Standardized Web Hosting Comparison: Yearly Prices

Shopping for the best yearly web hosting prices can be a pain. While all the hosting companies display their prices, it’s difficult to get an accurate comparison due to the way different providers structure their information.

Here is a standardized comparison of web hosting prices:

On this site, I’ve converted all prices manually to “per year” billing cycles. This makes it easy to make an apples to apples comparison between the different hosting services.

In addition, you can use the top menu bar to get the list of deals for each individual hosting company. I hope you find it useful! Here are some of the ways in which this site normalizes information to achieve a fair web hosting price comparison

Comparison of all Yearly Web Hosting Prices

Almost all hosting sites display discounts to users for the first billing cycle. So some offer a 30% or 50% discount. However, they don’t always show the discount when you purchase their services for per year. Hostgator for example, has the annoying habit of showing discounted prices on their home page for a full 5 year purchase!

Look at the following pricing set from Hostgator for example. Here you can see the drastic discounts applied to a 3 year billing cycle.

That’s the difference between 34% off and 60% off! And guess which one they show on their website? That’s right – the 3 year plan. It’s only when you’re deep in the checkout process do you realize what the actual yearly web hosting prices are. It’s one of the traps that hosting providers use to make you pay more.

This being the case, you might be fooled into thinking that you’re getting a discount for 1 year and realize the difference only when you actually pay. WP-Tweaks takes all this into consideration and I only display the “per year” prices after going through the checkout process myself and seeing what the end user pays.

Out of all the web hosting providers reviewed on this site, only SiteGround shows you yearly plans. The others are all 2, 3, or 5 year plans.

So when you see the table of comparisons on this site, you know that you’re always seeing comparable prices across hosting providers.

Renewal Prices of Web Hosting Plans

In general, the discounts you find on this site only apply for  the first billing cycle of hosting. During that time, you get the discounted rate each month. After that, you pay the full renewal price. There’s no way around this, short of migrating your hosting once the initial billing period is up. Some providers like Bluehost actually give you lower renewal prices for longer billing cycles. But the discounts are nowhere near as steep as those for the first year.

So if you don’t fancy switching hosting providers all the time, I suggest you look not only at the discounts, but also the full renewal costs to get a better idea of how much you’re going to pay once the discount period is over.

Warning: Make sure you factor in SSL costs. This is an essential part of SSL, but you don’t need to pay for it. Bluehost and Hostgator have recently announced free SSL with all their shared hosting plans. This leaves only GoDaddy, and they charge really high prices for SSL! So don’t be fooled with $1/month hosting plans when you’re forced to pay big bucks for SSL!

Constant Price Updates

At the top of every pricing comparison chart, you will see the date on which the page was updated. All these prices are stored in a central location and shared with all the tables across the site. So when you view the individual prices for yearly VPS hosting for example, the same price will also show on the provider specific page. This way, you’re sure to always receive the latest prices, and know that what you’re looking at is up to date.