3 min read
Hostinger isn't a scam. It's genuinely the cheapest serious host you can buy, and the promo price is real. The catch is that it only applies to your first term, and the first term is four years long. By the time renewal arrives, most people have forgotten what they agreed to.
What renewal actually costs
These are Hostinger's own published prices as of July 2026:
| Plan | First 48 months | At renewal |
|---|---|---|
| Premium | $2.99/mo | $10.99/mo |
| Unlimited | $3.79/mo | $16.99/mo |
| Cloud Startup | $7.99/mo | $25.99/mo |
Run the numbers on Premium. Your first bill is $143.52 for four years. The next one, for the same plan with nothing added, is $527.52. That's not a penalty and it's not hidden, it's just how promo pricing works. If you'd happily have paid the renewal price on day one, stay. No shame in that. If not, here's how to leave without breaking anything.
First, untangle what you actually have there
A Hostinger account is usually three things bundled together, and each one moves separately:
- Your website lives in hPanel, Hostinger's own control panel. Guides written for other hosts won't match the screens you see there, but that's fine. The only section you really need is Backups.
- Your email. Moving your website does not move your email with it. Your mailboxes are a separate job, so before you start, count them and note which addresses actually get used.
- Your domain, the name itself, was probably free for the first year. It renews at full price. If you ever want to move it to another company, you'll need its transfer code (Hostinger calls it an EPP code), which lives in hPanel under the domain's settings.
One honest warning. If your site was built with Hostinger Website Builder, it cannot be exported to WordPress or anywhere else. That's a rebuild, not a migration, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. We'd rather tell you now than after you've signed up.
The order that works
- Download your own backups from hPanel. That means your website files, the database behind them, and a copy of your DNS records, which are the settings that connect your domain to your site. Even if your new host does the whole move for you, having your own copy costs nothing.
- Move the website first. The new host builds a working copy while your Hostinger site stays live, so visitors never see a gap. We do this on every plan, free, mailboxes included.
- Test the copy. Click through your pages, log in to your admin area, send yourself a test email from the new mailboxes.
- Point your domain at the new site. The change takes a little while to reach everyone, so keep the old hosting active for a few days as a safety net.
- Move the domain last, or not at all. Your site runs fine with the domain still registered at Hostinger. If you do move it, one warning: don't change the name or address listed on the domain first, because that can freeze transfers for 60 days.
Before you cancel
Turn off auto-renewal in the billing section well before your term ends, so a forgotten setting doesn't buy you four more years. Then look for stragglers: mailboxes still receiving mail, extra addresses like shop.yourdomain.com, and the renewal date on that bundled domain.
The lazy option
Steps 1 through 4 are things we do for you, free, on any plan. You hand us your Hostinger login or a backup, we build the copy, you approve it, we flip the switch. And if you're on Website Builder, we'll say so straight away instead of wasting a week of your time. Start here.