Web hosting prices, compared
Read from the hosts’ own pricing pages and gathered across 13 providers: what hosting providers charge per month. The September 2026 average stands at $8.03/mo.
Prices last checked on
Average per month
$8.03/mo
Median
$3.99/mo
Cheapest
$1.00/mo
IONOS
Providers tracked
13
Hosting price list, cheapest first
Each host’s cheapest paid plan, taken from its own price list.
| Rank | Provider | Relative price | Entry price |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | IONOS | $1.00/mo | |
| 2 | Namecheap | $1.98/mo | |
| 3 | DreamHost | $2.89/mo | |
| 4 | Hostinger | $2.99/mo | |
| 5 | SiteGround | $2.99/mo | |
| 6 | A2 Hosting | $2.99/mo | |
| 7 | Bluehost | $3.99/mo | |
| 8 | DigitalOcean | $4.00/mo | |
| 9 | Hetzner | $4.59/mo | |
| 10 | GoDaddy | $5.99/mo | |
| 11 | Cloudways | $11.00/mo | |
| 12 | Kinsta | $30.00/mo | |
| 13 | WP Engine | $30.00/mo |
The paid average leaves free tiers out.
Where these prices come from
Every amount above was copied from the pricing page of the host itself; the list of those pages sits below this paragraph, so checking a number takes a minute. Hosts change prices without warning, which means their page outranks ours whenever the two disagree.
What you really pay over 3 years
Twelve months at the promo price, followed by two years at the renewal rate. The lowest intro offer seldom ends up cheapest once renewal is counted.
For the 8 hosts that publish a renewal rate, the renewal comes to 4.2x the intro price on average. On the sticker, IONOS wins at $1.00/mo; stretched over three years, Namecheap costs less.
36-month total: 12 months at the intro price plus 24 months at renewal. Figures are monthly guide prices, charged in whatever billing cycle the host uses. A host that does not publish its renewal price is omitted.
The trend
Two consecutive months did not cover the same hosts (10 and 8 and 9providers), so any month-on-month change would reflect our coverage rather than hosting prices. No trend appears until two months share one basket. Each individual price above was taken from the host’s own page and holds regardless.
Cite this data
The HostingShortlist Price Index puts the average hosting provider at $8.03/mo in September 2026 (https://hostingshortlist.com/data/price-index).
Reuse is free under CC BY 4.0 provided you credit the source and link back. The same data as JSON:
https://hostingshortlist.com/data/price-index.jsonMethodology
Each tracked host contributes its lowest paid monthly price, the amount a new customer realistically pays to get started. From those 13 paid plans we derive the average, the median, and the cheapest and dearest entry. Free tiers stay out of the paid average.
Guide prices are what we publish: they get verified at intervals and a hosting promo can shift them overnight, which is why we intend to automate the re-measurement and keep every earlier reading. The complete series sits in the machine-readable feed.
In the rankings this index counts as one input, not the whole verdict. The rest of the procedure, the sources we admit and the reason a commission has no effect on the order, is documented in how we rank.