IONOS labels its Plus plan the bestselling option on its hosting page. The advertised price is one dollar a month on a one-year term. The page then says, in smaller type, then only $14/month. That is a fourteenfold step-up, a 1,300 percent increase, applied to the plan the company itself points customers toward.

Across nineteen shared plans checked on September 11, 2026 at Bluehost, Hostinger, SiteGround, DreamHost, GreenGeeks, Namecheap and IONOS, the median promotional-to-renewal multiple came to 3.25. The range ran from 1.33 at the top of DreamHost's managed tier to that fourteenfold jump at IONOS.

SiteGround is the most instructive case, because it markets the gap as a feature. The StartUp plan advertises at $2.99 a month and the same page states plainly that it renews at $17.99/mo, prepaid for twelve months. Elsewhere the page describes this as savings of 83 percent. An 83 percent discount and a six-times renewal multiple are the same number read from opposite ends.

The Cheapest Headline Is Always the Worst Deal

The pattern holds inside every multi-tier host surveyed, without exception. At Bluehost the Starter plan doubles and a half, from $3.99 to $9.99, while eCommerce Essentials climbs only from $14.99 to $21.99. At GreenGeeks the Lite plan runs a 4.73 multiple and Premium a 3.46. At IONOS the spread is starkest, with Plus at fourteen times and Ultimate at 1.80.

This is pricing architecture, not coincidence. The entry plan is an acquisition tool, priced to stand out in comparison tables and attract new customers. Profit is often recovered at renewal, after customers have uploaded a website, connected a domain and stopped comparing providers. Higher tiers target buyers with clearer requirements and are priced closer to cost. Compare both introductory and renewal rates before switching.

The second thing the advertised rate hides is the term. These are not monthly prices. Hostinger states on its own page that all plans are paid upfront and that the monthly figure is the total divided by the months in the plan. Premium at $2.99 requires a 48-month commitment, which is $143.52 handed over on day one. When that term ends, twelve months at $10.99 comes to $131.88. The first renewal year costs 92 percent of the entire preceding four years.

Bluehost Starter works out almost identically, at $143.64 for thirty-six months. Namecheap is unusually direct about the mechanics, stating that its advertised discount does not apply to renewals, and attaching conditions to its refund guarantee that exclude anyone who has previously opened and cancelled an account.

Managed Hosts Do Not Play This Game At All

Here is the finding that should reorganise how a small operator shops. Not one managed WordPress host surveyed uses introductory pricing. WP Engine, Kinsta, Pressable and Cloudways each publish a single flat number, and discount only for annual prepayment.

Kinsta's Launch plan is $35 a month, or $30 on annual billing, for 75,000 visits and 15 GB of storage. Pressable Signature 1 is $25 a month or $250 a year for one install and 30,000 visits. WP Engine Essential starts at $28. Cloudways begins at $11 a month for a two-gigabyte DigitalOcean instance.

Set those against the renewal column rather than the promo column and the comparison changes completely. The apparent gulf between three-dollar hosting and thirty-five-dollar hosting is a comparison between a first-term rate and a permanent one. The real gap is between $17.99 and $35, which is roughly two to one, and at that ratio the decision stops being about price and becomes a question of staging environments, real storage, included CDN and how many concurrent uncached requests the platform will serve you.

Overages, and the Unit Nobody Reads

Flat pricing carries its own trap, which is metered usage. The published overage rates vary by a factor of four for what is nominally the same unit. Kinsta charges $0.50 per 1,000 visits, $0.50 per gigabyte of server bandwidth and $2 per gigabyte of disk per month. Pressable charges $1.20 per 1,000 visits and $1.00 per gigabyte of storage. WP Engine charges $2 per 1,000 extra monthly visitors on its Startup through Agency Pro plans.

The unit itself is worth knowing precisely. WP Engine defines a visit as one unique IP address logged per day in UTC, excluding static assets, and states that both known and suspected bot user agents are not counted. That last exclusion is not universal courtesy. Kinsta launched bandwidth-based plans in October 2025 after reporting that customers were seeing visit growth unmatched by bandwidth growth, which is the signature of automated traffic inflating a bill.

The Limits That Actually Bind Your Site

Nothing above tells you what you need. For that, ignore price pages and read resource limits, because those decide whether a site stays up under load.

WP Engine describes the mechanism in useful terms, explaining that each uncached page request is handled by a PHP worker and that you can think of these PHP Workers as cashiers in a store, each handling one customer at a time. Kinsta, which renamed the same concept PHP threads, is explicit about what happens when they run out, noting that once the limit is reached the queue starts to push out older requests, producing 504 errors, with 502 errors following a sixty-second timeout.

The operative word in both descriptions is uncached. A request served from cache consumes no worker, which means a brochure site with functioning page caching will never approach the limit, while a store with logged-in users, carts and checkout will, because those paths bypass cache by design. Fixing caching converts a worker problem into a non-problem without paying for a plan upgrade. That is the single highest-leverage move available to most operators, and it costs nothing.

On shared hosting the ceilings are arithmetic rather than architectural, and SiteGround is the rare host that publishes them. StartUp allows 1,000 CPU seconds per hour and 300,000 per month with 200,000 inodes; GrowBig doubles the hourly figure to 2,000 and GoGeek reaches 4,000. Note the asymmetry against price. GoGeek renews at fifteen times StartUp's promotional rate while delivering four times the hourly CPU allowance and 2.67 times the monthly one.

Bluehost takes the opposite approach to disclosure, stating on its usage policy that for packages supporting unmetered disk space or data transfer it does not have defined limitations, adding that 99.95 percent of customers fall into a normal range and that it aims to give at least forty-eight hours notice before corrective steps. Unlimited here means undefined rather than infinite, and the real constraint sits in the entry-process and CPU ceilings that bite long before any transfer figure would. You cannot serve unlimited bandwidth through a capped number of simultaneous processes.

Who Actually Owns the Market

The competitive picture explains some of the pricing behaviour. W3Techs data surveyed on 11 September 2026 shows no provider above 5.4 percent of all websites. Shopify leads at 5.4, Hostinger sits second at 5.2 percent, Amazon has 4.5 and Wix 4.2. Newfold Digital, which owns Bluehost and Network Solutions, holds 2.4 percent.

That last comparison rewards a second look. Hostinger reported 2025 revenue of 275.4 million euros and 4.6 million customers, growing revenue at a 58 percent compound rate since 2022, and credited an AI support agent with handling 81 percent of customer interactions. Newfold, with nearly seven million customers, took a $100 million investment from Clearlake and Siris in December 2025. More customers, less of the web, and outside capital required to keep moving.

What to Do Before You Renew

Open your host's pricing page and find the renewal figure, not the one in the large type, then multiply it by twelve. Add the domain renewal, which Bluehost and DreamHost both decline to publish while advertising a first-year rate; Namecheap, which does publish, registers a .com at $11.28 and renews it at $18.48. Add email if your plan excludes it, as managed plans generally do. WP Engine states that default email functionality on its platform is limited and highly suggests utilizing a 3rd party email host, which is a real line item on a thirty-five-dollar plan that a three-dollar plan usually covers.

Then check what you are using. If your traffic is uncached because caching is misconfigured, no plan tier will fix that, and the upgrade you are being steered toward is treating a symptom. Migration, at least, has stopped costing money: WP Engine, SiteGround and Cloudways all now advertise free transfers, which removes the switching cost that made these renewal multiples stick in the first place. Our emergency repair checklist covers the diagnostic order when a site is already down, and the Core Web Vitals guide covers the caching layer that decides how many workers you need in the first place.