Hostinger is one the best and most affordable dedicated hosting providers on the market. DigitalOcean offers cloud hosting as well as a suite of other cloud-oriented services and infrastructure as a service.

I compared each company based on a number of criteria that matter for your website and Hostinger came out on top as the winner. However, depending on your business needs, DigitalOcean may still be a better fit for you.

So read on to see the different criteria I used and the services they offer, so you can decide for yourself.

Overall Comparison Hostinger vs DigitalOcean

Winner: Hostinger

Overall, Hostinger is the best hosting provider as they provide specifically hosting services. DigitalOcean provides hosting plus so many other solutions which if you’re new to website backends, can get confusing.

About Hostinger and DigitalOcean

Hostinger is a web hosting provider/domain registrar headquartered in Lithuania and founded in 2011. Hostinger provides shared, VPS, cloud, WordPress and agency hosting as well as other niche hosting plans to over 1 million users. One selling point for Hostinger is its custom cPanel – hPanel designed to give webmasters, including those without technical experience, easy control over their hosting backend. 000webhost, Niagahoster, Weblink , Hosting24 and Zyro, are also Hostinger daughter brands.

DigitalOcean is a hosting/cloud infrastructure provider also founded in 2011. The company provides infrastructure as a service to developers, SMBs and enterprises and is also the brand behind Hacktoberfest. The company currently has 15 data centers across 4 continents and serves over 660,000 customers.

Round 1: Hosting features – Key Hosting Features and Services

Key Hostinger Features

Hostinger offers a hybrid of unmetered and high bandwidth for all its plans with a 100 GB starting point for its basic plan. There’s also a special free hosting plan with a 3 GB bandwidth cap. And for their cloud hosting, you get up to 300 GB bandwidth.

High-performance SSD storage is a staple in all plans with up to 300 GB on the agency and cloud hosting and you also enjoy free backups on most plans except the less frequent weekly backups for shared plans.

To get your website up and running quickly, Hostinger boasts 1-click installs of popular apps like WordPress, offers a free website builder, and a free SSL to give you the ‘https’ badge out-of-the-box plus a free domain on plans from the highest shared package and higher.

Key DigitalOcean Features

DigitalOcean offers cloud and VPS hosting through “Droplets” – its virtual servers with a pay-as-you-use subscription. Out-of-the-box, you get up to 500 GiB data transfer per month for free and up to 6 TiB for its basic droplet plans. You also get between 10-320 GiB SSD storage for its basic Droplets and up to 7.030 TiB for its highest storage-optimized Droplets.

Like Hostinger you get high-performance SSD and this time, daily backups on all plans. Installing popular apps like WordPress is free and while migrating your site to DigitalOcean is too, shifting from traditional host to the company’s cloud services is a little technical but doable.

You also get the DigitalOcean App platform to help you build web apps and static sites.

And the winner is… Hostinger

Overall, I’d go with Hostinger because its features are easier to understand and everything you get is right there. With DigitalOcean, its hosting plans are mixed up in so many other services and it’s hard to figure out what you’re getting especially if you’re not very technical.

 Round 2:  Prices & Plans

Hostinger Pricing Plans

Hostinger offers shared, cloud, VPS (eight of them), WordPress and Agency hosting, among other niche-specific hosting plans suited to particular businesses and platforms. These plans are best for:

• Shared hosting – Basic hosting plans for small portofolio, freelance and business websites with a few pages
• Cloud hosting – Robust hosting plans for businesses that need quickly scalable resources
• VPS hosting – Once your shared hosting plan is struggling to keep up with your traffic and resource demand, Hostinger’s VPS plans are just for you
• WordPress hosting – Plans optimized for websites built on WordPress and WooCommerce stores
• Agency hosting – Best for developers and professional teams; team management features included.

DigitalOcean Pricing Plans

DigitalOcean is a cloud provider so it makes sense that it’s only cloud hosting they provide… and they do a lot of them. Due to the sheer number of cloud hosting (droplets), I didn’t include them in the table but took snapshots of them. Each droplet type is best suited to:

• Basic Droplets – Low-cost CPU plans best for websites and web apps that use fluctuating CPU levels
• General purpose Droplets – Best balance between memory and CPU. Best for general purpose websites
• CPU-optimized Droplets – Best for websites that demand fast CPU without extra memory
• Memory optimized Droplets – Best for websites with high memory demand
• Storage optimized Droplets – Higher storage capacity and performance with NVMe than traditional SSDs.

And the Winner Is… Hostinger

Hostinger offers more versatile hosting plans and its basic shared hosting is cheaper than DigitalOcean. DigitalOcean, however, offers so many dedicated virtual server plans and is a solid Hostinger competitor.

Round 3: Website performance (Uptime & Speed)

It’s important to know your host’s server speed as that will affect how quickly your website loads to your users. Your host’s uptime too, represented in %, is how much of the time their servers stay online.

To measure each host’s speed, I ran their domains through two popular website testing tools – GTMetrix and Google PageSpeed Insights.

These were the results for the speed:

We also checked for the overall performance of each host on the said tools.

Hostinger Uptime & Speed

On GTMetrix, Hostinger had an excellent server response time (Time to First Byte) of 96 ms and an overall performance of 74%:

While on PageSpeed Insights, the host had a TTFB of 800 ms and a decent performance of 80%:

DigitalOceanUptime & Speed

On GTMetrix, DigitalOcean performed very very well too with a TTFB of 108 ms and an even better overall performance of 88%:

On PageSpeed Insights, the host had a TTFB of 600 ms and a very similar  overall performance of 82%:

And the Winner Is… Hostinger

Hostinger was able to generate a rather impressive response time on GTMetrix. DigitalOcean too is very close behind and is also very excellent in terms of performance.

Round 4: Customer Support – Who Has the Best Support System?

Hostinger customer Support

Hostinger has a healthy support hub with the following portals working 24/7 – live chat, a vast knowledgebase, email, blog, tutorials, and the Hostinger academy.

I tried to access the live chat option to rate their support but you apparently have to be a customer first. The live chat and email options are awesome if you need one-on-one help with an agent:

And if you a confident self-learner, you can figure stuff out with Hostinger’s knowledgebase:

Their blog section:

And their dedicated tutorials page:

Hostinger also offers the Hostinger Academy – a dedicated YouTube channel with answers to trending topics and questions you may have:

DigitalOcean customer Support

DigitalOcean offers quite similar support portals as Hostinger but you get most of the advanced support only as a customer. However, out-of-the-box, there’s a knowledgebase, tutorial page, community and blog you can access.

I personally like how their community page is also their tutorial page:

There’s, however, also a separate tutorial page packed with getting-started guides, how-tos, and what-is pieces on everything you may need answers to:

And I also like the themes on DigitalOcean’s pages. The host knowledgebase is also very intuitive:

DigitalOcean, quite surprisingly, offers paid support plans asides from the basic support for small teams that’s free:

And the Winner Is… Hostinger

Hostinger wins this round over DigitalOcean once again – it provides more support options.

Round 5: Ease of use – Which Platform Is Easier to Use?

Hostinger Ease of use

Hostinger makes figuring out everything you need to do on your website backend as easy as possible. First, as a new visitor, their UI is visually appealing with its awesome purple theme:

Hostinger’s account management dashboard too is incredibly intuitive and from there you can tweak your plans, emails, domains, VPS, SSL, billing etc:

And also access Hostinger’s native cPanel alternative – the hPanel – a control panel specifically designed to look less intimidating and more beginner-friendly than the traditional cPanel:

DigitalOcean Ease of use

DigitalOcean is also awesomely designed and easy to find your way around. The brand caters to professionals who’ve been in the game for a while and are looking for more robust cloud services and it looks like it:

DigitalOcean’s account management dashboard allows you to maintain your account, manage your droplets, route existing domains, tweak firewalls etc., and install other apps including the traditional cPanel:

And the Winner Is… Hostinger

Hostinger is far more intuitive and beginner-friendly than DigitalOcean as it caters to customers at every technical level, whereas the latter is more specialized to professionals.

Round 6: Security – Which Platform is More Secure?

Hostinger Security

Hostinger takes security seriously and the shielding features it includes reflect that. First, you get a free SSL on all your plans, DDoS protection, and the host is CloudFlare compatible to cache your website content across its worldwide data centers.

Next, you get automatic backups – weekly on shared plans – and daily on every other higher plan, plus malware scans to weed out viruses. While the host doesn’t specify its SiteLock compatibility, you also enjoy their in-house web application firewall that allows you set rules on the kind of traffic you want visiting your site.

DigitalOcean Security

DigitalOcean offers a host of security features on its different products and services. But we’ll be focusing on its Droplets. First you get SSH keys – a secure way to login to your Droplet management accounts.

DigitalOcean also has a unique Droplets console that allows you to build apps conveniently and manage your Droplets conveniently. You also get Cloud firewalls – allowing you to set traffic-control rules to your website.

And the Winner Is… DigitalOcean

DigitalOcean wins this round in terms of its sheer number of security features spanning its entire product suite but Hostinger still provides a ton of security features for its hosting plans.

Round 7: Server locations

Your website is hosted on your host’s servers and the more servers your host has the wider your “website footprint”. A wider server footprint means your website presence is more likely to span the areas where your target audience is located and load quickly.

Hostinger Server location

Hostinger has data centers hosting its servers in – The U.S.A, South America (Brazil), Europe (Netherlands, United Kingdom & Lithuania) and Asia (India and Singapore). Hostinger is also CloudFlare compatible, allowing to cache your website data over the CDN’s widespread network:

DigitalOcean Server locations

DigitalOcean has servers located in data centers in the U.S.A (New York, San Francisco), Canada, Europe (Germany, U.K, Netherlands), and Asia (India, Singapore)

And the Winner Is… DigitalOcean

DigitalOcean has servers located in 15 data centers – a little more than Hostinger – and therefore wins this round.

Hostinger vs DigitalOcean: final recommendations

When to Choose Hostinger:

Hostinger is one of the best hosting providers on the market with affordable and versatile plans for every kind of business. Choose Hostinger if:

• You are new to hosting
• You want versatile hosting plans you can grow with
• You are an agency
• You want affordable hosting plans
• You want an easy-to-use control panel and don’t care much for the traditional cPanel
• You want plans tailored for specific businesses

Go for DigitalOcean if you:

DigitalOcean is a niche cloud provider helping developers, businesses and enterprises with infrastructure as a service and you should for them if:

• You specifically want cloud hosting plans
• You have been in the hosting industry for a while
• You want a niche cloud service to migrate your website to
• You only want to pay for the resources your use
• You target a worldwide audience