How much does web hosting cost per month?
The short answer
For a normal website, expect $3 to $10 a month for shared hosting in 2026. Promo prices start around $2 to $3, but watch the renewal, which is often two to four times higher. Managed WordPress hosting starts around $30 a month.
In detail
The hosting market runs on teaser pricing. The first term is cheap, then you pay the real rate. Hostinger charges about $3 a month if you prepay four years and about $11 at renewal. Bluehost jumps from about $4 to about $10, SiteGround from $3 to $18. So always compare on the renewal price, because that is what you pay for years.
Honest exceptions exist. Namecheap renews at a still-modest $5.88 and IONOS at a reasonable $8, so the cheap start does not turn into an expensive year two.
When is more expensive worth it? The moment your site earns money. Managed WordPress hosting (Kinsta, WP Engine, from $30 a month on annual billing) takes updates, security, backups, and speed off your plate. Overkill for a hobby site, but cheaper than one day of your own troubleshooting per month for a business site.
The honest range for shared hosting today: $1.00 to $5.99 a month in the first year, and $5.88 to $17.99 a month after that. IONOS is the cheapest way in, Namecheap the cheapest to stay, SiteGround the most expensive to keep.
The number nobody quotes is the multi-year one. Count one promo year plus two at the renewal rate and three years of shared hosting runs from $164.88 (Namecheap) to $467.64 (SiteGround), with a median across the eight hosts of $299.04. That is the figure to budget with.
Managed WordPress hosting is a different tier, not a pricier version of the same thing. Kinsta and WP Engine both start at $30 a month on annual billing, which buys server-level caching, staging, daily backups and support that does nothing but WordPress.
Cloudways sits between the two worlds at $11 a month for the smallest DigitalOcean server, with no limit on how many sites you put on it. If you run more than one site, that changes the per-site math completely.
The figures in this section come from the August 2026 snapshot of the prices we record for each host every month. Promotions change, so check the renewal price on the provider page before you buy, and treat everything above as a guide rather than a quote.