Hosting Packages and Pricing

What these plans are, and how they differ

The table below carries the current numbers. This section covers the part a table cannot: which plan fits which business, and why the differences exist at all.

There are three plans. Starter is sized for a personal site, a family or club site, a church, a single-location trade business, or any brochure site of a few dozen pages — the kind of site that exists to tell people who you are, where you are, and how to reach you. Small Business is for a business with staff who each need an address at the domain, a site carrying real photography, a store attached, or anything running WordPress. Custom exists because a fixed plan is a poor fit for several domains under one account, an online store doing genuine order volume, or an application that needs something shared hosting does not offer; those are priced after we look at the site rather than before.

Two differences do most of the sorting. The first is mailboxes: Starter covers a handful of addresses, Small Business covers considerably more, and the number of people who need an address at your domain is usually the clearest signal of which plan you belong on. The second is room — storage and monthly transfer — which almost never matters for a brochure site and starts to matter as soon as the site carries large photograph galleries or a catalog.

Monthly or annual, and what the setup fee is for

Every plan can be paid monthly or annually. Annual costs less over a year than twelve monthly payments, which is ordinary and not a trick.

There is a one-time setup fee on monthly plans, and it is waived on annual plans. It is worth explaining what it covers, because "setup fee" is a phrase that has been abused across this industry. Setting up an account is not automatic when it is done properly: the domain has to be pointed correctly, mail records configured so your messages are accepted rather than filed as spam, a certificate issued and set to renew, an existing site migrated and checked page by page, and old redirects preserved so the links other people have to your site do not break. That is human time, it happens once, and it is where most of the mistakes in a migration get made.

Waiving it on annual plans is a straightforward trade. An annual commitment reduces the administrative overhead on our side and the payment risk, and we would rather return that in a form you can see than pretend the fee vanished for no reason. If the annual amount is not workable in one payment, take the monthly plan and the fee — that is a normal choice and nobody here thinks less of it.

The Small Business plan on annual billing also includes the domain registration for the first year. After the first year a domain renews at its ordinary rate, which is set by the registry for that extension and is not something any host controls.

What no long-term contract actually means

The phrase gets used loosely, so here is the specific version.

• There is no minimum term. A monthly plan can be canceled at the end of a month. You are not signing a thirty-six month agreement, and there is no early termination charge, because there is no term to terminate early.
• Prices do not escalate on a schedule. There is no promotional rate that quietly triples at renewal.
• You own your files. If you leave, you take the site with you. We will hand over a complete copy, and we will help the next provider get it running rather than making the handover difficult.
• You own your domain. It is registered in your name, with your contact details as registrant, and you can transfer it away without asking permission — subject only to the standard registry rules that apply to everyone, such as the sixty-day lock after a transfer or a change of registrant.
• Annual is prepaid, not locked. Paying annually buys a year of service at a lower effective rate; it does not create an obligation to renew.

The reason to say all of this explicitly is that the alternative model is common. A "free website" attached to a three- or four-year agreement is a financed website with the interest hidden inside the monthly fee, and month-to-month site rental where you never receive the files is renting, with rent that never ends. Neither is fraud. Both are worth recognizing before you sign.

What is not included

A plan comparison that lists only inclusions is not much use, so here is the other side.

• Design and build are not hosting. Hosting keeps a site available. Creating one, redesigning one, or writing its content is project work, quoted separately.
• Ongoing search work is separate. Nothing in a hosting plan makes a site rank, and any host implying otherwise is describing something that does not exist.
• Content changes are not unlimited. Small edits are part of a working relationship; a monthly redesign is not.
• Domain renewals after the included year are billed at the registry rate for the extension, as are transfers, privacy services and any premium name.
• Paid advertising budget is yours and goes to the ad platform, not to us.
• Third-party software licenses — a commercial theme, a paid plugin, a booking or payment service — are billed by whoever sells them.
• Email volume has limits. Shared hosting mail is for a business's ordinary correspondence. Sending a newsletter to a large list belongs on a dedicated sending service, for deliverability reasons rather than policy ones.
• Backups exist, and are not a substitute for your own copy. We take daily backups and will restore from them. You should still be able to lay hands on a copy of your site that does not depend on us.

When you should not buy hosting from us at all

Three situations, stated plainly, where the right answer is that you keep your money.

You already have hosting that works. If your site is up, your mail is delivered, your certificate renews on its own, and you know how to reach whoever runs it, moving is a project with real downside and no upside. Switching hosts is worth doing when something is broken, when nobody can find the login, when the price has drifted somewhere unreasonable, or when the current provider has become unreachable. "Someone offered me a slightly better plan" is not on that list.

You need one page and a Google Business Profile. A one-person trade business whose customers all arrive by referral and by phone frequently does not need a website in any meaningful sense. It needs a complete, verified business profile with correct hours, correct categories, real photographs and a phone number that gets answered. That is genuinely an afternoon of work. If that is your situation, we will tell you so, and we would rather do that afternoon than sell you a plan that renews for years while the underlying problem stays unfixed.

Your site is on a platform that hosts itself. If you have built on one of the all-in-one website builders or a hosted store platform, hosting is already bundled into what you pay them and buying it again from us achieves nothing. Those platforms have real trade-offs — the recurring cost, the limits on what you can change, and how difficult it can be to leave — but the answer to those trade-offs is a decision about the platform, not a second hosting bill layered on top.

There is a fourth case worth naming: if you are a nonprofit or a church with almost no budget, ask us before you buy anything. Some of what small organizations get sold is available to them free, and the eligibility rules are worth checking first.

How to choose, in four questions

If you would rather not read the whole comparison, this usually resolves it.

1. How many people need an email address at your domain? A handful points to Starter. A team points to Small Business. That single answer decides most accounts.
2. Does the site sell anything, take bookings, or run WordPress? If yes, start at Small Business. A store and a plugin-driven site both want more room and more overhead than a brochure site.
3. Is there more than one domain? Several domains under one account is the ordinary reason to be on Custom, along with an online store with real order volume.
4. Can you pay for a year at once? If yes, annual is the better arrangement: the setup fee is waived, and on the Small Business plan the first year of the domain comes with it. If not, monthly is a legitimate choice and costs you the setup fee once.

Everything on every plan includes an SSL certificate that renews automatically, daily backups, traffic statistics, PHP and MySQL, free migration of an existing site, no long-term contract, and a person in Texas who answers the phone. Most sites are live within a day of signup. If you are between two plans, take the smaller one — moving up later is trivial, and paying for room you never use is the most common waste in this category.