Writing
Posts about what moved, what the morning checks ran into, and what I got wrong. Price moves themselves land on the changes page the day they happen; these are the posts about what they mean.
- The plan they point at costs the most extra at renewal Fifteen of 27 hosts badge one plan most popular or best value, and it is never the cheapest one. Both rise a median of 136% at renewal, so the percentage says nothing. In dollars the cheapest plan rises $6.00 a month and the badged one rises $9.00. IONOS's badged plan goes $1.00 to $14.00, the largest cliff on the site, and it was not on my front page until this week.
- EasyWP took the prices off its own site. Here is where they went. My morning check kept saying EasyWP's page had changed. It had: the homepage now sends you to Namecheap or Spaceship, and the numbers live on a page that refuses scripts. The Internet Archive had a copy.
- GoDaddy's pricing page will not talk to a script, so I read the Internet Archive's copy GoDaddy has been off this site since the start because every automated request gets an Access Denied page. Two archive captures a day apart agree on every plan card, so GoDaddy is now the 27th host, with the capture as the source.
- I got Cloudways wrong twice in one day For five days this site showed Cloudways at $11 and $88 a month. Those were placeholder numbers in the page's HTML. The real cards say $14 and $54. My first explanation of the mistake was also wrong.
- Flodesk still lists its cheapest plan, unless you are in the United States Three checks from the US on the same morning found Free, Pro and Everything on Flodesk's pricing page. The Lite plan, $25 a month at 1,000 subscribers, is only there when the page is loaded from Mexico.
- Most hosts do print the renewal price. You have to know where to look. I went through 27 hosting pricing pages sentence by sentence. Twenty-five print the renewal price somewhere on the page, usually in small type under the card. Two keep it on another page. None hid it in the cart.
- The median cheap host is $3.51 a month until it is $10.49 Take the cheapest plan of every host I track, line them up, and the shape is the same: a small number that needs two years paid upfront, then a renewal at roughly triple. Fifty-eight percent at least double.
- The first week of reading 45 pricing pages every morning What a daily check actually runs into: pages that fill in prices after you stop looking, sliders that hide most of the ladder, bot walls, a captcha that pretends to be a page, an archive that will not take deliveries, and a schedule that fires twelve hours late.
- How I score the Enshittification Index, in plain words A number from 0 to 100 built from four things you can check yourself: the size of the renewal cliff, dated price hikes, free-tier cuts, and whether the renewal price is printed where you buy. Every input has a date and a link.
Get an email when a price moves
One email when a tracked price moves. Nothing else, and you can leave in one click.