What the renewal price still leaves out

Any number on this site, including the ones the calculator produces, is a floor. Your invoice will be higher. This page is about the distance between the two, and why we do not try to close it with estimates.

What is actually inside the figures here?

Only four things: the advertised monthly price, the prepaid term it requires, the published renewal price, and any published setup fee. Everything else is outside.

That is a narrower claim than it sounds, and it is deliberate. Those four are the numbers hosts publish precisely enough to compute with. The rest vary by host, by plan and by what your site does.

The five that move a real invoice

1. The domain in year two. A free first-year domain is standard on shared hosting, and its renewal is a separate price list — frequently above what a dedicated registrar charges for the same extension. It renews at the same moment the hosting does, which is how a bill that was budgeted at one figure arrives at another. We record whether a plan includes a free first-year domain; we do not add its renewal, because that is a different product with its own price list.

2. Going over the plan's limits. Managed WordPress hosts do not usually take a site down when it exceeds its visit allowance — they bill for it. Kinsta and WP Engine publish per-1,000-visit, per-GB-storage and per-GB-bandwidth rates, and WP Engine publishes a per-extra-site fee. Where a host publishes those rates, they are shown on its page here, in a table of their own, explicitly outside the cost calculation. A site that outgrows its plan can pay more in overage than in subscription.

3. Backups, email, SSL and migration are often sold separately, and which of these are bundled differs by host and by tier. The pattern to watch is a cheap entry plan that excludes the one thing you assumed was included, most often automated backups or the ability to host email at all.

4. The tier you actually need. Entry plans cap sites, storage or visits, and the cap is usually set where a real site crosses it within the first year. Comparing everyone's cheapest plan is only meaningful if the cheapest plan does the job for all of them, and it often does not. Two hosts can swap places entirely one tier up.

5. VAT applies in the United Kingdom, where most hosts publish ex-VAT, which is normal practice for business services. We record the ex-VAT figure and flag it. If you are budgeting rather than comparing, add twenty percent.

Why not estimate these and add them in?

Because an estimate would be a number we made up, and on the page it would be indistinguishable from the numbers we read off a host's own site. A comparison that adds an invented $5 a month to every host for "typical extras" looks more complete and is less true.

The honest version is the one where the figure is narrow, sourced, dated and labeled as a floor. That is what the method page commits to, and what the calculator says on its own results.

Does this make the comparison useless?

No — it means it answers a narrower question than it appears to. The published figures are reliable for ruling hosts out, and for holding a salesperson to a number. They are unreliable as a forecast of your bill.

Used the first way, they work well, because the five items above tend to move every host in the same direction and none of them is large relative to a six-fold spread. A host that costs $200 more over three years on published prices is very unlikely to end up cheaper once extras are counted. Used the second way, as a budget, the figures will under-read by an amount nobody can tell you in advance.

The overage question, specifically

This one deserves its own note because it behaves differently from the others. The first four items are roughly predictable once you have asked. Overage is not — it scales with how well your site does.

A managed WordPress plan priced for 35,000 visits a month that bills per 1,000 above that has an unbounded cost if something you publish gets picked up. That is a different risk from a shared plan that simply gets slow. Before choosing a plan with a visit allowance, find out which of the two happens when you exceed it, because hosts differ and both behaviors are common.

Five questions that close most of the gap

Ask these before signing, in writing:

1. What is the price when this term ends?
2. What does the free domain cost to renew?
3. What happens if I exceed the plan's limits — billed, throttled, or suspended?
4. What is not included at this tier that is included one tier up?
5. What is refundable, and for how long?

The first two do most of the work. A host that answers both in an email has given you almost everything the published pages cannot.

Who this is not for

This is not for anyone who needs a firm budget today without contacting anybody. We cannot give you one, and neither can anyone working only from published prices — the honest answer is a floor we can source and a ceiling we cannot.

It is also not for sites with unusual requirements: high traffic, compliance obligations, or anything where the hosting itself is the complicated part. Published entry-level pricing is not built for those, and comparing it will mislead you.

For an ordinary site, start with the calculator, read the two closest hosts on the host list, and take the five questions to both.

Sources

The overage rates named above are published by Kinsta and WP Engine on their own pages and were read on 20 August 2026; they are recorded with their source URLs in /data.json. The general categories are drawn from the conditions hosts publish alongside their plans, and every such condition we recorded is quoted rather than paraphrased. Where a host does not state whether something is included, our record says so rather than guessing.

Last updated: 2026-09-07