Cheap web hosting for small business: what it costs in year two

The cheapest list in this market is sorted by the price that stops mattering after month one. You will find them on the row above: a dollar, two dollars and ninety-nine, five dollars and ninety-nine. Sort the same builders by what they cost in year two and the order changes completely, because the renewal rate is published on a different page from the entry rate and almost nobody reads both.

These are the audited figures from this site's own builder pages: the entry rate the vendor prints, the rate the same plan renews at, and the two-year total those two published rates make.

The last four rows are at the end because they are missing from the order, not because their year two is high. Olitt, PlayCode, Squarespace and Strikingly publish no renewal rate at all, so there is no two-year total to sort them by — and the table above used to print one anyway, which is how a vendor's number ends up in another vendor's row. A price you cannot quote is a gap in the table, and it is printed as a gap.

Shopify's first three months cost a dollar, and its two-year total is $528.00. Hostinger's entry rate is $2.99 — the lowest in the table — and it renews at $10.99, a step of 3.68×. And the builder that looks most expensive in year one, Olitt at ten dollars a year, cannot be ranked at all: it is one of the four rows whose year two is not on the page. A cheap entry rate you cannot check is not a cheap subscription.

One caveat, because a sorted table can lie. The cheapest lines in this table are one-page sites and the cheapest monthly rates are for a single plan of a full builder: they are not the same product, and the cheapest website is not the cheapest line here. What the table compares honestly is the thing the comparison pages leave out — what the same plan costs in the second year.

Three price postures, and what each one costs you

1. Flat — the plan renews at the rate it sold at. Six of the fourteen

above do this: Carrd, Webifly, Weblium, 10Web, Tilda and Simvoly. Why do website builders increase renewal prices by 2x to 4x after year one? has the audited step behind every multiple, including the ones that are 1.0×.

1. Intro, then the real price — Hostinger at 3.68×, IONOS at 2.33×, Wix

at 2× and Shopify at 25× to 33×: its annual plan renews at $25/mo and its monthly plan at $33/mo, so the step depends on which way you pay. The four builders you are most likely to meet in a "cheapest" list are the four that move the most.

1. Not published — Olitt, PlayCode, Strikingly and Squarespace publish

an entry rate and no renewal rate. Olitt is the interesting one: every price it publishes is an annual price, and its own page says there is no monthly/annual pair anywhere on it — so the ten dollars a year you read is a subscription rate, not a renewal quote. PlayCode's annual toggle is worse: the rate it would show is rendered client-side and never reaches the page you can read. If the second-year rate is not on the page, the vendor is not telling you what year two costs.

Where the free end fits

The entry rates in this table start at $1.00 and at ten dollars a year, and those numbers are mostly promotional rather than structural: a dollar for three months is not a price, and a free first-year domain is a lease with the renewal marked to be disclosed. What a free website builder actually gives you is the other half of this answer — what each free tier grants, and what it withholds, because a tier that de-indexes your site is free of the one thing a business buys a website for.

Where Zeso sits

The comparison this site's own pages make is on policy and shape, not on a hypothetical price: a flat rate that renews at 1.0×, a one-page static site that is free forever with a domain registered at cost, and an open document you can take with you. How much should a website cost? has the ledger this table comes from, and How to read a hosting price honestly has the six cells a price has — the two columns that decide the bill are the ones a headline never shows.

Sources

• The audited builder pages on this site, each with the published rates, the

two-year total and the date they were read.