How to compare web hosting plans (without getting burned)

TL;DR — the six things to line up

1. 1. Intro price vs. renewal price (per month, per year).
2. 2. Contract length required to unlock the intro price.
3. 3. Storage type (SSD vs NVMe) and amount.
4. 4. Bandwidth — a real number, or an "unmetered" fair-use policy.
5. 5. What's included (SSL, backups, migration, email).
6. 6. Refund window and what triggers extra fees.

Below is what to look for in each — and the traps that make cheap hosts expensive.

1. Price vs. renewal rate

The single biggest gap between hosts isn't the sticker price — it's the renewal. A plan advertised at $2.95/mo often renews at $11.99–$14.99/mo. If you commit to a 3-year term to lock the intro rate, you'll still hit that renewal when it's time to resign.

A plan at $8/mo that renews at $10/mo is almost always cheaper over 3 years than a $2.95 teaser that jumps to $14.99.

2. Storage: SSD, NVMe, or "unlimited"

Storage marketing is a mess. Here's the plain-English version:

• NVMe SSD — the fastest common option today. If two plans are close in price and one is NVMe, take the NVMe.
• SATA SSD — still solid for most brochure sites and small stores. Noticeably slower than NVMe under database load.
• "Unlimited storage" — never actually unlimited. Look for the acceptable use policy: caps around 100–500k inodes (files) and bans on using the host as a backup or media server.

For a WordPress or Shopify-scale site, 20–50 GB of NVMe is plenty. Don't pay for "unlimited" if it means giving up NVMe.

3. Bandwidth limits

Same story as storage. "Unmetered bandwidth" is a fair-use policy, not infinity. In practice you'll only bump into limits if you're serving heavy video or images from the host itself.

For a rough sanity check: an average HTML/CSS page is under 2 MB. That means 1 TB of bandwidth is roughly 500,000 pageviews — more than most sites will ever hit. If a host quotes a real number under 100 GB, that's a shared-hosting entry tier and you should size up.

4. What's actually included

Cheap hosts hit their price point by unbundling. Before you compare monthly cost, add up what each of these would cost as an add-on:

• • SSL certificate — should be free (Let's Encrypt). Some resellers still charge $50+/yr.
• • Daily backups + one-click restore — often a $2–5/mo add-on.
• • Site migration — free at most reputable hosts, $99–$149 elsewhere.
• • Email hosting — increasingly separate; some hosts drop it entirely on entry plans.
• • Staging environment — standard on managed WordPress plans, rare on cheap shared.
• • CDN — Cloudflare's free tier covers most people, but a host-integrated CDN is convenient.

5. The fees hosts bury

The usual suspects to search the fine print for:

• • Domain privacy — should be free; still $10–15/yr at some registrars.
• • Restore-from-backup fee — some hosts charge per restore even when backups are "included".
• • Overage fees for CPU, RAM, or inode limits on shared plans.
• • Cancellation fees or forfeited prepaid months outside the refund window.
• • Dedicated IP — rarely needed, often upsold aggressively.

6. Refund window and support

30–45 day money-back is standard for shared hosting. VPS and dedicated typically don't offer one. Before you commit for 3 years to lock the intro rate, open a pre-sales chat and time the response — it's the cheapest way to preview the support you'll actually get.