This one needs a bit of explaining, because on the surface it sounds like a strange thing to be proud of.
Most businesses run promotions. Discounts bring in new customers, and new customers are good. So why would a hosting company make a point of never offering them?
The answer is that introductory pricing in the hosting industry is not really a discount. It is a pricing structure where new customers pay a low rate for a fixed period, after which the price increases substantially and stays there. The low rate is the hook. The higher rate is the product. What looks like a promotion is actually a long-term pricing commitment dressed up as a short-term one.
We think that is worth being clear about, and it is why Angelsites works differently.
What introductory pricing actually does
When you sign up for a hosting plan advertised at £1.99/month, you are not signing up for a £1.99/month service. You are signing up for a service that costs £1.99/month for the first twelve or twenty-four months, and then considerably more after that. The higher price is the real price. The lower price is an acquisition cost the host has decided to pass on to you.
This is not a secret. The renewal rate is disclosed, usually in smaller text beneath the headline price or in the terms and conditions. The information is technically available. But the way it is presented is designed to make the introductory rate memorable and the renewal rate forgettable, because that combination is what drives signups.
The result is that a significant number of customers reach their first renewal without having thought about the higher rate since the day they signed up. Some of them do the maths and decide to move. Many of them do not, because moving a website involves effort and the renewal price, while higher than expected, is not quite high enough to make switching feel worth the bother. The hosts know this. It is part of the model.
Why we decided not to do it
When Angelsites was being set up, the question of whether to run introductory offers came up early. The commercial argument for doing so is not trivial. A low headline price gets you onto comparison sites. It generates clicks. It converts browsers into customers.
The argument against was simpler: we did not want to have the renewal conversation.
Introductory pricing creates a moment, about twelve or twenty-four months into a customer relationship, where the customer receives a bill that is larger than the one they were expecting. Some of them call it a surprise. Some of them call it a price hike. Some of them just quietly cancel. All of those outcomes require a response, and none of them are the kind of conversation you want to have with someone whose trust you are trying to earn.
We also thought about what introductory pricing signals about a business. A company that charges you less in year one than in year two is telling you something about how it thinks about the relationship. It is prioritising acquisition over retention. It is betting that inertia will keep you paying a higher rate once the initial period is over. That is a legitimate business strategy. It is just not one we wanted to build on.
What it means in practice
Angelsites charges the same price from day one. If you sign up for a plan at £5.99/month, that is what your invoice says in month one, month thirteen, and month sixty-one. There is no rate that expires, no renewal notice where the number is different from what you have been paying, and no moment where you have to decide whether to stay or switch because the price changed.
This means our headline price looks higher than some competitors. A host advertising £0.99/month will always look cheaper than one advertising £5.99/month, even if the five-year cost of the cheaper option is considerably higher. We have accepted that this makes us less visible on price-comparison searches. We think the customers who read past the headline figure and think about total cost are the customers we want.
It also means we have to be worth the price we charge from day one, because there is no introductory period where we can afford to be worth less. That feels like the right kind of pressure to operate under.
The comparison that matters
Here is a straightforward example. A host advertising £2.49/month on an initial two-year term, renewing at £11.99/month, costs £347.52 over four years. Angelsites at £5.99/month costs £287.52 over the same period, with nothing to recalculate at renewal.
The cheaper-looking option costs more. Not because of small print or tricks, but simply because the headline figure is not the price of the product. This is not an unusual case. It is how the introductory pricing model works when you run the numbers across a realistic timeframe.
We are not pointing this out to be clever about it. We are pointing it out because we think people buying hosting deserve to know what they are actually paying, and because being transparent about this is the only honest way to explain why our price looks higher at first glance than it sometimes is.
What this means for you
If you are evaluating hosting providers, one question is worth asking about every option on your list: what does this cost in year three?
Not the introductory rate. Not the headline figure. The renewal rate, multiplied by twelve, for however long you intend to keep your site. Add up the total and compare it against the total cost of providers with consistent pricing.
For some people, particularly those who know they will move hosts every one or two years anyway, an introductory deal is genuinely the cheaper option. We are not arguing otherwise.
For everyone else, for the freelancer who set up a portfolio site and intends to keep it running, for the creator who built something worth keeping, for the small business owner who wants to stop thinking about hosting costs entirely, the total cost over time is the number that matters. And on that number, Angelsites is competitive with most of the hosts whose headline prices look considerably lower.
The price you see is the price you pay. In year one and year ten. That is the offer, and it is the only one we will ever make.
See our plans at angelsites.co.uk.
Angelsites is a small UK web host for freelancers and creators. UK data centre, honest pricing, support from a real person.