How much web hosting costs depends far less on which tier you buy than on when you ask. The honest answer has two numbers in it — what you pay now and what you pay after the intro term — and most guides publish only the first. Across the 16 hosts we have reviewed the second is on average 3.5 times the first.
Shared hosting: the short answer
$0.72 to $3.75 per month on intro rates. $3.88 to $17.99 on renewal.
Over 36 months that works out at anything from $25.92 to $467.64 — an eighteenfold spread between products whose pricing pages are nearly indistinguishable. The whole table is on the renewal price comparison.
What decides where you land in that range
Two things, in this order:
- How long the intro rate is locked. 48 months at Hostinger, 12 at SiteGround, and 48 at MilesWeb — which is why MilesWeb totals $25.92 while SiteGround totals $467.64.
- What the renewal is. A 1.7× rise and an 8× rise are different products regardless of the starting price.
Managed WordPress hosting
$25.00 to $35.00 per month, and here the pricing is more honest: WP Engine renews at $30.00 and Kinsta does not raise its price at all. You are paying roughly ten times shared hosting for a managed platform, and in exchange the number mostly stops moving. Over three years: $1,020.00 and $1,260.00.
VPS and cloud
Entry VPS plans sit a few dollars above shared hosting and carry the same intro-then-renew pattern. Cloudways starts at $11.00 with no rise, which totals $396.00 over three years — more than every climbing shared host except SiteGround. Flat pricing is predictable, not automatically cheap. The VPS comparison puts the renewal beside the intro price for each.
What the advertised price does not include
These are the additions that turn a $3 plan into a $12 month, roughly in order of how much they actually cost:
- The renewal itself — not an add-on, but by far the largest difference between the advertised price and your real cost. Everything below is rounding error beside it.
- Domain renewal — free for year one at most hosts, then $10 to $20 a year.
- Email — increasingly a separate product rather than a bundled feature. See email hosting priced per mailbox, where the entry prices run from about $0.39 to $2.95 per mailbox per month.
- Backups — included by some, a monthly add-on at others, and occasionally free to store but chargeable to restore. Check the restore terms.
- Migration — free at most hosts, chargeable at a few.
- Dedicated IP — a few dollars a month, and almost never necessary now.
The full treatment, with which of these are real and which are upsells, is in the hidden costs of web hosting.
What you get for the money
Price with no specification attached is not a comparison. Here is the cheapest plan at each reviewed host and what it includes — the site limit is the one to watch, because a second site usually means the next tier, and the next tier renews steeply too.
| Host | Entry plan | Intro / mo | Renews at | Sites | Storage |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| BigRock | Single Domain | $1.73 | $9.29 | 1 | 20 GB |
| Bluehost | Basic | $2.95 | $8.99 | 1 | 10 GB SSD |
| ChemiCloud | Starter | $2.49 | $11.95 | 1 | 20 GB NVMe |
| Cloudways | DigitalOcean 1GB | $11.00 | $11.00 | 1+ | 25 GB |
| DreamHost | Shared Starter | $2.89 | $10.99 | 1 | 50 GB SSD |
| FastComet | FastCloud | $2.95 | $8.95 | 1 | 15 GB SSD |
| GreenGeeks | Lite | $2.95 | $13.95 | 1 | 10 GB |
| HostGator | Hatchling | $3.75 | $10.99 | 1 | Unmetered |
| Hosting.com | Startup | $2.99 | $10.99 | 1 | 100 GB SSD |
| Hostinger | Premium | $2.99 | $8.99 | 100 | 100 GB SSD |
| IONOS | Essential | $1.00 | $8.00 | 1 | 10 GB |
| MilesWeb | Solo (Rs 69/mo) | $0.80 | $1.73 | 1 | 10 GB SSD |
| Namecheap Hosting | Stellar | $2.28 | $3.88 | 3 | 20 GB |
| SiteGround | StartUp | $2.99 | $17.99 | 1 | 10 GB |
Working out your own number
The arithmetic is: intro rate × months locked, plus renewal rate × the remaining months of your horizon. For a three-year plan at SiteGround's entry price that is (12 × $2.99) + (24 × $17.99) = $467.64. The true cost calculator does it for whatever term you have in mind and shows its working, including the domain assumption.
Is cheaper hosting worse hosting?
Not reliably, and that is the useful finding. The most expensive shared host we have reviewed is not the best one on any measure we can show you, and the cheapest is cheap because of a long price lock rather than a thin product. What price does correlate with is support quality and resource limits — and neither is visible on a pricing page, which is why most of the specs are noise.
Common questions
Is paying annually cheaper than monthly?
Almost always, and that is the discount you are actually being offered. Monthly billing at most hosts costs 20-40% more per month. Just know the renewal date before you prepay three years.
Can hosting be free?
It can, with real trade-offs that are worth understanding before you accept them — whether free hosting is worth it.
What should a small business budget?
For a site that has to stay up, budget the renewal from day one rather than the intro rate, and treat a long refund window as the trial period it is. More in best hosting for a small business.
How much does hosting cost in India specifically?
Similar in dollar terms, with one extra variable: whether the host bills in rupees or converts at your card's rate each renewal. That is covered in best web hosting in India.