Real WordPress hosting prices, a comparison and their misleading pricing

Real WordPress hosting prices, a comparison and their misleading pricing

Overview

In this article, we take our first look at hosting companies. If you’ve ever tried to find a good WordPress hosting company, you’ll know that it can be very confusing.   Not only do you have the quality of brand to consider, you also have a lot of technical jargon, the pricing varies from company to company, and you often find the cost comes out much more than advertised.  This makes comparing hosting companies very difficult.

In part one in the series we’ve gone to every shared hosting company we could find and signed up for a shared WordPress hosting plan to see what we got, compared to what was advertised. You’ll see that in some cases this can be extremely different, especially when it comes to actual price vs advertised price.

False / Misleading Advertising

One of the worst attributes of many of these hosting companies is false advertising.  The claim that you can have something for a price, which you find does not exist.  The most common offense here, is claiming a low monthly price which can only be paid for annually, bi-annually, or tri-annually in some cases (that is to say, to get the ‘monthly’ pricing advertised you may find you need to sign up for three years and pay the whole three years in a single payment up front.  So if it was $3.99 per month you may have to pay $3.99×36=$143.64 up front.

Apples with Apples

Another problem is that the plans do not always match.  Of course, it would be normal to expect some variation, however when things like backups and malware protection on varied, (included in some and an extra cost in others) we feel this is not acceptable.  As such all pricing within the below table has been adjusted to include as close to an apple with apples comparison as we can.

How we normalised the pricing and plans

In this comparison, automated backups, online security, anti-hacking and standard WordPress optimised features are considered mandatory, if these are optional extras on the plan, they have been added and the cost accounted for.  If they come with the plan, then the price will reflect this as it will be lower. If the option was not available at all, the hosting company was removed from the comparison altogether.

With regard to some companies requiring a 36month sign up to get cheaper pricing, all plans are normalised to 12 months and in US dollars.  So if it is more expensive to sign up for 12 months, this will again be reflected in the 12 month price.  We believe signing up for more than 12 months in the technology industry is a mistake anyway.

How to read the comparison table

There are a number of sites that are using a template or franchise style of setup.  You can see this when you go to the signup page and see that the site is identical to another in it’s layout, right down to the pictures of the people on the servicedesk.  We’ve noted this in the notes column by the ‘Franchise’ label.

• Advertised monthly price – The price advertised by the hosting company
• Actual monthly price – The actual normalised price per month if you took a monthly payment option.  (Where NA is given, no monthly option is available)
• Actual Monthly Price (Second Month+) – The actual monthly price you pay after the first month.  (The first month often applies extra discounts and sometimes extra setup fees).
• Actual Annual Price (First year) – Same idea as ‘Actual monthly price’
• Actual Annual Price (Second year+) – Sasme idea as Actual monthly price (Second Month+)
• SSL – Some of this information was not available, we will update it as it comes to hand.
• Notes – Any information that didn’t warrant an entire column for it.

[alert color=”EBA132″ icon=”fa-align-right” title=”Please note:”]To scroll the table to the right, click on the table and use the right arrow key on your keyboard. Alternatively, you may be able to achieve this by right scrolling with your mouse if it supports it.[/alert]

Final Word

So there you have it, a lot of work went into this and there are likely to be errors, if you find one, or have a correction to make, please include your insights and opinions in the comments below.

Marshalleq