Hostinger or Pressable: where I’d put a running club site
I run sites on both. Here's what each is good at, and what caught me out.
I use both. clubs.racerpacer.com, this site, and the Wildstride demo are on Hostinger. The WordPress site that holds RacerPacer’s race calendar is on Pressable. So everything below is from running real sites, not from reading the sales pages.
I’ve left prices out, because they change more often than this post will. Check them on the day.
The short answer
Hostinger for a club, or a small event company watching the pennies. Pressable when someone else’s time is worth more than the hosting bill, or when several people will be editing at once and you’d rather updates and backups were somebody else’s job.
Hostinger: what’s good
- Cheap to start, and WordPress installs in a few clicks.
- Free SSL certificates, applied for you.
- Subdomains on the same plan. This site, clubs.racerpacer.com and the Wildstride demo are three subdomains of one website, on one bill.
- A CDN in front, so pages are served from near the visitor.
Hostinger: what caught me out
Its standard setup told the CDN to cache every HTML page for a week. Fine for a brochure site. On a club site it meant owners edited their page, pressed save, and saw last week’s version. The club kit now sends its own cache headers to stop that, but if you use anything else, load a page while logged in and check the cache-control header.
It also blocks bursts of requests from one IP address with a 403 error. If you’re testing quickly and the site suddenly looks down, wait a minute before panicking.
Pressable: what’s good
It’s managed WordPress, run by the company behind WordPress.com. Updates, backups and staging copies are handled for you, and there’s nothing in the server to tune.
Pressable: what caught me out
It throttles repeated logins made with application passwords. That’s the login a script uses to push content in, so a sync of a few hundred records has to slow down and space its requests. Most club sites will never notice.
Either way, check these
- PHP 8.0 or later, and WordPress 6.5 or later
- You can upload a plugin or theme as a zip file
- Outgoing email works. Send yourself a password reset before you trust it
- Daily backups, and you’ve restored one, once, to see that it works