Hosting on Hostinger LiteSpeed: Performance Notes

Why we use Hostinger at all

The honest answer: it's cheap, LiteSpeed is genuinely fast for static + WordPress workloads, and Singapore datacenters give us 8-25 ms RTT to Bangkok users. For 80% of marketing sites, that's enough. For the other 20%, we move to Cloudflare Pages or Vercel — and we'll show you exactly when that line gets crossed.

This isn't a sponsored post. We pay our own bills. Some of the sites in this dataset are clients (with permission to share aggregate data); others are our own properties — including the partner sites at sitplay.media, seoagencybangkok.com, and bangkokdigitalmarketingagency.com.

The dataset

17 production sites. Mix of stacks:

• 9 WordPress sites (LiteSpeed Cache plugin enabled), median ~2,400 monthly users
• 5 static Next.js exports (next build && next export deployed via FTP), median ~1,800 monthly users
• 3 Astro static sites, median ~3,100 monthly users

Plans split: 8 on Premium Shared (฿79-179/month), 6 on Cloud Startup (฿299-599/month), 3 on VPS KVM2 (฿599-899/month). All measured with PageSpeed Insights API + RUM via web-vitals over 90 days. Numbers are p75 — that's what Google uses for ranking signals.

The numbers

Three things jump out:

1. Static beats dynamic on every plan tier. A static export on shared crushes WordPress on Cloud.
2. LSCache is the difference between pass and fail on shared WP. Don't run WP without it.
3. The Cloud tier is the sweet spot for most clients. Below it you're rolling dice on noisy neighbors.

What LiteSpeed actually does

LiteSpeed is an Apache/Nginx-replacement web server. The version Hostinger ships includes:

• QUIC.cloud edge cache — full-page HTML cache at the edge (not just origin)
• HTTP/3 + QUIC by default (saves 1-2 RTT on first connection)
• ESI (Edge Side Includes) — partial-page caching for logged-in users
• Built-in Brotli
• Image WebP/AVIF conversion via the LSCache plugin

The combination is real, not marketing copy. A WordPress page that takes 800 ms to render PHP-side delivers in 40-80 ms once cached at QUIC.cloud's Singapore POP. That's why the WP + LSCache row above hits passing CWV even on shared.

The .htaccess that matters

Out of the box, Hostinger's LSCache plugin writes most of the right rules. The two we always add:

# .htaccess — force HTTPS + bypass cache for query strings
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
RewriteRule ^ https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [L,R=301]

# Long cache for hashed assets (Next.js, Astro)
<IfModule mod_headers.c>
  <FilesMatch "\.(js|css|woff2?|webp|avif|svg)$">
    Header set Cache-Control "public, max-age=31536000, immutable"
  </FilesMatch>
  <FilesMatch "\.html$">
    Header set Cache-Control "public, max-age=0, must-revalidate"
  </FilesMatch>
</IfModule>

Where shared dies

Three reliable failure modes we've debugged repeatedly:

1. Noisy neighbors

Premium Shared puts you on a server with hundreds of other sites. p75 LCP is fine in aggregate, but p99 will spike to 6-9s during peak hours when someone else's badly-coded plugin is consuming CPU. If your business spends on paid traffic and a slow page costs you conversions, the variance alone justifies upgrading.

2. PHP worker limits

Shared plans cap concurrent PHP processes (~4-8 typically). A small traffic spike (200 concurrent users) can queue requests, even though raw bandwidth is fine. siege -c 50 -t 60s is our standard pre-launch test:

$ siege -c 50 -t 60s https://example.com/
Transactions:           2,847 hits
Availability:           99.86 %
Response time:          1.04 secs
Longest transaction:    8.92 secs   # ← this is the killer

# On Cloud Startup, same test:
Longest transaction:    1.21 secs

3. Database bottlenecks

Shared MySQL is shared. Slow queries on neighboring sites can lock yours. We've seen WordPress sites timeout on wp-admin while the public site (LSCache-cached) stayed up. If your stack hits the database on every request, upgrade.

When to use what

Premium Shared (฿79-179/month)

Use for: Static sites, brochure WP under 1,000 monthly users, dev/staging environments. Don't use for: e-commerce, membership sites, anything with logged-in user state, paid-traffic landing pages.

Cloud Startup (฿299-599/month)

Use for: Real WordPress with LSCache, small Next.js + Node, brochure sites with ฿20-80K/month ad spend behind them. The dedicated CPU + RAM allocation eliminates the noisy-neighbor problem. This is our default recommendation for SMB clients.

VPS KVM2-KVM4 (฿599-1,499/month)

Use for: Anything that needs Node.js SSR (Next.js with App Router), persistent connections (WebSockets), background workers, custom databases, or PM2-style process management. You manage the server yourself — root access, systemd, the whole thing.

When to leave Hostinger entirely

We move clients to Cloudflare Pages or Vercel when:

• Traffic exceeds ~50K monthly pageviews on a global audience
• Edge functions are needed (image proxying, A/B routing, geo-redirects)
• The build is fully Next.js with ISR + on-demand revalidation (covered in Next.js 15 patterns)
• The team needs preview deployments per PR (huge DX win)

The deploy script we use

For static sites on Hostinger, we ship via rsync over SSH. No FTP clients. No control-panel uploads. Repeatable, fast, version-controlled.

#!/usr/bin/env bash
# deploy.sh
set -euo pipefail

PROJECT="example.com"
REMOTE_USER="u123456"
REMOTE_HOST="123.45.67.89"
REMOTE_PATH="/home/u123456/domains/${PROJECT}/public_html"

echo "→ Building"
pnpm build

echo "→ Deploying to ${REMOTE_HOST}"
rsync -avz --delete \
  --exclude='.htaccess' \
  --exclude='.well-known' \
  ./out/ \
  "${REMOTE_USER}@${REMOTE_HOST}:${REMOTE_PATH}/"

echo "→ Purging LSCache"
curl -X POST "https://api.quic.cloud/v2/purge?domain=${PROJECT}" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer ${QUIC_TOKEN}"

echo "→ Done"

Total cycle time: 35-90 seconds for a 50-page static build. We integrate this into the GitHub Actions pipeline used for all our 15-day ship projects.

Things that surprised us

1. QUIC.cloud free tier is generous

20 GB/month of edge cache traffic on the free plan. Most of our shared-plan sites never exceed it. Combined with LSCache, you effectively get a CDN for free.

2. Backups are not free

Daily backups on Premium Shared cost extra (~฿89/month). On Cloud they're included. Don't skip this — we've watched a client database get nuked by a corrupted plugin update and only the Hostinger snapshot saved them.

3. Email is bundled but not great

Hostinger email works for info@example.com-level needs but flunks DKIM/SPF reputation tests vs. Google Workspace. For client work where deliverability matters, we always recommend Workspace at $6/user/month.

Our default recommendation

For a Bangkok client launching a WordPress site or a static Next.js export with under 30K monthly users: Hostinger Cloud Startup, Singapore datacenter, LSCache configured, daily backups on, QUIC.cloud connected. Total cost: ~฿400/month. p75 CWV will pass. You'll have headroom to grow into 50K monthly users before it matters.

For anything bigger, more dynamic, or globally distributed: Cloudflare Pages (free, edge-rendered) or Vercel (paid, but the DX is worth it for serious teams). Our WordPress to Next.js migration playbook covers the cutover process if you're considering moving off WP entirely.

If you'd like a free hosting + CWV audit on your current site, email us. We'll run the same diagnostics we use internally and tell you what's actually slowing your site down.