Your hosting renewal doubled. Here is how to read a price before you buy

The invoice arrives twelve months after you signed up and it is two to four times what you paid. Nothing went wrong and nobody broke a rule: you bought a promotional first term, and the renewal is the real price. It was on the page, in grey, under the price you actually read.

This is how the industry works, and you are not going to change it. You can learn to read it in thirty seconds.

The five questions

1. 1What is the renewal price, in numbers?Not "renews at the regular rate" — the number. If a host makes you calculate it from a percentage in a footnote, that is a decision about how much they want you to know.
2. 2What is the term you are actually buying?The headline is usually the monthly equivalent of a three-year prepayment. "$2.99/mo" often means $107.64 today, and the renewal in three years is at a rate nobody quotes.
3. 3Does the discount apply once or every term?This is the question that separates a promo from a real discount. "Two months free on annual billing" applied every year is a pricing policy. Applied once is a coupon.
4. 4What does cancelling cost?Not the refund window — the leaving. Migration fees, "setup fee waived on signup, charged on cancellation", domains registered in the host's name.
5. 5What is priced separately?Backups, SSL, staging, a WAF, malware cleanup, email. A plan that is $3 cheaper with backups at $2 a month is not cheaper.

Ask all five before you hand over a card. Every one of them has a number as its answer.

Do the arithmetic over three years

One number, comparable across hosts:

three-year cost = first term × terms in the promo period
                + renewal price × remaining terms
                + anything billed separately × 36 months

A worked example with numbers from a real promo shelf:

Host A is cheaper for exactly twelve months, and then it is more than twice the price. Both prices are honest; only one of them is the price.

The tells

• The renewal price is not on the pricing page at all. It is in the terms, or in the cart at step three.
• “Save 70%” with no baseline. Seventy per cent off what?
• A countdown timer on a plan that has been on sale continuously for two years.
• Different prices for different terms with no renewal column — three columns of promo and no indication which one you are anchored to afterwards.
• A cancellation flow that requires a ticket. A host that is confident about its renewal price lets you cancel with a button.

What to do if you are already in it

You have more room than you think:

1. Check what the renewal actually is in the client area before the invoice. Most panels show the next due amount thirty days ahead.
2. Ask. A retention discount is often one ticket away. It is usually a one-year extension of the promo, which means you will have this conversation again next year.
3. If you move, move deliberately. Take a backup you have verified, check where the domain is registered, and switch DNS after testing, not before. An unplanned migration at renewal deadline is how people lose email.
4. Write the renewal date in a calendar with a reminder six weeks out. That is enough time to move calmly.

We publish one price per plan and renew at it — the same figure on the page is the figure on the invoice in year two and year three, and yearly billing is the same −17% every year rather than a first-term coupon. The comparison table on each hosting page shows the monthly and the yearly price side by side, because the point of the policy is that you can check it.

The short version

Promotional pricing is a loan against your future attention. Ask for the renewal number, multiply over three years, add what is billed separately, and compare that. It takes half a minute and it is the only comparison that means anything.