Hostinger Backups: How They Work, What They Cover, and How to Restore
Hostinger backups are a feature of your hosting plan, and the specifics below change depending on which one you have. If you have not signed up yet, our 123hostinger covers registration along with the different hosting types and plan tiers, since backup frequency is one of the real differences between them.
This guide assumes you already have an active Hostinger hosting plan. If that’s not the case, our comprehensive Hostinger review walks you through the registration process and presents you with the different hosting types and plan tiers Hostinger offers, so you can pick the right one for you.
How Often Hostinger Actually Backs Up Your Site
Backup frequency depends entirely on your plan, and the naming does not always match current pricing pages exactly.
| Plan | Backup frequency |
| Premium | Automated weekly backups |
| Business (Formerly Unlimited) | Automated daily backups |
| Cloud Startup | Daily backups, plus on-demand backups |
Weekly backups are retained longer than daily ones, usually around 6 weeks. If you are on a plan with weekly backups only, Hostinger lets you add daily backups separately without a full plan upgrade.
Where to Find Backups in hPanel
From the Websites list, click Dashboard next to the site you want to check.
The path is Files > Backups.
This page opens on the Manage backups tab, which has more useful detail than I expected:
- A notice that backup plugin archives, cache, and database export files are excluded from backups to keep them light, a policy that started 2026-06-25
- A Website backups summary showing the exact date and time of the latest backup, with a View backups button
- A Manual backups card, which showed as Locked on my test account
- An Automated backups card labeled Weekly, showing the next scheduled backup date
- A Need daily backups? upsell box offering an upgrade starting from $2.09/mo
That Locked badge on manual backups matches something Kodee confirmed directly, manual backups are only available on Business plans and higher, so a Premium-tier account like the one I tested cannot trigger one without upgrading.
Restoring a Backup: Full Site, Files Only, or Database Only
The Restore and download tab is where the actual recovery happens. It gives you three separate restore types as toggle buttons at the top:
- Website backup, restores files and database together
- Files backup, restores only files and folders, leaving the database untouched
- Database backup, restores only the database, leaving files untouched
Selecting Database backup adds a second dropdown to pick which specific database to restore, useful if your site runs more than one. Each option lets you either restore directly or download the backup file instead.
One thing to know before clicking restore on anything, Kodee confirmed there is no preview or staging step. Restoring overwrites the live version of whatever you selected immediately, and any changes made after that backup’s date are lost.
If your plan supports WordPress staging, create a staging copy first to test a restore safely rather than doing it directly on the live site.
What You Can and Cannot Restore
Not every level of granularity is available directly through the restore tool:
- Single file or folder, yes, restorable without touching the database
- Entire database, yes, restorable without touching website files
- Single database table, no, not directly. You would need to download the database backup, extract the table you need, and import it manually through phpMyAdmin or a similar tool
- Full WordPress restore, restores both files and database together in one action
Manual Backups
Manual backups exist for the moment right before a risky change, a plugin update, a theme switch, anything where you want a fresh restore point on demand rather than waiting for the next scheduled backup.
Kodee confirmed a few real limits here:
- Available on Business plans and higher, including Cloud Hosting, not on Premium
- Limited to one manual backup every 24 hours
- Takes anywhere from a few minutes to several hours depending on your site’s file and database size
- The backup must finish generating before you can download or restore it
How Long Hostinger Keeps Your Backups
Retention depends on your plan and whether daily backups are active.
| Situation | Retention |
| Active hosting with daily backups | 7 daily and 7 weekly backups, within a 60-day window |
| Active hosting without daily backups | Last 7 weekly backups, within a 60-day window |
| VPS with backups enabled | 2 most recent daily and 2 most recent weekly backups |
| Expired Web or Cloud Hosting | One latest backup, availability window unclear |
That last row needs a direct flag. I asked about expired-plan retention twice in the same conversation and got two different answers from Kodee, one said backups remain available for up to 90 days after expiration, the other said up to 30 days, with a note that recovery beyond that is not guaranteed.
I am not going to pick one and present it as fact when the source itself was inconsistent.
The safe assumption is the shorter window, 30 days, and the actual move is not to test the limit at all. Download a fresh backup before letting any plan lapse rather than counting on either number holding.
VPS Backups Are a Completely Different System
If you also run a VPS on Hostinger, do not assume it works the same way as shared or cloud hosting. It does not.
From Home, click Manage next to the VPS instance you want.
The path is VPS > Manage > Backups & Monitoring > Snapshots & Backups.
On my test VPS, auto-backups were running weekly by default, with an option to upgrade to automated daily backups for $12.00/mo.
Two real backups were listed, both stored in France, each around 10.7 to 10.8 GB, capturing the full system including Docker and Traefik, with a documented restore time of 30 minutes.
A note on the page confirms backups are stored separately from the main server for better security, and older backups are replaced automatically rather than stacking up indefinitely.
Below the automated backups sits a manual snapshot option. A snapshot captures the VPS’s current state, files, configurations, and system settings, in one action.
Clicking Create snapshot brings up a confirmation warning that any existing snapshot will be replaced, matching what Kodee described, only one manual snapshot can exist at a time on a VPS, and it expires after just 1 day.
This is a much tighter window than the shared hosting manual backup limit, so a VPS snapshot is really meant for the few minutes around a single risky change, not as a standing recovery point.
Where Are Backups Actually Stored
Both systems keep backups off the server they are protecting. Shared and cloud hosting backups do not count against your site’s disk quota, and Hostinger confirmed the exact physical location is not shown in hPanel for those.
VPS backups are more transparent about this, the panel explicitly listed France as the storage location for my test server’s backups.
Bottom Line
Hostinger’s backup system does what it advertises for shared and cloud hosting, automated backups run on a real schedule that matches the plan tier, restores are genuinely granular between files, database, and full site, and backups sit outside your storage quota so they cannot fill up your disk.
The rough edges are in the details that are easy to miss, manual backups are locked out entirely below Business tier, restores overwrite live content with zero preview step, and support gave two different answers for how long backups survive after a plan expires.
VPS backups run on an entirely separate system with tighter limits, a single manual snapshot that expires in a day, and weekly auto-backups unless you pay extra for daily.
If you are relying on Hostinger’s backups as your only safety net anywhere on the account, download a copy before major changes rather than assuming the automated schedule alone has you covered.
