What I Pay for Hosting, Domains and Email

The obvious way to write this post is to publish my own invoices with the personal details blacked out. I decided against it. An invoice tells you what one person paid on one day, on a term and a promotion that are unlikely to be the ones you are offered this afternoon, and publishing mine would look like evidence while working as decoration.

So here is the version I can stand behind: exactly what I hold and pay for right now, and next to it what those same products cost on their public pricing pages on 20 September 2026, checked from Spain, with the links so you can see whether they have moved since. Where a page does not publish something, I say that instead of guessing.

What I actually hold today

• One Hostinger shared plan carrying three sites: this blog, vireltify.com and creativowebvlc.com. The two blogs are WordPress on LiteSpeed with PHP 8.3.33; the agency site is static HTML served through the host’s CDN.
• One Hostinger VPS, plan KVM 1, carrying a single Node app behind Caddy.
• Domains at DonDominio and the ones that came bundled with the hosting plan, plus one at IONOS that I look after for a family project rather than pay for myself.
• Mailboxes, included with the shared plan rather than bought separately.
• A static site on Cloudflare Pages and demo deployments on Netlify, both on the free tiers, both with real domains and real certificates.

That is the whole estate. Five sites, two paid plans, two free platforms. I mention it because hosting articles are usually written as if everyone is choosing one plan for one site, and the interesting money question is what happens when you are carrying a handful of things at once and they all renew in different months.

What the same shelf costs today

Two warnings that belong inside the table rather than under it. SiteGround’s US page redirected me, with a 302, to its European site because I was browsing from Spain, so those are euro prices excluding VAT and not what a reader in Ohio would see. And DonDominio publishes an annual price with no renewal figure and no minimum term anywhere on the page. I am not going to invent one. “Not published on the page, checked 20 September 2026” is a real answer, and it is also a data point about the company.

The renewal multiplier is the entire story

Divide each renewal price by its entry price and the shared hosting market turns into something much easier to read.

The one I keep coming back to is the last row. The VPS has the smallest jump of anything on the list, and it ends up within about a dollar of the cheapest shared plan at renewal, which quietly rearranges the whole shared-versus-VPS conversation. I go into what that dollar actually buys, in work rather than money, in shared or VPS: I run both.

The one that should make you read the small print is the first. A one dollar promotional month that becomes fourteen is not a scandal, it is an advertised price, but a table showing only the left-hand column is not information, it is a sales page with a border around it.

One small site, eight years, on published numbers

Here is the arithmetic nobody does at checkout. Take Hostinger Premium, the plan shape closest to what carries this blog. Forty-eight months at $2.99 is $143.52, paid in one go on day one. The following forty-eight months at the published renewal rate of $10.99 come to $527.52. Same plan, same site, 3.7 times the money, eight years in.

The VPS does the same sum like this: twenty-four months at $6.49 is $155.76, and the next twenty-four at $11.99 is $287.76.

Two caveats I am not going to bury. The pages quote a monthly-equivalent renewal rate and do not spell out what term you have to commit to in order to get it, so this is arithmetic on published monthly figures rather than a quotation. And prices move, which is exactly why every figure here carries the date I read it.

What I could not price on 20 September

Two real gaps, and I would rather leave them open than fill them with a number from memory.

• Domain renewals. I did not re-check the domain renewal prices at DonDominio or IONOS that day, so there is no figure in this post. What I can say is structural: several hosting plans throw in a domain free for the first year, Hostinger Premium and IONOS Essential among them, and a free first year is a discount on year one, not a free domain. I put what I know about the three registrars I actually use in the three registrars I use, and where the renewal price hides.
• Email after the bundled year. Hostinger’s Premium plan lists two mailboxes per website, free for one year. After that it is a line item, and the amount was not something I verified on the day. For comparison, DonDominio’s 39 EUR a year hosting plan lists 15 mailboxes of 2 GB, which is a completely different way of pricing the same thing. What actually broke for me had nothing to do with price, and it is in email on your own domain: what I set up and what broke.

Where the bill is zero, and what that zero covers

Two of my five sites cost nothing to host: a static site on Cloudflare Pages, with a real domain and a certificate I never touch, and the demos I park on Netlify. On the published free plans, the ceiling a brochure site meets first on Cloudflare is 500 builds a month rather than traffic, and Netlify now meters everything in credits, 300 a month on the free plan, with a production deploy priced at 15 (Pages limits and netlify.com/pricing, both checked 20 September 2026). Zero is the hosting line only: the domain, and email if you want it, still cost money every year. The limits, the terms and the one clause to read before you put ads on a free plan are in free hosting that is actually worth using.

The three arguments I keep having about this table

Should I pay four years up front to get the cheap price?

Only for a host you have already lived with. Forty-eight months at $2.99 is $143.52 of commitment to a company you may have chosen from a comparison table twenty minutes ago. My own compromise is to take a short term first, move the site if I dislike it, and only then buy a long term. The discount is real, but it is a bet on your future self not wanting to leave.

Is it cheaper to take the free domain from the host?

For year one, yes, by definition. My preference is to keep domains at a registrar and hosting at a host, and it is not about money. When the registration lives somewhere else, moving hosts is a DNS change on a quiet afternoon rather than a negotiation with the company you are trying to leave.

Can I just not pay for hosting at all?

If the site is static, genuinely yes, and I do it. If it is WordPress, no, because WordPress needs PHP and a database and free tiers of the static platforms do not run either. And if it carries advertising, read the terms of the free plan before you build on it: at least one well-known free tier is for non-commercial use only.

What I would budget, if you made me put a figure on it

For one small WordPress site, budget the renewal price from day one and treat the promotional year as a windfall. On the numbers above that means planning around roughly $10 to $17 a month for shared hosting, plus a domain renewal you should look up yourself at your own registrar, plus nothing for email if your plan includes mailboxes and something if it does not. If your site is static, budget nothing for hosting and spend the attention on the domain instead.

The mistake I see most often is not overpaying. It is budgeting for the sign-up price, forgetting the renewal date, and then discovering the real number in a card statement fourteen months later. Put the renewal dates in a calendar. It is the cheapest hosting optimisation there is, and it is the one nobody sells. If you want the list of what I am paying for and what runs on it, that is the hosts I actually pay for in 2026.