SupportHost hosting pricing history: 2010 to present

SupportHost was founded on two core principles: support and transparency. Now, it’s time to address a long-standing issue—pricing.

As you’re likely aware, price increases have become a daily reality across all industries, and the hosting market is no exception. Rising license fees and raw material costs have significantly impacted the industry.

Despite this ongoing upward trend, our commitment to delivering reliable and affordable solutions remains unwavering.

That’s why we want to show you how, since 2010, we’ve worked to keep our prices stable while adapting to market fluctuations.

How prices work in the hosting market

In the hosting industry, as in many other sectors, pricing strategies often involve introductory deals to attract new customers.

A common practice is to offer services at a heavily discounted rate for an initial period. For example, shared hosting might be offered at a very low price for the first year. The hosting provider benefits from this strategy since hosting is a recurring service, and most customers keep their sites active well beyond the initial year.

This leads the customer, drawn in by the initial offer, to sign up for a service without giving much thought to the price they’ll face at renewal.

It is at renewal that the customer encounters the unpleasant surprise of seeing the price doubled, tripled, or even worse.

So the question arises: is it necessary to follow this market trend, or is there always an alternative?

How have SupportHost’s service prices evolved over the years?

At SupportHost, we’ve always prioritized transparency, and we continue to do so by sharing this pricing history to highlight the changes that have occurred since SupportHost was founded in 2010.

In 2010, we offered three plans:

• Silver for a single website, similar to today’s shared plans.
• Gold for a set amount of websites (5 to 20).
• Platinum for unlimited domains, like today’s semi-dedicated plans.

In October 2012, we revamped the Gold plans: while the price stayed the same, we doubled the disk space and monthly traffic.

In 2016, we upgraded the plans again, keeping prices steady while increasing the resources for the Silver plans in terms of disk space and monthly traffic.

In 2019, we streamlined our offerings down to two options:

• silver (shared hosting);
• platinum (semi-dedicated hosting).

The prices remained the same, but we increased disk space and provided unlimited monthly traffic for the Platinum plans.

In 2022, based on customer feedback, we introduced new hosting plans:

• Shared hosting, replacing the Silver plans.
• Semi-dedicated hosting, replacing the Platinum plans.

These new shared and semi-dedicated hosting plans offer unlimited traffic and enhanced resources, with slightly higher costs compared to the old Silver and Platinum plans.

In the infographic below, you can see a summary of these changes, focusing on the Silver 1 and Platinum 1 plans.

With the introduction of the new plans, customers with a Silver or Premium plan had the option to switch to the new plan by simply paying the difference for an upgrade, or they could continue with their current plan at the same price.

Over the years, we have worked diligently to uphold our promise of stable and transparent pricing, and we’ve even sought to exceed this by redesigning our plans to offer better-performing solutions.

Today, however, we face new challenges that require action.

How the situation is evolving with price increases

Price increases are not a new phenomenon; in 2022, we managed rising licensing costs and higher expenses from datacenters.

By the end of 2023, we encountered further market cost increases, particularly affecting servers, licenses, and domain registration fees. We once again chose to absorb these increases to keep the prices of our shared hosting plans unchanged.

However, we did make minor adjustments, such as increasing .com domain prices from €11 to €11.70, and we applied the necessary licensing cost increases for dedicated services like servers and cloud plans.

Verisign, the company managing .com domains, is raising .com domain registration fees by 7 percent annually. This is in accordance with their agreement with ICANN, allowing them to implement annual increases of up to 7 percent. In an Afnic study, you can see the price rise for .com and .net domains from 2011 to 2023. These increases force registrars to pass on the additional costs to end customers.

Looking ahead to 2025, a new wave of price increases is already approaching. In order to continue providing reliable solutions to all who choose our services, we can no longer absorb these rising costs, and therefore, we must adjust our prices accordingly.

These adjustments are primarily driven by rising licensing fees. For instance, licenses for cPanel, WHMCS, and Plesk continue to increase year after year. Specifically, in 2025, Admin licenses for cPanel will see a 10% increase, while the cost of the cPanel SOLO license will have doubled compared to 2024.