Putting its content delivery network on every web hosting plan would have required Hostinger, by its own estimate, to roughly double its server count. Instead, the company reworked the CDN and cut the computing resources it needs by 45 to 50 percent, without new servers or hardware. On October 14, Hostinger announced that the CDN is now rolled out across all its web hosting plans, including Single and Premium, at no extra cost. Mario Bañares Colastra, its head of web hosting, described the work a day earlier in an interview with TechRadar.
The headline figure of up to 35 percent applies to Hostinger’s SSD-based servers, which now make up a minority of its fleet. Across the whole infrastructure, average server response times fell from 965 to 714 milliseconds, a 26 percent reduction. Hostinger describes the data as early.
Key facts
- The load: lower-tier servers ran 20 to 30 percent above the Business and Cloud average. Premium and Single servers now run 15 to 20 percent below it.
- The fixes: ECDSA certificates instead of RSA, kernel TLS, better session resumption, and routing through the edge nearest each site over warm, pooled connections.
- The plans: included on Single, Premium, Business and Unlimited, Cloud and Agency hosting. Advanced security levels come with Business, Unlimited and Cloud. VPS is not covered.
- Next: subdomains such as shop.yoursite.com, left out of earlier rollouts, are due this quarter, according to Bañares Colastra.
How Hostinger Cut the CDN’s Processing Load
The work started with measurement. Hostinger set up dashboards for each server and monitoring based on real visitors’ experience, then looked at where processor time went. Encrypted connections and image processing stood out.
On encryption, Hostinger moved its SSL certificates from RSA to ECDSA, which uses elliptic-curve keys that are cheaper to process during the TLS handshake. By the company’s figures, that reduced the processor time spent on SSL operations to roughly a third. Before the switch, the team checked that visitors’ browsers and devices would keep connecting. Hostinger also adopted kernel TLS, which moves the encryption of established connections into the operating system kernel, and improved session resumption, so returning visitors cost less to serve.
The second large gain came from Hostinger’s own traffic engine. Instead of several regions fetching and processing the same content independently, requests are routed through the edge closest to the website’s origin over warm, pooled connections. According to the company, that cut connection setup from tens of milliseconds to around 3 milliseconds and reduced global CPU usage by about 20 percent. Image optimization and similar processing can be reused across the network rather than repeated in several places. Smaller changes made up the rest, among them removing internal lock contention, moving bot fingerprinting into native code, and streamlining storage, logging, request handling and edge process recovery.
All Web Hosting Plans, With Automatic Activation for Eligible Sites
Once the CDN became cheaper to run, there was “no good reason to keep it for higher-priced plans,” in Bañares Colastra’s words. Hostinger’s figures show where the relief went. The SSD-based servers gained most because they had less performance headroom than the newer NVMe machines, and the lower-tier servers, once busier than the Business and Cloud fleet, now run below its average load. Even sites without the CDN got faster, because overall server pressure fell.
Existing customers were migrated automatically if they used Hostinger DNS, were not already running another CDN and had not opted out, and new web hosting customers get the CDN by default. The automatic activation began in August, with an email to each eligible domain beforehand, and customers can turn the CDN off at any time. Before activation, a site must use Hostinger nameservers, with its A record pointing to the hosting plan’s IP address. Activation then updates the DNS records so that traffic runs through the CDN. Only one CDN can be active per site.
Features differ by plan. Single and Premium plans get the CDN without the advanced security levels, Agency hosting gets basic controls only, and Website Builder sites are optimized automatically. VPS customers are pointed to third-party services such as Cloudflare. There is no separate CDN subscription and no per-visit fee.
