A realistic signup range for shared hosting is roughly $3 to $7 a month. Promotional teasers start near the familiar $2.95 hook, and the median published shared plan in the HostList directory sits at $6.81 a month. The figure that actually decides your cost, though, is the renewal price, which commonly runs two to six times the intro once your first term ends. So the honest answer to how much web hosting costs is not one number. It is a small signup number, and a much larger renewal number that most guides quietly skip.
HostList takes no affiliate commission and sells no placement, so we have no reason to quote the teaser and stop there. The prices below are median monthly figures pulled from published plans across the dedicated hosting providers in our directory, grouped by plan type. They tell you what the middle of the market charges, not what one host wants you to click.
What web hosting costs by plan type
Here is the median monthly entry price for each plan type, taken from active plans listed by pure hosting providers in the HostList directory. The sample size for each type is shown so you can weigh how firm the figure is.
- Shared hosting: $6.81 a month (median of 50 plans). The cheapest way onto the web, where many sites share the resources of one server.
- Managed WordPress: $18.42 a month (median of 8 plans). Shared-style resources plus WordPress-specific tooling, caching, and automatic updates.
- VPS hosting: $20 a month (median of 43 plans). A guaranteed slice of CPU and memory on a virtual server, with root access.
- Dedicated hosting: $149 a month (median of 17 plans). An entire physical server reserved for you.
Shared plans in the directory run from under a dollar a month at the promotional end to more than ninety at the top tier, which is exactly why a single median is more honest than any one advertised price. Cloud and reseller plans appear in the data too, but in numbers too small to publish a stable median, so we leave them out rather than quote a figure built on a handful of listings. You can see the same index refreshed every month, with month-over-month movement, on the HostList market insights price index.
Why the advertised price is not what you pay
Every median above is an entry price. The gap between that entry price and what you pay in year two is the single biggest reason hosting costs more than people expect. We covered the mechanics in detail in the renewal trap, so the short version here is this: the discounted first term is a customer-acquisition cost, the renewal is the real price, and across mainstream shared hosts the renewal commonly lands at two to six times the intro. A plan you signed up for at $2.99 can renew near $12 to $18. Set against the $6.81 shared median, that means you can end up paying more than the market midpoint for a plan you were sold as budget. Read the renewal figure before you buy, not after.
What drives the jump from $7 to $149
The price ladder tracks two things: how much of a server you get to yourself, and how much of the work the host does for you.
- Shared hosting is cheap because you split one machine with many other sites. It is fine for a brochure site, a blog, or a small store with modest traffic. The trade-off is that a busy neighbour on the same server can slow you down.
- Managed WordPress costs more than plain shared hosting because you are paying the host to run the tedious parts: updates, caching, staging, and security tuned for one application. The hardware underneath is often similar to shared.
- VPS hosting guarantees a fixed portion of CPU and memory and hands you root access. You are buying isolation and control rather than raw horsepower, which is why an entry VPS at $20 is only about three times a shared plan.
- Dedicated hosting reserves a whole physical server, so the median leaps to $149. You are renting the hardware outright, along with the data-centre space, power, and network behind it.
The costs the sticker price leaves out
The plan fee is rarely the whole bill. Budget for these before you decide a host is cheap.
- Renewal. The largest hidden cost, covered above. Total the price over three to four years, not the first month.
- Domain. Often free for the first year, then about $10 to $23 a year to renew a .com. The free-domain offer is a first-year discount, not a permanent one.
- SSL certificate. Basic SSL is free through Let's Encrypt and most hosts include it automatically. A few budget hosts still upsell a paid certificate you rarely need.
- Backups. Sometimes bundled, sometimes a paid add-on billed monthly. Check whether daily backups and one-click restore are included before you assume they are.
- Email. Some plans include mailboxes; others expect you to buy email hosting separately or bring your own provider.
How to work out your real annual cost
Take the renewal price, not the intro, and multiply by twelve. Then add the extras you actually need. A shared plan advertised at $2.99 that renews near $11 is about $132 a year once the discount lapses, before a domain renewal of roughly $15 and any backup add-on. Measured against the $6.81 median, a plan that renews well below the middle of the market is genuinely cheap; one that renews well above it is buying your signup with a discount it takes back later.
The same arithmetic scales up. An entry VPS at the $20 median is about $240 a year. A dedicated server at the $149 median is roughly $1,800 a year before add-ons. Knowing the median for your plan type tells you at a glance whether a quote is a fair deal or a markup.
So how much should you budget?
For a straightforward site on shared hosting, plan for roughly $7 to $18 a month at renewal once you include a domain and the occasional add-on, even if the signup price looks like half that. If your site runs on WordPress and you would rather not manage updates and caching yourself, managed WordPress sits around the $18 median, close to what a shared plan costs at renewal anyway once you add a domain. If you need guaranteed resources, an entry VPS around the $20 median is the honest floor. For a business-critical site on its own hardware, dedicated starts near the $149 median and climbs with specification.
If price is the deciding factor, our cheap hosting guide ranks providers by their honest renewal price rather than the teaser. The country hubs, such as hosting in the United States and hosting in the United Kingdom, let you compare local providers where data-centre location and billing currency matter.
A note on these numbers
These medians are entry prices from plans published in the HostList directory, so they reflect advertised rates rather than what every customer negotiates, and they shift with promotions and term length. The sample sizes per type are modest, from 8 managed WordPress plans to 50 shared plans, so treat them as a market reference point rather than a universal quote. The one constant across every type is that the renewal price, not the signup price, is the number worth planning around.
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