Hosting Renewal Prices: Which of 50 Hosts Actually Publish One

Every hosting price page shows you a number. Some of them show you two.

We scrape 50 providers every night. As of 7 September 2026 our database holds 1,441 active plans that carry both a signup price and a renewal price. Half the providers publish a renewal figure that differs from the signup figure somewhere in their catalog. The other half publish one rate and stop there.

That split is 25 against 25, and it is a far better predictor of your second-year bill than anything else we can measure.

Group	Providers	Active plans	Plans that renew higher
Publish a renewal price	25	645	418 (64.8%)
Publish a single price	25	796	not published, not measurable

Why every percentage here divides by 645

This matters enough to spell out before any other number. A plan that never advertises a renewal rate is not evidence of a plan that holds its price. It is an absence of evidence, and the two are easy to confuse.

Divide 418 markups by all 1,441 plans and you get 29%, which sounds like good news about the industry. That figure would be meaningless. It counts DigitalOcean's 90 metered plans and Hetzner's 40 flat-rate plans as if we had checked their renewal invoices and found no increase. We have not checked anybody's invoices. We read pricing pages.

So the denominator throughout is 645: the plans where a second published number exists to compare against. A plan counts as a markup when its published renewal rate sits more than 5% above its signup rate, which keeps rounding and currency conversion out of the count. On that basis, 64.8% of plans renew above their signup rate, and the average increase among those is 2.37x.

The 25 hosts that publish a renewal price

Provider	Plans	Renew higher	Share	Average markup
Hostinger	25	25	100%	2.75x
GoDaddy	22	22	100%	1.80x
HostArmada	21	21	100%	2.78x
Bluehost	19	19	100%	1.65x
ChemiCloud	18	18	100%	3.21x
NameHero	16	16	100%	2.75x
Scala Hosting	16	16	100%	2.18x
IONOS	15	15	100%	7.15x
HostGator	10	10	100%	2.83x
Time4VPS	36	35	97.2%	1.97x
UltaHost	51	47	92.2%	1.58x
A2 Hosting	26	23	88.5%	2.69x
GreenGeeks	15	12	80.0%	3.48x
Name.com	4	3	75.0%	1.31x
InMotion Hosting	12	8	66.7%	2.41x
HostPapa	34	22	64.7%	2.12x
Liquid Web	18	11	61.1%	1.85x
Hostwinds	49	29	59.2%	1.54x
FastComet	19	11	57.9%	2.58x
DreamHost	23	11	47.8%	1.63x
Devrims	46	21	45.7%	1.43x
SiteGround	7	3	42.9%	5.89x
Namecheap	29	11	37.9%	1.84x
OVHcloud	97	8	8.2%	2.83x
InterServer	17	1	5.9%	2.80x

The bottom two rows deserve a second look, because a low share here does not mean a gentle host. OVHcloud shows 8 markups out of 97 plans, which reads as tame until you notice all 8 are its shared hosting plans and that is all of its shared hosting plans. Its 41 cloud instances and 48 dedicated servers carry one number each. InterServer runs the same trick in reverse: its one exception is the Standard shared plan, $2.50 at signup against a $7.00 standard rate, sitting in a catalog otherwise built on the price lock it markets.

Nine hosts raise the price on every plan they sell

Hostinger, GoDaddy, HostArmada, Bluehost, ChemiCloud, NameHero, Scala Hosting, IONOS and HostGator have no exceptions. Across 162 plans between them, in shared hosting, WordPress, VPS, reseller, dedicated and website builders, every single one renews above its signup rate.

IONOS is the extreme. Its average markup of 7.15x is not a rounding artifact of one weird plan; it has four plans priced at $1.00 for the first year. The eCommerce Plus builder renews at $32.00, which is 32x. The Plus website builder goes $1.00 to $20.00. The Plus shared plan goes $1.00 to $14.00. The Grow WordPress plan goes $1.00 to $12.00.

Nothing here is hidden. IONOS prints both numbers on the page. Whether anyone reads the second one is a different question.

Why the renewal multiple is a bad way to shop

Here is the finding I did not expect. The size of the markup barely predicts what you pay, because the length of the introductory term varies from 12 months to 48 and swamps it.

Take entry shared plans and run them out to four years, paying the published signup rate for the length of the intro term and the published renewal rate afterwards.

Plan	Signup	Intro term	Renewal	Markup	Four-year total
A2 Hosting Starter	$1.99/mo	48 months	$9.99/mo	5.02x	$95.52
Hostinger Premium	$2.99/mo	48 months	$10.99/mo	3.68x	$143.52
HostArmada Start Dock	$1.99/mo	36 months	$9.95/mo	5.00x	$191.04
ChemiCloud Starter	$1.95/mo	36 months	$11.95/mo	6.13x	$213.60
Bluehost Starter	$3.99/mo	36 months	$9.99/mo	2.50x	$263.52
FastComet Starter	$1.99/mo	12 months	$9.95/mo	5.00x	$382.08
IONOS Plus	$1.00/mo	12 months	$14.00/mo	14.00x	$516.00
GreenGeeks Lite	$2.95/mo	12 months	$13.95/mo	4.73x	$537.60
SiteGround StartUp	$2.99/mo	12 months	$17.99/mo	6.02x	$683.52

A2 Hosting's Starter plan carries one of the steeper markups in the whole dataset, 5.02x, and produces the cheapest four-year bill of any renewal-publishing shared plan we track. SiteGround's StartUp carries a similar 6.02x and costs seven times more over the same four years. The difference is entirely the term: A2 sells you 48 months up front at $1.99, SiteGround sells you 12 at $2.99 and then wants $17.99.

Hostinger's own price data makes the mechanism obvious. Its Premium plan lists a 48-month total of $143.52 against an undiscounted total of $575.52 for the same four years. You are buying four years of discount at once. Sign the same plan for 12 months instead and the rate is $3.99, not $2.99.

If you want to run this for plans not in the table, our true cost calculator does the arithmetic, and the A2 Hosting vs SiteGround comparison puts those two side by side with specs attached.

What renews, by product type

Within those 645 plans, the pattern sorts cleanly by what you are buying.

Plan type	Plans	Renew higher	Share	Average markup
Shared	89	86	96.6%	3.11x
Reseller	37	34	91.9%	1.93x
WordPress	55	48	87.3%	3.00x
VPS	208	172	82.7%	1.89x
WooCommerce	10	7	70.0%	3.20x
Cloud	98	28	28.6%	1.62x
Dedicated	131	26	19.8%	1.38x
Website builder	10	10	100%	7.43x

Shared hosting at 96.6% is the number most people already suspect. VPS at 82.7% is the one that surprises, because VPS shoppers tend to assume they have escaped the promo game by moving up a tier. Among hosts that publish renewal rates, they have not. The average VPS markup is gentler, 1.89x rather than 3.11x, but four out of five plans still rise.

Dedicated servers are the safest ground at 19.8%, which makes commercial sense. Nobody signs a $300 per month server on a teaser rate and then quietly absorbs a doubling.

The website builder line is small enough to be noise, ten plans, but the 7.43x average is real and it is mostly IONOS.

The 796 plans with one number, and what we cannot tell you

Twenty-five providers record a single rate on every plan: Vultr with 93 plans, DigitalOcean with 90, ServaRica 80, Evolution Host 71, Cloudways 63, PebbleHost 57, ExtraVM 45, Hetzner 40, Linode 39, Private Hosting 37, Kinsta 32, Contabo 26, Netcup 25, Amazon Lightsail 25, Rocket.net 18, Fly.io 14, Kamatera 10, then Shopify, Diploi, Tiiny Host, Squarespace, Wix, Railway, WP Engine and Dynadot with single digits each.

Our record for those 796 plans holds one price. That is a fact about their pricing pages, not a promise about their invoices. A host that has never printed a renewal rate has also never committed to one.

There is a structural reason to expect stability from most of this group, and it is worth understanding rather than trusting. Metered infrastructure has no anniversary date. DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode and Amazon Lightsail bill by the hour for what is running, so there is no contract to renew and no second number to print. Cloudways, Fly.io, Kamatera and Railway work the same way. Kinsta, Rocket.net and WP Engine sell flat subscriptions and market the absence of promo pricing as a feature.

Hetzner, Contabo, Netcup and Evolution Host are the interesting middle. They sell fixed-term commitments in the way a shared host does, they just publish one rate for the term and for the renewal. That is a stronger signal than metered billing gives you, but it is still a pricing page, and pricing pages get edited. Hetzner repriced parts of its cloud range in June 2026, which tells you a flat-rate host can still move a price. It just moves it for everybody at once instead of moving it for you on your anniversary.

What we can say honestly: for the plans in this group with history going back before June, the advertised price has been stable. What we cannot say is what any of them bills you in month 25, because they never told us.

The euro pattern is a product mix pattern

Nine of the 50 providers bill in euros, covering 342 active plans, and only 43 of those renew higher. At 12.6% that looks like a continental discipline about pricing, and it is tempting to write it up that way.

It falls apart on inspection. Seven of the nine euro hosts publish a single price, so their 209 plans contribute nothing but a zero to that percentage. All 43 markups sit in exactly two catalogs. Time4VPS accounts for 35 of them and OVHcloud for the other 8. Judged on the same 645-plan basis as everyone else, euro billing carries no advantage worth naming. The euro catalog is simply full of VPS and dedicated shops, and those are the categories with the lowest markup rates in any currency.

Time4VPS is also the cleanest renewal structure in the dataset, and a useful worked example. Thirty-two of its 35 markups land on exactly 2.00x, on a 24-month term, with no variation. Compare its Container C8 against a similar Contabo box.

Plan	Specs	First 24 months	Months 25 to 48	Four-year total
Time4VPS Container C8	3 vCPU, 8 GB RAM, 100 GB SSD, 8 TB transfer	EUR 4.38/mo (EUR 105.12)	EUR 8.76/mo (EUR 210.24)	EUR 315.36
Contabo Cloud VPS 4	4 vCPU, 8 GB RAM, 100 GB SSD, unmetered	EUR 4.40/mo (EUR 105.60)	published rate: EUR 4.40/mo	EUR 211.20 if it holds

Contabo's box is 33% cheaper over four years on the published rates, with an extra vCPU. The caveat is the whole point of this article: Time4VPS has told you what month 25 costs and Contabo has not. The same Time4VPS box costs EUR 12.99 on a rolling monthly term, so its 24-month rate is a genuine commitment discount rather than a bait rate. The Contabo vs Time4VPS page has the rest of the specs.

Advertised prices barely move

We snapshot every tracked plan nightly. For the 1,030 plans whose history reaches back before 10 June 2026, that is 197,814 individual readings, and 811 of them (78.7%) have shown exactly one price on every single night.

Split by group, the difference is small: 81.0% of single-price plans have never moved, against 74.8% of plans from renewal-publishing hosts. Both groups are dominated by stillness.

Read that carefully, because it is easy to over-claim. Those readings measure the sticker price on a pricing page. They say nothing about what an existing customer is charged at renewal, because a host does not repost your invoice on its homepage. The honest summary is that hosting list prices are far more stable than the industry's discount theatre implies, and that the volatility you actually experience comes from your own contract rolling over rather than from the market repricing around you.

What I would buy for a small WordPress site today

On a four-year horizon, A2 Hosting's Starter plan at $95.52 total is the cheapest deal among hosts that will tell you their renewal rate, and I would take it over anything else in the shared tier. Hostinger Premium at $143.52 is the better buy if you need more than one site, and it is the plan I would recommend to somebody who wants a name they have heard of. Both make you pay four years up front, which is the actual trade.

Avoid pairing a 12-month intro term with a 5x or steeper markup unless you have a migration in your calendar. SiteGround StartUp, FastComet Starter and GreenGeeks Lite all cost more over four years than plans with worse-looking multiples, and the reason is always the same: the discount runs out three or four times sooner.

If renewal pricing bothers you as a matter of principle, the metered hosts remove the problem by removing the contract. You give up cPanel, one-click WordPress installs, phone support and somebody else keeping your backups, and for most small sites that is a bad trade. For a developer who already runs their own stack, it is the obvious one. Our VPS hosting and shared hosting category pages are sorted so you can see both worlds against each other.

One last habit worth forming. Before you enter a card, find the renewal rate on the page. If you cannot find it, that is not the same as it not existing, and it is worth two minutes in the host's terms of service to check. All figures here were read from our production database on 7 September 2026 and cover 50 providers.