Hostinger is one of the largest hosting companies in the world, selling shared hosting, WordPress hosting, domains, email and a four-plan VPS line to millions of customers. Raff Technologies is a US cloud provider where the virtual machine is one product among several, alongside managed databases, object storage, Functions and Kubernetes on the same account. Both sell shared-vCPU VMs on AMD EPYC with NVMe storage, so the comparison is a fair one: Hostinger KVM 2 lists at $24.49/month for 2 vCPU and 8 GB, and the closest Raff plan is $27.99/month. The interesting differences are not in the server — they are in the transfer policy, the disk, and what happens when one machine is no longer enough.
Hostinger VPS and Raff at a glance
Hostinger sells four KVM VPS plans, all on AMD EPYC with NVMe storage and a 1 Gbps network. KVM 1 is 1 vCPU, 4 GB RAM, 50 GB and 4 TB of transfer; KVM 8 is 8 vCPU, 32 GB, 400 GB and 32 TB. Every plan includes free weekly backups, firewall management, public API access, an AI-assisted web terminal, and a free domain for the first year.
Pricing runs on three levels, and it matters which one you compare. The list price is what the plan costs without a term — $19.49, $24.49, $42.99 and $73.99. The advertised price is a 24-month promotional rate at 63–70% off. After that term the plan renews at a third price: $11.99, $14.99, $28.99 and $49.99. This page compares list prices, with promo and renewal shown alongside.
Raff Technologies runs 15,000+ VMs for 3,000+ customers from its us-east region, with a 99.9% uptime SLA backed by service credits, rated 4.5/5 on Trustpilot and 4.6/5 on G2. VMs run AMD EPYC with DDR5 ECC memory and NVMe storage in two lines: General Purpose with shared vCPU from $4.99/month, and CPU-Optimized with dedicated vCPU from $9.99/month, scaling to 16 vCPU and 32 GB. Every plan includes a 3 Gbps port with unmetered transfer, automated Daily or Weekly backup schedules, uncapped snapshots, firewall controls, private networking and full root access.
Past the VM the catalogs diverge. Raff sells S3-compatible object storage at $7/month for 100 GB and 1 TB of egress, managed PostgreSQL, MySQL, Valkey, ClickHouse and Kafka from $7.99/month, managed Kubernetes with a free control plane and workers from $9.99/month, Functions with a free monthly tier, block volumes at $0.08/GiB-month, and Raff Apps from $3/month. Hostinger bundles the things a website needs — a domain, email, a control panel.
Hostinger VPS pricing vs Raff pricing
Hostinger KVM plans use shared vCPU cores, so the like-for-like Raff line is General Purpose.
| Shape | Hostinger KVM list | Hostinger 24-mo promo → renewal | Raff General Purpose |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 vCPU / 4 GB | $19.49 — KVM 1, 50 GB NVMe, 4 TB, 1 Gbps | $6.49 → $11.99 | $13.99 — 2 vCPU / 4 GB / 80 GB NVMe, unmetered, 3 Gbps |
| 2 vCPU / 8 GB | $24.49 — KVM 2, 100 GB NVMe, 8 TB, 1 Gbps | $8.99 → $14.99 | $27.99 — 2 vCPU / 8 GB / 160 GB NVMe, unmetered, 3 Gbps |
| 4 vCPU / 16 GB | $42.99 — KVM 4, 200 GB NVMe, 16 TB, 1 Gbps | $12.99 → $28.99 | $52.99 — 4 vCPU / 16 GB / 320 GB NVMe, unmetered, 3 Gbps |
| 8 vCPU / 32 GB | $73.99 — KVM 8, 400 GB NVMe, 32 TB, 1 Gbps | $25.99 → $49.99 | $115.99 — 8 vCPU / 32 GB / 640 GB NVMe, unmetered, 3 Gbps |
Raff General Purpose against Hostinger KVM — both shared AMD EPYC on NVMe. Hostinger publishes no dedicated-vCPU VPS line, so every row above is shared against shared. Hostinger list, promotional and renewal prices read from Hostinger's live pricing page on 2026-08-18; the promotional rate requires a 24-month term.
At list price the two are close, and at the smallest shape Raff is cheaper: $13.99 buys 2 vCPU, 4 GB and 80 GB against KVM 1's $19.49 for 1 vCPU, 4 GB and 50 GB — twice the cores and 60% more disk for less money. Against the 24-month promotional rate Hostinger is substantially cheaper at every tier, and against the renewal rate it stays cheaper from KVM 2 upward. Hostinger also ships more RAM per core across the range.
Bandwidth cost math
Hostinger meters transfer; Raff does not. There is no per-GB overage to calculate, because Hostinger does not bill overage — it throttles. Once a plan reaches its monthly cap the connection drops to 10 Mbps for the remainder of the month, then resets.
| Monthly transfer | Raff 2 vCPU / 8 GB | Hostinger KVM 2 (8 TB cap) |
|---|---|---|
| 1 TB | $27.99 · 3 Gbps | $24.49 · full 1 Gbps |
| 5 TB | $27.99 · 3 Gbps | $24.49 · full 1 Gbps |
| 8 TB | $27.99 · 3 Gbps | at cap |
| 10 TB | $27.99 · 3 Gbps | throttled to 10 Mbps for the rest of the month |
| 25 TB | $27.99 · 3 Gbps | throttled to 10 Mbps for the rest of the month |
The cost of exceeding the cap is not money, it is a 100x reduction in port speed until the calendar turns. For a media-heavy site, a backup target, or an API with a traffic spike, that is a harder failure than an overage line on an invoice. Hostinger's own guidance is to monitor usage in hPanel and upgrade the plan if the cap is reached repeatedly.
The allowances are generous for most websites — 8 TB covers the large majority of small-business traffic. This matters at the tail, not the median.
Automated backups
Hostinger includes free weekly backups on VPS plans. Raff includes a free backup and snapshot storage pool — 50 GB per account plus 10–15% of each VM's disk — and you choose the schedule: Daily, Weekly, or both running together, with retention from 1 to 365 days and uncapped snapshots. Storage above the pool is $0.06/GB-month.
Weekly-only backups mean a worst-case recovery point of seven days. Match the schedule to how much work you can afford to lose.
Hostinger VPS performance vs Raff
This is the only comparison on this site backed by a paid head-to-head test rather than third-party data, and it does not flatter Raff on every axis.
Methodology
Measured 13 April 2026 on Ubuntu 24.04, single-pass: Raff General Purpose 2 vCPU / 4 GB in us-east against Hostinger KVM 2 in Boston, which carried roughly twice the RAM. Paid at standard rates by Raff Technologies, with no sponsorship or rebate from Hostinger. †
† Raff publishes a 3 Gbps port on 10 Gbps host uplinks; 9,574 Mbps is a peak across parallel streams.
Results
| Benchmark | Raff GP 2 vCPU | Hostinger KVM 2 | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Geekbench 6 single-core | 2,266 | 1,976 | Raff 15% higher |
| Geekbench 6 multi-core | 4,057 | 3,583 | Raff 13% higher |
| sysbench CPU single-thread | 2,171 events/s | 1,677 events/s | Raff 29% faster |
| sysbench CPU multi-thread | 4,320 events/s | 3,350 events/s | Raff 29% faster |
| sysbench memory read | 17.79 GiB/s | 11.15 GiB/s | Raff 59% faster |
| sysbench memory write | 11.42 GiB/s | 4.60 GiB/s | Raff 2.5x faster |
| sysbench memory write 1MB block | 47.08 GiB/s | 48.42 GiB/s | Hostinger 3% higher |
| fio 4K random read | 48.67k IOPS | 60.5k IOPS | Hostinger 24% faster |
| fio 4K random write | 48.80k IOPS | 60.7k IOPS | Hostinger 24% faster |
| fio 64K random read | 22.81k IOPS | 49.59k IOPS | Hostinger 2.2x faster |
| fio 64K random write | 22.93k IOPS | 49.85k IOPS | Hostinger 2.2x faster |
| sysbench fileio random read 4K | 52.31 MiB/s | 143.42 MiB/s | Hostinger 2.7x faster |
| sysbench fileio sequential read 128K | 1,730 MiB/s | 2,616 MiB/s | Hostinger 51% faster |
| sysbench fileio sequential write 128K | 664.85 MiB/s | 990.77 MiB/s | Hostinger 49% faster |
| iperf3 to NYC download | 3,635 Mbps | 1,024 Mbps | Raff 3.5x faster |
| iperf3 to NYC upload | 9,574 Mbps | 1,034 Mbps | Raff 9.3x faster |
| iperf3 to London download | 2,693 Mbps | 959 Mbps | Raff 2.8x faster |
| iperf3 to Los Angeles download | 3,430 Mbps | 962 Mbps | Raff 3.6x faster |
| Rails saturation point | ≈60–70 req/s | ≈60–70 req/s | Comparable |
| Rails timeouts at 70 req/s | 729 of 20,801 | 1,365 of 21,000 | Raff fewer errors at saturation |
What this tells you
The split is clean, and it runs both ways.
Raff wins CPU, memory and network. 29% faster sysbench CPU on both single and multi-threaded runs, 2.5x faster default-block memory write, and 3.5x to 9.3x higher iperf3 throughput. The network gap tracks the published port speeds — 3 Gbps against 1 Gbps — so it is structural rather than tuning.
Hostinger wins disk, and not marginally: 24% higher 4K random IOPS, 2.2x at 64K, 2.7x on sysbench fileio random read, and roughly 50% higher sequential read and write. That is architecture, not hardware quality. Hostinger attaches local NVMe directly to the host, so a small write lands and is done. Raff runs distributed block storage across an NVMe cluster, so the same write crosses the network and is replicated before it is acknowledged. No amount of tuning on Raff closes that particular gap.
What the distributed model buys is everything around the disk: data replicated rather than pinned to one machine, snapshots and backups taken at the storage layer, and a VM that changes plan by stopping and restarting rather than being rebuilt and restored.
At application level the two saturated at the same point, around 60–70 requests per second on a database-heavy Rails workload, with Raff returning about half the timeouts at saturation.
Read it as a trade: Raff for CPU, memory and egress-heavy work; Hostinger for disk-bound work.
Hostinger vs Raff: features and reliability
Compute
Hostinger offers four shared-vCPU KVM shapes from 1 to 8 cores and 4 to 32 GB RAM, shipping more RAM per core at every tier — 4 GB on a single core, 32 GB on eight. Raff offers General Purpose from $4.99/month and CPU-Optimized dedicated vCPU from $9.99/month, on AMD EPYC with DDR5 ECC memory, scaling to 16 vCPU and 32 GB, and pairs cores with memory more evenly. Raff plans resize on demand: stop the VM, switch plan, restart, with the difference settled to the account balance and a resize API endpoint for CPU, RAM and disk.
Networking
Raff includes a 3 Gbps port with unmetered transfer, private networking, VPC, firewall controls and site-to-site VPN gateways. Hostinger includes a 1 Gbps network with metered transfer and firewall management.
Storage
Both use NVMe, in the two different arrangements described in the benchmark section — Hostinger local, Raff distributed. Hostinger includes 50 to 400 GB by plan; Raff includes 80 to 640 GB on the matched shapes, and separates storage into VM disk, block volumes at $0.08/GiB-month that resize independently, and S3-compatible object storage at $7/month for 100 GB and 1 TB of egress.
Support
Raff provides 24/7 human support through live chat, with a first response typically under 10 minutes. No bots triaging you first, and no support tier to buy: a single $4.99 VM reaches the same engineers as a hundred production machines, through the same queue.
Platform
A VM is rarely the whole requirement. An application needs a database, somewhere to put uploads, background jobs, and eventually a way to scale past one server. On Raff those are products on the same account: managed PostgreSQL, MySQL, Valkey, ClickHouse and Kafka from $7.99/month, object storage at $7/month, Functions with a free tier of 100,000 GB-seconds and 10,000 vCPU-seconds per month, Raff Apps from $3/month, and managed Kubernetes with a free control plane.
They connect over private networking, share one API, one CLI and one bill. Hostinger's VPS bundles hosting-account conveniences instead — a free domain for the first year, an AI web terminal, hPanel — which are genuinely useful if the VPS is hosting websites rather than backing an application.
The honest counter-argument is that you can run Postgres on the VPS itself for free. You can, and on a 32 GB KVM 8 it will run well. What you are then operating is backups, restore testing, failover, point-in-time recovery and version upgrades. If that work sits inside your team's capability and time budget, Hostinger is cheaper. If it does not, the question is not which VM costs less this month.
When you should choose Hostinger over Raff
- Disk-bound databases and write-heavy queues — 24% higher 4K random IOPS and 2.2x at 64K in paid head-to-head testing
- Websites with a domain, email and panel in one place — a free domain for the first year, hPanel and an AI web terminal, none of which Raff offers (VPS for web hosting)
- Memory-heavy single servers on a budget — 32 GB at 8 cores for $73.99 list, or $25.99 on a 24-month term
- Teams willing to commit two years — promotional pricing at 63–70% off is genuinely cheaper than Raff at every tier
When you should choose Raff over Hostinger
- Egress-heavy applications — 9.3x higher measured iperf3 upload, unmetered on a 3 Gbps port, against a cap that throttles to 10 Mbps (VPS for application hosting)
- CPU and memory-bound services — 29% faster sysbench CPU and 2.5x faster memory write, which is what caches, queues and API workers are bound by
- Stacks that outgrow one server — managed PostgreSQL, MySQL, Valkey, ClickHouse and Kafka from $7.99/month, object storage at $7/month, Functions and Kubernetes on the same account over private networking (VPS for databases)
- Workloads needing a tighter recovery point — Daily and Weekly schedules together with 1–365 day retention, against weekly-only backups
- Buyers who will not prepay two years — monthly billing with a 14-day money-back guarantee, and no renewal step-up
- 24/7 human support — live chat to the same engineers at every account size, first response typically under 10 minutes
Migrating from Hostinger to Raff
- Check your transfer profile first — if you are near a Hostinger cap, that is the strongest single reason to move; if you use 200 GB a month, it is not a factor at all.
- Right-size on utilisation, not RAM — Hostinger ships more memory per core. Measure what the workload actually uses before matching 32 GB with 32 GB.
- Provision and harden — create the Raff VM on the same distribution, apply firewall rules, attach private networking before moving data.
- Move data in order — files with rsync or SCP, then database dumps, then uploads and static assets to object storage.
- Test disk-bound paths explicitly — Hostinger measured faster on small-block random I/O, and that is architectural rather than tunable. If your application is disk-bound, benchmark it on Raff before committing.
- Cut over and check the term — lower DNS TTL beforehand, switch, then confirm your Hostinger billing term. A 24-month promotional term continues after migration, and the free domain is tied to that account.
About Hostinger
Hostinger is a hosting provider founded in 2004 and headquartered in Kaunas, Lithuania, offering shared hosting, WordPress hosting, domains, email and a four-plan KVM VPS line from data centers across several regions. See Hostinger VPS hosting for current plans and terms.
Conclusion: Hostinger or Raff?
The comparison resolves across four measured axes:
- Disk — Hostinger wins, 24% higher 4K random IOPS and 2.2x at 64K
- CPU, memory and network — Raff wins, 29% faster sysbench CPU, 2.5x memory write, 9.3x iperf3 upload
- Transfer — Raff unmetered at 3 Gbps; Hostinger capped at 4–32 TB then throttled to 10 Mbps until the month resets
- Price — Hostinger is cheaper on promotional and renewal pricing; at list price the two are close, and Raff is cheaper at the smallest shape, $13.99 for 2 vCPU / 4 GB / 80 GB against $19.49 for 1 vCPU / 4 GB / 50 GB
If your workload is disk-bound, or you want a website, domain and panel on one bill and will commit to two years, choose Hostinger. If your workload is CPU, memory or egress-bound, or it will need a managed database, object storage or Functions next to the VM, choose Raff.
Raff runs 15,000+ VMs for 3,000+ customers and is rated 4.5/5 on Trustpilot, with a 99.9% uptime SLA in writing.