Web hosting renewal prices: what the second invoice costs

Two things work against this page before the numbers start. No link on it earns Year Two anything at the time of writing. And every ranking here is only true for the period named next to it — change the period and the order changes with it, as the table further down shows.

Why one price is never enough

The advertised monthly rate is not a monthly bill. It is a monthly equivalent of an invoice you pay in one go, and the length of that invoice is a separate published fact.

Hostinger's Premium plan is the clearest case in this dataset. It advertises $2.99 a month, and Hostinger's own page states the amount charged at checkout: $143.52, covering 48 months. Compared over three years, the service you actually use in that window comes to $108. Neither figure is wrong, and neither of them is "what it costs". $143.52 leaves your account on day one; $108 is the part of it that three years of hosting accounts for; and $35.52 of prepaid service is still sitting unused when the comparison ends.

That is why the table below carries a service-cost column and a cash column, and why they disagree for every host with a prepaid term longer than the period.

The second published fact most hosts leave out

A renewal price on its own does not tell you what the renewal invoice will be, because the renewal price depends on the billing term you renew onto.

Bluehost publishes this openly once you find the right page. Its Starter plan renews at $9.99 a month on a 36-month renewal, $11.99 on a 12-month renewal and $15.99 billed monthly. Until 2026-09-06 this site recorded the $9.99 and $11.99 as two of Bluehost's own pages contradicting each other. They never contradicted each other; they are two different billing terms, and the mistake was ours. HostGator and Namecheap price the same way.

Most hosts do not publish the term at all. 58 of the plans in this dataset carry a renewal rate with no stated billing period, which means the invoice that arrives on renewal cannot be worked out from anything the host publishes. Those plans show a dash in every cash column here rather than being given an assumed term.

The 13 US shared hosts, by three-year service cost

Scroll sideways on a phone.

13 of the 13 hosts above change position when the same plans are ranked by three-year service cost instead of advertised monthly price. The cheapest advertised plan and the cheapest over three years are not the same plan, and neither is the plan with the lowest renewal rate — that order is in the hosts that stay cheap in year two.

The median increase in the table above is 3.7x. Across all 76 discounted plans in the whole dataset the median is 2.5x, because most of those are managed WordPress or cloud plans that never appear in a US shared table. The steepest is IONOS Plus, which advertises $1.00 a month and renews at $14.00 — 14.0x the advertised rate.

What changed since the last check

This dataset was fully re-read on 2026-09-06, seventeen days after the previous full refresh, and that was already too long. ChemiCloud's Starter rate had moved from $1.49 to $1.95, which changed its three-year figure by roughly a third. Namecheap had re-priced its entire Stellar range and published separate renewal prices for monthly, annual and two-year billing. InMotion had cut three renewal rates. WP Engine and Web Hosting UK had started publishing renewal prices they previously withheld, so the count of hosts that publish nothing fell to 7.

16 plans could not be fully re-read, mostly because the host renders its prices in JavaScript. Those are marked on their host pages as carried from an earlier check rather than shown as current.

Is the cheapest advertised host also the cheapest over three years?

No, and the answer changes again if you ask about cash rather than service.

ChemiCloud Starter has the lowest three-year service cost at $70, and because its prepaid term covers the whole period, the cash charged is the same $70. Namecheap Stellar has the lowest advertised rate in the set and the lowest renewal rate at $4.66 a month on the annual cycle, and still lands mid-table over three years because its introductory term is only twelve months.

Change the period and the winner changes again.

Scroll sideways on a phone.

Any "cheapest host" claim that does not state a period, and does not say whether it means cash or service, is not a claim about money.

How the figures are worked out

Where a host publishes several renewal terms, the one used is the term matching the introductory term the plan was bought on; the full rule, and the others, are on the method page.

Is a short introductory offer worse?

Almost always, and a short offer produces the most misleading headline of all. A £1.00 first month against a £10.00 renewal is a tenfold increase that barely moves a three-year figure, because 35 of those 36 months bill at the standard rate.

Every ranking on this site therefore sorts by cost over a stated period, never by the size of the increase. The increase is printed because it says something useful about how a host prices, not because anything is ordered by it.

Which hosts do not raise the price at all?

Only 35 plans, across 9 brands, carry no introductory discount, so the price in month 60 is the price in month one. Kinsta, Cloudways, Rocket.net, Pressable, DigitalOcean and Krystal Hosting price every plan recorded here that way.

A flat price is not automatically cheaper later, and this is where a comparison site usually overclaims. Most flat-priced plans in this dataset are managed WordPress or cloud products whose flat rate sits well above almost every shared renewal that can be checked. What a flat price buys is a figure you can compare on day one without arithmetic — and even that has a limit, because Kinsta's rate holds only while the site stays inside its visit allowance, above which it bills for overage.

Where this comparison falls short

7 of the 36 brands here publish no renewal price anywhere on their own site — CloudAccess.net, Hosting.com (formerly A2 Hosting), Hostwinds, Pipe Ten, UKHost4u, catalyst2, tsoHost — so no service-cost figure exists for them at all. A further 58 plans publish a rate without the billing term needed to compute the invoice. This site records both absences rather than estimating around them.

Three things to do when the arithmetic runs out. Ask the host's sales chat for the renewal price and its billing term in writing before buying, and treat a refusal as an answer. Or choose a flat-priced plan, where there is no renewal figure to hide. Or, if you know you will move within a year, the advertised price genuinely is close to what you will pay and this page matters less — the calculator will show you that for a one-year period.

Price is also the only thing on this site. Uptime, speed, support quality and how badly a migration goes are not measured here, because Year Two has not run a site on any of these products.

Common questions

Does every web host raise the price after the first term?

No. 35 plans here carry no introductory discount at all, across 9 brands. Usage charges sit outside that: a flat monthly rate on a managed WordPress plan holds only inside its visit allowance.

Is a monthly rolling plan cheaper than a discounted prepaid plan?

It depends on the host, and usually it makes no difference after the first term, because most hosts set the no-commitment monthly rate equal to the renewal rate. The prepaid discount buys a cheaper first term and changes nothing after it — while committing you to an invoice you have already paid. InMotion Hosting is the exception in this dataset and it goes both ways, with one plan renewing below its monthly rate and another above it.

Does the renewal price appear on the pricing page itself?

Yes for most hosts here, but not for all. Bluehost and HostGator publish their renewal terms in separate help articles, GreenGeeks publishes its renewal prices in a support article rather than on the pricing page, and 7 brands publish them nowhere.

What is the single next thing to do?

Only one step matters before any other. Find three figures for the specific plan you are looking at and write them down together: the amount charged at checkout, the length of the term it covers, and the renewal price with the billing term it applies to. If the third one is not published, that is an answer about the host — the hosts that will not tell you lists the ones that do this.

Who this is not for

This is not for anyone choosing a host on anything other than price, and not for anyone who has already decided to pay monthly with no commitment. Year Two ranks on money over a stated period and nothing else.

Sources

Every figure above comes from the named host's own published pricing and renewal pages, checked 2026-09-06. The full dataset, including the source URL, the check date, every published renewal option and its billing term, is at /data.json under CC BY 4.0. The arithmetic and the exclusions are on the method page, and every host in the dataset has its own page showing the components separately.

Last updated: 2026-09-07