Web hosting renewal prices: what a cheap plan actually costs over five years

Quick verdict

Ignore the monthly figure on the banner and work out two things: how long the discount runs, and what the plan costs the day after it ends. Everything else is decoration.

The discount window, not the renewal multiple

Every article about hosting renewals fixes on the same statistic: the multiple. Your $2.99 plan renews at $10.99, a 3.7x jump, and the bigger that number the worse the deal. It is intuitive, and it predicts almost nothing.

Bluehost Business has the gentlest renewal on this page — $6.99 rising to $13.99, exactly 2x — and costs $587.40 over five years. Hostinger Premium jumps 3.7x, nearly twice as steeply, and costs $275.40, less than half as much. The plan with the worse multiple is the better deal by a wide margin.

The reason is the term. Hostinger's discounted rate covers 48 months before it ever renews, Bluehost's covers 36, SiteGround's covers 12. A four-year discount at a bad rate beats a one-year discount at a good rate, and the multiple cannot see that, because it compares two prices without asking how long the first one lasts.

The clearest demonstration is the group of plans that all advertise the same number:

Our arithmetic on the published rates. Note the middle two rows: Hostinger Unlimited and SiteGround StartUp have nearly the same renewal multiple, 4.3x against 4.5x, and a 2.3x difference in what you actually pay.

Same advertised price, same broad promise, and a 2.4x spread in the real cost. The variable doing all the work is a term length printed in grey type under the price.

What five years actually costs

Below is every plan we could read at source, priced across 60 months: the discounted term at its advertised rate, then the published renewal rate for whatever is left.

Prices read September 2026 from Hostinger web hosting, SiteGround web hosting, Bluehost shared hosting and DigitalOcean droplet pricing. SiteGround states its figures are prepaid for 12 months and exclusive of VAT. Hostinger states a 30-day money-back guarantee and quotes its Premium term as $143.52 for 48 months, which matches our multiplication.

The two rankings barely agree. Sorted by advertised price, SiteGround StartUp is joint second-cheapest on the page; sorted by what you pay over five years, it is second from last. DigitalOcean moves the other way, from fifth on the banner to second in reality.

The day-one column deserves its own glance. Hostinger's cheapest plan is also its biggest cheque: $143.52 before you have published a post. That is not a trap — the money-back guarantee is stated and the total displayed — but it is four years of commitment to a project that may not exist in six months. SiteGround asks $47.88 to start and takes the difference back later.

The flat-rate alternative, and where it wins

Renewal pricing works because shared hosting is sold on a promotional model. Cloud infrastructure mostly is not. DigitalOcean's published droplet list has no promotional term and no renewal clause: a 1 GB droplet with 1 vCPU, 25 GB of SSD and 1 TB of transfer is $6 a month, and the next tier up is $12. Transfer beyond the included allowance is billed at $0.01 per GiB and the allowance is pooled across your account rather than per server, so bandwidth is very unlikely to be what makes this expensive.

Against Hostinger Premium the flat rate loses for a long time, then wins permanently. Hostinger is $143.52 for its first 48 months against $288 for four years of droplet. From month 49 it costs $10.99 against $6, closing $4.99 a month, and by our arithmetic the two lines cross at roughly month 77 — about six years and five months — after which the droplet is cheaper for as long as the site exists. Against SiteGround there is no crossover to wait for: $911.40 against $360 over five years, for a whole server rather than a slice of one.

What you give up is everything the shared host was doing quietly. No control panel, no one-click WordPress, no managed backups, no support desk that will look at your site. You patch the stack yourself, and if it breaks at 2am it stays broken until you fix it. That cost is real; it is just paid in hours rather than dollars — the same trade weighed in high-income digital skills.

If your site is static, the floor is lower still. Cloudflare Pages documents a free plan with 500 builds a month, up to 20,000 files per site, a 25 MiB limit on any single asset and 100 custom domains — enough to run an ordinary article site for nothing. The catch is the obvious one: no WordPress, no database, no PHP.

What an ad-funded blog actually needs

If the plan is to monetise with display ads, there is a second problem with the entry tiers, and it has nothing to do with price. SiteGround's own FAQ puts StartUp at around 10,000 visits a month, GrowBig at roughly 100,000 and GoGeek at 400,000 or more. Ten thousand visits is well below where display-ad income becomes meaningful, which means the cheap plan is not a plan you grow on — it is a plan you leave.

That changes which row you should be reading. A blog built for ad revenue is priced by GrowBig, not StartUp, and GrowBig is $1,519.80 over five years — the most expensive line in our table by some distance. If you are working through Ezoic versus Mediavine or the high-traffic display ad blog playbook, that is the number the plan has to earn back before it earns you anything.

Bluehost and Hostinger publish no comparable visit figures on the pages we read, so we will not guess at theirs. The general point survives regardless: entry-level shared hosting is specified for a site that is not yet getting traffic, and a site that is not yet getting traffic is not yet making ad revenue. Price the tier you expect to be on in year three, not the one you sign up on.

None of this makes hosting the expensive part of a content business — even the worst line in our table averages about $25 a month, less than most of the tools in our keyword research tools under $50 roundup. It is simply the one recurring cost that quadruples while you are not looking.

What we could not confirm

Stated plainly rather than filled in with numbers we could not read at source.

• Namecheap. Its shared hosting page returned HTTP 403 to us, so no Namecheap price, term or renewal rate appears anywhere on this page.
• Cloudways. Its pricing page showed two different entry tiers, Micro and Small, at the same $11 a month with identical specifications, quoted an hourly rate that does not reconcile with that monthly figure, and carried a banner advertising 30 percent off for three months. We could not tell which number is the standard rate, so we state none of them and left managed cloud hosting out of the comparison.
• Shorter billing terms. Hostinger's pricing page displayed only the 48-month option for the Premium plan. Most hosts sell 12-month and monthly terms at higher rates, but we could not read those rates, so every figure here uses the term the vendor displayed.
• Tax treatment. SiteGround marks its prices exclusive of VAT. The other providers do not state tax treatment on the pages we read, so cross-brand totals may not be like-for-like if you are buying from a VAT territory.
• SiteGround's visit capacities come from FAQ prose on its hosting page rather than the pricing table itself, and are described with hedging words — around, approximately — in the original. Treat them as guidance from the vendor, not a guaranteed limit.
• Cloudflare Pages bandwidth. Its published limits page lists builds, files, file size and custom domains but states no bandwidth figure, so we do not claim one.

Site-wide rule: a number we could not read at source does not get stated as a fact. Renewal rates and term lengths change, and these are the load-bearing figures on this page — check them against the vendor before you buy.

Final recommendation

Do the five-year sum before you buy. Multiply the advertised rate by the term, multiply the renewal rate by whatever is left of 60 months, and add them. That one calculation moves SiteGround StartUp from joint second-cheapest to second-dearest on our table, and pulls a flat $6 droplet up from fifth to second.

For most people starting a blog, Hostinger Premium is the cheapest managed option we could verify — provided you are willing to prepay $143.52 and genuinely intend to still be publishing in four years. If you are not sure the project will last, the flat-rate route costs more per month, nothing up front, and never surprises you. If you can live without WordPress, a static site on a free tier costs nothing but a domain.

Hosting sits underneath everything else, so it pays to get the cheap decision right early: AdSense approval comes next, and low-competition keywords decide whether anyone arrives.

Related reads: comparison hub, Ezoic vs Mediavine, building a high-traffic display ad blog, and Substack vs beehiiv vs Ghost fees, which turns on the same habit of pricing a platform on the wrong horizon.