Web hosting: real prices after the renewal hike (2026)

In short: shared hosting starts around $2.49 a month (Hostinger) or €1.59 excluding VAT (OVHcloud), and a VPS at €3.81 excluding VAT, but these are first-term prices: Hostinger's Premium plan renews at $10.99 and OVHcloud's Pro plan goes from €1.99 to €9.99 a month. Compare the cost over 36 months, not the first invoice. For a company site nobody wants to administer, we recommend a platform that includes hosting, such as Webflow ($15 or $25 a month billed annually). Changing hosts does not lift a site in Google, but repeated outages can hurt it.

The five types of hosting and their starting price

OVHcloud's VPS range runs from €3.81 excluding VAT a month (2 vCores, 4 GB of memory, 40 GB of NVMe storage) to €19.96 (8 vCores, 24 GB, 200 GB), with unlimited traffic and a daily backup covering the last 24 hours. The starting prices appear tied to a 12-month commitment, so check the configurator before ordering. We did not check dedicated server prices, which depend too much on the configuration for a single figure to mean anything.

The price shown is not the price paid: the renewal effect

The trap is not the first-year rate, it is the second-year one. Hostinger and OVHcloud both publish a promotional price tied to a term, then a renewal price. Here is what that looks like, prices excluding VAT, checked in October 2026.

OVHcloud's Pro plan shows how a first invoice misleads. Over 36 months (12 at the promotional price, 24 at the renewal price, our calculation) it costs about €264 excluding VAT, against about €180 for the Perso plan that looks twice as expensive on day one. Pro does give 250 GB instead of 100 GB, so the choice can still be right, but make it knowing the third-year price.

Hostinger's long term cuts the other way: the 48-month commitment locks the low price for four years, then the renewal rate applies. Read the term, the renewal price and the cancellation conditions before paying upfront.

All-in-one platforms: what Webflow includes and costs

On Webflow, hosting is part of the site plan. According to the official pricing page (October 2026), Starter is free, Basic costs $15 a month billed annually (no CMS, 300 static pages, 10 GB of bandwidth) and Premium $25 a month billed annually (20,000 CMS items, 40 collections). A Team plan costs $2,500 a month on an annual contract. Sites are served through Cloudflare's CDN with free SSL. The tiers are detailed in our article on Webflow pricing.

For a company, this is the choice we make most often: no server, no plugins to maintain, no security updates to follow. The trade-off is real: the site lives on the platform, and moving it elsewhere means rebuilding it. Our Webflow agency page explains how we work on these projects.

The setup (domain, DNS, site plan) is covered in our guide to hosting a Webflow site.

The criteria that really matter

• Server location, for latency and for data protection rules. European hosting simplifies the topic without settling it alone: see our guide to a GDPR-compliant Webflow site.
• Backups, and above all restoring them. A backup you cannot restore is worthless. OVHcloud includes a daily backup of the last 24 hours on its VPS range; longer options cost extra.
• Support: its language and its real hours. That is what counts on the day of an outage.
• The renewal price, not the teaser price.
• The ability to leave. Before you sign, check how you will get your files and your database back.

Does hosting affect SEO?

Indirectly, on two points. First availability: according to Google's documentation, 5xx server errors make its crawlers slow down temporarily, and content returned with a 5xx error is ignored. A one-off outage heals; repeated ones do not always.

Then response speed. Time to first byte (TTFB) is not a Core Web Vital, but web.dev rates it good at 0.8 seconds or less and poor above 1.8 seconds, because it weighs on the metrics that do count. For those, read our guide to Core Web Vitals.

On the other hand, changing hosts does not push a site up the results. If your pages are stuck, the problem is almost always elsewhere: intent, structure, content.

Changing hosts without breaking the site

A migration is prepared in four steps: keep URLs identical where you can, plan a redirect for each one that changes, lower the DNS TTL before the switch, and check indexing afterward. Our guide to migrating from WordPress to Webflow details these mechanics, which apply beyond that specific pair.

We did it for ourselves: in October 2026, Synqro moved from agence-synqro.fr to synqro.co, with 485 redirects written and tested before the switch. That unglamorous work is what lets an infrastructure change show up only in load times.

Which hosting for which project

For Cashbee, we developed the whole site on Webflow, then trained the team to manage content on their own. Since hosting is built into the platform, there is no server to administer. The details are in the Cashbee case study.

Our view

For the vast majority of company sites, hosting is a topic you should not spend time on. The real cost of a bad choice is not the monthly bill, it is the hours spent handling an incident nobody saw coming. A well-chosen shared plan is still fine for a small site: the point is to choose it knowing the third-year price.

Synqro is a brand and web agency based in Dubai, with a French-speaking team that has worked with more than 150 companies since 2019, in France and internationally. If you are unsure about your current setup, tell us about your site and we will tell you whether a change is worth the cost.