How To Upload PHP Project in Hostinger Hosting Easily 2026

Log in at hostinger.com to reach hPanel, Hostinger's control panel for every hosting plan, domain, and email account on your profile. The home screen lists each active service as its own card: your hosting plan, any Horizons projects, your email addresses, and backup status.

Find the Hosting card for the plan your domain runs on and click Manage. From the left-hand menu that opens, Websites is the entry point to File Manager. If you run multiple sites, confirm you're in the right plan here; uploading to the wrong one means your project won't be reachable at the domain you expect.

File Manager opens to a folder tree, and public_html is the one that matters: it's the web root Hostinger serves when someone visits your domain. Anything placed directly inside public_html becomes reachable at yourdomain.com, while a subfolder like public_html/myapp becomes yourdomain.com/myapp.

If you're replacing an existing site, check what's already there; a WordPress install, for instance, leaves folders like wp-admin and wp-content you don't want to overwrite by accident. Create a dedicated folder for your PHP project if you want it isolated from anything else on the same hosting account.

With public_html (or your chosen subfolder) open, use the upload icon in the top toolbar to select your files. For a project with many files, zip everything locally first, upload the single archive, then right-click it and choose Extract instead of uploading file by file.

Hostinger's File Manager unpacks .zip, .tar, .tar.gz, .tar.bz2, .tar.xz, .tar.lz4, and .tar.sz; it does not support .rar, so re-compress in one of those formats first if that's what you have. Once extracted, check that your entry file, usually index.php, sits at the top level of the folder you're serving from.

A nested extra folder from the zip is one of the most common reasons a fresh upload doesn't load. If a large archive stalls partway through, it's likely hitting your plan's PHP upload size limit rather than a connection problem; that's covered below.

If your PHP code connects to MySQL, create the database from hPanel's Databases section before you test the site; most projects throw a connection error until it exists. You type in the database name, username, and password yourself.

Hostinger doesn't generate these for you, but it does prepend a fixed account prefix, something like u123456789_, to both the name and username, and that prefix can't be removed or changed. The password needs at least 8 characters, with one number, one uppercase letter, and one lowercase letter, or Hostinger rejects it at creation.

Copy the full name and username, prefix included, into your project's config file exactly as they appear in hPanel; the host is normally localhost. Note that each database can only have one user on shared hosting; a second user for the same database needs a VPS plan. Some projects also expect a starting .sql file imported through phpMyAdmin, linked from the same Databases page.

PHP projects occasionally fail after upload because a folder or file has permissions too restrictive for the web server to read or write to it, commonly directories meant for caching, uploads, or logs. In File Manager, right-click the affected folder and use the Permissions option to adjust it.

Hostinger's own documentation doesn't publish a specific default; 755 for directories and 644 for files is the general convention most PHP applications expect, so use that unless your project's own documentation says otherwise. This is also a good point to double check you extracted into the correct directory, since a misplaced folder produces the same blank-page symptoms as a permissions problem.

Visit your domain in a fresh browser tab, ideally in a private or incognito window so you're not looking at a cached version. If your project pulls data from the database, click through to a page that depends on it to confirm the connection details actually work end to end, not just that the homepage renders. A blank page or a visible PHP error at this stage almost always traces back to the wrong upload directory or a database credential mismatch, both covered above.