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. If you want to know how much does web hosting cost, start with the yearly web hosting cost, because that is the figure renewals are billed against, and treat any web hosting cost quoted per month as a promotion until the renewal price is known. This guide gives price bands 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.

Dedicated hosting cost sits well above every other type because you rent a whole server instead of a share of one, which is why it only makes sense for sites with steady, heavy demand; our dedicated server hosting page covers when it is justified. The average cost of website hosting for a small business site is driven less by the headline price than by what the plan renews at, and our guide to website hosting for small business shows which plans fit which sites.

Website hosting cost by platform

The same site can cost very different amounts depending on the platform it runs on, and some platforms hide the hosting fee inside a larger subscription. These figures are published US price bands (market figures, not a Progression rate card).

• WordPress web hosting cost: basic shared plans start around $3 a month on promotional pricing, managed WordPress plans start around $25 and pass $300 for high-traffic sites, and renewal prices are higher than the first term.
• Wix website hosting cost: hosting is bundled into the Wix plan, so you pay one plan price that also covers the builder and templates, and the site cannot be moved to another host.
• Shopify website hosting cost: also bundled into the subscription alongside the store software, with transaction fees and paid apps on top.
• AWS website hosting cost: depends entirely on what you run. A static site on object storage and a CDN can cost very little, while servers, databases and traffic are billed by usage; small VPS and cloud servers sit roughly between $10 and $200 a month.
• Google website hosting cost: depends on the product. Google Cloud bills by usage like AWS, while Google’s own site builder is a simple option for small sites.

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.

The figures here are published US price bands (market figures, not a Progression rate card).

Web hosting cost per year vs per month

How much does website hosting cost per month? On published US price bands (market figures, not a Progression rate card), a basic plan is a few dollars on promotion, a managed WordPress plan starts around $25, and a small VPS or cloud server sits between about $10 and $200. How much does website hosting cost per year? Multiply the renewal price, not the first-term price, by twelve. The web hosting cost per year is often lower with annual prepayment, but a three-year promotion can renew at several times the price, so read the renewal line before paying.

Domain and web hosting cost together

Domain and web hosting cost are billed separately in most cases: the domain is an annual registration paid to a registrar, while hosting is the monthly or yearly plan that serves the site. Email hosting costs are a third line, usually charged per mailbox each month, so a site that needs company email carries three bills, not one. Adding all three, and the occasional cost of moving a site between hosts, as covered in our website migration services, gives the real total.

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. Everything quoted here is published US price bands (market figures, not a Progression rate card).

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. These are published US price bands (market figures, not a Progression rate card).

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