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When looking at reviews for hosting websites such as hostinger and siteground, I see people mentioning a ‘renewal cost’. What does this mean exactly? It doesn’t mean that after your initial payment plan period is up, you have to start paying more per month does it?
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Yep, it means after your first payment term, the next one is hiked up in price. So it’s best to look for a host that doesn’t try to do that to you. Go to r/webhosting
Are you sure this is for web hosting? Normally you pay a monthly cost for your web hosting and a yearly cost for a domain name. When people refer to renewal cost they more often mean their domain names.
If you see a hosting service that offers reduced-cost domains or hosting for the first year you should avoid them. Once a company brings in a marketing team to push things like this they often also start charging extra for things that should be free.
A lot of hosting providers offer an introductory price that’s heavily discounted. The renewal price is the full price. Always check the small print.
Go with something like Cloudways or Flywheel. They don’t change their intro pricing. They don’t have intro pricing.
Or – be prepared to migrate hosts after a year of intro prices.
>It doesn’t mean that after your initial payment plan period is up, you have to start paying more per month does it?
It does mean exactly that – an introductory/reduced pricing is the strategy of many well-known and established hosting companies, however with some of them you can negotiate about pricing if you renew hosting for more than 1 year.
I’ve been with Siteground for 5 years now. Is it the best? No. But does it get the job done? Yes.
Best thing to do is contact customer service when renewal price comes around. My domain was probably $6 a year when I bought it and now it’s $14. Same with hosting. Super cheap when you sign up, probably $3 month, then renewal is around $30 month.
So I contact Siteground about a month before renewal and use live chat or actually call and talk to someone. Every year I get a discount. This year I was able to get my domain renewal for $8 year and my hosting for $18 month.
If I wasn’t happy with Siteground, I would definitely switch but so far I’ve had no issues with them. It’s a local small business website with basic services and about pages, no e-commerce or products to sell, no invoicing, and a basic contact form.
It works great for me but I know it’s not for everyone.
In principle there’s nothing wrong with offering huge signup discounts. In practice it allows unscrupulous reviewers to include, say, SiteGround in lists of “the five fastest cheap hosting plans.” The reviewer gets the affiliate link, SiteGround gets a customer. Andddd a year later low-information customers squall about “huge price increases.”
For some reason SiteGround gets dinged heavily for this “deceptive” practice. I use it to move clients out of truly bad hosting with the premise that “you get a year of service for two months of payment. It’s almost a ‘free trial.’ You’ll have a whole year to decide.”
I think this is worth discussing here because WordPress customers can become unnaturally attached to their terrible hosting. “Yes, but I’m paid up with GoDaddy economy Linux for five years.” Being able to say, “it’s only $38 for the fiest year” is a pretty good crowbar. (And tbh after you add the $80/year SSL and $6/month for ram and “disc I/O” GoDaddy costs as much as SiteGround anyway.)
Bottom line: they’re not “renewal prices,” they’re *actual prices.” As WordPress pros who want our clients sites to perform well it’s up to us to educate them about the differences.
Many shared hosting plans come with a very cheap initial subscription. You pay upfront for a year (or 2-3), and your monthly fee is very low, such as $3/month. After the initial subscription is up, you are charged a renewal fee, which is their regular price, such as $10-15/month, or what ever they charge. In some cases it could be a bit lower than a regular per month price if you pre-pay for a year.