It's difficult to settle on a web host when the choice is so broad. At times, it seems easier to just leave your website with your current host or use free hosting.

But if you're set on a new web host, Hostinger is a good option. It offers shared, cloud, and VPS hosting. We've looked at its shared Premium and Business plans to help you decide if Hostinger is the right web host for you.

Why Host Your Site With Hostinger?

With so many web hosts offering packages for all purposes, it can be difficult to settle on a new host.

Hostinger offers a range of features suited to users of all levels of expertise, alongside hosting packages that suit all scales. You'll find support for everything from single user sites to VPS hosting.

We're most interested in Hostinger's Premium Shared Hosting and Business Shared Hosting plans. But why would a standard user choose either of these options when a Single Shared Hosting plan is available?

Well, it's all about scale. While Hostinger also offer a free platform (000webhost), the Single Shared Hosting plan offers more features. Similarly, you get more with the Premium and Business packages, which increase bandwidth and processing power. They also offer free domain registration.

Business and Premium Hostinger Plans

Hostinger offers several plans designed to suit your individual requirements as a web host. While it offers a Single Shared Hosting plan at $7.99 a month (at the time of writing, discounted to just $1.45 a month) it's worth considering the Business and Premium hosting accounts.

Hostinger's web hosting plans

Premium Shared Hosting from Hostinger provides you with unlimited websites, email accounts, and bandwidth, double the processing power of the single plan, and weekly backups. This costs just $11.95 a month (currently cut by 75 percent, down to $2.95 per month).

Meanwhile, you can get all of this and more in the Business Shared Hosting plan, which adds daily backups, a free SSL certificate, and four times the processing speed of the single plan. It comes at a price of $15.95 a month (again with the current 75 percent discount, this is down to $3.95 per month).

In short, with such massive discounts, choosing the Premium or Business plans makes more sense than the single site option.

Hostinger's Features

Install a web app on the Hostinger hPanel

Hosting your website with Hostinger gives you access to a collection of great features. We've already mentioned that Premium and Business subscribers get unlimited websites, storage, and bandwidth, but there's more. You plan also includes unlimited SQL databases for dynamic websites, unlimited email addresses, and access to 24/7/365 support.

Hostinger offers a 99.9% uptime guarantee, so your site should never be offline. Need daily backups? You can have them with the Business Shared Hosting plan. Weekly backups are available with both plans.

You'll also find DNS management tools, support for up to 100 subdomains, SSH access, domain parking, and FTP support.

You can access all these features via your account management screen or in the Hostinger control panel. If you've used web hosting in the past, then you'll know about using cPanel to manage your websites.

Hostinger has introduced its own version, which it calls hPanel, but you won't see this until your domain is set up.

Setting Up Your Domain With Hostinger

With your Hostinger account and hosting ready to go, you'll want to get on with setting up your website.

You have the choice of migrating an existing domain (for which you'll need to change the DNS settings with the domain registrar) or setting up a new one with Hostinger. What's particularly useful about this last option is that Hostinger lets you choose your hosting location. The options are:

  • North America: Asheville, Tennessee, USA
  • South America: São Paulo, Brazil
  • Europe: London, United Kingdom; Amsterdam, Netherlands; Vilnius and Kaunas, Lithuania
  • Asia: Singapore; Jakarta, Indonesia

Choosing a server in the region where most of your readers reside can improve your site's load time. This makes the option a valuable weapon against your site's competitors!

Upon setting up the domain and hosting, you have five options to create a website. These are:

  • Install WordPress: This automatically installs the latest version of WordPress.
  • Auto Installer: For other web apps such as CubeCart, Joomla, CMSMS, MediaWiki, and 96 more.
  • Website Builder: For website creation using a web interface.
  • File Manager: To upload files.
  • Access Manager: To control file access to your site.

Note that you can skip this stage and still get access to these options later in the hPanel.

Managing Your Site With the hPanel

The Hostinger management screen features a sensible user interface. Its home screen lets you set up Cloudflare Protection (for website security) and your SSL certificate, plus allows you to manage your hosting and domain.

Access the hPanel directly via the Manage button. Here, you'll see options to manage your hosting and account, as well as set up emails and domains, run installation scripts on your website, manage databases, and more.

Manage Hostinger hosting in the hPanel

As you'd expect, you'll also find the usual hosting tools for PHP configuration, SSL, SSH access, and security here. Concerned about hotlinked images eating your bandwidth? The Hotlink Protection tool can deal with this. Meanwhile, the search tool at the top of hPanel will help you quickly find the right feature to use.

Hostinger's Multilingual Customer Support

While Hostinger is easy to set up, at some point you might run into problems related to your hosting.

In this case, you can rely on the host's multilingual customer support service, accessed via a live chat service. It's easy to use and convenient; the chat box even features a hosting status message. This notification quickly lets you know if there is a problem with Hostinger's services.

Hostinger's multilingual chat support

For the most part, you won't need to access the management screen, hPanel, or the multilingual customer support. Your daily interaction with Hostinger will be as a service user: updating your website, blog, online store, collaboration tool, or wiki.

As such, you'll expect a fast service, and in terms of page load times, that's exactly what you're going to get. Hostinger's fast hosting delivers each web page in under one second, although this will depend on server load and bandwidth.

Host Your Site With Hostinger Today

Fast hosting, a low-cost deal for Premium and Business plans, and even the chance to choose cloud hosting. Hostinger has it all, with a customized control panel thrown in!

What stands out with Hostinger isn't the wealth of options, though. It isn't even the speed of the web pages, or the multilingual online support. The 30-day money back guarantee is a great enticement, but that's not even the best aspect about Hostinger.

This web host is just so easy to use. It took me around 30 minutes from signing up to get the domain set up and the hosting configured. A few minutes later, I had two web scripts installed with versions of MediaWiki and WordPress, ready to access.

Looking for premium or business-class web hosting with unlimited space, domains, and bandwidth that is easy to set up---and most importantly, affordable?

Then host your site with Hostinger!