Search for cheap website hosting and the results all show a number under three dollars. That number is real, and it is also temporary. It applies to your first term — often only if you pay for three or four years up front — and then the price roughly triples. None of this is hidden exactly; it is in the small print on every one of these pages. It is just never in the number you remember.
The promotional price and the renewal price
Figures below were taken from each provider’s own pricing page on 8 September 2026. Prices are in US dollars, before tax, and they change often — check the date on any comparison you read, including this one.
| Host and plan | Advertised | Renews at | Multiplier |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hostinger Premium | $2.99 / month on a 48-month term | $10.99 / month | 3.7× |
| Hostinger Unlimited | $3.99 / month on a 48-month term | $16.99 / month | 4.3× |
| Namecheap Stellar | $2.28 / month, first year | $5.88 / month | 2.6× |
| Namecheap Stellar Plus | $2.98 / month, first year | $7.88 / month | 2.6× |
| DreamHost Launch | $2.89 / month, first year | $10.99 / month | 3.8× |
Two details do more damage than the multiplier itself.
The cheapest rate usually requires a four-year commitment. Hostinger’s $2.99 is not a monthly arrangement — it is roughly $143 paid in advance for 48 months. Leaving early does not refund the difference.
The free domain is free for one year. After that it renews at the registrar’s standard rate, added to the higher hosting rate, in the same invoice. On a yearly-term plan the effect is starkest: a first year near $36 becomes a second year near $145.
Why the gap exists
Shared hosting is a commodity. The product is nearly identical between providers, so the competition happens entirely on the number in the advertisement, and the only way to keep advertising a low number is to recover the margin later.
It works because switching is unpleasant. Moving a WordPress site means moving files, a database, email accounts and DNS, and most people would rather absorb an extra eight dollars a month than spend a weekend on it. The renewal price is priced against the cost of leaving, not against the cost of serving your site.
None of that makes these hosts dishonest. Hostinger, Namecheap and DreamHost all run real infrastructure and publish their renewal rates openly. It does mean the advertised price tells you almost nothing about what you will pay.
Why a static site changes the maths
Shared hosting is priced for a dynamic site. WordPress needs PHP running, a MySQL database, memory reserved for you, and enough CPU to build every page when a visitor arrives. That is what you are renting.
A static site — the kind an AI tool hands you, or a designer exports — needs none of it. The pages are already finished before anyone asks for them. Serving them is closer to serving an image than to running an application.
So the whole cost structure disappears, which is why static hosting is cheap without a promotional trick. There is no database to keep alive and no server process to reserve. It is also why static hosts publish one price that stays the same: there is no expensive resource whose true cost has to be recovered in year two.
Do not compare $2.99 against $5. Compare the four-year total. Hostinger Premium at the advertised rate is about $143 for 48 months, then $10.99 a month after that. A static host at $5 a month, unchanged, is $240 over the same four years and $60 a year thereafter — less than the renewal rate, with nothing to renegotiate.
When free is genuinely the right answer
Free static hosting is not a trap in every case. Two of the four below are free indefinitely within their limits, and if your situation fits, use them.
GitHub Pages is free for public repositories, with a custom domain and automatic SSL. The cost is Git: a repository, commits, and public source files unless you pay for a plan that allows private ones.
Cloudflare Pages has no bandwidth charge on static requests at all and allows commercial use. Direct Upload takes a folder without Git. The catches are 500 builds a month, up to 1,000 files through the browser uploader, and an apex domain that has to be on Cloudflare’s nameservers.
Netlify’s free tier deserves a closer look than its reputation suggests. It is 300 credits a month covering deploys and bandwidth together, and when they run out the site is paused rather than slowed. Fine for a personal page, risky for anything a client sees.
Vercel’s free tier is non-commercial only. Personal projects, yes. A business site, no — that is $20 per user per month.
What a small site should actually cost
For a static site of a few pages, the honest budget in 2026 is a domain at $10 to $20 a year, and hosting somewhere between nothing and $10 a month depending on how much you value not thinking about it.
sofast sits in that range on purpose: $5 a month for two sites and 500 MB, $10 a month for ten sites and 5 GB, with a custom domain and an automatic SSL certificate on every plan and no promotional rate that expires. There is no free tier, which is a deliberate choice — we would rather charge a small amount and keep your site online than run a free tier we would have to take away later.
Whichever way you go, the useful habit is the same: write down what the second year costs before you buy the first one.
Common questions
The answers below cover renewal rates, hidden fees, whether cheap means slow, domains, and moving between hosts.
Almost certainly because your introductory term ended. Budget hosts advertise a first-term rate and renew at their standard rate, which is typically two to four times higher, and the free first-year domain renews at the same time. Both appear on one invoice, which is why the increase looks larger than either change alone.
For a shared plan, sometimes — you are sharing a machine, and a busy neighbour affects you. For static hosting the question barely applies: files are served from a content delivery network, and the price difference between providers reflects storage and support rather than speed. A $5 static host is not slower than a $50 one.
Only if you are certain about the site and the provider. Four years is longer than most small sites last in their original form, refunds beyond the initial window are limited, and you are betting on a company’s service quality over a period in which it may change ownership. A monthly or yearly plan at a slightly higher rate buys the option to leave.
No, and there is a good argument for not doing it. Keeping the domain at a separate registrar means moving hosts is a DNS change rather than a transfer, and it avoids a lapsed hosting bill putting your domain name at risk. The bundled free-first-year domain is convenient, not cheaper over time.
If it is personal and you are comfortable with Git, GitHub Pages costs nothing. If you want to avoid Git, Cloudflare Pages Direct Upload is free and allows commercial use. If you want updating it to be as easy as publishing it, that is what paid static hosting buys, starting at around $5 a month.
If the site is already static — plain HTML, CSS and images — yes, and it is mostly a download-and-upload job. If it runs WordPress, it is a bigger project: you either keep WordPress, or export the pages to static files and accept that comment forms and plugins stop working. Worth checking which one you actually have before you plan the move.
If your site is a finished folder rather than a WordPress install, these guides cover getting it online without the four-year commitment.
