Hostinger review: is it the best cheap hosting for freelancers?

This Hostinger review is based on real use. I host Vekon on Hostinger’s Premium plan, so everything here comes from actually building and running this site on it, not from the sales page.

If you’re a freelancer, you need somewhere to show your work, and a site on your own domain looks far more professional than a profile on someone else’s platform. Hostinger is one of the cheapest ways to get one.

Hostinger review: the short verdict

Hostinger made getting a WordPress site online genuinely easy, and the price is hard to beat for a freelancer starting out. The main catch is the renewal price, which is much higher than the price you sign up at, so lock in a longer term if you’re sure. Personally, I found it easy to use, and I think it’s a great tool to start with if you’re building your own website.

Hostinger at a glance

Who Hostinger is best for

• Freelancers starting their first site. Setup is guided and you don’t need any technical knowledge.
• Anyone on a tight budget. It’s one of the lowest starting prices around.
• People who want WordPress. It installs in a few clicks and comes with a caching plugin already set up.

It’s less suited to busy online shops or sites with heavy traffic, where you’d want a more powerful plan, and to anyone who hates being upsold during checkout.

How I tested Hostinger

For this Hostinger review, I didn’t use a demo account. I bought the Premium plan with my own money and built Vekon on it: I tried Hostinger’s AI website builder, switched to WordPress, connected a domain I’d bought elsewhere, installed plugins and designed the whole site. I score every tool on the same five criteria, explained on our how we test page.

Setting up WordPress

Getting started was easy. After signing up, Hostinger offers to build your site for you with AI or to set it up yourself. I tried the AI builder first and had a preview within minutes, but I switched to WordPress because it gives you far more control over design and SEO for a site you plan to grow.

Installing WordPress was a few clicks, and it came with LiteSpeed Cache already installed to keep pages fast. The whole setup was really quick: from paying to having WordPress up and running took me around 10 minutes.

Connecting your own domain

I bought my domain from Namecheap rather than Hostinger, because my email was already set up there. Instead of moving the nameservers, which would have broken my email, I pointed the domain at Hostinger with an A record. It started working as soon as the DNS change went through. If you buy the domain through Hostinger, or use the free one included with the plan, this step is done for you.

Speed and performance

I tested vekon.co, which runs on this plan, with Google PageSpeed Insights. It scored 96 for performance on mobile and 100 on desktop. That’s with a lightweight theme and the preinstalled cache, so a heavier site with lots of plugins may score lower, but the hosting clearly isn’t holding it back.

Premium uses LiteSpeed servers, and the cache plugin is preinstalled. One thing to know: when I changed my design, a visitor could briefly see the old cached version until I cleared the cache in hPanel, Hostinger’s control panel. It’s a one-click fix once you know where it is.

hPanel: the control panel

hPanel is where you manage everything: your website, domains, backups, cache and billing. Funnily enough, at first I couldn’t find hPanel itself. After signing up you’re taken through Hostinger’s setup steps, and it isn’t obvious where the control panel lives. (It’s at hpanel.hostinger.com, or click your account once you’re logged in.)

Once you know where it is, it’s cleaner than the old-fashioned cPanel many hosts use, and the main jobs (installing WordPress, adding a domain, clearing the cache) are easy to find. A few less common tasks are tucked away: it also took me a while to find where to delete the AI builder site once I’d moved to WordPress.

Pricing: watch the renewal price

Hostinger’s headline prices are for long terms paid up front, and the price goes up when your plan renews.

I paid $43.09 for a year of Premium, which works out at about $3.59 a month, plus $8.62 VAT, so $51.71 in total. Hostinger billed me in US dollars. Longer terms are cheaper per month, and when the plan renews, the price goes up to $131.88 a year, about $10.99 a month. That’s roughly three times what I paid in year one. Auto-renewal is switched on by default, and hPanel set my renewal date a couple of weeks before the plan actually ends.

It’s still good value, but budget for the renewal price, and pick the longest term you’re comfortable with to lock in the low rate. Expect add-ons to be offered during checkout. You can skip most of them.

There’s a 30-day money-back guarantee, so you can try it with little risk.

Customer support

Hostinger offers 24/7 live chat. I haven’t needed to contact support yet, so I can’t judge it from experience. I’ll update this review when I do.

Pros and cons

Frequently asked questions

Final thoughts: is Hostinger worth it?

That’s my Hostinger review in a nutshell. For a freelancer who wants a professional site without paying much or learning server admin, Hostinger is an easy recommendation. Just go in knowing what it will cost when it renews. It’s what I chose for Vekon, and I’d recommend it to any freelancer building their first website.