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In Colombia, drug gangs are waging a new kind of war — by air. Armed with cheap drones, they're targeting rivals in a dangerous escalation.

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The word fills an important gap in our language, but it was once stigmatized. The story of "y'all" also includes powerful cultural forces, from hip-hop to ideas of welcoming inclusivity.

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The Senate voted by a razor-thin margin late Tuesday to advance debate on a package of funding cuts requested by President Trump that would claw back $1.1 billion previously allocated to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

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AI isn’t just something to adopt; it’s already embedded in the systems we rely on. From threat detection and response to predictive analytics and automation, AI is actively reshaping how we defend against evolving cyber threats in real time. It’s not just a sales tactic (for some); it’s an operational necessity.

Yet, as with many game-changing technologies, the reality on the ground is more complex. The cybersecurity industry is once again grappling with a familiar disconnect: bold promises about efficiency and transformation that don’t always reflect the day-to-day experiences of those on the front lines. According to recent research, 71% of executives report that AI has significantly improved productivity, but only 22% of frontline analysts, the very people who use these tools, say the same.

When solutions are introduced without a clear understanding of the challenges practitioners face, the result isn’t transformation, it’s friction. Bridging that gap between strategic vision and operational reality is essential if AI is to deliver on its promise and drive meaningful, lasting impact in cybersecurity.

Executives love AI

According to Deloitte, 25% of companies are expected to have launched AI agents by the end of 2025, with that number projected to rise to 50% shortly thereafter. The growing interest in AI tools is driven not only by their potential but also by the tangible results they are already beginning to deliver

For executives, the stakes are rising. As more companies begin releasing AI-enabled products and services, the pressure to keep pace is intensifying. Organizations that can’t demonstrate AI capabilities, whether in their customer experience, cybersecurity response, or product features, risk being perceived as laggards, out-innovated by faster, more adaptive competitors. Across industries, we're seeing clear signals: AI is becoming table stakes, and customers and partners increasingly expect smarter, faster, and more adaptive solutions.

This competitive urgency is reshaping boardroom conversations. Executives are no longer asking whether they should integrate AI, but how quickly and effectively they can do so, without compromising trust, governance, or business continuity. The pressure isn’t just to adopt AI internally to drive efficiency, but to productize it in ways that enhance market differentiation and long-term customer value.

But the scramble to implement AI is doing more than reshaping strategy, it’s unlocking entirely new forms of innovation. Business leaders are recognizing that AI agents can do more than just streamline functions; they can help companies bring entirely new capabilities to market. From automating complex customer interactions to powering intelligent digital products and services, AI is quickly moving from a behind-the-scenes tool to a front-line differentiator. And for executives willing to lead with bold, well-governed AI strategies, the payoff isn’t just efficiency, it’s market relevance.

Analysts distrust AI

If anyone wants to make their job easier, it’s a SOC analyst, so their skepticism of AI comes from experience, not cynicism. The stakes in cybersecurity are high, and trust is earned, especially when systems that are designed to protect critical assets are involved. Research shows that only 10% of analysts currently trust AI to operate fully autonomously. This skepticism isn’t about rejecting innovation, it’s about ensuring that AI can meet the high standards required for real-time threat detection and response.

That said, while full autonomy is not yet on the table, analysts are beginning to see tangible results that are gradually building trust. For example, 56% of security teams report that AI has already boosted productivity by streamlining tasks, automating routine processes, and speeding up response times. These tools are increasingly trusted for well-defined tasks, giving analysts more time to focus on higher-priority, complex threats.

This incremental trust is key. While 56% of security professionals express confidence in AI for threat detection, they still hesitate to let it manage security autonomously. As AI tools continue to prove their ability to process vast amounts of data and provide actionable insights, initial skepticism is giving way to more measured, conditional trust.

Looking ahead

Closing the perception gap between executive enthusiasm and analyst skepticism is critical for business growth. Executives must create an environment where analysts feel empowered to use AI to enhance their expertise without compromising security standards. Without this, the organization risks falling into the hype cycle, where AI is overpromised but underdelivered.

In cybersecurity, where the margin for error is razor-thin, collaboration between AI systems and human analysts is critical. As these tools mature and demonstrate real-world impact, trust will grow, especially when their use is grounded in transparency, explainability, and accountability.

When AI is thoughtfully integrated and aligned with practitioner needs, it becomes a reliable asset that not only strengthens defenses but also drives long-term resilience and value across the organization.

We list the best cloud firewall.

This article was produced as part of TechRadarPro's Expert Insights channel where we feature the best and brightest minds in the technology industry today. The views expressed here are those of the author and are not necessarily those of TechRadarPro or Future plc. If you are interested in contributing find out more here: https://www.techradar.com/news/submit-your-story-to-techradar-pro

What types of hosting does InMotion Hosting offer?

InMotion Hosting offers everything from shared hosting for the most basic needs to dedicated servers.

Its managed WordPress hosting supports running anything from simple family blogs to heavy-duty business sites, while hosted WooCommerce and Prestashop plans can help you build a professional web store.

If it's raw server power you're after, VPS (Virtual Private Server), dedicated and cloud hosting plans cover everyone from expert personal users to international corporations.

Starting at the 8GB and higher plans, all VPS servers are using Gen 4 NVMe SSDs which can be 6x faster than SATA SSDs and up to 20x faster than traditional spinning drives.

There's a lot to consider, but next we'll look at some of these hosting types, find out what they offer, what they don't, and whether they could be a good choice for you.

Shared hosting 

Shared hosting is a system where your website and many others are stored on the same web server. Sharing both resources and costs means shared hosting can be slow, but it's also very cheap, and can be a good choice for smaller sites.

InMotion Hosting's shared hosting starts with its Core plan (from $2.24/mo for first time buyers) This includes a free domain and supports two websites, provides 100GB of storage and unlimited bandwidth. The plan only comes with 10 email addresses (most accounts have no limit) but it allows you to host two websites, where other starter plans often allow only one. There's free SSL, malware protection and 1-click WordPress installation, while the excellent cPanel has everything you'll need to manage your site.

The Launch Plan only support 25 websites but Power and Pro plans are unlimited. They handle as many email addresses as you need, and have some unusual speedup features including ultra-fast NVMe storage, for instance, something we rarely see with shared hosting.

Billing isn't as flexible as we'd like. The top Pro plan has a monthly payment option, but everything else is only available in one, two or three year terms. (There are similar issues with other ranges.)

Unsure about signing up for long-term contracts? Us too, but InMotion Hosting offers more protection than most with a 90-day money-back guarantee (three times the industry standard 30 days), plenty of time to be sure if this is the right package for you.

Prices before and after renewal for a three year plan

Plan

Starting price

Renewal price

Core

$2.24

$11.99

Launch

$3.59

$14.99

Power

$3.59

$18.99

Pro

$8.09

$25.99

WordPress hosting with In InMotion Hosting (Image credit: InMotion Hosting)WordPress hosting

WordPress is the world's favorite website creator, a one-stop tool which can build anything from simple personal sites to busy web stores and the most heavy-duty business-critical projects.

InMotion Hosting's shared plans have an automatic WordPress installer, good news if you're just looking to learn the basics. But its specialist WordPress hosting range goes further, with server-level speed optimisations, extra security to keep hackers at bay, automatic WordPress updates and more.

Prices start at only $2.62 a month over three years ($12.49 on renewal) for the WP Core plan. It's limited to two websites and ten email addresses, and there are no backups, but InMotion Hosting suggests a WP Core site could handle 20k visitors a month, more than enough for many users.

The $15.49 a month WP Launch plan adds offsite backups, and support for unlimited websites and email addresses, and enough resources to support 50k visitors a month, making it our budget pick.

These are capable plans, fairly priced, with the power to handle (at the top of the VPS range) perhaps a million visitors a month. But the WordPress-specific features are much the same as you'll find with other providers. If you're after real WordPress power, WP Engine offers genuinely Premium themes, intelligent updating, smart performance optimizations, page speed testing and more.

There are also managed plans. Fully managed starts from $200/mo and supports 250,000+ monthly visits. It's built on a VPS server and comes with a fully dedicated account manager.

Prices before and after renewal for a three year plan

Plan

Starting price

Renewal price

WP Core

$2.62

$12.49

WP Launch

$3.97

$15.49

WP Power

$3.97 (really)

$19.49

WP Pro

$8.47

$26.49

InMotion's plans have lots of features as standard (Image credit: InMotion Hosting)VPS hosting 

Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting is a mid-range option which gives your website more server power, for a little extra cost. You're likely to see better and more consistent speeds, with fewer of the slowdowns that often happen with shared hosting.

InMotion Hosting has five VPS plans. These start at $4.49 a month over three years for a plan with 4 GB RAM, 50 GB SSD storage and 2 vCPU core server, and range up to $111.99 for 32GB RAM, 460 GB NVMe SSD storage and 32 core system.

Although these prices are more expensive than some, that's because they're stuffed with valuable features. Every plan gets a free migration, at least two dedicated IPs and a choice of control panel. They're fully managed (InMotion Hosting support can help with updating your VPS and troubleshoot any server issues for you), and all plans come with Launch Assist, two hours with their expert System Administrators to help you set up and optimize the server, migrate a previous site, whatever else you need.

These are powerful products which could work for many levels of user. The 4 GB plan is ideal for mid-range sites which have outgrown shared hosting, or demanding projects which need more resources (a busy photography site where users can explore many image galleries, for instance.) Upgrading to a more powerful VPS may help with sites where consistent performance is critical - a web store where just a brief slowdown might drive customers away - or if you need to host multiple sites on the same server.

Pricing before and after renewal for a three year plan

Plan

Starting price

Renewal price

VPS 2 vCPU

$4.49

$13.99

VPS 4 vCPU

$9.99

$16.99

VPS 8 vCPU

$19.9

$46.99

VPS 12 vCPU

$31.99

$76.99

VPS 16 vCPU

$44.99

$111.99

Minecraft server hosting

Like Hostinger, InMotion Hosting doesn’t promote its Minecraft Server Hosting offerings as much as it does its other services, but it’s worth checking out. Eight different plans are available from the minimal Grass server which is $6 per month and offers 2GB RAM, right up to its hefty Netherite server for $185 and providing 32GB RAM.

All server plans take less than five minutes to set up, include a dedicated IP address, full access to files, and 99.9% server uptime. There’s also DDoS protection and 24/7 server support. A 7-day money-back guarantee is a good way to try things out.

Its game control panel is reasonably intuitive to use and clearly laid out, so you can easily pick out different mods or types of server.

It’s these kind of things that ensure InMotion Hosting feature in our look at the best Minecraft server hosting.

Dedicated hosting 

Opt for dedicated server hosting and your site gets the full power of a server all to itself. No more unexpected slowdowns because a neighboring site is suddenly really busy, because there are no neighboring sites: the server is entirely yours. If you're running a large business-critical site, where speed matters, even when you're really busy, dedicated hosting is a must-see.

InMotion Hosting has five dedicated hosting plans. These begin at an affordable $69.99 a month for a managed 4 core/ 8 thread, 16GB RAM and 1TB SSD system, and range up to a hugely powerful plan that provides Xeon E-2388G chips with a 8 cores/ 16 threads , 128 GB DDR4 RAM and 2x34TB NVMe RAID-1 storage. That'll cover most sites and requirements, but if you're unhappy, a 'Build your own' plan allows you to choose whatever CPU, RAM, storage and other features work for you.

These aren't the lowest prices around, but as with other InMotion Hosting products, that's because the company isn't skimping on the server specs. There's a 1Gbps network connection, for instance; unmetered bandwidth; at least 50GB free backup space; free cPanel and WHM licenses, free SSL, free website migrations, and more.

It's good to see that InMotion Hosting now offers a data center in the Netherlands, as well as the US, a welcome performance boost if your main audience is outside of North America.

Overall, InMotion Hosting's dedicated products offer a capable full-featured service which can handle some of the most demanding business and speed-critical tasks.

Pricing before and after renewal for a one year plan

Plan

Starting price

Renewal price

Aspire

$35.00

$69.99

Essential

$99.99

$99.99

Advanced

$169.99

$169.99

Elite

$219.99

$219.99

Extreme

$249.99

$249.99

InMotion Hosting's website builder solution (Image credit: InMotion Hosting)Does InMotion Hosting have a website builder?

InMotion Hosting includes the BoldGrid WordPress Website Builder for free with all its plans. Choose a prebuilt starter site from 200+ industry-specific designs, drag-and-drop blocks (text, pictures, videos, forms, more) onto the page, and you can customize them with your own text and photos just like any other editor.

BoldGrid is easy to use, and a handy site-creating alternative if regular WordPress feels a little too intimidating. But it doesn't have a lot of features, and is really only suitable for creating small-scale sites.

HostGator's Gator website builder is also simple and seriously cheap (from $3.84 a month), but even the most basic plan supports a tiny web store and email campaigns. At the top of the market, Wix has great templates, stacks of features, an intuitive editor, and the power to handle almost any web task.

Surplus control panel options (Image credit: InMotion Hosting)How easy is InMotion Hosting to use? 

InMotion Hosting's customer account panel looks more appealing than most, with the usual text links replaced by 30+ colorful cPanel-like icons. Unfortunately, many of these are for functions you'd use rarely, if ever. Add another credit card; buy or transfer in a new domain; buy a Sucuri website security package; read InMotion Hosting's GDPR statement. These should be tucked away in a menu, not permanently taking up valuable screen real estate as though you might need them every day.

There's a separate set of icons for each hosting package you have, but they share a similar problem. There are some useful shortcuts, for example to launch cPanel, or Softaculous to install WordPress or hundreds of other apps. But many of the others are less helpful. How often do you think you'd use functions like 'Request Email Limit Exemption' or 'Simple CSR Request for 3rd party SSL', for instance?

Fortunately, you don't have to spend long in the account panel. One click launches Softaculous, you can have WordPress ready to go within a minute or two, and the excellent cPanel has all the email, file, database and other management tools you need to get your site running smoothly.

InMotion Hosting GTMetrix performance (Image credit: GTMetrix)How fast is InMotion Hosting? 

We began our performance tests by signing up for an InMotion Hosting shared plan, then setting up a simple WordPress website based on a standard template.

Next, we measured our server's uptime by using monitoring service Uptime.com to check the site every five minutes over 14 days. InMotion Hosting managed a perfect 100% uptime, with a speedy server response time of 0.340 seconds (that's third fastest in our last 15 tests.)

We measure website speed by using GTMetrix to access a test page, and calculate how long it takes to load the main content (a figure technically known as Largest Contentful Paint, or LCP.) The lower the LCP, the more snappy and responsive your site feels.

InMotion Hosting scored an LCP of 0.610 seconds, fourth fastest in our recent tests, and less than half the time of budget shared plans from Domain.com (1.5 seconds) and iPage (1.6 seconds).

Results of InMotion Hosting's load time of a single page (Image credit: K61)

Measuring the load time of a single page is useful, but we also use k6 https://k6.io to discover how a site performs when it has 20 visitors accessing a page at the same time.

Our server did a good job, handling a peak of 20 requests per second without difficulty, and averaging a mid-range but very acceptable 15 requests per second.

These are positive results, but keep in mind our site was hosted on a shared plan. Our figures can't tell you how InMotion Hosting's VPS, dedicated or other plans might compare to the competition.

What is InMotion Hosting's support like?

InMotion Hosting offers 24/7 US-based support via phone, email and live chat, a web Support Center, a customer exclusive Knowledge Base and community forums.

Their website has a 5,000+ articles, guides and tutorials on the full range of hosting topics, way more than you'll see with most providers. The search engine doesn't do a good job of sorting its results by relevance, so it might take some scrolling to find what you need, but there is a lot of detailed and helpful content to explore.

They also have a Customer Exclusive Knowledgebase which is constantly being updated with new guides. Customers must be logged into their AMP to access the knowledgebase.

Ticket support wasn't the fastest we've seen, with replies to even relatively basic product queries taking around four hours. These typically pointed us in the right direction, though sometimes didn't have all the details we'd expect.

Fortunately, live chat gave the best results. We found responses were speedy and helpful, and the agents were able to give us useful answers to any extra questions we asked.

Final verdict

Whether you're a total website newbie or a big business running a huge and high-traffic web store, InMotion Hosting has a fast and feature-packed product which can help. A must for your web hosting shortlist.

InMotion Hosting FAQsWhat payment types does InMotion Hosting support?

InMotion Hosting accepts payment via credit or debit card, PayPal and U.S. purchase order or check.

Does InMotion Hosting offer refunds?

InMotion Hosting has a '100% satisfaction guarantee' which promises your money back if you ask for it within a very generous 90 days.

There are some exceptions. There's 90 days of protection for all shared hosting, 6 month and longer VPS and reseller hosting packages. But dedicated servers and monthly-billed VPS and reseller plans get 30 days.

Most hosts only give 30 days across the range, though, so even taking the small print into account, InMotion Hosting tramples over the rest.

InMotion Hosting uptime performance (Image credit: InMotion Hosting)Does InMotion Hosting have an uptime guarantee?

InMotion Hosting's website doesn't quote an uptime guarantee for shared hosting. Most hosts do a little more, typically claiming 99.9%, and with some explanation of how this is calculated and the compensation you might get if this isn't met.

The company looks to do better with VPS hosting, claiming each VPS is on a server 'with 99.99% uptime.' It doesn't use the word 'guarantee', though, and there's nothing in the small print to explain how this 99.99% is calculated or guaranteed.

Confusingly, the website quotes two figures for dedicated servers. At the top of the page it says servers are on a '99.99% uptime Tier 1 network'; at the bottom, it says current network uptime is 99.999%. Again, there's no mention of a guarantee.

We prefer hosts to offer more clarity, and offer compensation if expected uptime isn't met. For example, Scala Hosting's Uptime Guarantee says customers get all their monthly fees back if unscheduled downtime is greater than 1% (that's more than around 7 hours 18 minutes).

Where are InMotion Hosting's data centers?

InMotion Hosting has two US-based data centers in Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles. Even shared hosting users can choose which data center should host their website.

cPanel is included (Image credit: InMotion Hosting)What is my InMotion Hosting IP address?

If you need to connect your InMotion Hosting site to a domain managed elsewhere, it can help to find your web server's IP address.

To locate it, first log into the InMotion Hosting account management panel.

Scroll down and find your hosting plan in the list (it'll appear under your domain name).

Find and click your plan's cPanel icon (probably top left in the list.)

Your server IP address appears in the General Information panel on the left, in the 'Shared IP Address' box.

If you can't see a General Information panel, click the Server Information link, and look for the 'Shared IP Address'.

What are InMotion Hosting's nameservers?

InMotion Hosting's nameservers are ns1.InMotionhosting.com and ns2.InMotionhosting.com.

Cancel plans from the account panel subscriptions area (Image credit: InMotion Hosting)How do I cancel an InMotion Hosting product?

Point your browser at www.InMotionhosting.com, click Login top-right of the page, and log in using your regular InMotion Hosting credentials.

Click Billing, My Subscriptions.

If you see a red cross to the right of the subscription you'd like to cancel, click it and fill in the cancellation form. Your plan will remain active, but it won't renew and you won't be willed again.

If the Cancel column includes the text 'Set to Manual Renewal', the plan already has its 'auto-renew' setting turned off. You'll still receive email reminders just before the subscription is due to end, but if you're not interested, you can just ignore these and leave the account to expire.

We've used and tested 140 hosting providers and Hostinger ends up being top for a lot of our recommendations because they cater to home users that have little to no web hosting experience all the way to seasoned web-devs.

For this review, we used the most basic web hosting plan and a VPS to see if Hostinger offer the tools and reliability beginners and web-devs need alike . We built a test site, explored their custom control panel, tested support, monitored speeds, uptime, and compared our results with the best of the competition.

What we found was a service easy for complete beginners to use but with the tools and flexibility to keep more experienced customers happy.

In my latest round of testing I put Hostinger up against some cheaper hosting options to see if the extra price was worth it. After I got the test test results back I can say with confidence that the small amount extra for Hostinger is worth it to make your site function faster for website visitors.

Editor's note

Update: April 2025

Hostinger's cloud hosting plans now feature auto-scaling and geo-redundancy earning it the right to be included on the best cloud hosting page. This has also changed my recommendation for Hostinger as best for beginners to best overall which will be reflected on my best web hosting guide shortly.

(Image credit: Hostiner)Hostinger: The pros

Ease of use

When I started building websites, if you had zero experience and wanted a website you'd go to a place like Squarespace or Wix because they offered an easy to use website builder and hosting all in one. They were a bit more expensive but if you didn't want to pay for a web developer they were still much cheaper. Hostinger has changed the game as you can use Hostinger's website builder, AI tools, and guides to easily create and host a website at a much lower cost.

Cost

If you went with a website builder such as Wix you'll be paying $17 a month and if you want to add features to your site like taking bookings or payment you'll need to fork out even more. At Hostinger you can start from as little as $2.49 a month with very little restrictions. It's unlikely you'll need to upgrade your plan unless your site get more use. You won't need to pay more for features that you want. Plus, you get a website builder with Hostinger too. After renewal the most basic Hostinger plan is $11.99 a month still making it cheaper than Wix and Squarespace at $16 a month.

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(Image credit: Hostinger)

Feature packed plans

Hostinger’s plans are well priced and stuffed with features, many of which are chargeable extras elsewhere. Page speed monitoring, malware scanning, and analytics are all nice extras for beginners. There are also drag and drop website builders alongside AI builders and AI tools to manage website optimization and troubleshooting.

The more advanced plans like cloud the cloud hosting plans include auto-scaling and geo-redundancy for maximum flexibility and reliability.

Excellent uptime

Reliability is one of the most important elements in any quality web host. A provider can offer as many other features as it likes, but if your site is down all the time, most of your visitors will disappear.

We measured Hostinger’s performance by setting up a test WordPress website, then using Uptime.com to monitor its speed and any downtime from multiple locations around the world.

Although our site was hosted on Hostinger's most basic shared hosting plan, it still managed an excellent 100% uptime record over 10 weeks of monitoring.

Fast load times

We measure website load speeds with help from GTmetrix, which accesses a test page and reports how long its main content takes to load (a value called Largest Contentful Paint, or LCP). A low LCP means your website begins to appear on the screen more quickly, keeping visitors happy.

Hostinger scored here with a speedy LCP of 0.607 seconds, the second fastest result in our last 15 tests, just behind HostGator.

One-off load speed checks are important, but we also like to see how a site performs when it's busy. To do this, we use the stress-testing service k6 to unleash 20 virtual users on our site and measure what happens.

Hostinger's results showed it could handle 15 requests per second throughout the test. That’s similar to other providers, but very acceptable for shared hosting, and if you’re opting for a more high-powered cloud or VPS plan, you should be able to handle even more visitors.

Low starter prices

Hostinger’s prices start at just $2.49 a month for the four year Premium hosting plan (renewing at a still very reasonable $7.99 on the first renewal).

Not keen on signing up for such a long time? Switch to the annual plan and it’s still well priced at $2.99 a month and $11.99 on renewal.

The pricing can be a bit confusing and renewal prices can change based things like whether you have auto-renew enabled. You can ignore the countdown timer on the page as it's always refreshing and the prices stay the same. However, we do recommend that you take more time to look at the long term cost of your plans.

(Image credit: Hostinger)

Data centers in nine countries

Sign up with many web hosts and they’ll give you storage space in a data center but they won’t tell you where it is, or give you any choice of locations.

That could be bad performance news if, say, your target audience is in California but your website is hosted in a data center halfway around the world.

Hostinger has data centers in nine countries: the USA, UK, France, Netherlands, Indonesia, Lithuania, Singapore, India and Brazil.

That's far more than most hosts, and it’s especially good to see a service which doesn’t purely focus on North America and Europe.

There is one catch though, some plans don't support all the data centers. The Shared, Cloud and WordPress plans are available everywhere, but Hostinger's VPS plans can't be hosted in Netherlands, the UK, Indonesia, and Singapore.

Check the small print of individual plans to find out more, or take a look at Hostinger's 'Where are your servers located?' support document.

Quality custom control panel

Hostinger doesn't offer cPanel (an intuitive server and site management platform) to its shared hosting users, opting to provide its custom hPanel platform, instead. Custom control panels make us wary, probably because most of them are underpowered in the extreme, but hPanel is a rare exception.

It looks similar to cPanel with server details (location, IP address) in a sidebar, and colorful icons representing features in categories such as Domains, Emails, Files, WordPress and more.

Most functions are accessible to even novice users. Creating an email address, for instance, is as easy as entering the address and a password. Advanced features like importing existing emails, to setting up SPF and DKIM records (to authenticate emails and protect against phishing) are just a click or two away too.

Hostinger: The cons

Confusing prices

With three different subscription lengths and each one having a different renewal cost, it can be hard to work out which plan is best for you. Keep in mind when calculating long term costs. After the reduced renewal price the monthly fee will revert to the monthly cost of $11.99.

There are significant discounts to be had for longer plans but are you really going to need that plan for 48 months? Check your business plan and pick a subscription length not just based on price but one that might come up for renewal when you're about to out grow your hosting plan.

Performance restrictions

Any site that does any kind of image processing or has big databases will find low performance because disk read/write speeds are throttled and memory is not that generous. Any static site will be fine but performance of sites that have user accounts and to some extent eCommerce sites will be affected.

No telephone support

Hostinger say that telephone support just slows down getting things done and that they've been able to fix issues faster by removing this option. If you really care about speaking to a human via a voice call there are other hosts that offer phone support but they are more costly.

(Image credit: Hostinger)Hostinger: Tested

We've put Hostinger through its paces to see how well it copes and how easy it is to use. Our testers are industry experts that have extensive experience in a range of web hosting scenarios so we can give a reliable and comprehensive review on everything Hostinger claims to be.

On the whole, we found a web hosting service that's easy to use and performs well for the majority of users.

Hostinger hPanel (Image credit: Hostinger)Using Hostinger

Hostinger has put a lot of effort into making their shared hosting experience as seamless and beginner friendly as possible. From the moment you sign up, Hostinger walks you through every step with very clear and easy to follow instructions that can help beginners get their website up and running.

There's more for experienced users too. With the inclusion of additional features such as page speed monitoring, malware scanning, and analytics, they’re really making sure that you can manage every aspect of your website directly from Hostinger’s hPanel. This really goes above and beyond the industry standard control panel cPanel and it does a good job of hiding away any of the techy stuff that can be confusing, presenting everything in a logical manner.

Hostinger guide you through every combination of scenarios - building a fresh website vs migrating an existing one, doing it yourself vs getting a developer to do it - they really caters for everyone. They’ve even customised the Wordpress admin panel to ease the transition from their own control panel to help newbies get to grips with Wordpress.

Wordpress is by no-means difficult to use, but if you’re not familiar with it then it can be overwhelming and their customisations are a really nice touch. Overall impressions are very high.

Hostinger have developed a new AI troubleshooter that can automatically detect errors (403, 404, 500, 503, etc) and suggest fixes making hosting even easier than before. Currently the tool works 42% of the time but it's improving every month. It also only takes one minute to use so it's not an added inconvenience if it doesn't work, you can just go through the usual support channels.Hostinger is a genuine alternative to Wix and Squarespace. The getting started process is really well thought out. It covers every eventuality including, transferring your website from another host and installing WordPress.

Extras such as malware scanning, page speed monitoring and analytics are great for beginners who wouldn’t know how to set up third party tools such as google analytics

There's an AI website builder if you don't want to use WordPress but if you do it's very easy to personalise WordPress, add content, and configure performance improving settings like automatic caching.

When it comes to their VPS offerings, you’ve very much on your own. VPS tend to be aimed at people with experience setting up and managing servers and, in exchange for far more performance for your money, you will need to know how to run and manage the server yourself.

One click installers

Hostinger really shines here. There are a bunch of different things you can one-click install, most are a bit useless but there’s not much harm in having the choice. Some plans include staging versions which let you test changes to your website on a cloned version of your website. Perfect for beginners that are afraid of breaking their live site. There's also automatic updates which is a fantastic feature.

Hostinger's performance

We used Uptime.com to monitor our test website from multiple locations around the world, logging response times and any downtime.

Our test site was hosted on Hostinger's most basic shared hosting plan, but still managed a solid 99.96% uptime record over 10 weeks of monitoring.

Uptime.com recorded a response time range of 171ms to 1.73s, with an average of 382ms, over the last seven days of testing. Starter shared hosting plans typically manage 200-400ms with an average peak of 700-800ms, so Hostinger is a bit on the slow side when it comes to response times.

Page load times matter too, though, so we used Dotcom Tools' Website Speed Test to measure our site performance from 16 locations around the US and Europe. This time the results were much better at 878ms, putting it in the top 25% of providers.

One-off load speed checks are important, but we also like to see how a site performs when it's busy. To do this, we use the stress-testing service k6 to unleash 20 virtual users on our site and measure what happens.

Hostinger's results showed some drops in performance at peak load, but that's what we would expect for a shared hosting package. Overall, it was able to handle 15 requests per second throughout the test, a typical result for most providers.

These are broadly positive results, and show Hostinger performs better than most budget hosts. But keep in mind that our figures are based on testing a shared plan, and if you're opting for VPS, cloud hosting or any other product, your experience may be very different.

A mixed story, then, but keep in mind these are comparisons based on the cheapest shared hosting plan from each test provider. Some of those plans cost 5x to 10x the cost you could pay with Hostinger, so on balance we think the company did reasonably well.

Hostinger's GTmetrix grade showing 100% performance (Image credit: Future)Hostinger's performance metrics

LPC

Uptime

Response time

Page requests

Hostinger

0.607

99.96%

0.382

15

Average across top hosts

0.720

99.98%

0.300

14

Hostinger's support is entirely text based (Image credit: Hostinger)How good is Hostinger's support?

Unusually for a top hosting provider, Hostinger doesn't have telephone support. There's 24/7 live chat, though, and email or ticket support if you prefer.

We opened a ticket asking how we could install WordPress on a subdomain. That's not a complicated technical issue, but it's more involved than a simple product question, and gave us a better chance of getting an interesting response.

The reply arrived only 17 minutes later, just about as speedy as we could expect for ticket support. (Who needs live chat, anyway?)

The text used more jargon than we’d like, but was accurate and included all the detail we needed to figure out a solution.

Live chat is also available whenever you need it. We never waited more than a couple of minutes for a response, and agents were just as quick at identifying our issues and coming up with relevant and useful advice.

A web knowledgebase is on hand if you prefer the DIY approach. We'd recommend ignoring the Search box (it does a poor job of finding the best articles), and just browse the categories further down the page. There are hundreds of articles arranged into topics such as hPanel, cPanel, DNS, SSL Certificates and more.

These articles are often short, and not always organized or presented as you'd expect. The site does have plenty of useful advice on carrying out specific tasks, though, even when they're not about Hostinger's own services.

If your domain is managed by another registrar, for instance, most hosting providers don't give you any real advice on how to modify DNS records. But Hostinger has separate articles for managing DNS at Bluehost, GoDaddy, IONOS, Namecheap, HostGator, SiteGround, WordPress.com, DreamHost’s, and many more: 30+ providers in total.

There's clearly work to do here, but Hostinger scores well in most areas, and overall delivers a far better quality of support than most budget providers.

What sort of hosting plans does Hostinger offer?

Hostinger offers affordable shared hosting for small to medium low-traffic sites. VPS hosting and cloud hosting give your website more resources for extra speed, making them suitable for more demanding, business-critical sites. (How demanding? A good VPS can run a WordPress site with hundreds of thousands of visitors a month.)

Hostinger is also one of the few big hosting names to offer pre-configured Minecraft server hosting from under $10 a month.

• Hostinger is also top of our best Minecraft server hosting list

Shared hosting

Shared hosting works just as the name suggests: your site is stored on a web server along with many others, and everyone shares the server costs and resources. It's cheap and relatively easy to use, and although this is the slowest hosting type, shared plans may still be able to handle sites with tens of thousands of visitors a month.

Hostinger's shared hosting starts with the Premium plan. It's well priced at $2.49 a month over four years ($7.99 on renewal, then the standard $11.99 monthly price), and has some welcome features including free SSL, easy WordPress installation and management.

The Business plan comes at an affordable $3.99 a month ($8.99 on renewal, then the standard $13.99 monthly price). There's support for 100 websites and 100 email addresses, a free domain, and unlimited bandwidth are also available with the Premium plan. This plan comes with more (200 GB) and faster (NVMe instead of standard SSD) storage, free CDN for faster loading speeds, daily and on-demand backups, WordPress AI tools that help you create bespoke content and troubleshoot issues, Amazon Affiliate plugin for WordPress, and enhanced DDoS protection, to name a few.

On top of what the Business plan offers, the Cloud Startup plan adds a dedicated IP for increased security and enhanced control, as well as more power (100 PHP workers instead of 60 with the Business plan, 3GB RAM instead of 1.5GB, 1024 IOPS limit instead of 256), up to 2 million files and directories (inodes), and support for up to 300 websites. It starts at $7.99 a month for 48 months and renews at $19.99 a month before switching to the standard $24.99 a month. We recommend Hostinger's cloud hosting plans for WooCommerce users so they can enjoy the performance they expect.

Hostinger business web hosting | 4-years | $3.99 per month
Exclusive to TechRadar readers. This is an incredibly cheap deal. You can get a free domain, 200GB storage, unlimited traffic, a free SSL certificate, and daily backups. This package is perfect if you plan to host just one website and grow it rapidly with plenty of features not usually found at this price level.
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VPS hosting 

Signing up for VPS (Virtual Private Server) hosting gets you a private area in a web server with your own system resources. This automatically gives any VPS a speed advantage over shared hosting, and the more resources your plan includes (CPU time, RAM, storage space) the faster it's likely to be.

Hostinger offers four VPS plans. The first is $13.99 a month for 1 vCPU core, 4GB RAM, and 50GB NVMe storage. The higher end plan is $59.99 a month for 8 vCPU cores, 32 GB RAM, and 400GB NMVe storage. All these plans are on offer at a discount when you purchase plans of long durations. For example, the basic plan is $4.99 a month instead of $13.99 if you get a 24-month subscription.

The range is fair value, but it won't work for everyone. One reason Hostinger's prices are low is that their VPS plans are unmanaged. That means Hostinger doesn't monitor the operating system, set up the firewall, install security patches or do anything similar: you're left to manage the server's system software yourself. That's manageable for experts, but if you're not one, Hostinger has over 60 one-click templates, so clients can install top control panels and applications with ease. Also, VPS AI Assistant provides answers and guidance for VPS clients.

All VPS plans have 1000 Mb/s network speed which facilitates high-performing websites, smooth streaming, and fast data transfers.

A new feature from Hostinger for VPS servers is Vibe sysadmin. You can create an MCP server that acts as the link between an AI coding assistant and the VPS server. This can help you perform system administration like maintenance and automation more easily.

Cloud hosting

If Hostinger’s shared hosting isn’t powerful enough for your needs, its cloud hosting packages might help. They come with up to 20x more resources and come with a dedicated IP address, ensuring fast performance, great stability, and maximum security. But they’re also just as easy to use as the shared range.

There are three cloud hosting plans available: Cloud Startup, Cloud Professional, and Cloud Enterprise. They all offer unlimited bandwidth, free SSL, a free domain, daily backups and a dedicated IP address, and can host up to 300 websites on the same account.

The Cloud Startup plan includes 200GB of NVMe storage, 3GB of RAM, and 2 CPU cores for $27.99 billed monthly or $7.99 for a 48-month subscription. Other subscription durations are available too at varying discounts.

The Cloud Professional plan increases these to 250GB storage, 6GB RAM and 4 CPU cores, and remains reasonably priced at $47.99 a month (discounts are available for different subscription lengths).

Opting for the Cloud Enterprise plan gets you 300GB storage, 12GB RAM ,and 6 CPU cores for $69.99 a month or $29.99 for four years. The major difference between the Cloud Enterprise plan and the Cloud Professional plan is that Enterprise is more suitable for larger eCommerce businesses.

Does Hostinger have a website builder?

If you don't have a website yet, and WordPress seems a little intimidating, a website builder may be the easiest way to get started. Typically, they'll have a gallery of pre-built website designs you can use to get started. Adding pictures, videos, maps and other page elements is as easy as dragging and dropping, and customizing the content with your own text and photos works much like any editor.

Hostinger has its own website builder, which comes with unmetered traffic, unlimited free SSL certificates, web hosting, up to 100 websites, free domain, free email, ecommerce features, plus more.

We found it to be a simple and straightforward tool that we could use right away. No need to spend an age scrolling through feature lists, comparing plans or wondering what you can afford: just hand over your email address to create an account and you can start building right away. In fact, now you can generate your own, unique website with Hostinger's AI in less than a minute.

The editor is relatively basic, but the online shop’s what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) editor will give you tools to create detailed descriptions with HTML titles.

Hostinger website builder has two plans: Premium Website Builder and Business Website Builder. The entry-level plan costs $2.99 per month for a 12-month period and is a decent website builder for personal use and small sites. But, if you want more, the Business plan costs $3.99 per month for a 12-month period and offers eCommerce features and AI tools to write articles, generate images, and even whole sections for a website.

Does Hostinger provide Minecraft server hosting?

Hostinger Minecraft server hosting price plans (Image credit: Hostinger)

Hostinger offers Minecraft server hosting, even though it's not as obvious as its other hosting options.

Setting up a server isn’t quite as straightforward as Hostinger’s 1-click WordPress installers, but it’s not difficult either. The support site has tutorials on how to get your server running, find and install mods, tweak key settings and change your server type (options include Official, Spigot, CraftBukkit, Paper, Forge and more.)

Plans start with a small-scale 4GB RAM, 1 CPU package for $4.99 a month for a 24-month period, ranging up to $19.99 for a 24-month term, which offers 32 GB RAM, 8 vCPU cores, and 400 GB NVMe storage.

All plans include a malware scanner and a dedicated IP to protect your server from DDoS attacks, while automated backups keep you safe from just about everything else. Its AI assistant -- Kodee -- is a stand out feature as it'll help answer many common questions along the way. It's easily one of the best Minecraft server hosting options for most people.

Can you build a web store with Hostinger?

Hostinger has two options for eCommerce clients: WordPress clients can pick a managed WooCommerce plan, and eCommerce Website Builder is perfect for simple online shops.

As we’ve discussed above, Hostinger Website Builder can create web stores with up to 1000 products, and supports 20+ popular payment types. It’s not very configurable, but it’s easy to use and could be enough to run a simple home business.

The alternative is to sign up with one of Hostinger's other hosting plans, then install a specialist ecommerce platform. WooCommerce is probably the best-known option. It's a hugely capable WordPress plugin, which can be easily installed on any Hostinger plan, and includes all the product cataloging, inventory managing, payment taking and worldwide shipping integrations you need.

This really does give you the power to build a world-class web store, and handle most of it on your own. Hostinger will not only help with the hosting but also provide expert WooCommerce support for managed WooCommerce hosting clients.

Up and coming

Performance boost
This feature will enable you to boost the performance of your site to be able to cope with the traffic generated by promotions and seasonal peaks for longer periods of time.

Finer grained control

In the future you will be able to grant access to specific sites so you can better manage permissions and security.

Broken link checker

This tools helps you discover broken links on all pages and posts and will give you a detailed report on all URLs, link text.

Automatic optimization

Hostinger's range of AI tools is set to get even better after they release a site optimization tool that will suggest things you can do to help speed up your site.

There isn't a fixed date on when these features will be released. When they are we will jump in and give them a whirl.

Final verdict: Is Hostinger right for you?

Hostinger is really good for complete beginners and very basic websites and the VPS plans are good value. If you’re either a complete beginner or experienced enough to handle your own server through their VPS offering then Hostinger are good for you. Anyone that has enough experience to not need the help with the shared plans won't be getting their value for money and if you are not an expert at VPS then using Hostinger VPS packages might be slightly out of your league.

How we test

Hostinger was tested and reviewed by Lewis Wright who has years of experience in web hosting and infrastructure. He tested the features and usability of the basic shared plan and a VPS plan, assessed the performance, and compared the plans with hosts that offer similar packages.

Meet the authorsHostinger FAQs How big is Hostinger?

Hostinger is an experienced Lithuanian hosting provider with almost 900 employees and more than 2.5 million subscribers around the world.

Datanyze' Web Hosting Market Share report ranks Hostinger in 35th place, used by around 20,000 companies, for 0.45% of the hosting market.

Does Hostinger register domains?

Hostinger isn’t just about web hosting; the company can also help you find and register your perfect domain.

First year prices are reasonable, with .com’s available from $9.99, and some domain names are discounted to $0.99 in the first year (.cloud, .shop and so on).

Renewal prices can be more expensive than some. Shop domains are $0.99 in year one, but $34.99 afterwards, and Porkbun.com renews .shop domains at around $25 a year.

Hostinger domain registration has its plus points, though, including free domain privacy to hide your details from spammers. If you’re after a domain, it’s worth a look.

What payment types does Hostinger support?

Hostinger accepts payment via credit card, PayPal, Google Pay, Alipay and Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies via CoinGate.

Does Hostinger have an uptime guarantee?

Hostinger has an uptime guarantee of 99.9% per month, similar to many other budget hosts.

If Hostinger doesn't hit that target, you can contact the company and request a credit of 5% of your monthly hosting fee.

Capping your compensation at 5% is one of the least generous guarantees around. Other hosts typically give you much more. For example, ScalaHosting promises to credit users with a free month of hosting if its uptime drops below 1% (that's around seven hours and 18 minutes of downtime).

Where are Hostinger's data centers?

Hostinger has data centers in the USA, UK, France, Indonesia, Netherlands, Lithuania, Singapore, India and Brazil. That's far more than most hosts, and they're also more widely spread (many hosts barely step outside of the USA and Europe).

The advantage of having a lot of data centers is that more users can choose to host sites close to their audience, for the best possible performance. Another advantage is that their in-house content delivery network (CDN) covers all data centers on 4 continents. It automatically caches website’s content across other servers, loading up to 40% faster for end-users and minimizing pressure on the main server.

There's just one potential catch: some plans don't support all the data centers. The Shared, Cloud, and WordPress plans can be hosted in all eleven, but Hostinger's VPS plans can't be hosted in the Netherlands, the UK, Indonesia, and Singapore DCs.

Check the small print of individual plans to find out more, or take a look at Hostinger's 'Where are your servers located?' support document.

What are Hostinger's nameservers?

Before using an existing domain with your web hosting, it may be necessary to point the domain to Hostinger's nameservers.

The hPanel, Shared and Cloud plans use the nameservers ns1.dns-parking.com and ns2.dns-parking.com.

The cPanel nameservers depend on the plan and host a client is using.

How does Hostinger compare to other web hosting service providers?

Hostinger is cheaper than Bluehost, and by comparison, offers roughly the same amount of features in its shared hosting plans. While Hostinger has strong features and pricing, it doesn't have 24/7 telephone support like GoDaddy.

Hostinger also offers its web hosting and website builder services as a combination plan unlike other popular web hosting providers that will make users buy website building services separately.

When comparing Hostinger to popular web hosting solutions from SiteGround, Hostinger's shared plans are not an overall bad choice. It offers the same unlimited bandwidth and storage for the premium plans, an easy hPanel control system, free website migration, free domain for a year, and a better performance with 1.5s average page load time.

How do I cancel a Hostinger product?

Log into Hostinger's hPanel.

Click Hosting in the menu at the top of the screen, then click Manage.

Scroll down and click Deactivate Account.

Choose whether to cancel your hosting account immediately, or when your subscription expires, and click Continue to complete the cancellation process.

Does Hostinger offer refunds?

Hostinger has a 30-day money-back guarantee covering its hosting plans and some other products. These include SSL certificates, often excluded by other hosts.

It's good to see Hostinger's policy covers renewal fees as well as your original purchase, something else we don't see with all hosts.

There's a final bonus in a limited four day warranty for some domain registrations and domain name transfers (see the official Refund Policy for the list.) Sure, four days isn't long, but most hosts don't offer any domain-related refunds at all.

We've also teamed up with Hostinger to offer a full refund for a year's hosting in Amazon vouchers.

Can I build a WordPress site with Hostinger?

Yes. Hostinger have a wide range of tools and optimizations for WordPress. Hostinger has further rolled out several features, including a WordPress Compatibility Checker, which looks for compatibility issues between PHP and WordPress versions, plugins, and themes. Plus, the Hostinger Amazon Affiliate plugin and theme for WordPress help launch an affiliate marketing website much faster and easier.

There is also a new hosting infrastructure for WordPress that makes WordPress hosting 30% faster so in the near future we will need to re-do our speed tests.

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Season 3 will be the show's last. Before we say goodbye, it's time to return to Cousins for one last summer.

Once upon a time, members of the Code Switch team were just kids, learning about race and identity for the first time. So on this episode, we're sharing some of the books, movies and music that deeply influenced each of us at an early age — and set us on the path to being the race nerds we are today.

It’s a scenario that plays out far too often: A mid-sized company runs a routine threat validation exercise and stumbles on something unexpected, like an old infostealer variant that has been quietly active in their network for weeks.

This scenario doesn’t require a zero-day exploit or sophisticated malware. All it takes is one missed setting, inadequate endpoint oversight, or a user clicking what they shouldn’t. Such attacks don’t succeed because they’re advanced. They succeed because routine safeguards aren’t in place.

Take Lumma Stealer, for example. This is a simple phishing attack that lures users into running a fake CAPTCHA script. It spreads quickly but can be stopped cold by something as routine as restricting PowerShell access and providing basic user training. However, in many environments, even those basic defenses aren’t deployed.

This is the story behind many breaches today. Not headline-grabbing hacks or futuristic AI assaults—just overlooked updates, fatigued teams and basic cyber hygiene falling through the cracks.

Security Gaps That Shouldn’t Exist in 2025

Security leaders know the drill: patch the systems, limit access and train employees. Yet these essentials often get neglected. While the industry chases the latest exploits and talks up advanced tools, attackers keep targeting the same weak points. They don’t have to reinvent the wheel. They just need to find one that’s loose.

Just as the same old techniques are still at work, old malware is making a comeback. Variants like Mirai, Matsu and Klopp are resurfacing with minor updates and major impact. These aren’t sophisticated campaigns, but recycled attacks retooled just enough to slip past tired defenses.

The reason they work isn’t technical, it’s operational. Security teams are burned out. They’re managing too many alerts, juggling too many tools and doing it all with shrinking budgets and rising expectations. In this kind of environment, the basics don’t just get deprioritized, they get lost.

Burnout Is a Risk Factor

The cybersecurity industry often defines risk in terms of vulnerabilities, threat actors and tool coverage, but burnout may be the most overlooked risk of all. When analysts are overwhelmed, they miss routine maintenance. When processes are brittle, teams can’t keep up with the volume. When bandwidth runs out, even critical tasks can get sidelined.

This isn’t about laziness. It’s about capacity. Most breaches don’t reveal a lack of intelligence. They just demonstrate a lack of time.

Meanwhile, phishing campaigns are growing more sophisticated. Generative AI is making it easier for attackers to craft personalized lures. Infostealers continue to evolve, disguising themselves as login portals or trusted interfaces that lure users into running malicious code. Users often infect themselves, unknowingly handing over credentials or executing code.

These attacks still rely on the same assumptions: someone will click. The system will let it run. And no one will notice until it’s too late.

Why Real-World Readiness Matters More Than Tools

It’s easy to think readiness means buying new software or hiring a red team, but true preparedness is quieter and more disciplined. It’s about confirming that defenses such as access restrictions, endpoint rules and user permissions are working against the actual threats.

Achieving this level of preparedness takes more than monitoring generic threat feeds. Knowing that ransomware is trending globally isn’t the same as knowing which threat groups are actively scanning your infrastructure. That’s the difference between a broader weather forecast and radar focused on your ZIP code.

Organizations that regularly validate controls against real-world, environment-specific threats gain three key advantages.

First, they catch problems early. Second, they build confidence across their team. When everyone knows what to expect and how to respond, fatigue gives way to clarity. Thirdly, by knowing the threats that matter, and the ones focused on them, they can prioritize those fundamental activities that get ignored.

You may not need to patch every CVE right now, just the ones being used by the threat actors targeting you. What areas of your network are they actively doing reconnaissance on? Those subnets probably need more focus to patching and remediation.

Security Doesn’t Need to Be Sexy, It Needs to Work

There’s a cultural bias in cybersecurity toward innovation and incident response. The new tool, the emergency patch and the major breach all get more attention than the daily habits that quietly prevent problems.

Real resilience depends on consistency. It means users can’t run untrusted PowerShell scripts. It means patches are applied on a prioritized schedule, not “when we get around to it.” It means phishing training isn’t just a checkbox, but a habit reinforced over time.

These basics aren’t glamorous, but they work. In an environment where attackers are looking for the easiest way in, doing the simplest things correctly is one of the most effective strategies a team can take.

Discipline Is the New Innovation

The cybersecurity landscape will continue to change. AI will keep evolving, adversaries will go on adapting, and the next headline breach is likely already in motion. The best defense isn’t more noise or more tech, but better discipline.

Security teams don’t need to do everything. They need to do the right things consistently. That starts with reestablishing routine discipline: patch, configure, test, rinse and repeat. When those fundamentals are strong, the rest can hold.

For CISOs, now is the time to ask a simple but powerful question: Are we doing the basics well, and can we prove it? Start by assessing your organization’s hygiene baseline. What patches are overdue? What controls haven’t been tested in months? Where are your people stretched too thin to execute the essentials? The answers won’t just highlight the risks, they’ll point toward the pathway to resilience.

We list the best patch management software.

This article was produced as part of TechRadarPro's Expert Insights channel where we feature the best and brightest minds in the technology industry today. The views expressed here are those of the author and are not necessarily those of TechRadarPro or Future plc. If you are interested in contributing find out more here: https://www.techradar.com/news/submit-your-story-to-techradar-pro

The withdrawal accounts for nearly half of the soldiers sent to Los Angeles in June to suppress protests over the Trump administration's immigration crackdown.

(Image credit: Eric Thayer)

These are the best AV receivers from Onkyo, Sony, Yamaha and Denon, based on CNET's testing.

• WeTransfer users were outraged when it seemed an updated terms of service implied their data would be used to train AI models.
• The company moved fast to assure users it does not use uploaded content for AI training
• WeTransfer rewrote the clause in clearer language

File-sharing platform WeTransfer spent a frantic day reassuring users that it has no intention of using any uploaded files to train AI models, after an update to its terms of service suggested that anything sent through the platform could be used for making or improving machine learning tools.

The offending language buried in the ToS said that using WeTransfer gave the company the right to use the data "for the purposes of operating, developing, commercializing, and improving the Service or new technologies or services, including to improve performance of machine learning models that enhance our content moderation process, in accordance with the Privacy & Cookie Policy."

That part about machine learning and the general broad nature of the text seemed to suggest that WeTransfer could do whatever it wanted with your data, without any specific safeguards or clarifying qualifiers to alleviate suspicions.

Perhaps understandably, a lot of WeTransfer users, who include many creative professionals, were upset at what this seemed to imply. Many started posting their plans to switch away from WeTransfer to other services in the same vein. Others began warning that people should encrypt files or switch to old-school physical delivery methods.

Time to stop using @WeTransfer who from 8th August have decided they'll own anything you transfer to power AI pic.twitter.com/sYr1JnmemXJuly 15, 2025

WeTransfer noted the growing furor around the language and rushed to try and put out the fire. The company rewrote the section of the ToS and shared a blog explaining the confusion, promising repeatedly that no one's data would be used without their permission, especially for AI models.

"From your feedback, we understood that it may have been unclear that you retain ownership and control of your content. We’ve since updated the terms further to make them easier to understand," WeTransfer wrote in the blog. "We’ve also removed the mention of machine learning, as it’s not something WeTransfer uses in connection with customer content and may have caused some apprehension."

While still granting a standard license for improving WeTransfer, the new text omits references to machine learning, focusing instead on the familiar scope needed to run and improve the platform.

Clarified privacy

If this feels a little like deja vu, that's because something very similar happened about a year and a half ago with another file transfer platform, Dropbox. A change to the company's fine print implied that Dropbox was taking content uploaded by users in order to train AI models. Public outcry led to Dropbox apologizing for the confusion and fixing the offending boilerplate.

The fact that it happened again in such a similar fashion is interesting not because of the awkward legal language used by software companies, but because it implies a knee-jerk distrust in these companies to protect your information. Assuming the worst is the default approach when there's uncertainty, and the companies have to make an extra effort to ease those tensions.

Sensitivity from creative professionals to even the appearance of data misuse. In an era where tools like DALL·E, Midjourney, and ChatGPT train on the work of artists, writers, and musicians, the stakes are very real. The lawsuits and boycotts by artists over how their creations are used, not to mention suspicions of corporate data use, make the kinds of reassurances offered by WeTransfer are probably going to be something tech companies will want to have in place early on, lest they face the misplaced wrath of their customers

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