Original guide

Cloud hosting deals print four speed numbers. The provider's own CDN page explains what none of them measures

Answer first: Five provider pages publish four different speed-improvement figures for the same cloud and WordPress products - 4X more speed, 40%, 40% and 20% - plus a 1 Gbps network figure on VPS, and none of them states a baseline, a test page, a device, a region or a measurement date. The 40% on the cloud page is attributed to the CDN storing copies of your content on a global network; the 40% on the WordPress page is attributed to code minification, automatic image optimization and global rerouting; the 20% is attributed to an AI Website Optimizer applying LiteSpeed optimizations. The provider's own knowledge base then states that the CDN cannot speed up the HTML of most WordPress and PHP websites, because that HTML is generated by the hosting server on every request, and that the time to first byte of those pages is mostly the site's own code and database time. Every rule that decides how much of a 40% is reachable - a two-hour default for static files, 30 minutes for optimized images, up to seven days for Website Builder sites, and no caching at all for logged-in visitors, carts and checkouts - is published only in the knowledge base. The words HTTP/3, TLS, compression, WebP, gzip, object cache, Cache-Control, Development mode and flush cache appear zero times on all five deal pages. The CDN is included on web hosting, Cloud and Agency plans and is not available on VPS, and on Agency - the most expensive line - the provider withholds the entire Manage page.

Published: 2026-10-08 00:10

What this guide adds

Every figure and quotation in this article is taken from pages published by the hosting provider named in the sources: the plan cards, FAQ answers and feature blocks on its pricing, cloud, VPS, shared and WordPress product pages, and its own knowledge-base articles on the CDN, its plan availability, its caching rules, its optimization tools and its Object Cache feature. The occurrence counts - for example HTTP/3, compression, WebP, gzip, object cache and Development mode appearing zero times on the five deal pages, LiteSpeed appearing twice on the cloud page and three times on the WordPress page, ObjectCache appearing twice on the cloud page only, and the VPS page printing 1 Gbps twice as a feature line and twice as a network-speed claim - are our own counts over the flattened text of those five pages, and a reader can reproduce them from the same URLs. The side-by-side of the two 40% claims, the observation that the cheapest web plan is described differently by two of the provider's own knowledge-base articles, and the note that the Agency line loses CDN controls that the Cloud line keeps are our own reading of the provider's published text and are labelled as such in the article. No price, discount, traffic figure, ranking, click count, index count or performance measurement has been estimated, converted or invented, and no benchmark site's wording has been reproduced.

The four speed numbers, and what each one is attributed to

The two product pages that carry the speed claims are the cloud page and the WordPress page. Between them they publish four distinct improvement figures, and each one names a different cause.

On the cloud page, the FAQ states that managed cloud hosting offers "4X more speed and 20X more resources compared to traditional web hosting". That figure reaches the page four times - three times as "4X more speed" and once as "4x speed, 20x resources" in the product-comparison block. The baseline is named as "traditional web hosting" and is not defined anywhere on the page, and no test, page, device, region or date is attached to the multiplier.

Also on the cloud page, the CDN answer says the integrated content delivery network "automatically stores copies of your site's content across a global network of servers, improving site performance by 40%".

On the WordPress page, a benefit block headed "Quicker load times" reads "Keep your site fast with LiteSpeed servers and smart caching. Get a speed boost of up to 40% with code minification, automatic image optimization, and global rerouting." A separate block for the AI Website Optimizer reads "Increase site performance by 20% - AI applies LiteSpeed optimizations and detects slow queries automatically".

So the same provider publishes two different 40% claims with two different stated causes, one 20% claim with a third cause, and one 4X claim with a fourth. None of the four carries a measurement method. The separate "20X more resources" figure is a resource claim rather than a speed claim and is not treated here.

The provider's own CDN page says the CDN cannot speed up the page you are measuring

The knowledge-base article that explains what the CDN speeds up opens with the mechanism and then states the limit. It says the CDN "speeds up delivery of static files, secures connections closer to visitors, and optimizes images; it does not make your website's own code run faster, so the improvement depends on what your pages are made of".

Under a heading reading "What Hostinger CDN cannot speed up", the same article says the HTML of most WordPress and PHP websites "is generated by your hosting server for every request and is not stored on the CDN, unless your caching plugin marks pages as publicly cacheable", and that the time to first byte of such pages "is mostly the time your website takes to run its code and database queries - slow plugins, heavy themes, or unoptimized databases stay slow behind any CDN". Pages that require login, carts and checkouts are always fetched from the server.

The article also warns against reading a speed score as a CDN verdict: "Speed tools such as PageSpeed Insights or Lighthouse measure the whole page. A score that does not move after enabling the CDN usually means the page is dominated by server processing time or by render-blocking scripts rather than by file delivery."

The cloud page's 40% and the WordPress page's 40% are both about how quickly a site loads, and the cloud page attributes its 40% specifically to the CDN storing copies of your content. The knowledge base's own scope statement is narrower than that: the part of a WordPress or PHP page that a visitor waits for is the part the CDN is documented not to store by default.

Which plans get the CDN, and where the gate runs backwards

The plan-availability article gives a per-plan table. It states that "Hostinger CDN is included with all Web hosting plans as well as Cloud and Agency hosting, and it is enabled from Hostinger dashboard for each website", and that it "is not available on VPS (Virtual Private Server) hosting or for websites hosted elsewhere".

The table's rows read as follows. Single Web Hosting: included, with advanced security levels requiring Business/Unlimited or higher. Premium Web Hosting: included, with the same security note. Business Web Hosting and Unlimited Web Hosting: included, all CDN features including advanced security levels. Cloud Hosting: included, all CDN features. Agency Hosting: included, but "Enable, Disable, Development mode, and Flush cache only - the Manage page with the Analytics, Website optimization, Traffic blocking, and Security tabs is not available". Website Builder and Horizons: automatic, with "Optimization is applied automatically and cannot be modified". VPS Hosting: not available, with "Use a third-party service such as Cloudflare" as the stated alternative.

The optimization article repeats the same split in prose: "The Manage page is not available on Agency Hosting plans. Agency Hosting users can enable or disable Hostinger CDN, turn on Development mode, and flush the cache, but cannot access the Analytics, Website optimization, Traffic blocking, or Security tabs."

That is the inversion worth naming. Cloud Hosting is listed as getting all CDN features, while Agency Hosting - a higher-priced line on the provider's own pricing page - is listed as getting four controls and losing the whole Manage page. A buyer comparing the two lines on price alone would not see it, because the pricing page prints the same short CDN badge on both.

Two of the provider's own articles disagree about the cheapest web plan

The plan-availability article says the CDN "is included with all Web hosting plans" and lists Single Web Hosting as "Included".

The optimization article, describing the same product, says: "if you have a Premium Web, Business Web, Cloud or Agency hosting plan, you can use the Hostinger CDN to access various optimization tools. If you have a Single hosting plan, you can upgrade your plan to access this feature."

Read strictly, the first article gives the cheapest web plan the CDN and the second tells the same plan's owner to upgrade for it. Both articles carry the same "Updated 2 weeks ago" stamp. This site cannot say which statement is current, so it records both. The pricing page adds a third variant: the cheapest plan's card prints "CDN" while the two plans above it print "CDN included", even though the comparison table on the same page prints "Free CDN" for all three.

The ObjectCache badge has no tier on the page and a tier in the knowledge base

On the cloud page, a block headed "Fast under real traffic" reads: "PHP workers, CDN, LiteSpeed, ObjectCache, and NVMe SSD so stores and busy sites stay quick - plus a dedicated IP for mail and security." The block carries no plan name, no tick, no asterisk and no footnote; it sits in the same generic "Everything you need to run a growing project" area as the WordPress-tools and migration lines. The string "ObjectCache" appears twice on the page, both times inside that block, and nowhere else on any of the five deal pages.

The knowledge base gives the feature a different name and a condition. Its article is titled "How to manage Object Cache for WordPress websites at Hostinger" and subtitled "Managing LiteSpeed Memcached (LSMCD)". It describes the feature as storing "frequently accessed database information in memory, reducing the number of times your site needs to query the database directly", notes that it "works for images as well as some parts of your website's content", and then states the gate: "This feature is available for Web Business hosting plans or greater." It adds that Object Cache "is enabled by default once you install the LiteSpeed Cache plugin", and that a plan which does not include it should be upgraded.

So the deal page names the product and the knowledge base names the tier, and the two are on different pages. The two-word form "object cache", and the words "memcached" and "LSMCD", appear zero times on all five deal pages.

Every cache duration is in the knowledge base, and none of them is on the deal pages

The caching article publishes a table of what the CDN caches and for how long. Static files - images, CSS, JavaScript, fonts and downloads - are cached automatically with a default lifetime of "Up to 2 hours, or the time set by your website's cache headers". Optimized images in WebP or resized form default to "Up to 30 minutes ... or the time set by the original image's cache headers". HTML pages on web hosting, whether WordPress, PHP or Node.js, are cached "Only when marked cacheable by your website", for "the time your website or caching plugin specifies". Website Builder and Horizons sites are cached whole, "Up to 7 days; refreshed when you publish".

Redirects and errors have their own clocks: a 301 for up to 2 hours, a 302 for up to 20 minutes, a 404 for "a few seconds for pages and a few minutes for files", and 5xx responses never stored at all. Pages for logged-in visitors, carts and checkouts are never served from the cache, and the same article explains that a WordPress login cookie or a WooCommerce cart or session cookie "bypass the cache entirely".

One plugin setting drives the HTML side: the LiteSpeed Cache plugin caches a page "for the plugin's public cache lifetime (the plugin default is 7 days, max-age=604800)" once it marks the page publicly cacheable, and the CDN "usually clears its cached pages when the plugin purges".

Two operational limits are published alongside those numbers. A flush "invalidates the cached copies of the whole website within seconds. Individual URLs cannot be flushed separately." And the Analytics tab's period selector offers four windows only: 1 hour, 6 hours, 1 day, or 7 days.

None of those durations, statuses or limits is printed on any of the five deal pages. The only cache-related word that reaches a deal page at all is "caching", three times on the WordPress page and never as a duration.

The performance features the deal pages never name

Counting the flattened text of the five deal pages gives a clear picture of what is printed and what is not. The strings "HTTP/3", "TLS", "compression", "compress", "WebP", "gzip", "brotli", "object cache" in its two-word form, "memcached", "Cache-Control", "Development mode", "flush cache", "dynamic" and "bypass" all return zero occurrences on all five pages.

The knowledge base uses most of them. It says connection setup is faster because visitors connect over "TLS 1.3 and, for websites on their own domain, HTTP/3". It says "Compression delivers text files with the most efficient algorithm the visitor's browser supports." Its optimization article describes WebP image compression as converting images to WebP, "which is approximately 30% smaller than JPEG without losing quality", enabled by default. Its Security tab documents a toggle to "Use only the latest TLS version (TLS 1.3)" and notes that by default both TLS 1.2 and 1.3 are supported for compatibility.

The product names that do reach the deal pages are two. "LiteSpeed" appears twice on the cloud page and three times on the WordPress page, and zero times on the pricing, VPS and shared pages. "ObjectCache" appears twice on the cloud page and nowhere else. The VPS page instead prints "1 Gbps network speed" twice as a feature line and "1 Gbps VPS network speed" twice in its performance section, described as "included in all plans" - and prints the word "CDN" zero times, consistent with the knowledge base's statement that the CDN is not available on VPS, although the VPS page itself never says so.

The CDN now switches itself on, and can rewrite DNS records

Both the availability article and the optimization article describe an automatic rollout. The availability article says "Hostinger enables the CDN automatically for eligible web hosting websites since August 2026, and sends an email notification before the change". The optimization article gives the date as "Starting August 24, 2026" and adds that "Hostinger automatically enables CDN for eligible shared hosting websites. Each eligible domain receives an email notification before Hostinger applies the change."

The same paragraph carries the side effect: "Enabling CDN updates the domain's A and AAAA records to route traffic through the Hostinger CDN network. Custom A or AAAA records, such as those pointing to an external server or a legacy hosting plan, may be overwritten by this change." Restoring them means disabling the CDN and re-adding the records, with "up to 24 hours for DNS propagation".

Two conditions are also published. The domain must use Hostinger nameservers and its A record must point at the hosting plan, and "Only one CDN can be active for a website. Disable Cloudflare or another proxy service before enabling Hostinger CDN."

On cost, the availability article is explicit: "The CDN, image optimization, caching, and security features are part of the hosting plan. There is no separate CDN subscription to buy and no per-visit CDN fee." None of the automatic activation, the DNS rewrite or the one-CDN rule appears on the five deal pages.

What is still unstated

Four things a buyer would need in order to use these badges are not published anywhere this site could read.

First, no measurement method. None of the four speed figures - 4X, 40%, 40%, 20% - names a baseline page, a test tool, a device, a region, a repeat count or a date. The one baseline that is named, "traditional web hosting", is not defined on the page that uses it, so the 4X figure cannot be reproduced from the provider's own material.

Second, no per-plan speed figure. The claims are printed for a product line rather than for a plan; the cloud page's own "Fast under real traffic" line names five technologies with no tier beside them, and the knowledge base puts one of those five, Object Cache, behind a plan condition.

Third, no cache duration on any deal page. The two-hour static default, the 30-minute optimized-image default and the seven-day Website Builder window exist only in the knowledge base, so a buyer reading only the plan card cannot tell how long a change takes to appear or how much of a page the CDN can hold.

Fourth, no statement of what the CDN cannot do. The knowledge base's own limit - that the HTML of most WordPress and PHP sites is generated per request and is not stored, and that a slow site stays slow behind any CDN - is the sentence that most affects how a buyer should read the 40%. It is not on the page that prints the 40%.

Reading a speed badge before you buy

Three habits follow from the provider's own published material. Ask which plan the number belongs to, because the deal pages print speed claims for a product line while the feature gates live in the knowledge base. Ask what the claim's cause is, because the two 40% figures on the same provider's site come from different mechanisms - CDN file delivery in one case, code minification, image optimization and global rerouting in the other. And ask what the page is made of, because the provider's own CDN article says the improvement depends on that, and that the time to first byte of a WordPress or PHP page is mostly the site's own code and database work.

None of that requires a third-party benchmark. It requires only reading the plan card and the provider's own help article together, which is where the tier, the duration and the limitation are actually written.