For years, GoDaddy was my host. Not because I loved it — because it worked, and switching hosts is one of those chores everyone puts off until it isn’t optional anymore. Support was always sketchy, but it was there. You could get someone eventually.
That changed this past month.
Four or five separate times, I sat down to do routine work — get into WordPress admin, spin up a staging site, just manage the sites I pay them to host — and hit a wall. No access. No staging. And when I went looking for support, there wasn’t any. Not slow support. No support. Four or five times in one month is not a fluke, that’s a pattern, and patterns tell you something about where a company’s priorities have gone.
So I started looking around.
Enter Hostinger
After some digging, I landed on Hostinger. Pricier than I expected walking in, but I locked in a solid four-year deal, and with a 30-day window to bail if it didn’t work out, the risk was low. Worst case, I’m out a little time and I’m back to square one. What the heck — I signed up.
Migrating Five Sites From a Lawn Chair
Here’s where it gets a little absurd. Last night I was at a jazz concert, sitting on the lawn enjoying the music, and I decided that was the moment to start migrating five WordPress sites to a new host. As one does. I pulled out my trusty phone and got to work.
Two sites migrated in about an hour. The other three took twelve. All WordPress, all similar in structure, wildly different migration times — that’s just how it goes sometimes. By this morning, everything was sitting on Hostinger and ready.
Then came the part that actually takes patience: moving the name servers from GoDaddy to Hostinger. That ate another four hours or so, but that’s not a knock on Hostinger. DNS propagation is an old, creaky system — name servers have to replicate and filter out across the entire internet before the change is fully recognized everywhere. Twenty years ago this would’ve taken considerably longer. It’s not glamorous, it’s just physics-adjacent bureaucracy, and you wait it out.
I run my email through Proton, so once the sites were squared away I exported all the DNS records from GoDaddy and imported them straight into Hostinger. Clean, no drama, everything came up ready to go.
The Support That Actually Worked
I hit a few hiccups along the way, mostly fallout from the migration itself — the usual small snags you’d expect moving five WordPress sites at once. Here’s the thing: I never talked to a human being. Not once. I ran everything through Hostinger’s AI support instead, and I’ll be honest, I’m impressed. It nailed pretty much every issue I threw at it, spot on, no runaround.
That alone made the whole move feel worth it. After a month of getting nothing from GoDaddy — no staging, no access, no support, period — landing somewhere that solved my problems without me ever needing to wait on hold was its own kind of relief. As we used to say in the Navy: Bravo Zulu, Hostinger. Well done.
First Impressions: hPanel
Hostinger’s control panel — they call it hPanel — is genuinely impressive, and I say that as someone who went in on the Cloud Startup plan, their mid-tier option, one step below their business-class offerings. Already loaded with bells and whistles at that level. That tells you something about how the rest of the lineup probably performs.
A few things stood out compared to GoDaddy. The one I love most: hPanel’s File Manager works on both the live site and the staging site, right out of the box. Need to poke at a file on staging? Open it, edit it, save it, done — same as you would on the live site. On GoDaddy, there’s no file manager on staging at all. You have to install a plugin just to get that basic access. That’s a big miss for a managed WordPress host, and it’s exactly the kind of friction that pushed me to look elsewhere in the first place.
Beyond that, staging itself is built in and one click away instead of feeling bolted on, backups are easy to generate on demand before you make any big change, and if you get stuck, Hostinger’s AI assistant is sitting right there in the panel — which, as I mentioned, handled every issue I threw at it without ever routing me to a human.
A Side Project: Rebuilding Datastream
With everything migrated, I got a little ambitious and rebuilt the entire Datastream website in an afternoon. I went minimalistic but — I’ll say it — eloquent. Very few images, almost none outside the blog posts themselves. I’d gotten tired of stock photography that reads as exactly what it is: gimmicky filler standing in for actual content. Clean and sparse said more than a stock photo library ever could.
Having the template already written helped enormously — I wasn’t starting from a blank page, just rebuilding on a foundation I already trusted. If you’re in the market for a template or want a hand building your own site — minimalist or loaded with bells and whistles — that’s literally what Datastream does. Let’s talk.
The Takeaway
If you’re stuck with a host that’s stopped showing up for you, know that there are alternatives out there that won’t break the bank. Hostinger has impressed me so far, and combined with Proton on the email side, I’m running a setup I actually trust again. More on Proton another time — that’s its own post.
For now: five sites migrated, one rebuilt, zero regrets. Not bad for a night that started on a lawn listening to jazz with my Mrs.
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