Hostinger
★★★★★ 4.5
Digital · Compare
A first website, or several small sites, on a tight budget
Read the Hostinger reviewHostinger vs Cloudways
One host sells a plan that arrives assembled on a long first term; the other bills a cloud server by the hour and lets the reader choose which cloud sits under it. This comparison sets their published plans, agreements and refund rules side by side.
In this comparison: At a glance Table Criteria FAQ
At a glance
A first site on a small budget belongs on Hostinger, where the year is inexpensive and the order arrives ready to build on. A site that has outgrown shared hosting belongs on Cloudways, where the resources are its own and nothing is prepaid. The pair rarely compete for the same reader, which is why much of what follows describes two different jobs rather than one contest.
Cloudways
★★★★★ 4.4
Digital · Compare
A site that needs the cloud underneath it chosen, not bundled
Read the Cloudways reviewWhat this is based on. Two kinds of document decide almost every row here: what each company publishes about its plans, and what its agreements say it owes. ElevenReview rents no server for its reviews. Where a difference is something neither company's paperwork settles, the row is left untagged rather than decided on a hunch. The sources that were read are named at the end, and each carries the date it was checked.
Quick comparison
Five of these rows are scores each full review already published, brought onto one grid so the two hosts can be read side by side; the remaining rows are the facts that decide a purchase. A row is tagged only where a published document settles the difference, never on a gap of a tenth of a point. Ease of use and setup is the row tagged here, and the reason sits in the order rather than in the score beside it: what each host includes with a plan is a published fact, and the two lists differ by items rather than by degree.
| Criterion | Hostinger | Cloudways |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price Checked 15 Sep 2026 | From $2.99/mo on a 48-month term paid upfront, renewing at $10.99 | From $11/mo, billed hourly, no term |
| Free plan | No. A 30-day money-back guarantee on hosting, renewals included | No. A three-day trial, no card required |
| Performance and infrastructure | 4.5 / 5 | 4.6 / 5 |
| Plan range and scalability | 4.7 / 5 | 4.5 / 5 |
| Support and reliability | 4.4 / 5 | 4.3 / 5 |
| Ease of use and setup | 4.5 / 5Best | 4.4 / 5 |
| Price and value | 4.4 / 5 | 4.3 / 5 |
| Best for | A first website, or several small sites, on a tight budget | A site that needs the cloud underneath it chosen, not bundled |
Scroll the table sideways to see both platforms.
How they compare on each criterion
The five axes below are the ones these two hosts actually separate on: what the site runs on, how far the account grows, what the host owes when something breaks, how much of the setup is already done, and what the bill does after the first term. Each figure below is the score the full review already published, so nothing here is scored a second time.
Performance and infrastructure
What the site runs on, and who decided it.
Hostinger’s stack is LiteSpeed servers, a CDN and a certificate attached to each plan rather than sold beside it, and advertised bandwidth that is not metered, with NVMe storage from the second plan upward and the KVM VPS line running on AMD EPYC processors. Cloudways puts the hardware decision in the buyer’s hands instead, because the machine comes from one of five cloud providers chosen at setup, and the plan includes the Cloudflare Enterprise edge alongside Redis and Object Cache Pro. Cloudways rates higher because its ceiling is not one company’s to set, and the caching and the edge arrive with the server rather than as additions. Hostinger stays close behind because LiteSpeed is on the cheapest plan rather than reserved for the dearest. Neither company publishes a benchmark of its own platform, so each figure describes the stack a plan includes rather than a measured result.
Plan range and scalability
How far the account can grow without being rebuilt.
Hostinger keeps one account across the whole ladder. A site can start on shared hosting and be moved to cloud or to the KVM VPS line without leaving it, and the rungs in between are documented: the entry plan carries three websites and 20 GB of storage, the rung above drops the website limit and runs daily backups at 50 GB, and the third reaches 100 GB and adds restores on demand. Cloudways sells two shapes. Flexible is pay-as-you-go, with no cap on websites or visits and a server that resizes vertically from the panel, while the fixed-price Autonomous tiers are built for one site at a time, which leaves a reader running several of them on Flexible. The host that scores higher here is the one whose ladder a small site can enter at the bottom of, which is where the 4.7 sits.
Support and reliability
What happens when something breaks, and what the host owes you when it does.
The two promises are written at different levels. Cloudways commits to response times by tier: a high-priority ticket is targeted at three hours on the standard level, thirty minutes on Advanced and ten on Premium, and the agreement says these clock the start of work rather than its completion. What a missed target owes is five per cent of the month’s fee for every hour over it, and the promise covers the support desk rather than the platform the site runs on. Hostinger advertises 24/7 priority support without publishing a first-response time at all, and its uptime commitment covers the hosting service itself, with account credit claimable within thirty days. Backups separate its plans in the same direction, running weekly at the entry tier, daily one rung up, and adding a restore on demand at the top. That is where the 4.4 sits. The commitment attaches to the hosting service itself, which is the thing being bought, while the Cloudways targets govern the support desk and leave the availability of the cloud underneath to the provider’s own terms.
Ease of use and setup
How much of the setup arrives already done.
This is the row tagged as the win, and the reason is the contents of the order rather than a score. Hostinger includes a domain for the first year, issues and installs the certificate without a step from the buyer, installs WordPress or Node.js from its own panel, and puts mailboxes in every plan free for a year, without a cap on the two higher ones. Its AI Builder is metered in credits, five on the entry plan and fifteen above it. Cloudways opens here instead: before a site exists the buyer has answered which cloud, which region and how large a server, and the panel that runs them is not the provider’s own. What it does include is work that would otherwise land on a developer: managed migration, staging and cloning at no charge, a certificate through Cloudflare, a built-in firewall and a vulnerability scanner. No domain and no mailbox come with the order, and a mailbox is bought at $1.50 a month. The 4.5 belongs to the host that answers the domain and the mail question inside the plan itself.
Price and value
What the second year costs, and what can move the bill before it arrives.
These are opposite billing shapes. Hostinger’s advertised rate belongs to the longest term it sells, so Premium is $2.99 a month across the 48 months, settled up front as $143.52, and the renewal is printed beside it at $10.99 a month. That first term is low enough that a year of hosting barely registers in a first site’s budget, while the second is ordinary pricing, which pushes the four-year average well above the figure on the homepage. Cloudways prepays nothing: nothing is charged until the month is over, the machine is billed for the hours it runs, and $11 is the second month’s price as much as the first. What Cloudways leaves open is everything the plan does not cover, and the provider choice sets those rates, with transfer priced differently by cloud, from $0.02 a gigabyte on DigitalOcean to $0.12 on AWS, and disk, backup storage and autoscaling metered onto the same invoice. Neither host offers a free plan, which leaves the Hostinger 30-day guarantee and the Cloudways three-day trial as the only look before money changes hands. The two entry prices describe different things, so the figures worth setting side by side are the renewal at $10.99 a month against the smallest server at $11, with the difference that one of them can be given up in any month.
Which one should you pick?
Choose Hostinger if the site does not exist yet
- The whole order arrives assembled, with the domain, the certificate, the WordPress install and the mailboxes, so nothing has to be bought elsewhere first.
- One small site, or a handful of side projects, is what the plan is sized for, and the rung above is a change to the same account rather than a move.
- The four-year bill can be paid in one go, since the advertised rate belongs to a term paid in full at checkout.
Choose Cloudways once shared hosting is being outgrown
- The resources need to belong to the site alone, and a shared plan throttling it at busy hours is the problem being solved.
- Where the server sits is worth deciding, and the provider whose data centres are nearest the audience is the one to pick.
- The bill should stay hourly and open-ended, with no term to sit out and no renewal to plan for.
Choose neither if you want the hosting company to run WordPress for you. Both hosts put the platform in your hands, one as a panel that has done the setup for you and the other as a server you choose and then manage. A host whose whole product is running WordPress is where that job belongs. Read the SiteGround review
Frequently asked questions
Do I need a developer for either one?
The question in both cases is where the site will live rather than how it is built. Hostinger answers it for the buyer, since the plan arrives with the install, the certificate and the domain already placed. Cloudways hands it over, and the answer is a judgement about the site rather than a technical one: which cloud and which region is a decision about how close the server sits to the audience. A plain WordPress site needs neither a developer nor a server administrator on either host.
How short can the first commitment be?
Over four years on Hostinger, and one month on Cloudways. Cloudways bills monthly in arrears with no prepaid plan to buy, so a server can be rented, used and given up, though an invoice already raised is not returned. Hostinger's headline rate assumes the whole term is settled on the first invoice, which is why the 30-day guarantee is the way back out.
What happens to the bill in a month with unusually high traffic?
Very little on Hostinger, and a line on the next invoice at Cloudways. Hostinger charges a flat rate for a web hosting plan, so a month with a traffic spike costs the same as any other. At Cloudways the plan price is only the floor: transfer, disk, backups and scaling beyond the baseline are billed by use, and what a gigabyte of transfer costs depends on which of the five providers the server sits on.
Hostinger for a first site, Cloudways once shared hosting runs out
A site can begin on one host and move to the other, which is why the comparison ends without a single winner. Hostinger carries the higher overall rating, 4.5 out of 5 in our full review, and it earns that on a ladder that costs little to enter and an order that arrives with the domain and the certificate already in it. Cloudways sits at 4.4 in its own review, and its strength is the infrastructure rather than the setup: the best performance figure on this page, 4.6, is its. Plan around the first year being the cheap one, and around the move being the moment those extras turn back into errands you run yourself.
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Sources
Hostinger (hostinger.com), checked 15 September 2026: the price pages for the web hosting and VPS ranges, for plan limits and both rates; the hosting agreement for the uptime commitment; and the refund rules for the guarantee and the free domain.
Cloudways (cloudways.com), checked 15 September 2026: the plan pages for the two billing shapes, the five providers, the rates and the metered extras; the service level agreement for the response targets and the credit owed when one is missed; and the provider terms covering the account's billing and exit.
Every figure traces to a named source
We tell you what we could not verify
No vendor can pay for a score