The hosts that will not tell you the renewal price

Any comparison built from published prices has a hole shaped exactly like the hosts that will not publish. The usual fix — quoting a figure from a review site — makes the hole worse rather than smaller.

What does "does not publish" actually mean here?

Not that the figure is buried — that there is no figure. It means we read the host's own pricing page, looked for a renewal or pricing help article on the same domain, and found no figure for what happens when the introductory term ends. Not a figure that was hard to find. No figure.

That is different from a host that has no introductory discount, where the advertised price simply continues. Those are recorded with the renewal equal to the intro price, and they show as *no increase* in every table here. Kinsta, Cloudways, Flywheel, Rocket.net and Pressable are in that group, and it is a good place to be.

Why do some hosts publish and others not?

Because of how the host expects to be bought, in most cases. The pattern tracks that closely. Self-serve shared hosting, where a card is entered and nobody is spoken to, mostly publishes both prices — the renewal is often in small type beside the offer, but it is there. Hosts selling through a sales conversation, or selling to businesses that will not shop on price, are the ones that leave it out.

There is a second, less flattering pattern. Some of the steepest renewals in this dataset sit on hosts that publish theirs plainly, and some hosts that publish nothing turn out to have no discount at all. Not publishing is not evidence of a bad price. It is evidence that you cannot compare without asking.

When two of a host's own pages disagree

Bluehost is the one host in the current dataset where this happens. Its shared hosting page and its pricing page each carry renewal rates for the same three plans, and the two sets differ by $2 a plan:

We record both and do not pick one. Choosing the lower figure would flatter the host and choosing the higher would penalize it, and we have no basis for either. Where this happens the host's page here says so, and the calculation uses the first figure with the conflict noted beside it.

If you are buying, ask the host in writing which figure applies before you pay. Where the two figures sit against the rest of the market is in the hosts that stay cheap in year two, which ranks the same US shared plans by renewal rate.

Why we do not fill the gap with estimates

Because the figures that circulate are not measurements. Search for what any of these hosts charges on renewal and you will find review sites quoting exact numbers with no source and no date, and tracing them back leads to another review site doing the same thing. Most of those sites earn a commission from the host they are quoting.

Publishing such a number here would make the comparison look complete and make it wrong. A reader would set a checked, dated, sourced figure for one host against an invented one for another and treat both as facts.

So on this site a host that publishes no renewal price gets a page, gets its plans listed, and gets the renewal field marked *not stated anywhere on the host's own site* with the date we checked. It is excluded from the calculator and from every cost-ordered table, and the tables say so. The host list shows the whole set with a column for which is which.

What to do if you want one of these hosts anyway

Get the number, in a form you can compare.

1. Ask what the price is when this term ends, in writing. Not the current offer — the standard rate. A host that will not put that in an email before you pay is telling you how the relationship will go.
2. Ask whether the renewal is quoted per month or per term. Some hosts renew a long plan as another long block at a better rate than the monthly standard.
3. The free domain is worth a question of its own: what does it cost to renew? It renews at the same time and it sits on a separate price list.
4. Then put that total next to the published totals for your own period, not for a round number.

Having published figures to hold up helps here. If you know four hosts will run the site for between $70 and $240 of service over three years, you are a harder person to quote $500 to.

Is a published renewal price binding?

No, and it is worth being clear about that. Hosts change prices without notice, and several plans in this dataset carry promotional pricing that reverts. What a published figure gives you is a dated, checkable reference point rather than a guarantee — which is why every number here carries the date it was read, and why anything we have not re-checked in ninety days says so on the page rather than sitting there looking current.

Who this is not for

This is not useful if you have already chosen one of the nine and just want to know what to pay. We cannot tell you, and that is the finding rather than a shortcoming.

It is also not a reason to strike these hosts off a shortlist. WP Engine is one of the best-known managed WordPress providers in the market, and a shortlist that excludes it because of how it publishes is a worse shortlist. Use the calculator to get the floor from the hosts that do publish, then make the ones that do not answer the question.

Sources

Publication status was determined by reading each host's own pricing page and any renewal or pricing help article on the same domain, on 20 August 2026, and recording whether any renewal figure appeared. The Bluehost conflict is between two pages on bluehost.com read the same day. The full record, including every URL read, is in /data.json under CC BY 4.0, and how these hosts are handled in every table is set out on the method page.

Last updated: 2026-09-07