Hostinger Free Domain: What You Get, and What It Costs After Year One

Every hosting review leads with the same line: free domain included. It is technically true and routinely misunderstood. What you actually get is one year of registration paid for by Hostinger, and then a renewal bill at the full retail rate for whatever extension you picked. The gap between those two numbers is the single most common source of second-year pricing complaints, and it is entirely predictable if you look at the table before you buy rather than after.

This guide covers what the offer includes, which plans qualify, the real first-year and renewal rates across popular extensions, and the handful of traps that turn a free domain into an annual cost you did not plan for.

What the free domain offer actually covers

When you buy an eligible Hostinger plan, the registration fee for a single domain is waived for the first 12 months. That is the whole of it. Specifically, the offer covers:

• One domain, for one year. Not a domain for the life of your hosting account.
• Registration only. It does not pre-pay the second year, and it does not cover a premium or already-registered name.
• A single claim. You do not get a free domain per website, or a second one if you change your mind about the name later.

The free year starts ticking on the purchase date, not the date you launch the site. If you buy hosting in March, spend two months building, and go live in May, you have ten months of “free” domain left, not twelve. That sounds trivial until you are planning a launch around it.

Which plans qualify

The offer requires a term of 12 months or more and applies from the Premium tier upwards:

Two things catch people out here. First, the VPS plans are excluded — a KVM 2 at $8.99/mo is a self-managed server, and the domain is your responsibility. Second, monthly billing does not qualify. If you drop to a shorter term to reduce your upfront commitment, you lose the domain and pay the standalone registration price instead.

The offer also applies to Hostinger’s annual Business Premium email hosting plan, which matters if you are buying professional email on its own rather than as part of a hosting bundle.

The numbers that matter: first year versus renewal

This is the part the checkout page does not dwell on. The promotional first-year rate and the renewal rate are different numbers, and only one of them recurs.

Read the table by the renewal column, not the first-year column. A .com costs about $20 a year to keep. A .shop costs about $40. An .io costs about $75 — nearly four times a .com, every year, indefinitely. If you are choosing an extension for a project you intend to keep, the renewal rate is the price, and the first-year number is marketing.

First-year promotional rates rotate constantly and vary by extension, so treat the figures above as the shape of the market rather than a quote. The renewal rates are the stable, decision-relevant numbers.

The rule of thumb: over a five-year horizon, a .io costs roughly $375 in registration fees where a .com costs roughly $100. Choose the extension as if you are paying for it forever, because functionally you are.

How to claim the free domain without losing it

The claim happens inside the checkout flow, and it is easy to miss if you are moving quickly.

1. Add an eligible plan on a 12-month or longer term to your cart.
2. Use the domain search field in the cart, not a separate purchase. This is where the waiver is applied. Buying the domain in a separate transaction later forfeits it.
3. Pick an eligible extension. The search only offers extensions included in the offer, and premium names are filtered out.
4. Verify privacy protection is switched on before you complete the order.
5. Complete the order — the domain registers instantly, and DNS begins resolving within minutes.

If you already own the domain you want, skip the claim entirely and transfer it instead. A transfer carries a year of registration with it and Hostinger charges from $9.99 for a .com transfer, which is frequently less than renewing at your existing registrar. The domain must be at least 60 days old, unlocked, and you need the authorisation code from your current provider.

What happens at renewal

Thirty days or so before the free year ends, Hostinger sends a renewal notice quoting the standard rate for your extension. From that point:

• Auto-renewal is on by default. If you do nothing, the card on file is charged and the domain continues.
• The price is the list renewal rate for the extension — the right-hand column of the table above. The free year does not carry any discount forward.
• Renewal rates are not discountable the way new purchases are. Coupon codes apply to hosting, not to domain renewals.
• Lapsed domains go into a grace period, then redemption, then release. Recovering a released domain usually costs far more than the renewal would have, and there is no guarantee you get it back.

The practical move is to decide at the notice, not at the charge. Either you are keeping the domain and should budget the renewal, or you are not, in which case transfer it out well before expiry — transfers need time, and a domain mid-transfer near its expiry date is a genuinely bad position to be in.

Three traps worth naming

The renewal-rate trap. Choosing a .io or .shop because the first year was a dollar, then discovering the annual cost is thirty to seventy-five dollars. Nothing improper happens here; the renewal price is published. It just is not the number on the plan card.

The cancel-and-lose-it trap. The free year is tied to the qualifying hosting purchase. Cancel the hosting and the domain does not vanish, but it stops being free. If you migrate away from Hostinger hosting and want to keep the domain, transfer it properly rather than letting the renewal fail.

The parked-domain trap. It is tempting to register a second, third and fourth name “just in case” while you are in the checkout flow. Each one is a separate annual commitment at its own renewal rate, and unused domains renew silently. Hostinger’s plans include generous parked-domain allowances — 100 on Premium and Unlimited, 300 on Cloud Startup — but those slots are for pointing domains you already own, not for a discounted pile of speculative registrations.

Does the free domain change which plan you should buy?

Slightly, and in one direction only: it removes the domain cost from the first year, which narrows the gap between the cheapest qualifying plan and the one you actually want. Premium at $2.99/mo on the 48-month term includes the domain, as does Unlimited at $3.99/mo. The dollar-a-month difference between them buys double the CPU allocation, daily backups with one-click restore, a dedicated IP, and unlimited websites instead of three. If the free domain is what tipped you towards Premium, it is worth recalculating — the hosting difference over four years is $48, and the spec difference is substantial.

For a fuller breakdown of which tier fits which kind of site, see our guide to choosing the right Hostinger plan, and for what each plan actually costs after the introductory term, the renewal prices explained piece covers the whole catalogue.

The short version

The free domain is a genuine year-one saving, and it is worth taking. It is not a permanently free domain, and the extension you choose determines what you pay every year afterwards. Claim it inside the checkout, pick the extension by its renewal rate rather than its promo rate, verify privacy protection is on, and put the expiry date in your calendar with a month of warning. That is the whole discipline — and it is the difference between a free domain and a surprise bill.