Hostinger vs Bluehost vs SiteGround Shared Hosting Pricing Playbook: Intro vs Renewal Rates and 24-Month Costs

Shared hosting is the cheapest way to put a website online, and the cheapest headline is never the price you pay. Every one of these three vendors sells the first year or two at a deep discount and then renews at a multiple of it — Hostinger's Premium plan renews at 5.52 times its intro rate, SiteGround's StartUp at 6.02 times. The honest comparison is not the headline: it is what 1, 5, and 10 sites cost over 12 and 24 months, on the vendors' own pricing pages, read on 14 November 2026. On that measure the ranking changes with the number of sites and the length of the term, and the cheapest first year is not always the cheapest second year.

The nine plans side by side

The intro term in brackets is the whole game: Hostinger's $1.99 and Bluehost's $3.99 are 48- and 36-month prices; SiteGround's $2.99 is a 12-month price. Comparing $1.99 against $2.99 and stopping there compares a four-year lock-in against a one-year teaser.

Hostinger: the low floor, the long lock-in

Hostinger's Black Friday page prices Premium at $1.99 a month on a 48-month term — $95.52 due today — renewing at $10.99 a month. It covers 3 websites, 20 GB of SSD storage, weekly backups, a free domain for the first year, and 2 mailboxes per site free for the first year. Business is $2.79 a month on the same 48-month term, $133.92 due today, renewing at $16.99: unlimited websites, 50 GB of NVMe storage, daily backups, ecommerce free for one year, and AI email marketing free for one year for up to 100 subscribers. Cloud Startup is $7.99 a month, $383.52 due today, renewing at $25.99: unlimited websites, 100 GB of NVMe storage, daily backups plus on-demand backups, and unlimited mailboxes.

All three include the AI Website Builder, WordPress installation, a 30-day money-back guarantee, and cancellation at any time. The renewal multiples are the steepest here after SiteGround: Premium renews at 5.52 times its intro rate, Business at 6.09 times, Cloud Startup at 3.25 times. The 48-month term is what makes the first two years cheap — and it is also a four-year commitment to a vendor whose renewal price you are agreeing to in advance.

Bluehost: the middle price, the visit caps

Bluehost prices Starter at $3.99 a month on a 36-month term, renewing at $9.99. It covers 10 websites, 10 GB of NVMe storage, and 40,000 visits a month, with a free domain for the first year, free SSL, weekly backups, a free CDN, a 30-day money-back guarantee, and a 99.99% uptime SLA. Business is $6.99 a month, renewing at $13.99: 50 websites, 50 GB of NVMe storage, 200,000 visits a month, phone support, a web application firewall, DDoS protection, and domain privacy free for the first year. eCommerce Essentials is $14.99 a month, renewing at $21.99: 100 websites, 100 GB of NVMe storage, 400,000 visits a month, and WooCommerce auto-installation.

Bluehost is the only vendor here that publishes a visit cap on every plan, and the only one whose renewal multiples stay under 2.5 times: Starter 2.50 times, Business 2.00 times, eCommerce Essentials 1.47 times. That makes Bluehost the most predictable renewal — and the visit caps are the ceiling to watch, because 40,000 visits a month is a real limit for a site that starts to rank.

SiteGround: the premium price, the 12-month teaser

SiteGround's US pricing is StartUp at $2.99 a month on a 12-month term, renewing at $17.99; GrowBig at $4.99 a month, renewing at $29.99; GoGeek at $7.99 a month, renewing at $44.99. The 24-month intro rates are higher — $14.99, $24.99, and $39.99 a month — and the month-to-month rates are $24.99, $34.99, and $49.99. StartUp hosts 1 website on 10 GB with about 10,000 visits a month; GrowBig hosts unlimited websites on 50 GB with about 100,000 visits; GoGeek hosts unlimited websites on 100 GB with about 400,000 visits. All three include a free domain, free SSL, daily backups, a CDN with 170+ locations, and unlimited email.

SiteGround's renewal multiples are the highest in the comparison: StartUp 6.02 times, GrowBig 6.01 times, GoGeek 5.63 times. It is also the only vendor here whose intro term is 12 months, which is why its 24-month totals jump so hard — the second year is entirely at renewal price.

The cost math: 1, 5, and 10 sites over 12 and 24 months

Method, stated so anyone can reproduce it: Hostinger's and Bluehost's intro prices are for their longest discounted terms, 48 and 36 months, so months 13 to 24 stay at the intro rate. SiteGround's intro term is 12 months, so months 13 to 24 renew. All figures are US dollars, before tax, using the cheapest plan that covers the site count.

One site, first 12 months: Hostinger Premium $23.88 (12 × $1.99), Bluehost Starter $47.88 (12 × $3.99), SiteGround StartUp $35.88 (12 × $2.99). Hostinger wins the first year for a single site; SiteGround sits in the middle; Bluehost is the most expensive first year of the three.

One site, first 24 months: Hostinger $47.76, Bluehost $95.76, SiteGround $251.76. SiteGround's second year costs $215.88 at the $17.99 renewal rate, more than the entire 24 months at either rival. The renewal multiple, not the intro price, decides the two-year cost.

Five sites, first 12 months: Hostinger Business $33.48 (12 × $2.79), Bluehost Starter $47.88 — Starter already covers 10 websites — SiteGround GrowBig $59.88 (12 × $4.99). Five sites, first 24 months: Hostinger $66.96, Bluehost $95.76, SiteGround $419.76. Ten sites cost exactly the same as five on all three vendors: Hostinger Business is unlimited, Bluehost Starter covers 10, SiteGround GrowBig is unlimited.

That works out to Hostinger $0.28 per site per month ($66.96 / 240), Bluehost $0.40 ($95.76 / 240), and SiteGround $1.75 ($419.76 / 240). The gap widens with scale, not with time: SiteGround costs 6.27 times Hostinger per site per month at ten sites over two years.

The long tail matters too. SiteGround GrowBig over three years costs $779.64 — 12 months at $4.99, then 24 months at $29.99 — an average of $21.66 a month. Hostinger Premium's renewal year costs $131.88 (12 × $10.99). Bluehost Starter over its full 36-month term costs $143.64, and its renewal year costs $119.88 (12 × $9.99). Anyone budgeting past year two should price the renewal year, not the intro year.

Resource ceilings: where each plan actually stops

Intro prices buy shared resources, and each vendor caps them differently. SiteGround publishes its limits in its fair-use knowledge base, last updated 12 October 2021: CPU seconds of 1,000 per hour, 10,000 per day, and 300,000 per month on StartUp; 2,000 per hour, 20,000 per day, and 600,000 per month on GrowBig; 4,000 per hour, 40,000 per day, and 800,000 per month on GoGeek. Memory is capped at 768 MB of RAM per process on all three plans. Inode hard limits are 200,000 files on StartUp, 400,000 on GrowBig, and 600,000 on GoGeek, and databases are capped at 1,000 MB each.

Bluehost caps visits instead of CPU seconds — 40,000 a month on Starter, 200,000 on Business, 400,000 on eCommerce Essentials — and publishes a 99.99% uptime SLA. Hostinger publishes no visit cap and no CPU-seconds limit on its pricing page; its limits are storage (20 GB on Premium, 50 GB on Business, 100 GB on Cloud Startup) and the weekly-versus-daily backup split. The practical reading is straightforward: SiteGround tells you exactly when it will throttle you, Bluehost tells you in visits, and Hostinger tells you in gigabytes.

The execution sequence

1. Count your sites first. One site takes the cheapest single-site plan; five or ten sites take the cheapest plan that covers the count — Hostinger Business, Bluehost Starter, or SiteGround GrowBig.
2. Price 24 months, not the headline. Multiply the intro rate by 24 for Hostinger and Bluehost; for SiteGround, add 12 months at the intro rate to 12 months at the renewal rate.
3. Check the visit or CPU ceiling against your traffic. A site doing 50,000 visits a month has already outgrown Bluehost Starter's 40,000 and SiteGround StartUp's ~10,000.
4. Check the storage ceiling against your media. 10 GB is tight for a photo-heavy site; 20 GB on Hostinger Premium and 50 GB on GrowBig and Business give real headroom.
5. Confirm the free domain terms. All three include a free domain for the first year; the renewal price of the domain is a separate bill in year two.
6. Confirm the backup cadence. Weekly on Hostinger Premium and Bluehost Starter; daily on Hostinger Business and Cloud Startup and on all SiteGround plans.
7. Set the month-11 reminder. Decide on renewal, renegotiation, or migration before the renewal invoice, not after it.
8. Run the total through the website cost calculator before paying. It prices the same 12- and 24-month totals against the rest of the stack.

For the wider hosting picture, compare the frontend layer in Vercel vs Netlify vs Cloudflare Pages Frontend Hosting Pricing and the dedicated layer in Hetzner vs Contabo vs OVH Bare Metal VPS Pricing Playbook — shared hosting is the bottom rung, and knowing what the next rung costs keeps the renewal decision honest.

Pre-purchase checklist

• [x] Site count matched to the cheapest plan that covers it — not the cheapest plan on the page.
• [x] 24-month total computed with the method above, including the renewal year for SiteGround.
• [x] Visit or CPU ceiling checked against current traffic, with headroom for growth.
• [x] Storage checked against current media library size, not against the plan's headline number.
• [x] Free domain confirmed as first-year only, with the year-two domain price noted.
• [x] Backup cadence confirmed — weekly versus daily — and a restore tested before launch.
• [x] Money-back window noted: 30 days on all three vendors.
• [x] Month-11 renewal reminder set before the first payment clears.

Who should NOT use this

Shared hosting is the wrong buy for a store doing real order volume — WooCommerce on a shared plan with a 40,000-visit cap and 768 MB per-process memory limit will queue checkouts at the first traffic spike, and the eCommerce plans here are still shared. It is the wrong buy for a site that needs root access, custom server software, or a guaranteed CPU allocation: that is VPS territory, priced in the Hetzner vs Contabo vs OVH Bare Metal VPS Pricing Playbook. It is the wrong buy for anyone who needs a fixed monthly price for three years — every intro rate in this comparison expires, and the renewal is two to six times the intro. And it is the wrong buy for a business that cannot tolerate a neighbour's traffic spike slowing its own site: that is what the shared in shared hosting means.