When is cheap web hosting not so cheap? You may have heard or read that if cost is your main concern when shopping for website hosting, you shouldn’t just look at the price you’ll pay for the first year you sign up. After all, most of the top website hosting companies offer special deals or coupon codes which drastically lower their price—for your initial sign up period anyway!
Being aware of what your web hosting renewal costs will be after your first term ends is good advice, but that’s only part of the answer. To really find out what your cheapest alternative is, you also need to take into account any extra services you may require as well as certain hidden fees you may encounter. Also, many web hosts offer discounts if you sign up for multiple years. Let’s do a little exercise to see how this might work out.
For our sample purposes, let’s take a look at some of the top website hosting company web packages to determine which would really wind up costing you the least money. Obviously, everyone’s hosting needs may vary depending on their business or site requirements. For our example, let’s see how much hosting would cost for a three year period:
iPage lets you sign up for an initial period of 1 to 3 years. If you sign up for one year, the cost is $4.50 mo. If you lock in for three years, the cost is $3.50 mo. for a total of $126.00.
Hostgator, like many web hosting companies, offers several different levels or types of web hosting. For our purposes, let’s take their single domain plan. A one year term will cost you $5.56 mo. If you sign up for three years, the cost is $3.96 mo. for a total of $142.56.
InMotion Hosting has three different levels of business web hosting. Their “Launch” or first level business package has a two-year sign up option for $5.95 mo. The normal price is $6.95 mo., so let’s say you sign up for a third year at this rate for a total cost of $226.20. (In reality after your first two years, you could probably sign up for another multi-year term to save some money. But for our example, we’ll use the regular rate for year 3 to simplify things.)
Now, from the above data you might conclude that iPage is the cheapest, followed by Hostgator, and then InMotion. Well, maybe, but not necessarily. Let’s look at a few other items.
While iPage will backup your website data, you’ll need to pay an additional $12.95 per year to use their backup and restore tool. Also, if you’re going to use the premium version of their Drag and Drop Site Builder, you’ll need to pay an additional $99.95 per year. If you want the E-commerce site creator, you pay $179.40 yr. Of course you don’t need to use these tools. You can certainly build and run your site without them. And if you do, then iPage indeed might be the least expensive. But if you do need or want to take advantage and convenience of the additional services, you could wind up spending over $700 for the three years.
With Hostgator, you don’t pay a yearly fee for data backup and restore. Instead, you need to pay $15 per restore from the backups they run. Certainly everyone should back up their own data. And there is no charge if you restore from backup data that you save yourself. Just to be on the conservative side, let’s say you need to run a restore from their data a couple of times during the three years due to some unforeseen reasons. Then your total cost at Hostgator would be $172.56. If you only needed to restore data once, your cost would be $157.56. If you purchased hosting at iPage with just the data backup/restore option and not the site builder tools, you would pay $164.85 for three years. That’s pretty close. Now to further complicate things, both companies often run discount sales or promotions which will further affect the total amount you’d pay.
As for InMotion, yes, their base level business hosting plan would still cost more than the other two. However, they will restore your data for free once every four months. Their hosting plan also has features such as their max speed zones that you may prefer over the other companies.
So what’s the bottom line here? Well, two points really. First, if cost is going to be your main concern when shopping for web hosting, you’ve got to consider many factors—not just your initial fee and renewal rate. Second, and probably more important, is that cost shouldn’t really be your only consideration. I’d suggest you start out by taking a look at the top website hosting companies and see which one has the most features you’ll need for your site. All of the better hosting companies are pretty competitive when it comes to pricing. In the end, it’ll usually be more beneficial to find the best fit for your website needs rather than stressing out about saving a few dollars and cents here or there.
That’s not to say you shouldn’t look for sales or promotions that will save you some money. Check out our Hot Hosting Deals each month to see what promos are available. See our other article for more information on web hosting backup and restore fees. And also see our further comparison between Hostgator and InMotion Hosting.