The hosts that stay cheap after the introductory term ends

A renewal rate is the published rate that applies once the introductory term ends. It is not an annual price and it is not necessarily a monthly one: on several hosts it depends on the billing term you renew onto, and on many more the host publishes the rate without ever saying which billing period it belongs to.

Two things work against this page before the figures start. Ranking hosts by their renewal rate is not the same as ranking them by what you will pay, and on a three-year purchase the two orders barely agree. And no link on this page earns Year Two anything at the time of writing.

What "the renewal rate" actually means here

Where a host publishes one renewal figure, that is the figure in the table. Where a host publishes several — one per renewal billing term — the table uses the term that matches the introductory term the plan was bought on, and the host's page here shows every option it publishes. Bluehost, HostGator and Namecheap all price this way.

Where a host publishes a rate with no billing term at all, the rate is shown and the plan is left out of every cash calculation on this site. 58 plans in this dataset are in that position. A rate without a period is not enough to work out an invoice, and this site does not invent the missing half.

Which host has the lowest renewal rate?

No plan in this set renews lower than Namecheap Stellar, at $4.66 a month. The table below takes the same US shared plans used in what the second invoice costs and orders them by the renewal rate instead of by three-year service cost.

Scroll sideways on a phone.

The median renewal rate in this set is $10.99 and the median increase is 3.7x the advertised rate.

Does a low renewal rate make a host the cheapest?

No, and the gap between those two questions is the reason this site exists.

ChemiCloud Starter has one of the steepest increases on the list and is still the lowest three-year service cost at $70, because its prepaid term covers the whole period and the renewal never arrives inside it. Namecheap Stellar has the lowest renewal rate on the list and lands mid-table over three years, because its introductory term runs out after twelve months and the remaining twenty-four bill at the higher rate.

The renewal rate decides what you pay from the month the term runs out — no earlier, and not on any fixed anniversary. If the plan you are looking at prepays 36 or 48 months, nothing changes in month 13, and a comparison written around the idea of "year two" will mislead you about your own bill. If you expect the site to be up well past the term you are buying, the renewal rate is the number doing most of the work. Over five years the order changes again, and the five-year ranking for US shared hosting has it in full.

When does the higher rate actually start?

Not on any anniversary. It starts at the end of the introductory term, which is a published number and varies from one month to forty-eight across this dataset. The prepaid term column in the table above is the one that answers it.

Neither a long term nor a short one is straightforwardly better. A long term holds a low rate for longer and takes far more money at the door — Hostinger's 48-month offer is billed as a single $143.52 invoice — while a short term reaches the renewal sooner and asks for less up front. The prepaid term matters as much as either price works through what that does to a bill, and the calculator will do it for any period you type in.

What if the renewal rate is not published at all?

Not every host publishes one. 7 of the 36 brands in this dataset publish no renewal price anywhere on their own site: CloudAccess.net, Hosting.com (formerly A2 Hosting), Hostwinds, Pipe Ten, UKHost4u, catalyst2, tsoHost. They are not in the table above and their absence says nothing about whether they are cheap. Which hosts publish a renewal price lists them, and the hosts that will not tell you the renewal price goes through what that pattern looks like from the buyer's side.

Two of those brands changed position on 2026-09-06. WP Engine and Web Hosting UK both began publishing renewal figures they previously withheld, which is the direction this list is supposed to move.

Who this is not for

This is not for anyone buying a fixed period and then leaving. If you know you want three years and no more, the renewal rate on a 36-month plan never reaches you, and the ranking that matters is the three-year one in what the second invoice costs rather than the one on this page.

It is also not for managed WordPress buyers at the premium end. 35 plans here carry no introductory discount at all, so there is no increase to rank, and why managed WordPress hosts do not discount covers why.

Sources

Every advertised rate, renewal rate and renewal billing term in the table was read from the host's own pricing page or its own pricing help article on 2026-09-06. Where a host publishes two different renewal figures for the same billing term on two of its own pages, both are recorded and neither is picked. Where a host publishes a different figure for a different billing term, both are stored as renewal options, which is not the same thing and is no longer treated as a contradiction. The full record, including every URL read, is in /data.json under CC BY 4.0, and the arithmetic is set out on the method page.

Last updated: 2026-09-07