There’s a number that appears on a lot of UK hosting sign-up pages right now: £1.99.
Sometimes it’s £2.49. Sometimes it’s £0.99, which sounds so low that it barely registers as a real price. The pages are bright, the copy is confident, and the logos of the companies running these offers are ones you’d recognise. They look like serious businesses. They are serious businesses. That’s part of what makes the number worth paying attention to.
Because £1.99 is not what you’ll pay for your hosting. Not really. Not for long.
How introductory pricing works
The model is simple and it’s been standard in UK hosting for at least a decade. You sign up for a plan at a low introductory rate, usually locked in for one or two years. At the end of that period, the subscription renews at the standard rate, which is typically between three and eight times higher than what you paid on day one.
The gap is not small. Here are some actual current examples, based on publicly listed pricing as of early 2026:
Hostinger lists a plan at around £1.99/month for the first year. The renewal rate on that plan is closer to £7.99/month. If you signed up for a two-year intro deal and then renewed for two more years, you’d pay roughly £48 for years one and two, and then £192 for years three and four. Same plan. Same site. Same service.
SiteGround runs a similar structure. Introductory rates of around £2.99 to £3.99 per month climb to £10.99 or more on renewal.
123-Reg and Fasthosts follow the same pattern, as does almost every large provider in the UK market.
None of this is hidden. The renewal rate is usually disclosed somewhere on the sign-up page, in smaller text, after the main pricing. The companies would say, reasonably, that they’re not deceiving anyone. The information is there. And that’s technically true. But “technically not hidden” is a very low bar.
What this costs over time
Take a hypothetical photographer with a portfolio site. They sign up in 2024 at £1.99/month on a two-year deal. They spend the next two years building their site, adding client work, optimising for SEO, building backlinks. They’re invested. Moving hosts at that point involves real work: migrating WordPress files, updating DNS, testing everything, potentially losing a few days of email.
In 2026, the renewal lands. £11.99/month. They hadn’t thought about it. They pay, because the alternative is a migration they don’t have time for.
By 2028, they’ve spent:
- 2024 to 2026: £47.76 (£1.99 × 24 months)
- 2026 to 2028: £287.76 (£11.99 × 24 months)
Total over four years: £335.52.
Had they been on a flat-rate plan at, say, £5.99 a month from the start, they’d have paid £287.52 over the same period. Almost identical, but with none of the surprise.
The introductory pricing model doesn’t save customers money. It defers costs to a point when the customer is least likely to leave.
Why the industry works this way
There are a few reasons this became the dominant model and none of them are particularly flattering.
The first is that headline price drives acquisition. Hosting is a commodity. Most people shopping for a plan don’t know the difference between shared and managed hosting, don’t know what TTFB means, don’t know whether NVMe storage matters for their site. What they do know is that £1.99 looks good on a comparison site. So providers compete on that number, which drives it lower and lower, which makes the renewal gap wider and wider.
The second is that churn is low after year one. Once a WordPress site is set up, the bar to migrate is high enough that most customers don’t bother. Providers know this. Renewal rates exploit it.
The third is that comparison sites, which are where a lot of hosting decisions get made, are mostly paid placements. The host appearing at the top of a “best UK hosting” round-up has almost certainly paid for that position. The review is not independent. The “recommended” badge doesn’t mean what it implies. This isn’t a conspiracy; it’s just how affiliate publishing works. But it does mean that the ecosystem is largely designed to funnel customers towards providers that have the money to play that game, which tends to be the larger providers with the most aggressive introductory offers.
What “locked pricing” actually means
Some hosts now advertise locked pricing, or price-lock guarantees, or similar language. It’s worth reading the small print carefully, because these guarantees vary considerably.
Some mean: the price is locked for the duration of your current term, but not beyond it.
Some mean: the price is locked for a specific number of years, after which standard rates apply.
A genuine locked pricing model means that the price you paid on day one is the price you pay indefinitely. No introductory period, no expiry. If the price ever changes, it changes for new customers, not existing ones.
This is not complicated. It’s just not common.
What to look for when evaluating a host
If you’re currently shopping for hosting, or considering switching, these are the questions worth asking before you commit.
What is the renewal price? Not the intro price. The renewal price. If this isn’t clearly stated, ask before signing up. If a support agent can’t tell you, treat that as a signal.
How long is the introductory period? A 12-month deal at £1.99 that renews at £9.99 is a much worse deal than it initially appears. Run the numbers over two or three years, not just year one.
What does migration actually involve? Some hosts offer free migration from other providers. It’s worth checking whether that’s done for you or whether it’s just a guide that assumes you know what cPanel is.
Where are the servers? For a UK audience, UK data centres matter for page load speed, and they matter for GDPR compliance. US hosting is fine for many purposes, but it isn’t the same as UK hosting, and some providers are vague about this.
Is there a money-back guarantee? Most reputable hosts offer 30 days. Some offer more. This gives you a genuine window to test performance before committing.
What does support actually look like? Large hosting companies run support through ticketing systems with variable response times. Smaller hosts often provide faster, more direct responses. Neither is universally better, but it’s worth knowing what you’re signing up for.
Why we started Angelsites
I’ve been involved in web hosting in one form or another for several years. I’m also a teacher and creator who runs websites as part of work, so I’ve been on the customer side of this relationship too.
When I decided to relaunch Angelsites properly in 2026, the pricing decision was straightforward. The introductory model is designed to exploit inertia, and I didn’t want to build something that relied on that. So we don’t do it.
The price on the page is the price on your invoice. That’s it. Year one, year five, year ten. If pricing ever changes, it only applies to new customers, and there’ll be reasonable notice before it does.
We’re a small UK host, with a UK data centre, run by a person rather than a corporate support department. That’s a niche position, and it’s deliberately so. Angelsites isn’t trying to compete with Hostinger on volume or GoDaddy on brand recognition. It’s trying to be the right answer for freelancers, creators, and small site owners who want a host they can actually understand and contact.
The honest summary
Cheap introductory pricing is a sales mechanism, not a customer benefit. The UK hosting market is built around it because it works: customers sign up, settle in, and renew at rates they didn’t fully anticipate when they clicked “get started.”
This isn’t unique to hosting. Software subscriptions do it. Insurance does it. But with hosting, the switching cost is just high enough that a lot of people decide it’s not worth the hassle, and that’s what the providers are counting on.
Before you commit to a plan, spend five minutes looking up the renewal rate and doing the maths across two or three years. You might still choose the same provider. But you’ll be choosing it with the full picture rather than just the headline.
Angelsites offers WordPress hosting from £5.99/month. No introductory rates, no renewal hikes. If you’re looking for straightforward UK hosting, take a look at our plans.