Hosting on hostinger.com - your opinions/experiences ?

[brokeBuilder2019]

I've finished developing a small website for my friend's small business, and am ready to host it on hostinger.com.

Any opinions or experiences with hostinger.com ?

NOTE - I have already hosted the site on their free service - 000webhost.com, and am mostly satisfied with it, so moving the site to hostinger.com would be an upgrade (and an easy migration effort).

I will be choosing the Premium shared hosting plan (cheapest tier, intermediate plan).

Please share your experiences with:

• Customer service (friendly ? prompt response ?)
• Ease of administration and maintenance / troubleshooting (SSH ? cPanel ?)
• Backups and disaster recovery
• Anything else

P.S. - It is a very small site - about 6 or 7 web pages with only static content and not too many resources (images or other).

 

[Ralston18]

First:

Has your friend looked at your work and tested (offline) the website? Ensure that that is fully agreed upon as being correct with respect to his requirements and expectations.

Second:

Host being:

https://www.hostinger.com/

[Full disclosure: no experience or knowledge of Hostinger.]

Are you very sure that you understand the payment options? Did you/he click the little purple downward pointing arrows to see the details?

Who will be paying for the hosting? How is the hosting being paid for? Can you/your friend stop payments, terminate the website, etc. if things go wrong?

E.g., his webpages go down. Hostinger blames your code.

"Some kind of email hookup" - you and/or your friend need to know specifically what that means or implies.

I.e., are email addresses being harvested and sold by Hostinger?

What does Hostinger really promise and really do?

Take a close look at the Hostinger EUA (End User Agreements) to look at what is being said as well as what is not being said.

My opinion/experience: Be very skeptical and ask any potential website host lots of questions. How they answer (or do not answer) can tell you a lot about that host.

 

[brokeBuilder2019]

Hi Ralston,

Thanks for the response. You make some good points about things to consider. However, I think I wasn't clear in my original post ... sorry about that

To clarify, I have already been using Hostinger's free service - 000webhostapp.com, which is basically their "try us for free" service ... for months now, and I am reasonably satisfied with their service. Hostinger.com would be a paid upgrade from this free service ... with many more features, of course.

Yes, the website has been thoroughly reviewed and approved by my friend. I already have it hooked up to send emails to GMail through SMTP using phpMailer, and that works well.

So, in other words, I already have the website up and running on their free service (albeit our site is not really "public" at the moment), and am confident that it will suffice, in technical terms, for my website.

What I'm now trying to determine is -

1 - How is Hostinger's paid tier of hosting plans ?
2 - Do you get good service for the money ?
3 - Are they diligent about backups and disaster recovery ?
4 - Are you able to reach them fairly quickly when something goes wrong ?
5 - As a web developer/admin, is it easy to SSH into the actual web server host and do your work ? This facility is not available, per my knowledge, with the free service, only with the paid ones.

Thanks.

 

[Ralston18]

#1 & #2 - Having no experience with Hostinger I can only and fairly defer to others who have worked with them.

Does Hostinger provide any documentation? SOPs (Standard Operating Procedures) explaining how the support effort works. Any FAQs? Can you obtain the documentation before signing up?

#4 - What you might do is try contacting them via telephone, email, and chat to gauge how they do indeed respond.

Overall it would be appropriate to focus on some questions about backup and recovery. E.g., who is responsible for what and when.

And have your friend contact them as well.

Your question(s) could focus on #5.

Your friend could ask about #3. If the website goes down or gets corrupted does he, you, or they reload the code? I would expect that Hostinger is the responsible party.

 

[brokeBuilder2019]

Thanks ! That's a good starting point. I will reach out to them to see how they respond and how much confidence they can instill in me