Hostinger VPS

eEKBAh · July 26, 2023

Today I decided to give Hostinger's VPS service a go since their sign up deal was cheaper for 12 months than what I am paying a for a single month at Vultr(It's not a direct comparison because vultr = 16 cores 64GB ram vs. 8 cores 32GB)

TL;DR Hostinger BAD

The sign up process is simple and fast, it took my $357.90CAD for a years worth of 8Core CPU, 32GB RAM, 400GB Storage and 8 Terabyte per month bandwidth usage just fine without a hitch. It setup the VPS super fast too so that seemed good. Well the first clue that thing's weren't great was that it wasn't allowing me to login to my root account with a wrong password message over and over. They let you choose your own root password in the sign up process which isn't normally what I am used to but that's cool I guess. When creating the root password I triple checked because no one wants to type the root password wrong on top of it asking you for the password twice to verify. Any way, I was able to login to root after using their change root password option in the dashboard. I created my sudo user with out any issues(god imagine that not working) and then went to the next process which should be almost as rock solid as creating a user which was:

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade

The first time I ran it, it hung while downloading a 300kb package. I stopped it and restarted the process and although it took what seemed long it completed the process.

The next step was to install a GUI which is done by using this command:

sudo apt install ubuntu-desktop

(yes I install GUI on my VPS', I do web scraping through headless chrome and there are ways through a docker container or installing all the required packages minus the GUI but that isn't the point of what went wrong)

It took over 2 HOURS to download up to 98%(~2GB) and then hung like it did during the update/upgrade. I've done this exact process on Vultr multiple times and it has never taken more than 15 minutes max. After waiting a bit to make sure it wasn't just being extra slow on that download I stopped it and restarted it and it obviously had all the packages already downloaded and stored because it was instant this time. I then installed the display manager which was actually decent but it's only 3MB.

Once I was using remote desktop(xrdp) it was like watching a slide show. If I clicked on a button I literally had to wait 30 or more seconds for it to start the next slide. The refresh rate was akin to watching a jpeg load during the 14.4k dial up era for those of you as old as me.

As a last ditch effort I used their server location transfer to move from USA to Brazil to see if maybe I fluked out on being clumped in with some one who is constantly maxing out the CPU and bandwidth but after 2 hours it still had not completed the 18GB transfer so I gave up and requested a refund. The process to request a refund within 30 days is automatic but it can take several days to get the money back.

Was I expecting something that costs less per year than what I was paying per month to be as good? Not exactly but the advertised specs should at least be able to download ubuntu packages and display a desktop at a normal refresh rate. This is basically unusable for what I need and maybe for any usage at all since it couldn't even download files without issue. To be clear this isn't an ad for Vultr either, the servers are amazing there but I do think the price is a little on the expensive side. Had I not thought their price was too high I wouldn't of ended up trying out Hostinger.

Also if any one has suggestions on fairly priced VPS services I'd love to hear them(I'm currently on the OVH website but am trigger shy after this experience).

EDIT: I went with AWS EC2 c6i.8xlarge which is a 32core 64GB ram and it only charges you hourly(~$1.30/hr) while it is up and running and since I don't need 24/7 uptime I will likely be way below what I was paying at Vultr for more server power.

Edited July 26, 2023 by eEKBAh
Adding which VPS host I chose to go with

Levent · July 26, 2023

Hostinger also claimed I was using “too much of CPU power” while just hosting an OpenVPN server back in the day. Ditched them for digitalocean and never looked back. Also look at AWS and EC2, other than those two OVH and Linode are you best bets.

eEKBAh · July 26, 2023

11 hours ago, Levent said:

Hostinger also claimed I was using “too much of CPU power” while just hosting an OpenVPN server back in the day. Ditched them for digitalocean and never looked back. Also look at AWS and EC2, other than those two OVH and Linode are you best bets.

Yea, I've used digitalocean and they are great. Vultr has been equally as good if not better service wise but maybe ever so slightly more expensive. I've looked into AWS before and it wasn't super straight forward but I just looked at it again and it might be the way to go where I can power off the server and stop paying until I start using it again because I don't need 24 hour service.

Levent · July 27, 2023

23 hours ago, eEKBAh said:

Yea, I've used digitalocean and they are great. Vultr has been equally as good if not better service wise but maybe ever so slightly more expensive. I've looked into AWS before and it wasn't super straight forward but I just looked at it again and it might be the way to go where I can power off the server and stop paying until I start using it again because I don't need 24 hour service.

I am not sure but I believe AWS charges for disk space and also if you decide to set a static ip to your instance you will get charged for it even if instance is turned off. One of the recommendations above was supposed to be google cloud, I looked into that for couple of super small use cases but their network fees were unnecessarily expensive and complicated for my taste.