Hostinger vs Wix

Hostinger and Wix now pitch the same person: someone with no technical help who wants a site built this week, ideally by describing it. Both funnels lean on AI to close that sale. The products underneath are different things. Hostinger is a hosting company whose shared plans list an AI Builder as one of four build options on every card, next to WordPress, an AI assistant for an online store and Node.js. Wix is a builder platform whose plans carry hosting the way a subscription carries postage: included on every tier, the free one included, never separately itemised. The choice between them is a choice between those two shapes, and it plays out in the payment terms, the units each ladder grades, and what happens when you want to leave.

Two funnels aimed at one beginner

Hostinger's funnel starts on a hosting page. The plans are hosting plans, graded in websites, storage and RAM, and the AI Builder appears as a feature of them: describe what you need and AI will build it, no tech skills needed, per the captured page. WordPress gets equal billing with a 1-click installer, and the cloud line above adds managed WordPress, WooCommerce and web apps.

Wix's funnel starts and stays inside the builder. The Premium ladder runs Free, Light, Core, Business, Business Elite, then a custom-priced Enterprise, and it grades platform quantities: storage, site collaborators, monthly AI credits, ecommerce features. Hosting, security monitoring and a CDN of 200+ nodes come with every site, free plan included. No cPanel, SSH, FTP or server access of any kind is stated; the only compute figures published are per-backend-container quotas in the compare table.

What the entry price actually buys

Hostinger's headline reads $1.99 per month, checked November 2026. The mechanics: that is the 48-month term paid upfront, $95.52 at purchase, renewing at $10.99 per month for the same term. Unlimited headlines $2.79 on the same footing ($133.92 upfront, $16.99 renewal). No month-to-month price appears on the captured pages.

Wix's ladder reads $9, $16, $25 and $119 per month from Light to Business Elite, checked November 2026, each a yearly subscription paid in full at purchase, with first-term half-price promotions on Core, Business and Business Elite at capture time; a UK rendering of the same page showed the same numbers in pounds. Beneath it all sits the Free plan: $0, no credit card, hosting and editor included, on a Wixsite subdomain with Wix ads.

Comparing the two headline numbers is the wrong move; the denominators differ. Hostinger's intro rate buys four years of commitment and publishes its renewal. Wix's prices are annual by default, its promotions cover only the first term, and neither company publishes a month-to-month rate. The escape hatches differ too: Hostinger allows 30 days for a full refund, Wix 14.

Ladders graded in different units

Hostinger grades in hosting units. Premium carries 3 websites, 20 GB SSD storage, 2 GB RAM and weekly backups; Unlimited carries unlimited websites, 50 GB NVMe, daily backups, unlimited mailboxes for the free email year and 500 AI credits. Every unlimited feature sits under a Fair Usage Policy whose thresholds the pages do not publish.

Wix grades in platform units. Storage steps 2, 50, 100 GB then unlimited; collaborators step 2, 5, 10, 100; monthly AI credits step 150 to 1,000. Ecommerce starts at Core, and the fee on Wix pricing-plan sales falls 4, 2, then 0 per cent as you climb. Even the number of websites each plan covers goes unstated. The audit table holds both sets of numbers side by side, and a 50 GB Wix plan is not the same purchase as 50 GB on a server with hPanel behind it: one is a quota inside a platform, the other is space on hosting you can partly control.

Portability, the asymmetry that surfaces later

Hostinger hosts standard WordPress. hPanel ships SSH, WP-CLI, PHP version control, Git integration and a MySQL manager, and migrations in are free, unlimited and handled for you with zero downtime, the cloud page claiming most moves finish in about 20 minutes. A WordPress site on Hostinger is a WordPress site anywhere: the files and database can be carried to another host.

The Wix captures state no export or migration-out path at all, and no migration in either. What moving involves is written nowhere in them, so this article goes only as far as they do: no exit is stated. Treat that as a rebuild risk when you sign up, not a discovery for year three.

The visit-limit silence both share

Neither company states a visit or traffic allowance on any captured page. Hostinger says unlimited bandwidth on its feature strip and unmetered on Premium in its FAQ, both under the unpublished Fair Usage Policy, and its stated answer to a spike is a free 24-hour plan boost. Wix states no visits, bandwidth or overage wording anywhere; its ceilings are the storage, collaborator and request-per-minute quotas in its compare table. The silence is shared, so neither side gets charged against the other here, but a buyer with spiky traffic is buying unknown metering either way.

Support, backups and the stated gaps

Hostinger's stated channel is 24/7 live chat on every plan, with a vendor-claimed median response of one minute for English-language priority requests on cloud plans; no phone or ticket channel appears. Wix lists 24/7 customer care on every plan, free included, by chat or scheduled call, with priority care arriving at Business Elite and no published phone number.

Backups split oddly. Hostinger states weekly on Premium, daily on Unlimited and cloud, and on-demand on Cloud Startup, with no retention period stated anywhere. Wix's captured pages state nothing about backups at all, on any tier including Business Elite. Neither states a staging environment, and neither publishes SLA terms: Hostinger's 99.9 per cent uptime figure appears on its cloud page only, while Wix's compare table carries an Uptime SLO row with no percentage behind it.

Where each one wins

Hostinger for the beginner whose site is WordPress now or may become it, who wants files that move, WP-CLI and SSH on the account, mailboxes included for a year, and 30 days to change their mind. Wix for the person who wants to build, publish and judge the result before paying anything, whose site is a storefront rather than a codebase, and who accepts a closed platform as the cost of never thinking about servers.

Two wider reads: Cloudways vs Hostinger tests Hostinger's tiers against hosting you control at the server level, and Cloudways vs Wix works the closed-platform question through at length. The hosting comparison tool sets both against every other host audited on the same citation rules.