#pricing — Web Hosting News

In the final part of the series, BrandForge CEO Michiel Grotenhuis turns to the practical question: what do you actually do about rising hosting costs? He borrows from streaming, SaaS, and retail, shares what the community is doing, and argues for reducing dependence on any single vendor.

First edition of our quarterly index, measured July 29: SiteGround renews at up to 5.3x, the price-lock club at 1.0x, and GoDaddy, HostGator, and Namecheap mid-band at 1.7–3.7x. At every provider with a full plan range, the entry plan renews at a higher multiple than the top plan.

Part two of the hosting price squeeze series tackles the decision that keeps founders up at night: pass rising costs on, absorb them, or find a middle path. A segment-by-segment guide to raising prices without breaking customer trust.

After three Hetzner price increases and OVHcloud raising VPS prices up to 67%, European shared vCPU hosting remains 60-75% cheaper than US providers. But dedicated vCPU instances have reached price parity with DigitalOcean, Vultr, and Linode. The choice is no longer about cost alone.

The widely reported 30-37% Hetzner price increase applied to CX and CAX entry-level servers. CCX dedicated vCPU instances rose 113-173% in the EU and up to 157% in the US. CPX Intel servers in the US rose up to 204%. Full price tables inside.

A few hosts promised never to raise renewal prices, through the worst hardware inflation in a decade. New renewal laws just turned that into strategy.

AI infrastructure competes with traditional hosting for the same DRAM. VPS and dedicated servers have repriced. Shared hosting adjusts last - with 3-5 year hardware cycles, the bill arrives at renewal. Two cost vectors are already building.

Hetzner announced its third price move of 2026 on May 27, effective June 15. New orders only, portfolio standardised into -1/-2/-3 tiers, and a new Limited tier introduces hardware segmentation as a structural market shift. Other European hosts will face pressure to follow.

Server DRAM prices surged over 100% in Q1 2026 as AI demand consumed fabrication capacity. Then Iranian drones hit Qatar's Ras Laffan facility on March 2, taking 33% of global helium supply offline - and helium is irreplaceable in chip manufacturing. Hetzner is raising prices 30-50%. OVHcloud warns of 15-300% component cost increases. SK Group's chairman says the shortage could last until 2030. For hosting providers, this is not a temporary spike. It is a structural shift in what it costs to run servers, and the next round of price increases has not even arrived yet.

We often talk with solution/software providers that want to bring new products or services to web hosting companies. They are quickly surprised when they hit a wall as hosters do not want

Verisign recently published its 2023 earnings report, showing not only its results for the year, but also its roadmap for 2024. What's of interest to everyone is the announced price increases for .com domains, which will see costs increase to $10.26.