Hosting Price History 2022–2026 — Who Actually Raised Their Rates?

Last Verified: September 2026  |  Author: Tom George

Data pulled from the Wayback Machine's archived snapshots of each host's own pricing page, one snapshot per host per year (Q1 of 2022 through 2026), cross-checked against a live browser render where the archived page used client-side JavaScript pricing. This is a different dataset from our Renewal Prices article, which re-verifies each host's current promo-vs-renewal gap live — the two may differ slightly since this tracker uses point-in-time archives rather than today's page.

Marketing Says Prices Are Stable. Archives Say Otherwise.

Every host will tell you their pricing is fair and predictable. The only way to check that claim is to look at what they actually charged in the past — not what they say today about the past.

So we did that. We pulled archived pricing pages for 11 major hosts, one snapshot per year, going back to 2022. Real numbers, dated, sourced, and cross-checked.

The results split cleanly into three groups: hosts that have never played the promo-then-shock-renewal game, hosts that raise renewal prices gradually, and at least one host whose 2026 rebrand came with an 84% renewal increase in a single year.

5-Year Pricing History, Host by Host

Prices below are the true monthly-billed headline price as archived in Q1 of each year — not an annual-equivalent rate. Where a host also offers a lower annual-prepay rate, that is noted in the host's section below. Bold = renewal price, the number in small text underneath is the promotional/intro price for that year. An asterisk (*) marks a figure we had to estimate from partial archive data rather than read directly off a clean snapshot; a dash (—) means no reliable figure exists in the archive for that host/year.

Hostinger is excluded from this tracker — every hostinger.com URL, including robots.txt, is permanently blocked from the Wayback Machine at the domain level, verified against working control hosts on the same infrastructure. Not an outage; a standing exclusion.

Host by Host: The Story Behind the Number

Rocket.net — never moved in five years

$30/month in 2022. $30/month in 2026. No promo rate, no renewal rate, no gap between them, ever. Of the 11 hosts we archived, only Rocket.net and Pressable held a completely flat line across all five years.

See Rocket.net Plans

Kinsta — one increase, then held flat

Kinsta's +17% over the five-year window is a single step, not a rolling trend: it raised its Starter plan from $30 to $35/month once, in 2023, and hasn't touched it since — flat from 2023 through 2026, under two different plan names (Single 35k, then Single 20GB, as Kinsta restructured its plan tiers). Read it as raised once, held steady since. In every single year we archived, Kinsta's promo and renewal price were identical — it has never run the promo-then-renewal-shock model that shared hosts rely on.

See Kinsta Plans

Cloudways — one price step, still flat pricing

Cloudways' DigitalOcean-backed entry tier moved from $12 to $14/month in 2024 and has held there since (the 2026 figure required a small correction — a Standard/Premium toggle briefly clouded the archived snapshot, resolved against the live 2026 page). Like Kinsta, every year shows promo = renewal — no gap, ever.

See Cloudways Plans

Pressable — flat $25/month since 2022

$25/month in 2022, $25/month in 2026, and every year in between identical — no promo rate, no renewal rate, no gap. Pressable is owned by Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, and like the other flat-pricing hosts here it has never used a promo-then-shock-renewal structure. Its entry plan was renamed from "Personal" to "Signature 1" over the five years, but the price never moved. Pressable also sells a lower annual-prepay rate (about $20.83/month billed yearly); this tracker follows the monthly-billed headline price, so that isn't the figure shown above.

See Pressable Plans

SiteGround — a real step increase in 2024

SiteGround's StartUp renewal held at $14.99/month through 2022-2023, then stepped up to $17.99/month in 2024 and has stayed there since — a genuine, dated 20% increase, not a rumor. The promo rate also dropped slightly over the same window ($3.99 → $2.99), widening the promo-to-renewal gap even further.

GoDaddy — the slowest, steadiest creep

GoDaddy is the closest thing to a straight line up: $8.99 in 2022-2023, $9.99 in 2024-2025, $11.99 in 2026 — a 33% increase spread evenly across three separate steps rather than one shock. The plan itself was also renamed along the way, from "Economy" to "Web Hosting Economy" in 2024.

DreamHost — the biggest single-year jump in the dataset

DreamHost held $5.99/month renewal pricing through 2024-2025 on its Shared Starter plan, then rebranded it "Web Hosting Launch" in 2026 with a renewal price of $10.99 — an 83.5% (84% rounded) jump in a single year, the largest one-year move of any host we tracked. Over the full 2022-2026 window the increase is 57%, since the plan actually dropped slightly ($6.99 → $5.99) between 2022 and 2024 before the 2026 rebrand more than reversed that.

Bluehost — real gaps, real restructuring

Bluehost is one of two hosts in this dataset where the archive itself has real holes, not just flat pricing: 2022 is unrecoverable entirely (the pricing grid didn't survive in any snapshot we checked), 2023 has a renewal figure but no clean promo read, and 2026 has the reverse problem — a promo figure but no renewal price, since Bluehost's pricing moved behind a client-side React grid that Wayback's snapshot doesn't hydrate consistently. Where we do have clean exact data (2024-2025), the renewal price was flat at $10.99. Bluehost has also restructured its plan lineup since 2022 — "Basic" no longer exists as a plan name, replaced by "Starter." See our Bluehost 2026 review and its changelog for the current, live-verified renewal rate.

See Bluehost Plans

HostGator — a clean archive dead-end after 2023

HostGator is the cleanest example of a host we simply lost after a certain point: 2022 and 2023 are both exact, server-rendered, and flat at $6.95/month renewal. Starting in 2024, HostGator's pricing grid moved to a JavaScript-only widget that never hydrates in any archived snapshot — we checked three separate 2024 snapshots plus one each for 2025 and 2026, all placeholders. This isn't a HostGator-specific choice to hide pricing; it's the same failure mode Bluehost hit with its own 2022 gap, just at the opposite end of the timeline.

InterServer — flat promo, permanently opaque renewal

InterServer's promotional rate has been a flat $2.50/month for the first month in every year we checked, 2022 through 2026 — genuinely never moved. The renewal price is a different story: InterServer renders it through a client-side "pricely" widget that is dead in every single archived snapshot we tried, in every year, under both a plain fetch and a full Chrome render. InterServer's own current live page and our Renewal Prices article both cite a $7/month rate that locks for life after the first month — but we can't verify that figure held at $7 all the way back to 2022 the way we can for hosts with a clean archived read.

WP Engine — undisclosed in every snapshot we tracked

WP Engine's Startup plan promo rate has bounced between $20 and $25/month across the five years we checked, but the renewal price was never published on any archived pricing page in the years we tracked (2022 through the Jan-2026 snapshot). WP Engine's own Terms of Service reserve the right to bill "then-current rates" at renewal without stating what that rate is anywhere public, a structural difference from every flat-pricing host in this dataset. WP Engine has since published explicit renewal pricing in 2026 (after this tracker's most recent snapshot) — see our Renewal Prices article for the current figure and what it means if you're already a customer.

See WP Engine Plans

Methodology

Each host's pricing history was pulled from the Wayback Machine's CDX index, targeting one snapshot per host per year (Q1 of 2022 through 2026) on the host's own pricing or shared-hosting URL. Where the archived HTML was server-rendered, prices were read directly from the page source. Where a host's pricing grid loads via client-side JavaScript (Bluehost since ~2023, HostGator since ~2024, InterServer's renewal widget throughout), we attempted a full browser render of the same archived snapshot before marking a figure unavailable — a dead client-side widget in an archive can't be revived by rendering it, it simply never receives the data it originally fetched live.

Every figure is tagged with a confidence level in the underlying dataset: exact (read directly from a clean snapshot), estimated (interpolated from partial data — for example, a renewal figure with no matching promo read that year), or unavailable (no reliable figure exists). This page surfaces that distinction with the * and — markers above rather than presenting every cell as equally certain.

This tracker will be re-pulled and extended by a year going forward rather than re-verified monthly — expect it to move roughly annually as each host's next pricing cycle gets archived.

FAQ

Which host has raised its price the most since 2022?

On a single-year basis, DreamHost — its 2026 rebrand from "Shared Starter" to "Web Hosting Launch" came with an 84% renewal jump in one year. Measured across the full 2022-2026 window instead, DreamHost is also the largest mover among hosts with a complete data set, at +57%.

Which host has never raised its price at all?

Two hosts, actually: Rocket.net ($30/month) and Pressable ($25/month). Both held exactly the same price every year from 2022 through 2026 — the only two hosts in this dataset with zero change over the full five-year window.

Has Kinsta ever raised its price?

Yes, once — from $30 to $35/month in 2023 — and it has held at $35 every year since. In no year we checked did Kinsta's promo price differ from its renewal price; it has never used a promo-then-shock-renewal structure.

Why don't you have a renewal price for WP Engine?

Because WP Engine never published one on any archived pricing page we could find, from 2022 through our Jan-2026 snapshot. Its Terms of Service reserve the right to bill "then-current rates" at renewal without disclosing that rate publicly. WP Engine has since published explicit renewal pricing in 2026, after this tracker's most recent snapshot — see our Renewal Prices article for the current figure.

Why is InterServer's renewal price missing from every year?

InterServer's renewal price is rendered by a client-side pricing widget that never hydrates in any Wayback Machine snapshot we checked, in any year, even under a full browser render. The company's current live page cites $7/month locked for life after the first month, but we can't independently verify that figure held historically the way we can for hosts with clean archived data.

Why is HostGator's data missing after 2023?

HostGator moved its pricing grid to a JavaScript-only widget sometime around 2024, and that widget's pricing API doesn't respond in any archived snapshot from 2024, 2025, or 2026 that we checked — three separate 2024 snapshots included. The 2022-2023 figures are confirmed exact, server-rendered.

Is this the same as your Renewal Prices article?

Related but distinct. Our Renewal Prices article shows each host's current promo-to-renewal gap, re-verified live from today's pricing page. This tracker shows the multi-year trend since 2022, using archived point-in-time snapshots — so a figure here may lag a few months behind the always-current numbers in that article.

Will this page be updated?

Yes, roughly once a year as each host's next pricing cycle becomes archivable — this isn't a live-scraping tool, it's a dated historical record re-extended periodically.

Related Reading

• The Real Cost of Web Hosting — Current Renewal Prices Ranked
• Kinsta Full Review 2026
• Kinsta Pricing & Plan Changelog
• Rocket.net Full Review 2026
• Kinsta vs Rocket.net — Full Comparison
• SiteGround to Kinsta — Hidden Costs, Real Numbers
• Bluehost in 2026 — Still Worth It, or Time to Move On?

Data Sources

All figures sourced from the Wayback Machine (web.archive.org) CDX index, one Q1 snapshot per host per year, 2022-2026, cross-checked with a live browser render where the archived page required JavaScript to display pricing. Live-verified current rates for comparison are available in our Renewal Prices article. Hostinger excluded — every hostinger.com URL is permanently blocked from Wayback Machine archival at the domain level.