How much should web hosting cost?
The advertised price is rarely the price you pay in year two. Here is how hosting pricing really works.
Hosting pricing is deliberately confusing. Not in a fraudulent way, but in the way airline pricing is confusing: the number you see first is engineered to be the smallest number that can legally be shown.
Here is how it actually works, so you can compare like with like.
The three prices of any hosting plan
Every shared hosting plan really has three prices, and only one of them is on the billboard.
The headline price. Usually per month, usually requiring a one to four year prepayment, usually the deepest discount the host offers. This is the number in the advert.
The amount you actually pay today. The headline monthly price multiplied by the term length. A "£2.49/month" plan on a three-year term is a single payment of roughly ninety pounds. That is not a bad deal, but it is not £2.49.
The renewal price. What it costs from the second term onwards. This is frequently two to four times the introductory rate, and it is the number that determines what hosting really costs you over the life of the site.
A plan that is cheap for three years and then triples is still often the right choice — but only if you knew that going in, and diarised the renewal date.
What you are paying for as the price goes up
Broadly, money buys you four things, in this order of impact:
| Spend level | What actually improves |
|---|---|
| Budget shared | Nothing much beyond "it works" — you get a server slice and a control panel |
| Mid shared | Fewer neighbours per server, better caching, staging, real support |
| Managed WordPress | Platform-level caching, automatic updates, staging, WordPress specialists on support |
| VPS / cloud | Guaranteed resources, root access, scaling under your control |
The biggest single jump in perceived quality is usually from budget shared to mid-tier shared, not from mid-tier to managed. Managed hosting is worth it when your time is the expensive resource, or when downtime costs money.
Where the extras hide
The plan price is not the whole bill. Watch for:
- Domain renewal — often free for year one, then charged at list price
- SSL — should be free (Let's Encrypt); if a host charges for basic DV SSL, that tells you something about the host
- Backups — sometimes a paid add-on, sometimes retention is so short it is useless
- Email — most managed WordPress platforms do not include it at all
- Migration — usually free, occasionally not
- Overage — metered plans charge for traffic above the plan limit
The email one catches people out constantly. If you move to a managed WordPress host, you need a separate mail provider, and that is a real monthly cost to factor in.
Signals you are paying too much
- You are on a dedicated server for a site with modest traffic
- You are paying for managed WordPress and never use staging or the support
- You are buying add-ons that your host's competitors include as standard
- Your renewal has quietly risen and you never re-checked the market
Signals you are paying too little
- Your site is slow at predictable times of day
- You hit resource limits in your control panel
- Support takes days, or answers with a link to a knowledge base article
- Backups are your responsibility and you are not taking them
- There is no staging, so every change is made live
That last one is worth more than most people credit. The cost of breaking a live site once, badly, tends to exceed several years of the price difference between a cheap host and a decent one.
How to compare fairly
Work out the three-year total cost for each option, including renewals at list price, plus email if it is not included, plus anything you would have to add.
Then ask what happens if the site succeeds. A plan that is cheap now but has no sensible upgrade path is a plan you will migrate away from later, and migration has a cost in time and risk.
Use the Hosting Finder to narrow by budget and requirements, and check the current deals — but do the three-year sum before committing to a long term.
A note on our pricing data
We deliberately do not publish a price for a provider until an editor has checked it against the provider's own pricing page and recorded the date. Hosting prices change often enough that a stale number is worse than no number — it looks authoritative and is quietly wrong. Where you see "pricing not yet verified" on this site, that is exactly what it means.
Common questions
Why does hosting get more expensive when it renews?
Introductory pricing is a customer-acquisition cost. The first term is discounted heavily, often 60–75% off, and the renewal returns to list price. This is standard across most of the shared hosting market and is disclosed in the small print.
Is free hosting ever a good idea?
For learning, yes. For anything that represents a business, no — you generally cannot control performance, you may not be able to export cleanly, and support is minimal or non-existent.