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What you get from hosting under $2 a month
Cheap hosting isn't necessarily bad hosting. Around 850 plans from almost 500 hosts cost under about $2 a month; the cheapest go for well under half a dollar, and the median is just over $1. But for that money the host sells a very specific set of resources, and it's important to know upfront what's included and what you'll have to pay extra for.
What budget plans really offer
The median disk size in this selection is 3 GB, compared with 20 GB across the whole catalog. The cheapest plans give you as little as 250–500 MB. Most allow a single website, fewer allow two or three, or five. About a third of plans have NVMe storage and almost half come with unmetered traffic, so on these specs cheap plans differ little from expensive ones. The savings come from elsewhere:
- CPU and memory limits. Entry-level plans usually get the smallest CPU share and the fewest concurrent PHP processes. The site runs fast while traffic is low, but at peak times it may start throwing 508 or 503 errors.
- Number of databases and mailboxes. One database and one or two mailboxes is the typical allowance.
- Backups. On budget plans backups may run less often, be kept for fewer days, or be restorable only for a fee.
- Support. Replies may take hours rather than minutes, and complex questions get redirected to a higher plan.
Hidden costs
The total for a year is almost always higher than "monthly price × 12". Check a few things before you pay.
- Renewal price. Many plans cost a few cents a month only for the first term and only if you prepay for a year or more. On renewal the price can double or triple, and the "cheap" plan ends up costing more than an average one.
- Domain. A free domain usually lasts for the first year only; after that it renews at the host's registrar rate, which can be above market price. Sometimes it's cheaper to register the domain elsewhere.
- SSL. A decent host issues a Let's Encrypt certificate for free. If there's no free SSL, add the cost of a paid certificate to the price, or just look for another plan.
- Backups and restores. Restoring from a backup via a support request sometimes costs more than a month of hosting.
- Email limits. A cap on messages per hour can get in the way even of an online store's order notifications. Third-party email for your domain is a separate expense.
- Currency and fees. Prices from hosts that bill in other currencies are converted at the exchange rate, and tax and payment processing fees may be added at checkout.
When a cheap plan is enough
- A landing page or promo page. Static HTML or a lightweight site builder barely loads the server, and 1 GB of disk is more than enough.
- A business card site for a company or freelancer. A few pages, a contact form, a few dozen visitors a day.
- A personal blog. WordPress with a caching plugin runs fine on an entry-level plan until you're getting thousands of visitors a day.
- A test environment or learning project you won't mind losing.
When not to cut corners
- Online stores. The cart, customer accounts and catalog filters can't be fully cached, so CPU limits kick in quickly. For a store, consider pricier plans or a VPS for an online store.
- Sites with paid traffic. If you pay for clicks, downtime at peak hours costs you more than the difference in hosting price.
- Multiple websites. Five of the cheapest plans are usually worse than one plan for 10 sites — see our hosting for 10 websites selection.
- Sites that handle customers' personal data subject to data localization rules: some countries, Russia among them, require such data to be stored locally, and an inexpensive local plan settles the question right away.
Where to find cheap plans
Hosts with servers in the US, Germany and the UK offer the most budget plans, followed by Singapore, Russia, the Netherlands and Turkey. Many of the very cheapest offers in the table come from small regional companies in Iran, Bangladesh, Turkey and other countries that focus on their local market. That doesn't make them bad, but support may only be available in the local language and payment only through local methods. For a site with a clear target audience, it usually makes more sense to pick an affordable plan from a host in or near that region: lower latency, familiar payment methods, and terms and support in a language you understand.
The control panel picture matches the market as a whole: cPanel leads, followed by Plesk, DirectAdmin and ISPmanager. On cheap plans the panel affects convenience more than capabilities, so choose one you've already worked with.
A practical approach is to shortlist two or three plans from the table, check the renewal price and backup terms, and if the host offers a trial, deploy a copy of your site there first. Hosts with a free trial are collected on the hosting with a free trial page.