SiteGround vs Hostinger

SiteGround and Hostinger court the same shopper: someone putting a first WordPress site, or a handful of small ones, on inexpensive shared hosting. What separates them is the receipt, not the category. SiteGround's UK site quotes pounds, discounts a single invoice of a year's prepay and prints the renewal beside it; Hostinger quotes dollars, discounts the whole of a four-year prepay and lists the machine's RAM and CPU where a traffic ceiling might sit. Choose by which receipt you can budget from.

Two meters, neither one complete

SiteGround grades its shared line, StartUp to GoGeek, by approximate monthly visits: roughly 10,000, then 100,000, then 400,000, checked October 2026. The word approximate earns its place, yet the pages never finish the thought. No overage charge, throttling rule or upgrade trigger appears anywhere, and no RAM or CPU figure appears either. You buy a slot with a soft traffic gauge and take the hardware on trust.

Hostinger inverts the disclosure. Its plan cards and its help-centre limits article give websites (three on Premium, unlimited above), RAM (2 GB, then 3 GB), CPU cores, databases and storage, checked November 2026, while no visit or traffic allowance appears on any captured page. Bandwidth reads as unlimited in one section and unmetered in another, subject to a Fair Usage Policy whose thresholds are not published. The two audits therefore record opposite silences: SiteGround names the ceiling and hides the machine, Hostinger names the machine and declines to name a ceiling. A buyer who can estimate their traffic can climb SiteGround's ladder knowingly; a buyer who thinks in stack size can compare Hostinger's numbers like for like. Nobody gets both.

Pounds, dollars and the length of the discount

The first honest obstacle is currency. SiteGround's figures come from siteground.co.uk in pounds excluding VAT; Hostinger's come from hostinger.com in dollars before applicable taxes. Any direct comparison is a conversion you perform yourself, plus VAT if you are a UK buyer, and this page will not pretend otherwise.

The discounts run on different clocks. SiteGround's £1.99, £3.99 and £5.99 cover only the opening invoice of a prepaid 12-month term, and the same pages print every renewal: £13.99, £23.99 and £34.99 a month before VAT. Hostinger's intro rate stretches across four years and charges for the reach: the Premium card wants $95.52 today, $1.99 a month over 48 months, renewing at $10.99, while Unlimited takes $133.92 up front and renews at $16.99. Two of Hostinger's cloud tiers, Professional and Enterprise, carry FAQ monthly rates but no published renewal at all, so their year-five price is a question for support. SiteGround's year-two price is on its own page; that asymmetry matters more than any headline figure.

Daily work: backups, staging, email

Backups differ at the entry tier. SiteGround automates daily backups on every plan, on-demand copies included from GrowBig upward. Hostinger's Premium plan gets weekly backups, daily arrives on Unlimited and the cloud line, and on-demand restores sit with Cloud Startup. How far back any of these reach is stated by neither vendor, a gap both audits carry and your pre-purchase questions should too.

Staging splits them awkwardly. SiteGround ties staging to GrowBig, adds Git at GoGeek, and leaves its own pages in mild disagreement about StartUp, where the hosting page withholds staging and the feature list does not split by plan. Hostinger states no staging environment on any captured page, across shared, cloud and VPS lines. If your habit is change, check, then ship, one vendor sells you that habit from its middle tier; the other leaves it to a plugin.

Email compounds quietly. SiteGround includes email accounts on every plan with no stated expiry; unlimited mailboxes at your domain are described on the hosting page. Hostinger's email is free for one year, a gigabyte per mailbox, two mailboxes per website on Premium, then a paid Business Email upgrade whose price the pages never quote. The free domain runs on the same clock: stated with the plan at SiteGround, first year of qualifying orders at Hostinger.

Migrations are the paragraph without an argument. SiteGround moves sites in free, by automatic WordPress migrator or by its staff, with a free email migrator alongside. Hostinger advertises unlimited free transfers with zero downtime, its cloud page putting most moves at about 20 minutes, with non-CMS cases guided by Customer Success. Bring an existing site to either and expect to keep it.

Support: three channels against one

SiteGround's captured pages commit to phone, chat and tickets, around the clock, on every plan, priority handling reserved for GoGeek. Hostinger's describe 24/7 live chat plus self-help resources, with no phone or ticket channel stated anywhere. Hostinger's single response figure, a median of one minute for English chat on cloud plans, is a vendor claim; SiteGround publishes no response-time figure at all, and neither vendor turns any figure into a guarantee. The verifiable difference is shape, not speed: a voice on a phone against a chat window.

Where each one wins

SiteGround suits the buyer of one or a few sites who wants the renewal printed in pounds, daily backups from the bottom tier, email and a domain with no expiry clock, staging from the middle tier and a phone number for the bad hours.

Hostinger suits the buyer minimising a multi-year bill across several sites, who reads RAM, CPU and database counts as purchasing information, wants Node.js named on the shared plan card where SiteGround announces Node.js hosting in a blog headline without documenting it in its feature lists, or values the separate KVM VPS line with root access, ten data centres and a location you can change later.

Both vendors leave gaps, and the audit table further down lists each one rather than smoothing them away. For the managed-cloud middle ground, read Cloudways vs SiteGround and Cloudways vs Hostinger. The hosting comparison tool sets this pair's audit rows beside every other host captured under the same citation rules.