Web hosting cost — what a domain costs, what hosting costs, and what year two adds

A domain and hosting are the two smallest bills in a website project — and the two most often mis-planned. Not because they are expensive, but because the figure at checkout is rarely the figure you pay in year two. Both taken apart below, with every price read on the provider's own page on 10 September 2026.

Domain vs hosting — two things, two bills

A domain is the unique address — `yourcompany.com` — that a visitor types to reach your site. Hosting is the space on a server where that site's files and mailboxes sit. The domain is the nameplate on the door; the hosting is the building.

Keeping them apart is not a formality. Three things follow, all worth understanding before you buy:

• Two separate contracts, potentially with two companies. A domain is registered with a registrar, a site is hosted with a host. Bought in one basket they are easy to confuse, but they stay two products with separate renewal dates and price lists.
• One expiring does not touch the other. When hosting lapses, the files stop being served but the address is still yours. When the domain lapses, the address stops working while the files sit untouched. Two failures, repaired two ways.
• A domain is portable; hosting is replaceable. You take the address to any provider, and it is the thing you build over years. A server can be swapped over a weekend and nobody notices.

Of the two, only the domain is irreplaceable. Hosting is a service you buy by the year and compare against competitors. A domain is the name customers find you under — and the only line in this bill where losing it cannot be undone.

What a domain costs — and why renewal is the only price worth comparing

The renewal price is the only domain price worth comparing, and whether there is a gap between it and the first year is a decision each registrar makes, not a law of the market. Both models are sold openly, side by side, on the same day.

The step column is our arithmetic on the two figures each provider prints. The UK rows are sterling, a separate price level rather than a European one; both UK registrars quote excluding VAT, and Strato's domain table states no VAT basis. Krystal's row is not an oversight — it prints registration and renewal at identical figures for its entire range, under the line "Transparent, upfront pricing that stays the same when it comes to renewal". The absence of a gap, sold as the product.

The size of the step tracks the extension, not the country. At Strato, on one page on one day, .de steps 20× and .com 3×; the Swiss registrar hosttech steps .ch 2.8× and .store 16×. Country extensions and .com move by a small multiple. The deep teasers and the violent renewals sit on the newer retail-flavoured ones.

And some providers print no renewal price at all. IONOS advertises a domain at eight cents a month and a 94% saving without printing what applies from month thirteen — the number that decides what it costs you.

So the rule is not "renewal always costs more" but check the renewal price before you buy, because that is the one you pay every year for the life of the site. Afterwards your only remedy is a transfer, which costs time.

When a domain expires

This is the one line in the whole website bill where being a few weeks late is sometimes irreversible, so the mechanism is worth knowing before you need it.

The site and the mail stop working on the expiry date, not after some grace period. An unrenewed domain leaves the name system, and the address goes with it — along with every mailbox on that domain.

Then a repair window whose length and price are set by the registry and passed on by the registrar, both differing by extension — so the number to check is your registrar's. Gandi publishes it: €50.00 to restore an expired `.com` on top of the normal renewal. Others charge nothing; Hostpoint lists restore, transfer and ownership change as free.

After that window the name returns to the pool, and expired business domains are routinely picked up automatically by people who trade in names. Recovering your own address stops being a fee and becomes a negotiation with a stranger.

Two things close this off in five minutes: turn on auto-renew, and check which address the reminders go to. The second matters more than it looks — if notifications go to a mailbox on the same domain, then on the day it expires the channel you were going to hear about it through stops working too.

How many domains to buy

One, unless you have a reason. Registering .com, your country extension and .eu "just in case" means three renewals a year instead of one, and protection against name-grabbing only becomes real once you have a brand worth grabbing. A second domain earns its place when you enter a market that uses it.

Together or separately — one provider or two

Most hosts sell the domain in the same package, and that is convenient: one invoice, one panel, one renewal to watch. For a brochure site, where nobody loses money if it is down for a day, that is sensible and there is no reason to complicate it. Above that shelf there are three arguments for keeping the domain away from the hosting.

Operational safety. When hosting has a serious outage, repointing DNS at a standby server takes fifteen minutes — provided the domain sits with an independent registrar whose panel you can reach. With both at one company, an outage ties both your hands at once. The same applies to a commercial dispute: an account suspended over an unpaid invoice can suspend control of the name with it.

The transfer code. Moving a domain requires the current registrar to release an authorisation code. Formally an obligation, practically a process — and a provider earning money on your renewal has no reason to hurry. Keeping the domain elsewhere removes that conflict of interest.

Renewal cost over several years. A thin-margin registrar plus hosting chosen on its own merits beats a bundle where the domain is an afterthought priced at the top of the range. A .com renews at €21.60 at Strato's post-promotional rate and at €31.98 at Gandi — for what is, at every registrar, the same domain.

The more depends on the site, the more it pays to split them. A single invoice is worth exactly as much as the worst day on which you discover everything sits in one place.

Hosting: what keeping a business site online really costs

Shared hosting for a simple business site runs from about €32 to €130 a year in the eurozone, and the spread is about promotions, not quality. Netcup charges €2.69 a month including VAT with no introductory rate — €32.28 a year, the same in year one and year five, under the plainest sentence in this market: "The prices of our webhosting packages are valid for the entire term and not just for the first months." IONOS charges €1 a month for twelve months plus a €10 setup fee, then €11 — €22 in year one, €132 from year two.

For most service companies that shelf is right, until the site does more than present an offer. Above it, price stops depending on a price list and starts depending on what the site does: traffic, background processing, a shop, staging. That is why we give no band for a VPS or cloud — it would be invented. Price your own case in the maintenance cost calculator and compare it with the offer on your table.

What actually raises the hosting bill

Plan names talk about technology; you pay for consequences. What changes as you move up a shelf — without figures where we have not documented them:

A working rule: until you can answer "what exactly stops working on shared hosting", you do not need a dearer shelf. Moving up answers a measured problem — it is not insurance.

Free hosting is a separate subject with its own article, because "for nothing" usually means somebody else's ads, no domain of your own and no backups.

What WordPress needs from a host

If the site runs on WordPress, choosing hosting stops being a choice of price and becomes a check of four lines in the specification — not a package labelled "WordPress hosting", which is often the same server at a higher price, but what is in the parameters.

• PHP version. A current release, in practice 8.2 or newer, with version switching from the panel. The second half matters more: sooner or later a plugin forces a change, and you do not want to file a ticket about it.
• Memory and time limits. memory_limit of at least 256 MB, comfortably 512 MB, and a matching max_execution_time. Those two values are usually the cause of most "white screens", during a content import or a larger plugin update.
• Disk and database. NVMe storage, and a MariaDB or MySQL instance not sharing resources with the rest of the server. WordPress is a database application — the database, not the processor, is the bottleneck.
• Backups. Automatic, daily, stored off that server, with at least 14 to 30 days of retention. A copy on the same machine is not a backup, it is a second file.

The fifth question is about the contract, not the parameters: do you restore a backup yourself from the panel, or by raising a ticket? Usually the difference between fifteen minutes and a day.

Mail on your own domain — where to keep it

The address [email protected] is seen more often than the site: on every message you send, on invoices, in proposals. A free webmail address costs credibility every time, and costs nothing to fix — you already have the domain. Three arrangements, differing not in price but in what happens when something breaks.

• Mail included with hosting. Cheapest, usually bundled. One serious drawback: a hosting outage takes the site and the mail at once, often including the channel you would have heard about it through. Check mailbox sizes too — sometimes small enough that a surcharge arrives after a year.
• Mail with a separate provider. Google Workspace, Microsoft 365 or any dedicated mail host. It costs separately, but site and mail fail independently and mailboxes survive a hosting move.
• Forwarding to an existing mailbox. A compromise for a sole trader: the address exists, messages land where they always did. Sending needs configuring so replies leave from the right address — otherwise the customer sees your personal account.

The rule, without arithmetic: if customer enquiries arrive by email, mail is more critical than the site — and should not depend on the same machine.

An SSL certificate stopped being optional — and it has a date

A basic certificate costs nothing. Let's Encrypt issues them free and most hosts install them automatically. Commercial certificates, with a warranty and organisation validation, cost extra and rarely earn it on a brochure site — they buy a different kind of verification, not stronger encryption.

What changes is what happens without one. From version 154, planned for October 2026, Chrome turns on "Always Use Secure Connections" by default for everyone, asking for confirmation before it first loads any public page over plain HTTP; for Enhanced Safe Browsing users it has been live since Chrome 147 in April 2026, announced on the Google Online Security Blog. A site without HTTPS will not be "ranked lower" — it will be shown behind a warning, which is the difference between a lower position and a lost visit.

"99.9% uptime guarantee" is a paid line item, not a property of hosting

In hosting offers an SLA appears as though it were a property of the service. In practice it is sold separately, and not on the cheapest shelf. At Cloudflare the Free and Pro plans carry no availability SLA at all; the guarantee starts on Business, and the application firewall sits behind the same wall from Pro upwards. If an offer shows "99.9%" with no price beside it, ask what happens when that figure is missed — because without an SLA the answer is "nothing".

What else goes into the annual bill

A domain and hosting are the foundation, not the whole thing. Three items appear least often in offers and most reliably in the budget.

• Technical care. The largest recurring line, and the only one that can exceed the build. It has its own breakdown, including which charges can be deferred and which cannot.
• Backups. Some hosts include them, some bill separately, some run them so that restoring takes a ticket and a day. Ask before buying, not after a failure.
• Mail on the domain. Sometimes bundled, sometimes separate — and sometimes small enough that a surcharge follows within a year.

And if you wonder whether cheaper is really cheaper: cheap website design — what it actually costs.

What it comes to over a year

For a simple business site maintained in-house: a domain renewal of €12 to €32 plus shared hosting at €32 to €132, certificate at zero. Roughly €45 to €165 a year — invisible in a company budget, which is exactly why it is forgotten until the domain expires.

The same site with technical care is a different order of magnitude. German agencies publish care plans at €52.50, €89 and €159 a month depending on tier and included hours — €630 to €1,900 a year, which for many brochure sites is more than building them cost. Not an argument against technical care, but for deciding about it deliberately rather than discovering it in an offer.

For the wider context, go back to the guide: website cost — the two halves of the bill.

Where these figures come from

Domain prices come from the registrars' own lists — Strato, Gandi, 123 Reg, Krystal — read on 10 September 2026; the step multiples are our arithmetic on the two figures each of them prints. Hosting figures come from the lists of Netcup, IONOS and Strato the same day, annual amounts multiplied out from the monthly. The VAT basis differs by market and is given only where the provider gives it, so no single assumption carries across. Care plan prices are published German rate cards; the Chrome dates are Google's own. Where we had no documented figure — the renewal IONOS does not print, VPS and cloud bands, restore fees beyond the registrars that publish them — we give the mechanism instead of a band.