The prepaid term matters as much as either price

The renewal multiple is the number that sounds alarming. The term length is the number that decides your bill.

Why does the term matter more than the multiple?

Because it decides how many months you pay each price for. A steep renewal that starts in year five is cheaper than a mild one that starts in year two, and the arithmetic is not close.

Read these two rows against each other. Both are published US shared plans, read 20 August 2026:

Scroll sideways on a phone.

IONOS looks better on every number a comparison table usually shows. It has the gentler renewal. It costs more than twice as much.

What happens at five years instead of three?

Because the intro term runs out inside the period, the ordering reverses again for some hosts — which is the point of checking rather than assuming. Bluehost's Starter plan at $3.99 on a 36-month term costs $144 over three years — the whole period is at the intro rate. Push the same plan to five years and you add twenty-four months at $9.99, which is $384 in total, or $6.40 a month.

Nothing about the offer changed. The period did.

This is why every page on this site shows one, two, three and five years rather than one figure. A single number would be right for one reader and wrong for the rest.

The same plan at four different periods

Nothing in that table is a projection. Both figures are published; only the split between them changes.

Three shapes worth recognizing

Hostinger, ChemiCloud and ScalaHosting take the first shape: a long term with a steep renewal, 36 to 48 months at a heavy discount, then three to eight times the price. Cheapest of all if your period matches the term, and expensive the moment it does not.

Short term, mild renewal. IONOS, Namecheap: twelve months at a modest discount, then roughly double. Less dramatic, but the expensive part starts a lot sooner.

Promotional month, standard rate. names.co.uk, 20i, Heart Internet, HostPresto: a first month at £1 or under, then the standard price. These produce the most extreme multiples in the dataset — up to fourteen times — and almost the highest three-year service costs. A £1 first month saves you £9. It is a discount on one month, presented as a price.

Kinsta, Cloudways, Flywheel, Rocket.net and Pressable do not discount at all. Nothing to work out — what you see is what you keep paying.

Is a long prepaid term a bad thing?

It depends entirely on whether you will still want the host at the end of it. Paying four years up front to save $8 a month is a good trade if the site is still there in year four, and a poor one if you move in month seven and the refund window closed after thirty days.

Two things to check before signing a long term:

1. The refund window. Most hosts publish one. It is almost always far shorter than the term you are prepaying — thirty days against forty-eight months is common.
2. Whether the renewal applies to the same term. Some hosts renew a 48-month plan at the monthly standard rate; others renew it as another 48-month block at a lower figure than the monthly rate. The host's own renewal page usually says which, and where it does not, we record that it does not.

What this means for how you should shop

Work in this order, not the order the pricing page invites:

1. Pick your period first — how long do you want this site up, honestly?
2. Find the term each advertised price requires. A $2.99 offer on 48 months and a $2.99 offer on 12 months are different products.
3. Then compute the total. The calculator does this across every host that publishes enough, for whatever period you enter.
4. The multiple comes last, after the total. It tells you what happens if you stay longer than you planned, which is worth knowing but is not the decision.

The host list shows the advertised price, the renewal price and the three-year service cost side by side for every host we hold, and the method page gives the arithmetic in full.

Who this is not for

This is not for anyone who cannot commit to a term at all — some businesses need monthly billing with no lock-in, and roughly a third of the plans here offer it at a higher monthly figure. The advertised discount is not available to you, and comparing against it will only mislead you.

It is also not for managed WordPress buyers at the premium end, where most plans carry no introductory discount and the term question does not arise.

Sources

All prices, prepaid terms and renewal figures come from the named hosts' own pricing and renewal pages, read on 20 August 2026, and are recorded with their source URLs in /data.json under CC BY 4.0.

Last updated: 2026-09-07