Today, I’m not reviewing the top 10 free SSL hosting providers. Instead, I’m renewing my review of a particular hosting service that offers free SSL, unlimited websites, hosted email services, and more. I’ve been using this hosting for about 5 years, and my experience has been excellent.
So, let me introduce you to the best free SSL hosting service: Hostinger.
Hostinger has significantly evolved since its inception as a free web hosting service over 15 years ago. Today, it stands as one of the most recognized names in web hosting, known for its affordable plans, high-quality experience, and various perks for website owners.
Whether you’re starting a new site from scratch or considering switching providers, this in-depth review will help you determine if Hostinger is the right choice for you (spoiler: it probably is).
Hostinger: The Good and The Bad
Like any product, Hostinger has its pros and cons as a web hosting provider. To give you a balanced view, we’ve highlighted some key advantages that work in Hostinger’s favor, as well as a few potential drawbacks. This way, you can make an informed decision about whether Hostinger is the best choice for your websites.
The Good
Fast Load Times: Website visitors won’t wait long for a page to load; many leave if it takes more than a couple of seconds. Fortunately, Hostinger consistently delivers fast speeds for a shared hosting service. We tested their shared hosting, VPS hosting, and WordPress hosting, and experienced loading times around 470 ms, with VPS hosting being slightly faster.
LiteSpeed Web Servers: Hostinger’s impressive speed is largely due to its use of LiteSpeed web servers. LiteSpeed allows Hostinger to run its custom hPanel without compromising on performance. It’s much faster than the Apache web servers used by most affordable shared hosting providers. Moreover, LiteSpeed servers utilize caching to store copies of your web pages, enabling quicker load times for visitors.
Global Data Centers: Hostinger has data centers located across the globe, including North America, South America, Europe, the UK, India, and Asia. If you use Hostinger’s CDN (included with Business plans and higher), your website will load from the location closest to your visitor, ensuring optimal speed. The main benefits of multiple data centers are the ability to choose the one nearest to your audience and the redundancy they provide—if one data center experiences an outage, another can take over to keep your site running smoothly.
Highly Affordable: Hostinger not only provides blazing fast site speeds but also offers some of the lowest prices around. Shared hosting starts at just $2.99 per month, allowing you to host up to 100 websites with 100 GB of shared storage. It’s hard to find a better deal. Besides shared hosting, Hostinger’s cloud plans begin at $9.99 per month, and VPS plans start as low as $4.99 per month.
Feature-Rich: Despite the low costs, Hostinger offers a wealth of features. You’ll get backups, free WordPress tools, a website builder, AI capabilities, malware scanning, a web firewall, a CDN, and more. Hostinger doesn’t skimp on value.
Free Domain for the First Year: Each Hostinger plan includes a free domain name for the first year, preconfigured to eliminate technical setup hassles.
Complimentary AI-Powered Website Builder: Hostinger provides an excellent website builder for free with every plan. Whether you’re creating a basic company website or a fully-functional online store, it’s easy to use even if you have no technical experience. With over 100 templates to choose from, or the option to use the AI site builder, you can have a customized site ready in minutes
Easy to Get Started: Hostinger is very user-friendly, especially when setting everything up. The clean interface, guided setup, and intuitive dashboard make it ideal for beginners—you won’t need any prior experience to use it effectively.
One-Click Installs: Despite its simplicity, Hostinger offers powerful tools. The Auto Installer feature allows you to install apps like WordPress, Drupal, WooCommerce, or PrestaShop with just one click. No need to mess with code or endure lengthy installation processes.
Simple Site Migrations: Hostinger takes care of all the technical details of moving an existing website to their hosting services. Just initiate a website migration, provide some details, and you’re all set.
User-Friendly hPanel: Hostinger’s custom hPanel is a fantastic alternative to cPanel. It’s well-designed, logically laid out, and incredibly easy to navigate. You won’t have to guess where things are, making it a breeze to manage your website
Strong Customer Service: Although Hostinger’s support response time could be faster, every representative we spoke with provided clear and detailed answers. Each interaction left us knowing exactly what to do next. They even included annotated screenshots to guide us, a level of detail we haven’t seen from other budget hosting services.
Money-Back Guarantee: If you’re not satisfied with your Hostinger purchase, you have 30 days to try it out and request a refund. However, keep in mind that redemption fees, domain name renewals, and privacy protection are not covered by this guarantee.
The Bad
No Phone Support: Hostinger provides a wealth of resources, including tutorials, blog posts, knowledge base articles, and Hostinger Academy—a series of tutorials on YouTube. While helpful, these resources can’t replace the convenience of a phone call, especially when you’re frustrated and need immediate assistance.
Unfortunately, the only ways to contact customer support are through live chat and email or ticket systems, though these channels are available 24/7
