Hostinger vs. STRATO – Close Match, but Only One Winner [2020]

Thanks to their wide range of hosting services and products, Hostinger and Germany-based STRATO may appear quite similar. However, there’re differences between these two hosting providers that you should know about. Since choosing one out of these two may be difficult, I decided to offer some help. I tested both thoroughly on multiple parameters like features, performance, pricing, security, and support. Though STRATO gave Hostinger a good fight, the ultimate winner that offered more value for money was Hostinger.

Check Hostinger’s latest deals here or continue reading to know how Hostinger emerges the winner in this Hostinger vs. STRATO competition.

1. Plans and Pricing

Hostinger has cheaper overall prices and offers more flexibility with its billing cycles

With Hostinger, you’ll get shared and WordPress hosting along with email hosting, VPS (Linux, Windows, and Minecraft servers), and cloud servers. STRATO offers shared, WordPress, and email hosting together with VPS (Linux/Windows), managed web servers, dedicated servers (Linux/Windows), and cloud storage. Hostinger’s shared hosting plans are cheaper than STRATO’s provided you opt for the longest (quadrennial) term.

Though STRATO’s shared hosting plans are payable yearly, you’ll get a one-month free trial with three of them. In case you opt for the monthly term of Hostinger, your total payable would still be lower as except for STRATO Hosting basic, all other shared plans charge a set-up fee. Hostinger’s WordPress plans are cheaper (with the 48-month term) than STRATO’s. The minimum contract period with Hostinger is a month while STRATO needs an annual commitment. However, Hostinger’s monthly WordPress plans are pricier than STRATO’s monthly costs (with the annual term).

Both these providers offer a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Overall lower prices plus flexibility in choosing your billing cycle help Hostinger win this round.

2. Features

Features that offer more value for money help Hostinger edge past STRATO

STRATO Hosting plus and Hosting pro are ideal for club/company websites and memory-intensive web projects respectively. You may even use Hostinger’s Premium/Business plans for such websites/web projects. With Hostinger’s shared hosting plans, you’ll get CloudLinux OS, LSCache for WordPress, 1X-4X allocated resources, custom-developed hPanel, SSDs, access manager, DNS management, free domain (with the annual term of premium/business plans), lifetime free SSL, daily/weekly data backups, SSH access (with 2 higher plans), support for multiple PHP versions (5.2-7.4), free/paid (plan-dependent) Cloudflare CDN, a website builder (free for 1 month), 1-click auto-installer with over a hundred apps, and Github integration, among others.

STRATO’s shared hosting plans come with free/paid SSL certificates, Plesk control panel, free domains, DynDNS, PHP 7.4 support, SSDs, SSH and SFTP, 1-click popular CMS installation via AppWizard, WP-CLI, Git, and optional (paid) add-ons like Sitelock (for website security) and rankingCoach (for SEO). It also offers 3 website builder plans.

You can check this comparison table to compare these two providers.

Though STRATO offers better resource allocations (disk space/bandwidth), it can’t match Hostinger’s overall features that offer more value for money.

3. Performance

Hostinger outperforms STRATO

Hostinger’s datacenters are located across 7 different global regions. If your website visitors are scattered across the world, hosting your site with Hostinger would give you more flexibility in terms of getting your servers in a Tier-3 datacenter closest to your target audience.

But with STRATO’s 2 German datacenters (that use 100% green electricity), your choices are pretty limited. When it comes to performance-enhancing features, Hostinger outperforms STRATO again, thanks to using SSDs, Cloudflare CDN, dual uplinks with multiple ISPs, LSCache plugins, and GZIP compression. STRATO gives you a GDPR-compliant hosting environment and uses the latest PHP version, SSDs, caching, and coordinated RAM to deliver high-availability and high-performance.

4. Security

It’s a tie

If securing your website matters to you (and it should!), Hostinger offers multiple tools to ensure it – from SSL certificate, weekly/daily automatic backups, and CDN to LVE containers, RAID-10, proactive server monitoring, Wanguard anti-DDoS protection, and Imunify360/Bitninja (web application firewall).

STRATO does a good job with its 3-tiered security. It has multiple redundancies within its datacenters and offers SSL, multi-level spam and virus protection, STRATO Sitelock, SiteGuard, and Backup Control, and online store security via its partner janolaw. Its GDPR-compliant hosting environment and TÜV certification (ISO 27001) also instill confidence.

With both providers using robust security measures, it’s difficult to pick a clear winner.

5. Support

Thanks to its superfast support, Hostinger races ahead of STRATO

Say goodbye to poor or average support with Hostinger. It offers 24/7 live chat, ticket, and email support (available only for logged-in users). There’s a faster paid “Priority Support” option on offer too. Hostinger’s live chat was superfast and the support agent was courteous and efficient.

STRATO offers support via phone (including a 24/7 hotline number) and email (through contact form). However, its email support was sluggish and I got a reply after more than 48 hours. I noted several STRATO hosting reviews complaining about its sluggish (and often non-responsive) support.

Self-help enthusiasts can use Hostinger’s tutorials, blog, and an extensive knowledgebase. With STRATO, their choices would include a blog, YouTube tutorials, and an extensive FAQ section (styled like a knowledgebase).

Its superfast support helps Hostinger win this round.

Hostinger Emerges Triumphant

Except for the security round where STRATO matches Hostinger to secure a tie, Hostinger easily wins all the other rounds pretty convincingly – right from features and performance to pricing and support. So, I can confidently recommend Hostinger. If you’re still in doubt, knowing that Hostinger is included in our list of​ the best web hosting services could help​.

Comparison Table

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