Before You Buy Web Hosting in 2026: The $2.49 Plan Is $119.52 Up Front and Renews at $10.99. One Big Host Renews at 6x.

The page says $2.49 a month. The checkout says $119.52.

That's Hostinger's Premium plan. The monthly number is the 48-month total divided by 48. Hostinger says so on the page.

The renewal is a different number. It's the list price.

Here's what each host shows on October 20, 2026:

The multiples are our arithmetic. None of the pages states the renewal term length. Ask support in chat, and keep the transcript.

The sale price is a down payment. The renewal is the price.

What does that do to five years? Here's what stays on your card if you change nothing, hosting only, no tax:

Read those as what happens if you do nothing. The plans differ in storage, site count and limits, so don't treat the table as a ranking.

Namecheap raised its shared hosting renewals on May 19, 2026. Stellar renewals are now $5.88 a month, $55.88 a year or $102.88 for two years. We couldn't retrieve its intro prices, because Namecheap's main pages blocked us.

GoDaddy's pages blocked us too. A search snippet showed $5.99 a month for a three-year term against a listed $11.99, and an example that auto-renews at $551.63. We couldn't verify it, so don't rely on it.

Bluehost's free domain lasts one year.

Then it renews automatically at the current rate. Bluehost's own help article, updated July 4, 2026, lists .com renewal at $23.99 and privacy at $15.00. Porkbun lists .com at $11.08 for registration, renewal and transfer.

The difference over years two through five is $51.64, before the $15 a year privacy fee. Our arithmetic.

More fine print from Bluehost's pages:

• You must claim the free domain within 90 days of purchase
• It's limited to 12-month and 36-month plans, and premium names are excluded
• Cancel in the first year and the refund is reduced by the standard registration fee
• A new registration can't be transferred for the first 60 days
• An expired domain is held up to 30 days as a courtesy, not a guarantee, and getting it back costs $99.00

ICANN sets floors for every registrar. Registrars must send renewal reminders about a month and about a week before expiry. Registries must offer a 30-day Redemption Grace Period. But ICANN says it's up to your registrar to set its own prices.

The .com wholesale fee is moving too. Registrar-side blogs report Verisign's price rising from $10.26 to $10.97 on November 1, 2026. We couldn't retrieve Verisign's own notice.

So here's the move. Buy the domain separately at an at-cost registrar, then point it at your host. Cloudflare Registrar says it doesn't mark up domain prices. Porkbun lists .com at $11.08 and includes free privacy and SSL.

Then the host never owns the renewal price, and the free domain offer can't be used against you.

Almost every host gives 30 days. The exceptions are where the money goes.

Kinsta's terms say fees are non-refundable except as expressly stated. We found no refund clause.

Renewals are thinner. Namecheap refunds a renewal only if you cancel within 48 hours. SiteGround gives a full refund if you cancel within 30 days of the renewal payment and the new term hasn't started.

After day 30, a 36 or 48 month prepay is mostly gone.

Auto-renewal has its own clock. Bluehost says to turn off auto-renew at least 16 calendar days before the end of the term. DreamHost auto-renews at the then-current non-promotional rate, and you must cancel before the renewal date.

After you cancel, the data goes. Bluehost says all your content will be permanently removed from the server. Hostinger says content left on its servers will be deleted. SiteGround keeps an expired shared account a maximum of 30 calendar days and a backup up to 60 days, restorable only on paid restoration.

Chargebacks are a card-network right. Hostinger says one may lead to account termination. Bluehost's guarantee is valid for credit card payments only.

The FTC's click-to-cancel rule was vacated on July 8, 2025. Law-firm summaries say the Eighth Circuit acted days before its compliance date. We didn't read the opinion, and we couldn't retrieve state auto-renewal laws.

A host's marketing says backups. Its contract says something else.

Bluehost's terms, last modified August 21, 2026, say you are solely responsible for backing up all your content. They also say Bluehost won't attempt to back up accounts over 50,000 files or 30 GB.

Hostinger's agreement, last revised August 28, 2026, says backups run once a week and overwrite the previous one. Only two weeks are kept remotely. It also says it isn't responsible for files on your account, and it won't transfer your content to another provider.

SiteGround is better on paper. It lists up to 30 daily backup copies on shared plans. An expired account is kept up to 30 days.

WP Engine keeps daily backups for 30 days. DigitalOcean charges 20 percent of the server cost for weekly backups and 30 percent for daily.

Here's where it goes wrong. A fire destroyed OVHcloud's Strasbourg data center on March 10, 2021, along with customer backups kept in the same building. In 2023 a French commercial court in Lille ordered OVHcloud to pay two customers whose paid backups were in the same site, EUR 100,000 and EUR 150,000. OVHcloud said it would appeal. We read that through trade press, and we didn't find the appeal result.

So here's the rule I'd run:

• Keep one copy of the site and database off the host
• Test a restore once
• Ask whether backups live in the same data center
• Ask what a restore costs

A backup you've never restored is a rumor.

Unlimited is a marketing word. The limits live in the terms.

Hostinger's help center lists them for its plans:

Its agreement says all plans are subject to limits on inodes, database size, CPU, RAM and processes. It can suspend a site in its sole discretion.

Namecheap's policy says unmetered bandwidth means it doesn't strictly limit traffic. Then it says it sets limits on CPU, memory, entry processes and inodes.

Bluehost says it may require a customer's file count to be reduced, or end service for excessive use of resources.

SiteGround is the sharpest example. Its plan cards say unlimited traffic. Its FAQ gives rough visit capacity: about 10,000 a month on StartUp, about 100,000 on GrowBig and 400,000 or more on GoGeek. Its fair-use article, from 2021, lists processor-second limits.

Managed WordPress hosts meter openly. WP Engine charges $2 per 1,000 extra monthly visitors, and bills overages monthly even on annual prepay. Kinsta charges $0.50 per 1,000 extra visits and $0.50 per GB of extra bandwidth.

Here's what that looks like at 125,000 visits on a 100,000 visit plan, our arithmetic:

The first-year price helps too. WP Engine's Essential plan shows $28 a month billed annually, and it says the first-year offer applies only to new customers. It doesn't show the renewal price.

Kinsta Business starts at $35 a month, or $350 a year. That's $29.17 a month, our arithmetic.

A 99.9 percent uptime promise sounds serious. The remedy is small.

Here's what each host's terms promise:

Five percent of a $10.99 monthly fee is $0.55. Our arithmetic.

Here's what those percentages mean in minutes of downtime allowed in a 30-day month. Our arithmetic:

The credit rules matter more than the percentage.

Big outages hit everyone anyway.

Cloudflare had a global outage on November 18, 2025, with main impact resolved at 14:30 UTC. AWS had a us-east-1 disruption that ran from October 19 into October 20, 2025.

No contract fixes that. A site that must stay up needs another way to reach your customers, such as a status page and an email list.

Your host is a company with owners, lawyers and a breach history.

GoDaddy. In a November 22, 2021 notice filed with the SEC, GoDaddy said it found unauthorized access on November 17, 2021 through a compromised password on a legacy provisioning system. Access started September 6, 2021. Up to 1.2 million active and inactive Managed WordPress customers had email addresses and customer numbers exposed. Active customers' sFTP and database passwords were exposed. A subset had SSL private keys exposed.

The FTC alleged GoDaddy failed since 2018 to secure its hosting environment, with several breaches between 2019 and 2022. It proposed an order on January 15, 2025 and finalized it on May 21, 2025. GoDaddy's annual filing says the order runs at least 20 years. Those are FTC allegations settled by consent order, not a trial finding.

Ownership churn. Newfold Digital owns Bluehost, HostGator and Network Solutions. On December 31, 2025 it said it closed the sale of MarkMonitor. In April 2025 it closed the Web.com brand and moved customers to Network Solutions. A trade report said pricing wouldn't change.

When an owner refocuses, brands get folded. Check who the company is, not just the logo. We confirmed Newfold ownership only for Bluehost, HostGator and Network Solutions.

Platform fights. On December 10, 2024 a federal court granted WP Engine a preliminary injunction restoring its access to WordPress.org after Automattic blocked it. Automattic called it an early step before discovery. We didn't retrieve the docket after that.

Old precedent. The FTC's April 7, 2015 case against Network Solutions alleged it advertised a 30-day money-back guarantee but withheld up to 30 percent of refunds as cancellation fees. A 2015 consent order followed. It's useful as the pattern to check for.

The pattern is worth remembering. A hosting contract is only as good as the company behind it.

A hosting review is often an affiliate pitch.

Here's what hosts publish about paying affiliates:

40 percent of Hostinger's $119.52 plan is $47.81. Our arithmetic.

WordPress.org's own hosting page recommends Pressable, Bluehost and Hostinger. It says listing is completely arbitrary and that hosts may return part of your fee to WordPress.org. It notes Pressable is owned by Automattic.

The FTC's Endorsement Guides require a clear and conspicuous disclosure of a connection when a significant minority of the audience doesn't expect it. The FTC's reviews rule took effect October 21, 2024. It bans fake reviews, incentives tied to sentiment and sites that falsely claim independence. We found no FTC action against a hosting review site.

Strike-through prices deserve a look too. Hostinger Premium shows a regular price of $585.12 for 48 months. That's about $12.19 a month, which is higher than the same page's $10.99 renewal.

SiteGround's Save 83 percent matches its renewal price: 1 minus 2.99 divided by 17.99. Bluehost's Save 60 percent on Starter equals 1 minus 3.99 divided by 9.99. So those savings compare against the renewal, not a lower regular price. That's our arithmetic.

So what do you do? Use the host's own terms pages and the questions below. Treat any best-of list that doesn't say how it earns money as an ad.

A small site doesn't need a big plan. It needs a fair renewal.

Here are options beyond shared hosting, list prices on October 20, 2026:

Cloudflare's Pro plan is $20 a month annual or $25 monthly. We found no hosting plan that needs it.

A VPS has the cheapest sticker that doesn't jump to a multiple. But you become the server administrator. We found no sourced data on how many small-business owners can do that.

WordPress.org lists its own requirements. A host should run PHP 8.3 or newer, MariaDB 10.11 or newer or MySQL 8.0 or newer, and support HTTPS. The page was modified May 7, 2026.

SSL is free. Let's Encrypt is a nonprofit certificate authority. Every host we checked lists free SSL, though DreamHost still names SSL certificates in its refund exclusions.

Migration costs vary.

Kinsta and SiteGround list free migrations. GoDaddy's self-service options are free.

Bluehost's paid transfer was reported at $149.99 for up to 5 sites. That's from a search summary of its FAQ that we couldn't load.

For the email side, Google Workspace Starter is $7 per user a month. See the business software guide for the seat and renewal traps.

Ask these in chat and save the transcript:

1. What is the renewal price per month, and how long is the renewal term?
2. What is the total due today, and for how many months?
3. What is refunded in the first 30 days, and what's deducted?
4. Who owns the domain, and what does it cost to renew and to transfer out?
5. When is the auto-renew opt-out deadline?
6. How often are backups taken, where are they stored and what does a restore cost?
7. What are the file, memory, process and visit limits for this plan?
8. What are the overage rates, and are they billed monthly?
9. What do uptime credits actually pay, and how do I claim them?
10. What does migration in and out cost?
11. What happens to my data at expiry?
12. Who owns the company, and is this brand being folded into another?

A bad answer is a vague one. Worry if the renewal term isn't stated, if the plan says unlimited but support can't give a file cap, or if the host won't back up an account your size.

Six rules. Each one comes from the cases above.

We read each host's pricing, terms, refund and help pages on October 20, 2026. Prices change daily, and the tool we used summarizes pages, so check the live wording before you rely on a quote. GoDaddy's and Namecheap's main pages blocked us. Cloudways' pricing display was ambiguous, so we printed no Cloudways monthly figure.

The pages we used:

• Bluehost shared hosting
• Bluehost's terms of service
• Bluehost's domain pricing
• Hostinger web hosting
• Hostinger's refund policy
• Hostinger's hosting agreement
• Hostinger's plan limits
• SiteGround's hosting plans
• SiteGround's refund policy
• DreamHost shared hosting
• DreamHost's terms of service
• Namecheap's May 2026 renewal changes
• WP Engine's plans
• WP Engine's overage pricing
• Kinsta's pricing
• Kinsta's overage docs
• DigitalOcean's Droplet pricing
• Cloudflare's plans
• The FTC's order against GoDaddy
• The FTC's Network Solutions settlement
• ICANN on expired domain recovery
• WordPress.org's hosting page
• The FTC's reviews rule questions and answers

What we couldn't confirm:

• GoDaddy's and Namecheap's current intro prices
• Verisign's own notice of the .com fee change
• Renewal term lengths on any host
• Kinsta's and Cloudways' uptime terms
• State auto-renewal laws
• Outcome of the OVHcloud appeal and the WP Engine case after 2025
• Whether any Black Friday 2026 hosting deal will beat these prices
• Website builders such as Wix and Squarespace, which we didn't research

This guide is part of our series on what people research before they buy.