Price check · September 2026
September 2026 hosting price check
This is the first entry in a running record of what hosting actually costs. Every quarter we read the four providers’ own pricing pages, write down the intro price, the renewal price and the term, and screenshot the page we read it from. Nothing here is taken from a roundup or from a provider’s marketing email.
Because “hosting renews higher” is easy to assert and hard to prove. A dated archive turns it into something you can check. It also protects you from us: if we ever quote a renewal rate that looks wrong, you can compare it against the screenshot from the quarter it was taken.
The shared hosting baseline
Prices below were read on 20 September 2026. The four-year column is the number that matters — it is the intro term paid at the intro rate, then the published renewal rate for the remainder.
| Host & plan | Intro price | Renews at | Promo term | 4-year true cost | Resources |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| HostingerPremium | $2.99/mo | $10.99/mo+268% | 48 mo | $144 | 20 GB SSD3 sites |
| HostingerUnlimited | $3.99/mo | $16.99/mo+326% | 48 mo | $192 | 50 GB NVMeUnlimited sites |
| HostingerCloud Startup | $7.99/mo | $25.99/mo+225% | 48 mo | $384 | 100 GB NVMeUnlimited sites |
| BluehostStarter | $3.99/mo | $9.99/mo+150% | 36 mo | $264 | 10 GB NVMe10 sites |
| BluehostBusiness | $6.99/mo | $13.99/mo+100% | 36 mo | $420 | 50 GB NVMe50 sites |
| SiteGroundStartUp | $2.99/mo | $17.99/mo+502% | 12 mo | $684 | 10 GB1 site |
| SiteGroundGrowBig | $4.99/mo | $29.99/mo+501% | 12 mo | $1,140 | 50 GBUnlimited sites |
Intro prices require paying the full promo term upfront. “4-year true cost” is the promo term at the intro rate plus the remaining months at the renewal rate — the number the pricing page does not show you. Verified September 2026.
Hostinger
SiteGround
Bluehost
Cloudways, which has no renewal price
Cloudways is the exception on this site: it bills hourly with no promotional term, so there is no intro rate to expire. You pay the same in month one and month sixty. That is worse than shared hosting for the first few years and better afterwards.
| Host & plan | Monthly price | Renews at | Hourly rate | 4-year cost | Resources |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CloudwaysDigitalOcean 1 GB | $11.00/mo | same — no promo term | $0.0164/hr | $528 | 1 GB · 1 vCPU25 GB SSD · 1 TB transfer |
| CloudwaysDigitalOcean 2 GB | $24.00/mo | same — no promo term | $0.0357/hr | $1,152 | 2 GB · 1 vCPU50 GB SSD · 2 TB transfer |
| CloudwaysDigitalOcean 4 GB | $46.00/mo | same — no promo term | $0.0685/hr | $2,208 | 4 GB · 2 vCPU80 GB SSD · 4 TB transfer |
| CloudwaysDO Premium 1 GB | $14.00/mo | same — no promo term | $0.0208/hr | $672 | 1 GB · 1 vCPU25 GB NVMe · 1 TB transfer |
| CloudwaysVultr / Linode 1 GB | $14.00/mo | same — no promo term | $0.0194/hr | $672 | 1 GB · 1 vCPU25 GB · 1 TB transfer |
| CloudwaysAWS Micro | $20.56/mo | same — no promo term | $0.0286/hr | $987 | 1 GB · 2 vCPU20 GB · metered transfer |
Cloudways bills by the hour and invoices monthly in arrears. There is no promotional term and no separate renewal price: the four-year figure is simply 48 × the monthly rate. Promotions (for example 40% off for a limited period) are temporary discounts on this rate, not a lock-in. Verified September 2026.
What changed since the last check
This is the first dated entry, so there are no quarter-on-quarter movements to report yet. One change from earlier in the year is worth recording, because third-party roundups are still getting it wrong: Hostinger renamed its Business plan to Unlimited in July 2026 and the lineup no longer contains a plan called Business. Guides still listing Hostinger Business are describing a plan that does not exist.
Checking against the live page turned up an error on our side: our Cloudways hourly rates were understated. The DigitalOcean Standard servers bill at $0.0164, $0.0357 and $0.0685 per hour for the 1 GB, 2 GB and 4 GB tiers, not the slightly lower figures we had published. The monthly and four-year totals were unaffected. We also now label the storage on those servers as SSD rather than NVMe, which is what the Standard tier actually provides — NVMe is the Premium tier, $3 more per month.
What we will be watching
November is the only month in the year when these numbers move sharply, and they move in a specific direction: deeper intro discounts attached to longer commitments, with renewal rates untouched. The next entry in this series will be the Black Friday one, and it will be measured against exactly the table above.
After that, the next routine check is December 2026.