I bought my first a hostinger plan in 2017.
Then I was looking for something cheap to host.
What was my first business venture ever.
A tech blog that I would monetize through ads.
And at the time, I didn't even realize it,
but I joined a web hosting revolution in the making.
And even though that website never took off and is pretty much dead
five years later, I'm still using hostinger.
Why? I tried it to piece it all together.
And to answer this question, it's important for us to understand how hosting
companies make money and how this method changed over the years.
Hosting companies are essentially real estate businesses of the Internet.
They buy, sell, and rent land for your websites to live on.
That means they invest a large amount of money upfront
into server space and then try to make that money back through renting.
Here's the problem with this. For the longest time
ever, web hosting businesses were all about convincing you
to rent as much server space as possible and not use it.
Because if you're not using it, they can rent that same server space
to other people.
Fewer servers, more users, more money.
Of course, this created more problems.
Web hosting services had unusable interfaces almost by design,
making it as hard as possible to use the services you just paid for
hiding features and charging you the absolute maximum
to recoup server costs as fast as possible.
Companies weren't really connected with their users.
They were just offloading their garbage to people and hoped nobody noticed.
But this business model started to shift, starting somewhere around
2015 with the rise of simplicity.
Netflix Cheap and Simple.
Spotify Cheap and Simple.
Dollar Shave Club. Cheap and simple.
You get the idea.
And this is where I believe hostinger
as a company started to change the web hosting industry as a whole.
In 2016, their services cost around
$5 in 2017 and 2018.
It was $2.20 in 2019.
It was a $1.45.
And in 2020 it was just $0.80
You could get a four year hosting plan for like $38 at the same time.
The quality of their services kept increasing exponentially
better interfaces, faster servers and more features.
The combination of increasingly lower pricing and better quality services
positioned hostinger as a client first company among the sea of complex
competitors. Hostinger had found a new age formula
for hosting business. Connect with your customer and help them succeed.
Hosting, SSL certificates, basic email hosting and 24/7 support.
Were all included in the $0.80 a month price tag,
and all of it was simple to use.
People were even encouraged
to use their plans the maximum through intuitive interfaces
online tutorials, webinars, and extensive knowledge based articles.
All of the money that the hostinger earned they poured it right back
into their software and hardware. For example, in 2019
they made a full switch to Litespeed servers instead of regular Apache ones,
and they made sure that all of the advantages of Litespeed
were activated by default for every single user.
It didn't matter which plan you had, this took there several response time
from an average of 0.5 seconds to an incredible 0.1 seconds.
And this didn't cost anything extra to the users
because instead of selling server space, they started selling success to your site.
Instead of buying raw computing power and resources.
You were buying a full on service.
And this show hosting an event from 2.3 million in sales in 2016
to 23.4 million in sales in 2020.
So how did the service evolve over the past five years?
For me as a customer, the price seems to be climbing from the 2020 era of hostinger.
Slowly but surely there are small increases in price
for the cheapest plan and a decrease in price for the more expensive ones.
To me, it seems like Hostinger is trying to push the more expensive plans on you.
But don't be tricked.
If the cheapest one is enough for you and go for that one.
Keep in mind that hostinger plans are advertised as monthly.
But you do have to pay the full amount upfront.
Since I usually pay for one or two years in advance.
It's $50 to $100 per year.
And I just paid that and honestly, kind of forget about it
since there is no need to buy extra features afterwards.
One of the biggest negatives I've noticed is the support getting worse.
The response times are longer and complicated problems don't get solved.
As fast as I would like for them to.
I believe as user accounts grow, the physically just can't hire
enough skilled people to keep up.
So I expect this to only get worse before it gets better.
I've had a domain transfer issue this year.
It took me two months to get it solved with the hostinger.
Of course, this is an extreme event but I feel like every time
I contact the support nowadays it's a 20 to 30 minutes wait.
On average, at minimum.
The performance is currently the best it has ever been.
I try to monitor whenever my websites go offline and
usually is just a micro outage of 1 to 2 seconds. In the past.
Like 2019-2020.
I had instances where my site was offline for 1 or 2 hours at a time.
I haven't noticed this for the past year.
You can also track outages through the tools hostinger provides you with.
And of course, there are still small internal errors
in the user panel here or there, or it loads slowly from time to time.
But new features keep getting added at no additional cost.
Software updates are made available as well.
I've created this website using hostinger
for a tutorial this week and it loads in 0.7 seconds.
That's pretty much as fast as you can get.
Okay, so after all of this, why do I use hostinger?
Because for the most part, I feel like I'm getting a fair service.
I can get everything done that I need to get done,
and I can appreciate a company that tries to innovate once in a while
instead of trying to grab as much profit as possible.
Anyways, I hope you enjoyed this review by me
sharing my experiences and this helped on your web hosting journey.
My name is Emit and I'll see you in the next video.