When you look at the hosting packages on a hosting provider's website it is easy to know the price that corresponds to each of the different package plans. Because of this, it's easy to assume that this price is all that's going to be paid.
For some hosts, it is true that this price is all-inclusive. However, many hosts will have hidden fees that make the cost quite a bit higher than the package price.
The hidden costs of a typical web hosting service contain these two main types:
1. Price changes for hosting packages
2. Add-ons or services for an additional fee
Cost changes due to changes in hosting package prices
The most common reason for hidden costs to arise is a change in the price of the hosting package, which is especially common among inexpensive web hosts.
Many inexpensive web hosts will offer new customer promotional pricing that applies only to the first billing cycle (which varies from one to three years, depending on the host), or the first purchase discount period. If you choose to buy three years at once, then the first purchase discount period locks in for three years, and the price stays locked in at the discounted price for those three years.
This is how many web hosts attract new customers and capture market share with discounted first purchase prices, such as SiteGround, Bluehost, FastComet, and others.
When your initial purchase period expires and you want to start renewing at the regular price of the host, the regular price of the host is generally about 4-5 times higher than the initial purchase period discount price. Many web hosting users can't accept this, so some of them will look for other new web hosting providers to migrate their websites over and enjoy the new customer discount price of the first purchase period of the new web hosting provider.
If your first principle of web hosting choice is cheap, then you need to make sure that when you make a purchase decision, you should clearly know the promotional price for the first purchase period and the normal price after the promotional period. Otherwise, when you go to renew your web hosting subscription, you may be surprised and momentarily overwhelmed by the 4-5 times increase in price.
In fact, when you purchase a package, the corresponding hosting package will be marked with what the original or regular price is, just that you do not pay attention to the regular price of this hosting package due to the design of visual emphasis made by the discounted promotional price. Usually the word "Regular" or "Normally" is displayed, or a price with a strikethrough. This, as we all understand, means that it represents the original price and now offers a discount, highlighting the discounted price and downplaying the original or regular price.
Not only cheap hosts will offer a discount on the first purchase, as mentioned in the previous article, hosts generally use low discounts at the beginning to attract and lock in new users, and try to win customer trust with service and quality during the discount price lock-in period, and find ways to retain customers to get customers to renew their use. This process is like using a funnel with a hole at the bottom to scoop water from a pool to a bucket, and what the hosts earn in the end is the long-term value of the retained customers, while the customers who remain after the discount period ends and the regular price is restored are the long-term value customers.
Pay attention to the billing period of the first purchase discount. Usually, you need to pay upfront for the long term to get the lowest discounted price. For web hosting, this is usually 3 years; for more advanced web hosting types, it is usually only 1 year.
Cost changes due to additional charges for add-ons or services
In addition to hosting package price changes, another factor that creates hidden costs is that users may have to pay extra for add-ons or services other than web hosting.
Some hosting providers will charge you some additional fees, the common ones are
1. SSL certificates - While many hosts now offer free SSL certificates, you will still find some so-called "popular hosts" charging for SSL certificates.
Also, if you need a pan-domain SSL certificate (i.e. support for any second-level domain *.yourdomain.com), most web hosting providers charge extra. This is because the SSL certificate they provide is a basic SSL certificate and does not support wildcard
2. Backup - Many web hosts will charge extra to back up your website.
Although there are already N number of free and good WordPress website backup plugins, many new website builders are not aware of them and may choose additional backup services when paying for a hosting package subscription.
3. Security - Some web hosts offer value-added security precautions, charging extra for security firewall features or malware scanning.
SiteGround, for example, offers a daily website detection scan to check if a website has been hacked or injected with malicious and corrupt code. The cost is $19.80 per year.
4. CDN - Using a content delivery network (CDN) is one good way to speed up your WordPress site. However, some hosts will charge you an additional fee to use a CDN.
In this case, you will have to pay for the CDN while using the host. In fact, this is not a big problem. Once you learn how to build a website, your choices are free.
You can also choose not to use the CDN service provided by the hosting provider and pay for it yourself by using a third-party CDN service.
Among the above services, the backup should pay particular attention to. Although the use of WordPress can be independent site backup and automatic backup plan, but there are still some inconvenience. For example:
If your website has some strange glitches troubleshooting, but at this time still can normally login to the website background, then it does not matter, by operating in the background using the restore function of the backup plugin, restore the latest backup of the website files and database, you can restore to the state before the problem. But in case your website has a serious failure and you can't login to the backend of the website, you can't use the backup software to restore the website at this time, so it's quite troublesome.
You need to go to the directory where the backup plug-in is saved and download the zip file of the backup website files and database via FTP download tool, then restore the database via database management tools such as phpMyAdmin and upload the backup website files to restore the website to the backup state by this manual operation. The whole process is a little bit complicated.
The whole process will be a little bit troublesome, the customer pays for the services of a good web hosting provider will help to do some restoration of the backup site operations, but if the web hosting provider does not help you need to manually operate yourself, the process is a little bit troublesome.
So it is very convenient if the host provider has a service to help you backup your website. You can restore the backed up website directly without logging in under the website backend.
Summary
There can indeed be some hidden costs with web hosting. But don't worry, many hidden costs are completely avoidable.
In this series of tutorials, I will try to avoid unnecessary expenses for everyone, and try to spend money wisely.
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