Web Hosting Sticker Shock
My domain will be 30 years old in February. I have no idea how much I’ve spent on hosting and domain renewals in the past three decades. Certainly hundreds, if not over a thousand dollars, I imagine. For the past five years all the sites I have and support, have been hosted at Pair Networks.
Their price slowly crept up each year. I think it was initially around $102 per year (discounted since I paid a year at a time). Last year it was $136.20. A couple months ago I got an email from Pair touting their new “Platinum Mail” service. Email is no longer free. By setting up some forwarding rules, and eliminating one email address, I got the account down to two mailboxes. Which combined are $65.88 per year. Apparently the amount of storage used by our…
Web Hosting Sticker Shock
My domain will be 30 years old in February. I have no idea how much I’ve spent on hosting and domain renewals in the past three decades. Certainly hundreds, if not over a thousand dollars, I imagine. For the past five years all the sites I have and support, have been hosted at Pair Networks.
Their price slowly crept up each year. I think it was initially around $102 per year (discounted since I paid a year at a time). Last year it was $136.20. A couple months ago I got an email from Pair touting their new “Platinum Mail” service. Email is no longer free. By setting up some forwarding rules, and eliminating one email address, I got the account down to two mailboxes. Which combined are $65.88 per year. Apparently the amount of storage used by our email exceeds some limit, as we paid an extra $1.50 for “additional mailbox storage.” The kicker is the charge for web site hosting.
Ready? $227.88. AFTER a $12 discount for paying a year at a time. This gets us 60 GB of disk space, 1000 GB monthly transfer, and 30 MySQL databases. That’s their “Shared Hosting 2” plan which is $19.99 per month. They have a “Shared Hosting 1” plan for $13.99 per month with 30 GB storage, 500 GB monthly transfer, and 15 MySQL databases.
Combining the new email charge, with the hosting fee, and you get a total of $295.26. A mere 116% increase over the bill from last year. To say I was shocked would be an understatement. I couldn’t believe that I had missed an email announcing the hosting cost. Searching back through emails from Pair I finally found one from last December that had a paragraph at the bottom about new rates. The top of the email looked like advertisement for features and plans. Apparently I archived the email without reading to the bottom.
Using Claude AI and ChatGPT I did some queries as to current popular webhosting providers. I also asked about their reputations. When I moved to Pair in 2020 I was leaving Bluehost as their service had become painful. One of Claude’s recommendations was initially Bluehost. I also considered something like an unmanaged VPS at Hetzner, or a droplet at Digital Ocean.
The roll-your-own approach could potential be much less expensive in dollars, but it would be far more time consuming in setup and maintenance. And, it would not solve the email problem as I am not crazy enough to host my own email server.
The managed hosting providers are heavily geared toward the WordPress crowd. Three of the sites I’d be migrating are WordPress-based, but the rest are static sites, or a PHP/JavaScript visitor tracking application and database. I could go crazy and host the static sites on AWS S3, but that doesn’t make hosting the WordPress sites any cheaper. May as well have all the eggs in one basket.
Using Dreamhost as an example, the annual hosting cost would be $3.99 per month the first year, and then $12.99 per month after that. That makes the full price $155.88 per year. They also charge for email, $1.67 per mailbox paid annually. Two mailboxes would be $40.08. So the annual bill from Dreamhost would be $195.96. Only $37.80 less that Pair’s Shared Hosting 1 plan, and $97.80 less that my current Shared Hosting 2 plan.
There is a non-zero cost in time and effort to migrate from one hosting provider to another. I have my detailed notes from the last two host migrations I’ve done. Really not looking forward to doing all that again.
I think I need to contact Pair to see if my current usage fits inside the limits of the less expensive plan. If it doesn’t, I have to decide if $98 a year is worth the time, effort, and stress of migrating or not.