Building your own website is a rewarding venture that can attract an audience or generate revenue, especially as a budding blogger or a new business. However, first-time site builders often fall victim to inflated costs. In my experience, the greatest hurdle for novices isn’t the learning to use the technology; it’s the aggressive upselling of unnecessary add-ons. For example, you may like the idea of a free domain name, but not when the renewal rate is higher than it would be at a dedicated registrar. As someone who’s covered the web hosting space for five years, I offer the following six money-saving strategies to help you navigate the many checkout traps.
The Best Web Hosting Services We’ve Tested
(Credit: Bluehost/PCMag)
1. You Don’t Always Need an Annual Hosting Contract
Web hosting services always present their best rates first, with lower prices for annual or multi-year contracts. An attractive $2-per-month rate sounds great… until you read the fine print and see the higher renewal price after the year-long deal ends. That deal works if you plan to have a website for the long haul, but what if you only need temporary hosting for, say, a special occasion or a charity drive? In those cases, a year-long hosting plan is a waste of your money.
To avoid those additional costs, you should search for a host’s monthly rate, usually by tinkering with price menus. If a company lacks monthly options, move on. Don’t be afraid to shop around; there are many great web hosting services that charge on a month-to-month basis.
That said, keep in mind that shorter, month-to-month contracts forgo many of the bonus perks associated with the advertised deal. If a web host offers free domain registration or an SSL certificate (more on those in a bit), it usually applies only to the annual contract shown on the plan page.
(Credit: HostGator/PCMag)
2. Be Wary of Hidden ‘Free Domain Name’ Fees
Web hosting services often bundle domain registration into their hosting packages. At a glance, this can save you a lot of money, since you don’t need to register a URL elsewhere at a potentially higher fee. However, those are often introductory rates. Typically, you’ll have the domain for a year; afterward, you must renew it with your hosting provider, usually at a significantly higher rate than if you had purchased it directly from a registrar. What was a free feature during the first year could easily become a $15-$30 additional charge tacked onto your web hosting renewal fee.
Free domains aren’t inherently bad; just do your due diligence and find out what the domain renewal rate is from your potential web host. This information isn’t immediately obvious and may require contacting the web host’s customer support team for pricing. With that info, you should check out other registrars to find the best rates.
(Credit: Hostgator/PCMag)
3. Get Free WHOIS Protection
Whenever you register a domain, your name and address are listed in the WHOIS database. If your domain is registered to a business address, then that’s not much of a concern. However, if it’s registered to you, potentially shady people will know where you live.
Most web hosts don’t include free privacy protection. HostGator, for example, charges $14.95 per year to keep your name out of WHOIS. You can avoid that additional fee if you switch to a domain registrar like Cloudflare, Namecheap, or Porkbun, which include WHOIS privacy as a standard feature.
Of course, if you don’t mind having your address in a public database, you can build a website without this privacy protection. Still, we recommend using a registrar that offers this protection for free—safeguarding your data is of utmost importance in an age of online scams.
(Credit: Cloudflare/PCMag)
4. Avoid Paying for an SSL Certificate
Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) is a standard internet technology that secures the web connection between the server and client sides. This is a useful feature, particularly if you want to sell goods or collect visitor information via a web form. SSL encryption is so common that many visitors feel more secure when a URL features that familiar HTTPS and lock icon in the address bar. Most browsers now warn visitors when they visit a page without SSL security, which may discourage potential visitors from staying. You don’t want that if you’re trying to make money online.
Many web hosting services offer complimentary SSL certificates. However, you must check whether the SSL certificate is truly free, or you’ll pay for it later when it’s time to renew your contract. SSL prices are all over the map; you can pay anywhere from $10 to more than $500 per year. If you want to save money, Cloudflare and Let’s Encrypt provide free SSL certificates. Some web hosting services, including DreamHost, integrate Let’s Encrypt SSL certificates into their backends, enabling one-click activation.
Get Our Best Stories!
Your Daily Dose of Our Top Tech News
By clicking Sign Me Up, you confirm you are 16+ and agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy
Policy.
Thanks for signing up!
Your subscription has been confirmed. Keep an eye on your inbox!
Note: Although you should have an SSL certificate for e-commerce, it’s not necessary for a hobbyist site or a purely informative blog.
(Credit: Wordfence/PCMag)
5. You Don’t Need Every Security Option
Beyond SSL certificates, web hosting services offer additional security features, including malware detection, daily website backups, site monitoring, and DDoS protection. Some hosting services include these features as part of an annual subscription; others include them as add-ons.
Recommended by Our Editors
If your prospective website will handle valuable or sensitive data, such as client credit card info, then live security monitoring should be at the top of your security concerns. However, you could handle certain security aspects yourself, or forgo them altogether if you aren’t running a business or handling valuable data. Why pay Bluehost $2.99 per month for website backups when you can manually backup your website yourself?
Security suites and professional cleanup services, like SiteLock, can cost as little as $3.99 and as much as $44.99 per month for businesses. But if you use WordPress, you can leverage free security plug-ins like Wordfence for automated scanning and a basic firewall. The free version of Sucuri is also worth considering, but keep in mind that this offers no firewall protection. That said, Cloudflare comes to the rescue again with its free plan, which offers DDoS protection and a global CDN to block malicious traffic before it ever reaches your server. A little research can save quite a bit of money over time.
(Credit: Hostgator)
6. Don’t Rely on Your Host: Back Up Your Own Website
Many web hosting services offer “free backups,” but there’s a catch. While these hosts do backup your website, these are intended for the company’s own recovery (like some catastrophic server failure). It’s meant to protect the host’s server infrastructure, not your user data. In fact, hosts often label backups as “courtesy only,” meaning they don’t guarantee the backup will exist or work should you ever actually need it. Regardless, if you would like access to the host’s backup of your website, you will need to pay for it.
Expect to see a restoration fee every time you restore your hacked or broken website via a host-provided backup. Sadly, the term “free daily backups” is often just a marketing hook to make the service seem more generous and appealing, with hefty restoration fees buried in the host’s terms of service. For example, HostGator offers courtesy backups with all its shared hosting plans. What you don’t see is the $49 fee for restore requests: you only find this detail at the bottom of its backup policy page.
Not all hosts do this, though. SiteGround, for example, includes a 1-click restore tool for free on most of its plans. But it’s important to be informed, because hidden fees like these feel predatory, hitting us below the belt when we’re most vulnerable. When your website is broken, you’re stressed out and frustrated, and probably willing to pay extra to get it back online–a sentiment some hosts bank on.
The solution? Never rely solely on your host. Follow the 3-2-1 rule and keep three copies of your data on two different media types, with one stored off-site. If you use WordPress, free plug-ins like UpdraftPlus let you schedule backups and send them directly to your own Google Drive or Dropbox. Lastly, verify before signing up with a new host. Search their Knowledge Base or Terms of Service for phrases like “restoration fee” or “recovery fee.”
5 Smart Ways to Avoid Sneaky Web Hosting Fees
About Our Expert
Gabriel Zamora
Senior Writer, Software
Experience
In 2014, I began my career at PCMag as a freelancer. That blossomed into a full-time position in 2021, and I now review email marketing apps, mobile operating systems, web hosting services, streaming music platforms, and video games as a senior writer. I’m a graduate of Hunter College, a hard-core gamer, and an Apple enthusiast.
Read Full Bio
