How Much Does Website Hosting Cost? Prices by Hosting Type, Site Type and the Costs Nobody Puts in the Quote

Updated September 2026 · Written and maintained by the Progression Agency strategy team

Website hosting costs anything from nothing to thousands of dollars a month, and the advertised price is rarely what you pay after the first term. This guide gives planning ranges for shared, managed WordPress, VPS, cloud, dedicated and platform hosting, what a business site, store or application should expect to spend, the hidden costs (renewals, backups, email, CDN, migrations, support), and how to cut the bill without cutting reliability.

Website hosting prices by hosting type

Website hosting prices run from a few dollars a month for shared hosting to hundreds for managed cloud or dedicated servers, and the intro price is rarely the renewal price. The table gives the ranges by type.

What hosting should cost by site type

The site decides the hosting budget: a brochure site needs a fraction of what a store or application needs. The table gives an all-in monthly figure for each kind of site.

The costs that are not in the advertised price

The advertised hosting price leaves out renewals, domains, email, backups and the extras that turn a cheap plan into an ordinary one. The items to add:

• Renewal rates: multi-year intro prices commonly rise two to three times at renewal; Forbes Advisor’s hosting cost guide and host pricing pages show the pattern.
• Domain registration and privacy ($10-$20 a year), and DNS if not on Cloudflare (free).
• TLS certificates: free from Let’s Encrypt and most hosts; paid only for special validation types.
• Business email: use Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 ($6-$14 per user), not the host’s bundled mailboxes.
• Backups and off-site storage: often an add-on on shared and VPS plans.
• CDN and security: Cloudflare’s free plan covers most sites; paid plans for WAF rules and bot management.
• Migrations: free with many managed hosts, otherwise $1,000-$5,000 for a professional move; see website migration services.
• Maintenance: updates, monitoring and fixes, $100-$500 a month for business sites; see WordPress maintenance services.
• Bandwidth and usage overages on cloud and platform plans; set budgets and alerts.

Cloud hosting prices: how usage billing works

Cloud providers bill compute by the hour or second, storage by the gigabyte-month, data transfer out by the gigabyte, and managed services (databases, load balancers, functions) individually. A small site on a single small instance costs $10-$30 a month; a production application with a managed database, load balancer and backups usually lands at $150-$600 before traffic; large workloads go far higher. Reserved or committed pricing cuts compute cost 30-60% for steady loads. Calculators: AWS, Google Cloud, Azure. See AWS vs Azure vs Google Cloud.

VPS and dedicated server prices

Unmanaged VPS: roughly $4-$6 per vCPU-and-2GB unit per month at the value providers (Hetzner, DigitalOcean, Vultr); managed VPS $30-$200. Dedicated servers: $80-$150 for entry hardware at Hetzner or OVHcloud, $200-$1,000+ for current-generation machines from managed providers, more with GPUs. See VPS hosting and dedicated server hosting.

How to reduce hosting cost without losing reliability

Hosting cost comes down by matching the type to the site and putting a CDN in front, not by buying the cheapest plan. The steps that work:

1. Match the type to the site: static sites on free CDNs, WordPress on managed hosting sized to actual traffic, applications on platforms until scale justifies containers.
2. Put Cloudflare in front: caching cuts origin load and bandwidth bills.
3. Pay annually only at the renewal rate you can live with; avoid three-year prepayments on intro pricing.
4. Right-size cloud instances quarterly and use reserved pricing for steady workloads.
5. Move public assets to storage with no egress fees (Cloudflare R2) if bandwidth is the bill.
6. Keep email, domain and hosting separate so you can change one without paying to move the others.
7. Buy maintenance instead of emergency repair; a monthly plan is cheaper than one incident.

How Progression Agency estimates hosting

Every proposal includes an estimated monthly hosting and maintenance cost for the recommended setup, with the renewal rate rather than the intro rate, and the accounts are opened in the client’s name. See website development cost and website hosting for small business.

Cost of website hosting: averages and comparison

The cost of website hosting spans two orders of magnitude, which is why how much is website hosting and how much for website hosting have no single answer. A website hosting cost comparison across the tiers on this page gives a website hosting average cost of a few dollars a month for shared plans, tens of dollars for managed WordPress and VPS, and hundreds for dedicated or cloud infrastructure with management. Low cost website hosting is real at the shared tier; the renewal price is what to watch. Website hosting with site builder included, as Squarespace, Wix and Shopify sell it, folds hosting into a subscription and is compared on the website cost guide.

Frequently asked questions