Every item on this list is here because of something I got wrong. That is the only reason any of them are on it. I did not sit down and design a framework for choosing a web host; I signed up for things, discovered the part nobody mentions, and wrote down the question that would have saved me.
It is short on purpose. Eight questions, and I can get through them for a new project in about twenty minutes, most of which is spent reading pricing pages properly instead of skimming them. Nothing here involves star ratings or a scoring system, because I do not believe the ones I see on other hosting sites, including the ones this site used to publish.
The short version
- What does this cost in year two?
- Is anything actually caching the pages, or does every visit run PHP?
- Where do the backups live, and have I restored one?
- Which limits are published, and which ones am I guessing at?
- Does my actual use fit their terms?
- What is not included that I am going to need anyway?
- Can I leave without asking permission?
- Am I about to prepay four years to a company I have used for four minutes?
1. What does this cost in year two?
The headline price on a shared hosting page is an introductory rate attached to a long prepaid term. The number that matters is the renewal, and it is usually two to five times higher.
Some examples I read on 20 September 2026, all from the providers’ own pages. Hostinger’s Premium plan is $2.99 a month on the 48-month term and renews at $10.99, which is a jump of 3.7 times and requires paying four years up front to get (Hostinger web hosting). IONOS lists a Plus plan at $1 a month in a promotion that renews at $14 (IONOS web hosting). SiteGround’s StartUp is 2.99 euros a month renewing at 15.99, excluding VAT, on a 12-month prepaid term. That last one came with a detail worth knowing: from Spain, siteground.com redirected me with a 302 to the European site and quoted euros, so if you are in the United States you will see different figures on the same link.
And then there is the category I find most annoying: providers that publish no renewal price at all. DonDominio’s hosting page lists annual prices without VAT and, when I checked it on the same day, did not state a renewal price or a minimum term anywhere on the page. That is not a crime, but it means you cannot compare it with anything, and I treat “not published” as a fact about the company rather than an oversight.
Do the arithmetic over four years before you enjoy the discount. I keep my own totals, with renewals, in what I actually pay for hosting, domains and email.
2. Is anything actually caching the pages?
This one went on the list in September 2026, and it went on because of my own blog rather than a client project.
When I checked this blog with curl on 20 September 2026, five requests from a home fibre line in Valencia, Spain, no response carried a page-cache header, and adding a cache-busting query string to force the origin did not make a single request slower. There was no page cache at all. Every visit was running PHP 8.3.33 on LiteSpeed.
That is a spot check and I will not oversell it. Five requests from one line on one day is not a benchmark, it only covers the HTML of the home page, and it tells you nothing about what a reader in the United States sees. But the header check costs nothing and answers a real question, and the answer on a “LiteSpeed-powered” plan was not the one I assumed. Marketing tells you what the server is capable of. The headers tell you what it is doing.
3. Where do the backups live, and have I restored one?
Two separate questions, and the second is the one people skip. A backup you have never restored is a belief, not a backup.
What I look for on the pricing page: how often, how long they are kept, whether restoring is self-service, and whether it costs anything. On Hostinger’s page the Unlimited plan is the cheapest tier that lists daily backups (checked 20 September 2026), which is a detail worth catching before you buy the tier below it because the storage was enough.
Whatever the answer, I keep my own copy somewhere the host cannot reach, because a backup that lives inside the account is no help the day the problem is the account. Before every significant change to a site I take a local copy first.
4. Which limits are published, and which am I guessing at?
Shared hosting pages are generous with the numbers that sound big and quiet about the ones that bite. Storage, number of websites and mailboxes are always there. The limits that actually decide whether your site stays up during a busy hour, things like CPU allowance, PHP workers and concurrent processes, were not on any of the shared pricing pages I read on 20 September 2026. They exist, they are just somewhere else, usually in a knowledge base article you have to go looking for.
I do not treat that as disqualifying, because almost everyone does it. I treat it as a reason to go and find the article before signing, and as a reason to be suspicious of the word “unlimited” anywhere on the page. Unlimited bandwidth on a plan with a hard CPU ceiling is a sentence that means very little.
The same applies to uptime promises. A percentage in a hero banner is not a commitment; the commitment is whatever the service level agreement says, and those documents are worth thirty seconds of your attention. Bluehost, for example, advertises a “99.99% Uptime SLA” on its shared hosting page (checked 20 September 2026). That is their claim about their service, not something I have verified, and I have never been a Bluehost customer. I go through how to read those documents in how to read a hosting uptime guarantee.
5. Does my actual use fit their terms?
This check is newer than the others and it is the one people find surprising. A plan can be technically perfect and still be the wrong plan because of a sentence in the terms.
The clearest example I know: Vercel’s FAQ states that “Our Hobby plan is for personal, non-commercial use” (Vercel pricing, checked 20 September 2026). A blog with ads on it is not obviously non-commercial. If you are planning to monetise, the free tier that looked ideal may not be a tier you are entitled to use, and finding that out later is a worse day than finding it out now.
So: read what the free or cheap tier is for, not just what it includes.
6. What is not included that I will need anyway?
A shared plan covers a surprising amount and then stops, usually without telling you where.
A concrete one from my own measurements: not one of the five sites I checked on 20 September 2026 sends a Strict-Transport-Security header. Not the two WordPress blogs on shared hosting, not my agency site, not the VPS, not the static site on Cloudflare Pages. HTTPS works everywhere and redirects correctly, but HSTS is a header somebody has to add, and on none of those setups did anybody add it by default, including me. It is a small thing. It is also exactly the kind of small thing that is nobody’s job unless you decide it is yours.
Add to that list: page caching, a CDN in front if your audience is far from the server, mail deliverability beyond having a mailbox, and monitoring. If you want the plain-language version of what a hosting plan is and is not, I wrote what you are actually buying when you buy hosting for exactly that.
7. Can I leave without asking permission?
How easily you can get out is a property of the platform, and you should establish it on the way in rather than on the way out. My own move, this site from a static export to WordPress on the same host, was the easy version of leaving: every file was mine to copy, and it still left a mess behind.
The practical version of the question: can I download the files and the database myself, today, without opening a ticket? Is my domain registered somewhere independent, so that leaving the host does not mean negotiating for my own address? Closed platforms are the sharp end of this, because the site as it exists cannot leave at all; what leaves is your content, and you rebuild.
Where I have the choice, I keep the domain at a registrar, separately from where the site is hosted. It costs nothing to do and it removes an entire category of argument. And when the move does come, the hard part is not the files. It is the URLs you leave behind, which I learned the slow way and wrote up in moving a site without leaving old URLs live for months.
8. Am I about to prepay four years?
The cheapest advertised price almost always requires the longest term. Hostinger’s 48-month term is the clearest case: the $2.99 figure exists only if you pay for four years at once.
Sometimes I take that deal. I take it when I already know the provider, which for me means Hostinger, because I have sites there and I know what the panel does and does not do. I do not take it for a provider I have never used, no matter how good the arithmetic looks, because the discount is real and my judgement about a company I have used for four minutes is not.
What I stopped checking
Storage size, unless the site is unusual. Small WordPress sites do not run out of 20 GB, and I have never once chosen a host because it offered more disk.
Star ratings on review sites, including the ones that used to be on this one. A number out of five with no method behind it tells you what the writer wanted you to click, not what the service is like.
Uptime percentages quoted in marketing, as opposed to in the SLA. And long feature grids, which are mostly there to fill the page. Six things matter on a shared plan and the grid has forty rows.
Where a checklist runs out
It cannot tell you what the support is like. I have never had a serious support incident with any host, including Hostinger, which means I have no basis for an opinion about response times or how good anyone’s chat is. Anybody who gives you a figure for that should be able to show you the tickets.
It cannot rank providers I have not paid for. SiteGround, Bluehost, WP Engine, Kinsta: I have read their pricing pages and that is the entire extent of my relationship with them. Everything I can say first hand is about the accounts I hold, which I list in the hosts I actually pay for.
And it cannot protect you from the ordinary failure mode, which is not choosing a bad host. It is choosing a fine host for a site you did not understand yet. The checklist is quick enough that it is worth running again in a year, when the site is a different size and you are a different person about it.