Hostinger complaints: what's true, and how to switch

Yes. Hostinger is a real, ICANN-accredited company based in Lithuania. Its Trustpilot page shows 4.6 stars from about 73,000 reviews, with 7% at one star, though the company invites customers to leave those reviews.

Most complaints are about how the product is sold: a headline price that needs a four-year prepay, email that is free only for a year, refunds with exceptions, and support that is now mostly an AI. Each one is below, with the source.

On Hostinger's pricing page, checked 8 October 2026, Premium web hosting is $2.99 a month. That rate needs a 48-month term paid upfront, $143.52 on the day, and the plan renews at $10.99 a month. Cloud Startup is $7.99 on the same four-year prepay and renews at $25.99. The renewal rates are printed on the page. They are more than three times the headline prices, and they arrive four years after the purchase.

Hosting plans come with mailboxes, and the pricing page is exact about it: "2 mailboxes per website, free for 1 year" on Premium. Those free mailboxes are small. Hostinger's limits page gives the one-year trial 1 GB of storage and 100 messages a day, counted separately for mail in and mail out, against 5 GB and 1,000 a day on the paid Starter plan. When that year ends, Hostinger's own help article says that with a card on file "all mailboxes will automatically renew as a paid Hostinger Business Starter plan". Without a card you have to upgrade by hand before the date, and the article's advice for the alternative is to export your emails first "to prevent data loss".

From then on the email is a separate subscription, charged per mailbox: five mailboxes are five charges. The same page lists Starter at $0.39 a mailbox a month on a 48-month term, renewing at $1.59, with $2.99 struck through beside it.

Hostinger's own email plans list at $2.99, $3.99 and $5.99 a mailbox before discounts. Hostinger also resells Google Workspace, sold per user. On its Workspace page, checked 8 October 2026, Starter, Standard and Plus are $6.99, $13.99 and $21.99 a user a month on a 12-month term, with $9.99, $19.99 and $29.99 struck through beside them.

Workspace is managed from the Emails section of hPanel, the same place as Hostinger's own mail, and each extra address is bought as an additional paid account. If you are not sure which one you pay for, check the subscriptions list in hPanel's billing area. Moving out works the same way as below; in the migration wizard you pick Gmail / Google Workspace instead of Hostinger.

Hosting and email can be refunded within 30 days. Domains are different, and the refund policy spells it out. A .com is refundable only within 96 hours of registration. Domain renewals and completed transfers are never refundable, and neither are country domains like .uk or .ca.

The free domain has its own line. If your refunded hosting plan came with one, "the standard price of the domain may be deducted from your total refund amount".

Hostinger's chat is answered by an AI assistant, first Kodee and now Hostinger Agent. Since late June 2026, hard cases are no longer handed to a person. A specialist coaches the AI behind the scenes while you keep talking to the bot. By Hostinger's own figures, reported by webhosting.today, 91% of about 1.5 million monthly conversations close with no human involved.

Some customers say so in public:

Posts about suspended accounts come up again and again in replies to @Hostinger. This thread is one owner, three months apart:

We do not know why this account was suspended, and some suspensions are deserved. The general point holds either way: when your email is with a separate provider, nothing that happens to your hosting account can reach your inbox.

Some of the distrust is older. In 2019 Hostinger disclosed a breach of a database holding details on about 14 million customers, with passwords hashed in the deprecated SHA-1, and reset everyone's password. In 2017 the review site Review Signal accused it of rating itself up through employees posing as customers, as Wikipedia's article records.

Then there is abuse. Wikipedia's article also records that Netcraft found Hostinger hosting 90% of the Steam phishing sites it stopped in 2015, and that in 2023 it entered the top five phishing hosts tracked by the Cybercrime Information Center, before dropping out of the top 20 by April 2026. In 2024 the scam baiter Kitboga posted this:

You do not have to leave Hostinger in one go. The cheapest setup splits the account into three jobs. Cloudflare runs your DNS on its free plan and can later hold the domain. Faivelo runs the email at one flat price. The website stays wherever suits it, which can still be Hostinger.

On the domain, Hostinger shows .com at $0.01 for the first year beside a struck-through $19.99. Cloudflare Registrar says its registration, transfer and renewal prices "are always at or below what registries and ICANN charge us" (cloudflare.com/products/registrar). On the email, Hostinger Email Starter renews at $1.59 a mailbox a month on a four-year term, and Faivelo is $60 a year for the account, however many mailboxes you make.

For one to three addresses Hostinger Email costs less, and we would rather say so. From four up the flat price wins, and the gap grows with every address you add, because nothing on Faivelo is counted per mailbox.

The order matters: move the DNS first, so every later step is a click instead of a copy and paste.

Faivelo hosts email, not websites. If your site is static, Cloudflare Pages can host it on the same Cloudflare account. If it runs on a Hostinger hosting plan, it can stay there: with DNS at Cloudflare, your site's records point at the Hostinger server just as before.

Sites made with Hostinger's own Website Builder are a different case. Hostinger's help article covers moving them between plans in the same account, says moving to another Hostinger account "isn't available yet", and does not describe a way to move them to another host.