Hostinger
When you’re looking to dip your toes into the VPS world combined with Cyberpanel and WordPress, you might have come across these hosts, Vultr and Hostinger. Both offer great options, but which is better for your WordPress website?
To answer this question, I hosted this website on both of them, trying to find out which is better.
Hostinger has a better offer compared to Vultr for WordPress websites. The price is lower for about the same performance in the WordPress Hosting Benchmark tool. The setup on both was very similar, and the support was excellent.
Hosting history
First, let me show you my hosting history, so you get an idea of my choices.
I’ve been managing this website’s hosting for about 7 years, starting with shared hosting on Versio (yeah, it’s a Dutch hosting company) in 2015. It was dirt cheap, like €0,99/month, and an excellent way to start. But as time passed, my website grew, and I was unhappy with the WordPress dashboard speed. It would time out while saving a post or navigating the dashboard. That meant I needed to do everything over again. So it was time to look for another host that had offered better performance.
Siteground had a great one-year offer, I tested it out, and I got to say, everything worked much better. It was very fast and responsive. I just liked that everything I did went smoothly without any time-outs, plus Siteground offers some amazing optimization plugins. However, after one year, the price quadrupled ($24/month). This was too expensive for my taste, and it was time to move on again.
At that time, I came across a video from Adam from WPCrafter mentioning Cloudways, which offered better performance on Vultr HF at a far cheaper price ($14/month). So I moved and loved it! It was easy to maintain, had excellent support, and had dedicated resources! I would recommend Cloudways again if you have some traffic on your website.
After three years, I became increasingly interested in ‘managing a server,’ especially when I saw a video on how easy it is to set up Cyberpanel and Litespeed on Vultr. It’s the same price ($14/month) but for double the resources.
So I transferred to Vultr for the past 6 months and explored how to set up and manage a website on a VPS with Cyberpanel on a Litespeed server. That is where we are at now!
Fun fact: until the previous sentence, there were 404 words ????.
Comparing Prices and Buying Both
When comparing the pricing, Hostinger is cheaper, starting at $3.99/m. Vultr starts with a $6,-/m plan.
Just know with Hostinger, you’ll pay more when you renew. The cheapest plan will increase from $3.99 to $8.99. So it could be worth signing up for multiple months or at least a year. With Vultr, you sometimes get offers like my affiliate link into getting $100 of credits to test out the waters, which is a few months of free hosting,
When you climb into the higher plans, Hostinger gets more and more interesting because of the specifications offered for the price, especially when you buy for multiple years. I opted for the $10.99/m Hostinger plan for 4 years, and I was curious about how it performs for half of the money and more specifications compared to Vultr ($24/m). Since Hostinger offers a 30-day money-back guarantee, it was a no-brainer to test the waters.
Hostinger wins on pricing before renewal but offers on-par specification upon renewal. They offer a 30-day money-back guarantee allowing you to test the waters. Quick tip ???? when choosing Hostinger, go for at least a year ????.
Both offer a variety of options to purchase from their website. As someone in the Netherlands, I like that they have PayPal options because we don’t use credit cards. For those who don’t have both, you have the option at Vultr to pay by wire transfer, which is an excellent alternative. I want to see them offer iDeal (the most used payment method in the Netherlands).
Vultr offers to receive payment by wire transfer, which means anybody with a bank account could purchase a VPS. This is a big plus for someone living in the Netherlands and not having access to a Credit card or Paypal.
After purchase, you are redirected to the manage panels, where you can set up your VPS. Next, I’ll indulge you with WordPress Benchmarks before boring you with setup experience, documentation, and support.
WordPress Hosting Benchmark tool
I saw the YouTube channel ideaspot using a benchmark tool, which I thought would be cool to check out and see how these two platforms perform. This tool tests the CPU, memory bandwidth, disk speed, persistent object cache, and network download speed. It does this by creating large temporary files and running many SQL queries. After a few minutes, the results were in.
I….. was….. amazed! Vultr scored 7.8, and Hostinger scored 8. They were very close. But Hostinger scored 0.2 points better than Vultr. In all honesty, I didn’t expect the pricing they offered.
Hostinger wins in the WordPress Hosting Benchmark tool with a solid 8. Just 0.2 points better than Vultr.
Genuinely I couldn’t believe Hostinger could offer this performance for such a low price at first purchase. What is their strategy? Are they hoping people will not go through the hassle of moving everything over upon renewal? Get them in cheap and make them pay later? I mean, I would move to something different by then.
Another benchmark WPPerformanceTester
Another hosting performance benchmark I saw some Youtubers was the WPPerformanceTester. It does extensive Math, text manipulations, loops, conditional logic, and database checks. Everything WordPress would use. Just know this plugin is outdated and not being maintained. So I wouldn’t recommend using it in future tests.
In the image, you can see that Hostinger won, with 4 seconds faster in completing all the tests thrown at it. It could handle 50% more queries per second and was about 40% faster in execution time than Vultr.
Hostinger wins the WPPerformanceTester test in 9.7 seconds, 50% faster than Vultr.
I didn’t do any other speed tests like Google’s Pagespeed or Pingdom tests because, in my opinion, hosting is just one part of the complete WordPress optimization. You’re looking at multiple variables, like CDN, page optimization, etc… Testing this doesn’t make sense when you compare these VPS options on how well they perform.
Creating the VPS
Vultr offers a one-click setup button, but you need an account and be logged in for this to work. If logged in, you just hit Deploy, and everything is preconfigured. When you start, I will change from the default selection to Choose server Cloud Compute and Server Size to the $6/month.
With Hostinger, you need to choose the tier you want. When you have paid for it, you can enter the management panel for Hostinger. You’ll see a setup button that gets you into a wizard for setting up your VPS.
Both offer a very smooth way of getting started. I like the Vultr option the best because of the one-click setup.
Vultr wins because they have a very easy-to-use one-click setup button which I enjoyed using.
Support
The luck with VPS is that you mostly rely on available documentation from your web apps. With that said, Vultr and Hostinger both provide an option to ask for support from within the Management panel via the Chat option. I found that they were very responsive. I didn’t need to wait long before I got a response. As is custom nowadays, you’ll receive an email notification when something new happens.
When the chat support couldn’t answer my question, they at least pointed me to available tutorials or documentation. However, being technically inclined and knowing your why will undoubtedly help. Whenever I had issues I went to the community that could help me solve it.
For instance, I never set up a Cyberpanel instance on a VPS or worked on a VPS. So I searched on the community of Cyberpanel to find tutorials and debugging issues. Similar to the N8N forum and WordPress issues.