The cheapest credible hosting on the market, sold on a four-year prepayment. A close look at the model, the infrastructure and who it genuinely suits.
Hostinger has become the default answer to "what is the cheapest decent hosting" — a Lithuanian company that grew enormous on aggressive pricing and, unusually for the budget tier, actually built good infrastructure underneath it.
The infrastructure is genuinely good
This is the part sceptics get wrong. Hostinger runs LiteSpeed with NVMe storage, current PHP versions, free CDN, staging on higher plans, and a London data centre you can select at signup. hPanel is cleaner and more comprehensible than cPanel for a beginner. Free automated migrations work. Benchmarks for a cached WordPress site are competitive with hosts charging four times as much.
If you had told someone in 2015 that £3/month would buy this stack, they would not have believed you.
The pricing model is the catch
The advertised rate requires a 48-month prepayment. Not 12 months — four years, paid up front, typically £120–£150 in one go. That is how £2.49/month is achieved, and it is disclosed but easy to skim past.
At renewal the price is roughly two to three times the promotional rate. So the shape is: a large single payment now, four years of genuinely excellent value, then a decision point where the price roughly triples.
| Term chosen | Effective monthly | Paid up front |
|---|---|---|
| 48 months | ~£2.49 | ~£120–150 |
| 24 months | ~£3.50–4 | ~£85–95 |
| 12 months | ~£5–7 | ~£60–85 |
| 1 month | ~£9–11 | ~£10 |
| Renewal (any term) | ~£7–9 | — |
Indicative; Hostinger changes promotional pricing frequently.
Three things to know before buying
1. Choose the London data centre at signup. It is a dropdown at checkout, it is easy to miss, and changing it later means a migration. For UK visitors this is the difference between 10ms and 40ms of latency.
2. The cheapest plan is genuinely limited. Single Web Hosting caps you at one website with weekly rather than daily backups. Premium is the realistic entry point for anything you care about; Business adds daily backups and better resources.
3. Support now front-loads an AI assistant. You can reach a human, but the path is longer than it used to be, and the answers are less specific. For a straightforward site this is fine. For a difficult debugging session it is a real downgrade from the £6/month UK independents.
Who it genuinely suits
- Anyone certain they want the same host for four years and who can absorb the up-front payment. The value is real and hard to beat.
- Multiple small personal projects on the Premium plan, which allows several sites.
- People starting out who want a clean panel and a low barrier, without the £2 boxes' risk profile.
Who should look elsewhere
- Businesses where support quality matters. Krystal at £5.99 flat costs about £3.50/month more and answers with a UK engineer in minutes. For a site that earns money that is not a close call.
- Anyone unwilling to prepay four years to any company. Reasonable — take the 12-month term and accept roughly £5–7/month, at which point 20i and 34SP are directly comparable and do not have a renewal cliff.
- Agencies and resellers. The tooling is not built for managing client sites.
Fair verdict: Hostinger is the best genuinely cheap hosting available and the infrastructure deserves its reputation. The four-year prepayment is not a trick, but it is a real commitment to a company you have not worked with yet — and the honest comparison is against a flat-priced host at year three, not against the advert.
Published 18 April 2026. Prices and ownership change — check the comparison table for current figures, and the provider's own site before buying. No affiliate links anywhere on this site.