its my plugins causing the error. Remember its a brand new website with only wordpress installed from Hostinger auto-install feature. No plugins installed yet.
He then told me I can boost the site for only 24 hours to bypass the error for 24 hours. I refused to do that as I wanted a permanent solution and not a 24 hour patch. He then told me that it looks like the theme is causing it and the theme may not be compatible.
I said maybe I did something wrong (although I have been doing this for over 4 years) so I deleted all data again and started over using a different theme then another theme and another theme and all giving the same error. So then I have to think that all wordpress themes will give a 503 error on Hostinger. I have enough of them.
Garbage host. Much better to run your site on EC2 in AWS… very difficult to do anything with their clunky UI.
And when your hosting runs out, they suspend your account so you’re unable to retrieve your db files. They hold that data hostage unless you pay them to reactivate. Shady company.
This hosting provider doesn’t seem to understand how important quality Minecraft servers are. We’ve had countless problems, and their technical team has never been able to resolve them properly. Even if the service doesn’t work, you won’t get your money back. We wouldn’t recommend this provider for anyone who wants reliable hosting for their game server.
We are currently hosted on Hostinger and – it doesn’t feel like it’s the worst thing under the sun, but it is lacking.
Support has been hit or miss (response times are ok, they are very polite, sometimes they help, sometimes they are completely clueless).
Performance has been an issue, higher traffic and CPU goes crazy, even though the app is heavily optimized. Your remarks about CPU and HDD are interesting and would explain a lot … can you please share what were your sources regarding HW that Hostinger uses? We use Cloud Hosting (Professional tier), I wonder if that still uses HDD or belong to those already migrated to SSD…
We are currently looking into options where else to move
They use SSDs on their cloud hosting (listed on their cloud hosting page). If they used NVMe, they would definitely list this like the rest of hosts who use it. Other things are listed on internal pages like this https://www.hostinger.com/tutorials/mariadb-vs-mysql
It doesn’t paint the whole picture like which version of MariaDB they use, CPU GHz, etc. It’s more of “at a glance.” But I found if a host doesn’t list something critical like CPU GHz on their cloud hosting, it’s usually not good.
I made the mistake of subscribing to their “Titan Enterprise Email” plan, but there was no mention that you only get 1 email account with the plan. If you want an additional business email account, you have to fork out another $5.51, presumably added to your existing monthly subscription. Needless to say I won’t be seeking their services any longer.