Hostinger's plans compared: what $2.99, $3.99 and $7.99 actually buy you
The three shared plans side by side, storage, sites, backups and mailboxes, plus the renewal prices most reviews leave out, and which plan is genuinely worth it for a first website.
Hostinger sells three shared hosting plans. The headline prices are the ones everybody quotes; the numbers that decide whether it is a good deal are the renewal price and the term length, so those are here too.
The three plans
- Premium, $2.99/mo on a 48-month term, renewing at $10.99/mo. 20 GB SSD, 3 websites, weekly backups, 2 mailboxes per website.
- Unlimited, $3.99/mo on a 48-month term, renewing at $16.99/mo. 50 GB NVMe, unlimited websites, daily backups, unlimited mailboxes, CDN.
- Cloud Startup, $7.99/mo on a 48-month term, renewing at $25.99/mo. 100 GB NVMe, unlimited websites.
Across a full 48-month term that is $143.52, $191.52 and $383.52 respectively. Those totals are the honest way to compare, because a monthly figure attached to a four-year commitment is not really a monthly figure.
What is the same on every plan
A surprising amount, and this is the part that makes the cheapest plan defensible rather than a trap:
- LiteSpeed servers, NVMe storage, an in-house CDN and object caching.
- Automatic SSL, a malware scanner, DDoS protection and a web application firewall.
- Developer access: SSH, WP-CLI, PHP version switching, Git, and a MySQL manager.
- hPanel, Hostinger's own control panel, rather than cPanel.
- A free domain for the first year on annual and longer plans.
- A 99.9% uptime guarantee, with a 5% credit of that month's fee if they miss it.
Which one is actually right
Premium, if you have one site in mind
Three websites and 20 GB is more than a first site will use for years. The real constraint is the backup schedule: weekly, not daily. If your site changes rarely, a portfolio, a small business page, weekly is fine. If you publish daily, losing a week is a bad afternoon.
Unlimited, if you will build more than one thing
The jump from $2.99 to $3.99 buys daily backups, NVMe instead of SSD, unlimited mailboxes and the CDN. For a pound a month, daily backups alone justify it for anything you would be upset to lose.
Cloud Startup, only when you have outgrown shared
The renewal is $25.99/mo. If you are not yet sure the site will still exist in a year, this is not the plan to start on, start lower and move up, which is far easier than paying four years up front for headroom you may never use.
The thing to get right before you buy
Hostinger gives you 30 days to change your mind on hosting. Domains are different: for common extensions like .com and .net, registrations are only refundable within 96 hours, so treat the domain as a firmer decision than the hosting.
hPanel is not cPanel, and that matters more than it sounds
Hostinger built its own control panel rather than licensing cPanel, which is how the price gets as low as it does, cPanel licensing is a real per-account cost that every host using it passes on to you.
The practical consequences are worth knowing before you commit. hPanel is cleaner and easier for a first-time user, and almost every tutorial written in the last fifteen years assumes cPanel, so occasionally you will be reading instructions whose menus do not exist. It also means moving to another host later is a manual migration rather than a cPanel-to-cPanel transfer, which is genuinely easier.
None of that is a reason to avoid it. It is a reason to know that the cheapest plans in this market are cheap partly because of decisions like this one.
What is not included at any tier
- Staging on the cheapest plan, testing a change on the live site is the shared-hosting way of life until you move up.
- Priority routing on Premium; the priority support line is advertised for the plans above it.
- Anything resembling a dedicated resource guarantee. Shared hosting is shared, and a busy neighbour is always a possibility.
Common questions
Can I start small and move up later?
Yes, and it is the right way round. Upgrading within one host is straightforward; paying four years up front for a plan you have not grown into is how people end up with hosting they resent.
Is the free domain really free?
For the first year, on annual and longer plans. After that it renews at the registrar's normal rate, which is not the promotional one. Budget for it in year two rather than being surprised by it.
Do I need the CDN?
If your visitors are spread across countries, it makes a visible difference to how quickly images and stylesheets arrive. If everyone who reads your site is in one city, it matters much less than picking the right server location.
What happens at renewal if I do nothing?
It renews at the standard rate, automatically. Put a reminder in your calendar a month before the term ends, that is the moment you have leverage, and the moment most people miss.
The current offer
Our referral link takes 20% off the first term of any new plan. There is no code to type, the discount is attached to the link and shows in the price once you arrive.
20% OFF
Sources
Prices and specifications read from Hostinger's own pricing and web hosting pages on 11 September 2026. Hosting pricing changes often and varies by region, check the figure on the page before you buy, and treat anything here older than a few months as a starting point rather than a quote.
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