Cloud hosting deals print four different backup promises
Answer first: Four different backup promises are printed across the provider's own plan pages. The Premium card says "Free weekly backups". The Unlimited card says "Daily backups + easy data restore". The Cloud Startup card says "Daily and on demand backups". The VPS page prints "Free weekly backups" three times and never prints "daily backups", while the cloud hosting page prints "daily backups" once in its benefits line. Only the knowledge base states the rule behind those badges: "we provide weekly backups for all of our hosting plans, as well as daily backups for Web Business and greater hosting plans". The same article adds that on a Web Single or Premium plan daily backups are something you "purchase", that the purchased daily backups are "stored for the last 7 days" and then "automatically deleted", and that VPS daily backups are kept as "2 most recent daily backups and 2 most recent weekly backups". Manual backups are a "Business or greater" tool capped at "once every 24 hours". Six third-party backup tools covering seven folder paths are excluded from every backup, and the provider states the exclusion cannot be turned off.
Published: 2026-09-29 00:06
What this guide adds
Sourced facts on this page are the quoted backup strings, schedules, retention windows, tier names, purchase conditions, cadences and folder paths printed on the provider's own pages, each linked below. Clearly labelled derived arithmetic is limited to five things: the count of four distinct backup strings printed across the plan pages; the count of three "Free weekly backups" badges and zero "daily backups" strings on the VPS page; the count of six backup tools and seven folder paths in the exclusion table; the comparisons drawn from published figures only - the 3.5x difference between the published 7-day web retention window and the published 2-day VPS retention window, and the roughly 1/209th share of a 48-month term that a 7-day window covers; and the observation that the published manual cadence of one backup per 24 hours is the same frequency as the published automated daily schedule. No price, retention window, schedule, backup size or restore time is estimated anywhere on this page; cells the provider does not publish are reported as unstated.
The four backup strings the plan cards print
Backup wording on this provider changes with the plan tier, not with the product. The pricing page publishes three plan cards and each carries a different string.
Premium, printed at $2.99/mo with "Get 48 months for $143.52 (regular price $575.52)": "Free weekly backups". The same card prints 3 websites, 20 GB SSD storage and a domain free for 1 year.
Unlimited, printed at $3.99/mo with "Get 48 months for $191.52 (regular price $911.52)": "Daily backups + easy data restore". The same card prints unlimited websites and 50 GB NVMe storage.
Cloud Startup, printed at $7.99/mo with "Get 48 months for $383.52 (regular price $1,343.52)": "Daily and on demand backups". The same card prints unlimited websites and 100 GB NVMe storage.
That is four distinct backup strings once the VPS page is added. On the VPS page the plan strip prints "Free weekly backups" three times and the string "daily backups" appears zero times. The cloud hosting page does the opposite: it prints "daily backups" once, in its benefits line - "Stable and secure 99.9% uptime, daily backups, and DDoS protection so busy days stay online and client data stays put" - and prints no weekly backup promise at all.
The pricing page's own "Compare our plans" block lists a row labelled "Daily backups" among its top features. The per-plan values for that row could not be attributed from the served markup, so this guide reports none of them.
Only the knowledge base states the schedule, and it says weekly
One provider page states a schedule for backups: the knowledge base article on activating daily backups. Its opening line carries the rule that none of the plan cards print.
"At Hostinger, we provide weekly backups for all of our hosting plans, as well as daily backups for Web Business and greater hosting plans."
Read against the plan cards, that sentence makes the badges tier statements rather than product statements. Weekly is the baseline for every hosting plan, so "Free weekly backups" on the VPS strip and on the Premium card is the default rather than a downgrade. Daily is an entitlement that begins at a named tier, and the tier the knowledge base names is "Web Business and greater" while the plan the pricing page prints is called "Unlimited".
No page read for this guide states that those two names refer to the same tier, so this guide does not merge them. The cloud hosting page's "daily backups" line is therefore a tier claim it does not qualify, and a buyer reading only that line has no way to tell whether the promise applies to the cloud plan on the page or to a higher tier on a different page.
On the lower plans, daily backups are a purchase rather than a feature
The knowledge base article is explicit that daily backups on the cheaper plans are bought.
"If you have a Web Single or Premium plan and want to have daily backups, you can easily purchase this feature."
The flow it describes is a dashboard purchase: "Websites -> Dashboard", then "Backups under the Files menu", then "the Add Daily Backups button", then "Select the duration and payment method". Two things follow from that wording. First, the daily-backup entitlement on a lower plan has a duration the buyer chooses rather than a duration the plan fixes. Second, no price for it appears on any page read for this guide - the figure sits behind the dashboard flow.
The article then prints the alternative route: "Alternatively, you can get daily backups by upgrading your hosting plan to Business Web Hosting or above." So the same outcome is reachable two ways on a lower plan, a separate purchase or a tier upgrade, and neither price is printed beside the backup badge on the plan card.
The VPS route has the same shape. The VPS section of the same article directs the reader to open "Snapshots & Backups", then "click Upgrade under Daily Backups", then "Select the duration and payment method". A VPS buyer who reads only the deal page sees "Free weekly backups" and no indication that daily copies are a separate priced upgrade.
Two retention windows are published, and neither covers the included daily backups
Retention is the part of a backup promise that decides whether a copy is still there when it is needed, and this provider publishes two numbers for it.
For a purchased daily backup on Web Single or Premium: "Daily backups are created and stored for the last 7 days. After that time, they are automatically deleted." The same block adds "Manual deletion of these backups is not supported."
For a purchased VPS daily backup: "Daily backups are created and stored for 2 most recent daily backups and 2 most recent weekly backups. After that time, they are automatically deleted."
Derived from those two printed figures: the published web window is 3.5 times the published VPS daily window, 7 days against 2 days. On the published VPS rule a buyer holds at most four restore points, two daily and two weekly, while the published web rule allows up to seven daily copies.
Derived: the 7-day window is also short against the term the plan is sold on. A 48-month term is about 1,461 days, so the published retention window covers roughly 1/209th of the period the customer has prepaid.
What is not published matters as much. The retention window for the daily backups that the higher tiers include is not stated on any page read for this guide - the 7-day figure is printed in the section about the feature bought on Single and Premium, not in a section about the entitlement that Business and greater receive. The retention window for the baseline weekly backups is not stated either. Both cells are left blank here rather than filled with the nearest available number.
A manual backup is a Business-or-greater tool, capped at one every 24 hours
The second backup control is manual, and it is tier-gated in the provider's own words.
"At Hostinger, if your hosting plan is Business or greater, you can use the Backup tool to manually create backups of all the files and databases on your hosting plan."
The same page caps the cadence: "You can generate a new backup using this method once every 24 hours. If your hosting plan does not include this feature, consider upgrading it." It also sets expectations on time - the process "can take a few minutes to a few hours, depending on the number and size of files and databases in your hosting plan" - and notes that the Manage Backups view shows "the date of the last backup" and "the date of the next backup".
Derived from the two published cadences: a manual backup is limited to one per 24 hours, which is the same frequency as an automated daily backup. The difference between the two routes is who triggers the copy, not how often the provider permits one to be taken. A Business-or-greater customer can therefore reach the daily cadence without buying the daily add-on, while a customer below Business reaches the manual route not at all and reaches daily backups only by paying for the add-on or by upgrading a tier.
Six backup tools and seven folders are excluded from every backup, with no opt-out
The most consequential limit is published on a separate knowledge base page, and it is neither a schedule nor a window: certain files are never in the backup at all.
"Hostinger automatically creates regular backups of your website files and databases so you can restore your data if an emergency occurs. To keep these automated processes fast, reliable, and optimal in size, Hostinger leaves out one specific type of file: backups created by third-party WordPress backup plugins."
The page prints the excluded paths in a table: All-in-One WP Migration stores archives in wp-content/ai1wm-backups; UpdraftPlus in wp-content/updraft; WPvivid Backup in wp-content/wpvividbackups and wp-content/uploads/wpvividbackups; Duplicator (Lite) in wp-content/backups-dup-lite; Duplicator Pro in wp-content/backups-dup-pro; and other backup tools in wp-content/wp-snapshots. Derived from that printed table: six backup tools, seven folder paths.
The consequence is stated twice. On whether the rule can be switched off: "Can I turn this backup exclusion off? No." On recovering an excluded archive: "I need a plugin-made backup file that was excluded - can Hostinger recover it? No. Because Hostinger backups do not store these archive folders, they cannot be recovered through Hostinger dashboard."
The page anchors the rule in the provider's terms as well: "This is also described in our Terms of Service: backups created by third-party software, plugins, or services may be excluded from Hostinger's backup, retention, and restore processes." It names the plans in scope as "An active Hostinger web, cloud, or agency hosting plan", so the exclusion reaches cloud plans rather than shared hosting alone.
What remains covered is listed too - WordPress core files, themes and plugins, the uploads directory and database tables - and the provider's own summary is that the "actual website - pages, images, themes, plugins, and database - is still fully backed up", because the excluded items are copies made by other backup tools rather than live site files. The practical reading is narrow but real: a restore brings the site back, and the plugin-made archives a customer may have been counting on do not come with it.
The provider's limits table counts MySQL backup sizes, not backup schedules
The provider publishes a parameters and limits table for its hosting plans, which is the natural place to look for a backup limit. Its only backup-adjacent rows concern MySQL data rather than the backup routine: "MySQL max backup size (MB)", printed as 5,120 for the first group of plans, then 10,240, 20,480, 46,080 and 46,080 for the next group, and 46,080 for the cloud group.
Those rows govern how large a MySQL export or import may be. They say nothing about when a backup is taken, how long it is kept, who may trigger one manually, or what is left out of it. The table and the backup pages answer different questions, and a buyer comparing deals who reads only the table learns a number that sounds like a backup limit while missing every term that decides whether a restore is possible.
What the pages read for this guide do not state
- The retention window for the daily backups included with Business-or-greater plans. The published 7-day figure appears in the section about the feature bought on Web Single and Premium.
- The retention window for the baseline weekly backups, on any plan.
- The price of the daily-backup add-on for Web Single, Premium or VPS. The knowledge base describes choosing "the duration and payment method" but prints no figure.
- Whether the plan the pricing page calls "Unlimited" is the same tier the knowledge base calls "Web Business and greater". No page read for this guide states that the two names match.
- Whether the excluded plugin folders are skipped on VPS plans. The exclusion page names web, cloud and agency hosting plans.
- The size of a backup on any plan, and any restore-time commitment. The knowledge base gives a range for creating a backup but prints no target or maximum for a restore.
How to read a backup badge when you compare cloud hosting deals
Five checks turn a badge into a term.
1. Find the schedule, not the word. "Backups" and "daily backups" are different promises, and on this provider the schedule is printed in the knowledge base rather than on the plan card.
2. Ask whether the schedule is included or bought. If daily backups are an add-on on the plan under consideration, the badge describes an option rather than the plan.
3. Find the retention window and match it to the product. The published web window and the published VPS window are different figures from the same provider.
4. Check what is excluded before relying on the backup. A permanently excluded folder makes an independent off-server copy mandatory, and the provider's own advice points the same way: configure third-party plugins to "send its backups to external storage - such as Google Drive, Dropbox, or Amazon S3".
5. Check the tier gate on manual backups. If the manual tool starts above the plan being bought, an on-demand copy is not available at all.
Derived from the published rules: the shortest retention window this provider publishes is the VPS daily window of 2 daily copies plus 2 weekly copies, and the longest prepaid commitment it sells is a 48-month term. A 7-day window against a 48-month term is the kind of mismatch worth pricing before purchase, because the backup that matters is the one still stored on the day something breaks.