Hostinger vs. Site5 (web.com) Re-seller hosting

This one is going to be simple, Hostinger.com wins every category by significant margins and this article will help you understand the important things to consider when looking for a hosting provider for your business or website(s).

ABF Designs has been hosting web sites for nearly 20 years with site5.com with some minor glitches along the way and for more than reasonable prices so kudos to site5.com! This article is not about knocking site5.com but to focus on the important parameters when deciding on what works best for your hosting needs. Let’s begin!

Approximately 20 years ago around 2005 is when we came across site5.com and for just $20/month they were offering a reseller account which is basically an unlimited amount of websites that we could sell to customers. Wow! Those days were amazing, the technology was cutting edge! We earned a fair profit for years until Covid when we lost 90% of our customers not just from Covid but it was around the time Google also updated their algorithms a couple of times in a short period of time. Up until this point, site5 seemed to be a fairly solid and reputable company, there were a few glitches along the way and prices added up but they were justifiable.

Some of the issues were related to their migrations, they only occurred a couple of times, perhaps once every 3 to 5 years but they were painful. There was at least one migration that was not communicated to us that involved an updated to a major version of PHP which broke ever single website that we were hosting with them. 100% expected right? But where were the notifications that should have went out to us asking us to test and to be aware that listed the dates? This was one of the more painful experiences that we had, but again, completely understood that these things should be expected, *if only we were notified!*, right?

We were concerned, more for our clients of course but we quickly attributed these events to “this is life and life happens”, even though we knew that in “todays world with computers” should prevent these scenarios, we knew that “life is imperfect”, right?

Over the years, we saw the industry change, especially with Google algorithms which at one point, and still today, give websites “juice” when configured with SSL. We did extensive analysis and loved the fact that Google worked out a Free SSL solution for everyone, before changing their algorithm. Long story short, the free version of SSL required manual intervention to renew it every 90 days. Great! Right? In “todays” world, it’s easy to automate something like this and this is what Google pushed. Otherwise to pay for an SSL Certificate costed upwards of $200/year depending on the type of certificate you wanted to use. There are plenty of other fees that site5 added over the years such as payment for unique IP address for each SSL protected site but again, these were nominal fees so we never questioned it.

Fast forward to late 2024, we’re still very happy with site5.com’s services, still reasonably priced even though we’re paying a lot more than $20/month when you factor in all of the SSL certificates (approx. $200/year each and a fee for each unique IP address) but again, all of this sounded reasonable and justified and these really are nominal fees which are mostly passed onto the client anyway, right?

Thanks Goodness! that web.com took over site5.com and doubled their prices! We could not be more happy that this happened. We received a notice late in 2024 that our $20/month plan was doubled which was going to basically quadruple our costs as compared to when we first opened our account way back around 2005. As a result, we did our homework and boy did we wish we did it a few years sooner! We stumbled across hostinger.com on several reviews and made it part of our final analysis and boy we were happy.. and honestly, we are soo much more happy since we migrated to them.

We won’t try to hide any details here, since Google change their algorithms around 2019 we made a significant shift towards WordPress sites because it was just too much effort to maintain LAMP sites which require custom programming for highly customizable sites. As a small design shop, this was by far the best decision we have ever made. So with this in mind, it literally took us less than 2 hours to migrate 20 custom sites from site5.com to Hostinger.com. Hostinger has proven to execute automation 1000%.. Not only are we paying cheaper rates then when we started with site5.com 20 years ago but we no longer pay for IP addresses or SSL certificates, they have 100% automated the free solutions that Google put in place before updating their algorithms! In effect, we are able to save $100’s per year and also pass on a similar savings to our customers.. not only that but we no longer have to build in additional charges (such as per unique IP address) AND we now advertise “Free SSL” which is a huge benefit for our small business clients that are frequently weighing costs vs. benefit and $200/year for SSL vs. free SSL allows us to keep our hosting charges to $5 or less which ends up in a quick sale!!!

The moral of this story? Site5.com served it’s purpose but their 2005 technology was too embedded into their Operations to allow them to pivot with technology, why would they want to offer Free SSL and IP addresses when it makes up a good portion of their profits? They already proved that they are not good at communicating their migrations! In fact, during one of their migrations they completely lost one of my clients sites and it was a “you say” “we say” “it never existed” conversation where we just accepted that “this is reality, sometimes you lose things in life”. Since migrating to hostinger.com early in 2025 we have yet never needed to contact someone to speak to, their automation/migration technology is simply cutting edge. The WordPress migration process is absurdly easy and literally takes less than 10 clicks to download/export and upload/import a file and voila, done.

Not only has Hostinger automated Free SSL and the migration process, they offer a 4 year deal for just over $100 total which brings the monthly cost of reseller hosting to just under $5/month for 4 years! I’ll dig up the link and post it here soon but we (ABF Designs) highly encourage you to at least check out Hostinger for a free trial.. It will more than likely exceed your expectations by a mile! I’m sorry but web.com is a clear loser by taking over site5.com and doubling prices without bringing new technology. If they have new technology and are planning on rolling it out then they should have “communicated!”, but they didn’t! And prices should have gone up based on new services that should have been “communicated”! so it’s either an endless loop of poor business management or simply, greed!