How this site produces its figures

The five figures this site separates

1. Initial cash due. The published upfront invoice for the introductory billing term. Where the host states the total, we use the host's total; where it does not, we multiply the published monthly price by the term it requires and label the figure as computed.
2. Service cost for a selected period. The portion of paid service allocated to the months inside that period. This is what every ranked table on this site is sorted by.
3. Renewal invoice. The published renewal price for one stated renewal billing term. Where a host publishes more than one renewal term, each is stored separately and all of them are shown.
4. Cash paid through a date. The sum of the invoices that would have been charged on or before that date under the selected billing path. It can be larger than the service cost, because hosts bill whole terms.
5. Unused prepaid service. The paid-for months still remaining after the comparison date.

The arithmetic, in full

That is the entire calculation. Take a host's published intro price, the prepaid term it requires, and its published renewal price for a stated renewal term, and this arithmetic gives the numbers we show.

Which renewal option a ranking uses

Several hosts publish a different renewal price for each renewal billing term — Bluehost, HostGator and Namecheap all do. A single monthly renewal figure cannot represent that, so we store every published option and pick one for ranking by a fixed rule, in this order:

1. the renewal term that matches the introductory term the plan was bought on;
2. failing that, the renewal price the host publishes without stating a billing term;
3. failing that, the longest published renewal term.

The option used is marked on every host page, and the others are printed next to it. Where a host publishes a renewal rate but not the billing period it applies to, the plan is excluded from every cash comparison rather than given an assumed term. It still appears in the service-cost tables, because those do not depend on the billing period.

What is deliberately not in the calculation

• Domain renewal. Many hosts include a free domain for the first year. What it costs in year two is a separate price list, so we record whether the domain is free but do not add its renewal.
• Overage charges. Managed WordPress hosts bill for extra visits, storage and bandwidth. Those figures are shown on the host's page here, but they depend on your traffic and are not in any total.
• Migration fees, backups sold separately and support add-ons are outside it too.
• VAT. UK hosts mostly publish ex-VAT and we record the ex-VAT figure, flagged as such. Add 20% if you are budgeting rather than comparing.
• Currency conversion. US prices stay in dollars, UK prices in pounds, and the two never appear in the same table.
• We have not hosted a site on any of these, so quality of any kind is outside it as well.

How ordering is decided

Every ranked table is sorted by the service cost allocated to the period named in that page's title, ascending. That is the only sort key on a ranked page. The cash figures are printed beside it and never used to order anything, because a host that does not publish its renewal billing term has no cash figure and would silently drop out of the ranking. Where two hosts tie, the one checked more recently comes first.

The calculator is the exception, and deliberately so: it lets you choose the metric — service cost, cash paid through the period, or cash due today — because those three give different winners and no one of them is the right question for every buyer.

Listing position on this site is not for sale. We have never been offered payment for placement and would not take it. If that changes, this paragraph changes first and the change will be dated.

Short promotions are not introductory terms

A price that covers 3 months or fewer is a promotion, not a term, and we label it as one. Such a price can produce an enormous renewal multiple — a £1 first month against a £20 renewal is twenty times over — while barely affecting the three-year figure. That is why every ranking on this site is by total cost over a period rather than by the multiple. The multiple is shown because it is useful; it is not what anything is sorted by.

When a host contradicts itself

Some hosts publish different renewal prices on different pages of their own site for the same billing term. We record both and do not pick one. Where that happens, the host page says so.

A different renewal price for a different billing term is not a contradiction, and we no longer treat it as one. Bluehost's $9.99 and $11.99 were listed here as conflicting until 2026-09-06; they are the 36-month and 12-month renewal rates, and both are now stored as renewal options.

How we handle a host that publishes no renewal price

It is still listed, with the renewal field marked not stated anywhere on the host's own site and the date we checked. We do not fill that gap with a third-party estimate and we do not quietly drop the host. 7 of the 36 hosts here are in that position, and their absence from a cost-ordered table says nothing about whether they are cheap.

Prices that only appear when the page runs

Several hosts render prices with JavaScript — term selectors, currency toggles, ex-VAT switches — so the figure is on the host's own page but not in its raw HTML. Where that happened we recorded the price the page displays, and the plan's conditions record which term or toggle it belongs to.

How old the figures are

Every figure carries the date it was read. The last full refresh was 2026-09-06. Anything not re-checked for more than 7 days is labeled as such on the page where it appears, rather than left to look current.

Hosting prices move faster than a quarterly refresh. Between 2026-08-20 and 2026-09-06, ChemiCloud's advertised Starter rate moved from $1.49 to $1.95, Namecheap re-priced its whole Stellar range, and InMotion changed three renewal rates. Seventeen days was enough to make a headline ranking wrong. The standing rule we now hold ourselves to:

• Hosts on the most-read pages: re-read every 24 to 72 hours, with a person checking anything that changed.
• Every other plan: re-read within seven days.
• If a price cannot be read — a page that renders its figures in JavaScript, or blocks us — we do not show the old value as current. The plan is marked as carried from its last confirmed check, on the page where it appears.
• Statistics inside articles — medians, counts, the cheapest host — are generated from the dataset at build time, not typed in, so they cannot survive a data change.

The data itself

The full dataset behind every page is at the dataset page, as JSON and as CSV with a field-by-field dictionary and the refresh history, and directly at /data.json, including the source URL and check date for every figure. It is available under CC BY 4.0 — reuse it, including commercially, as long as you say where it came from.

Every published figure that has moved since the first release is listed, old number against new, on the price history page. It is the difference between dated snapshots of the dataset, not a log written by hand.

It currently holds 36 hosts and 178 published plans, and generates 285 pages.

The same arithmetic applied to real hosts, with the conflicting-figure rule and the unconfirmed inputs shown in place, is in how much web hosting costs after the first year.

Corrections

If a figure here is wrong, it is wrong on our side or the host has changed it. Either way we want to know: send it through the contact form and we will re-check the host's pages and re-date the entry.