Web hosting
What a hosting customer actually pays for
When you pay a few dollars a month for hosting, it can feel like you are renting a tiny corner of someone else's computer and the rest is profit. Fair question. So here is the honest breakdown of what that money covers, line by line, from the side of the counter where the bills land on us.
One note before the numbers. The costs below are the typical costs any small hosting company faces, described in plain categories, because they are the ordinary costs of this industry and not a secret. They are illustrative, not DotMoose's actual books. The prices at the end, ours and our competitors', are real, published, and checked.
The machine, and the room it sits in
Your website lives on a physical server in a data centre. That server cost thousands of dollars to buy, and it gets replaced on a cycle of a few years whether business is good or not. Parts fail in between, so there are spare drives and memory on a shelf, paid for before they are ever needed.
The room around the machine is not free either. Rack space, power, cooling, and backup power all bill monthly. When the grid flickers, battery systems and generators carry the load, and someone pays for the fuel, the testing, and the maintenance. A small host can spend more on the room than on the servers inside it.
Bandwidth: the road your visitors drive on
Every visit to your site moves data over a network connection the host pays for, usually billed by capacity rather than by the gigabyte. The catch is that the connection has to be sized for your busiest hour, not your average one. A quiet Tuesday still needs a road wide enough for the Friday your post gets shared around. Idle capacity most of the month is not waste. It is the reason your site stays up during the spike.
Licences: the quiet monthly bleed
Almost nothing on a modern hosting server is a one-time purchase. The control panel your host gives you is licensed per server, per month. So is the security and malware scanning software, the backup software, the spam filtering that keeps your inbox usable, and the tooling that isolates your account from every other account on the machine.
Individually, each licence looks small. Stacked on every server, every month, whether the server is full or half empty, they add up to a real number before a single customer logs in. This is also why hosts notice immediately when a licence vendor raises prices. There is nowhere in the stack to hide it.
Backups and spare storage
A proper backup is not a copy sitting on the same disk. It is copies, plural, kept apart from the live server, held for days or weeks, and actually tested from time to time. Storage for backups can rival the storage for the live sites themselves.
Nobody line-items this on your invoice. But it is in your price, or it should be. If it is not, you tend to find out on the worst possible day, which is the day you need the backup.
Support time: the most expensive line on the list
Hardware is predictable. People are not. One support ticket, the kind where a real person reads your message, logs in, finds the broken thing, and fixes it, can burn thirty minutes or more of skilled time. At any sane hourly rate, that one ticket costs more than a month of a starter hosting plan.
This is the math every host lives with. Most customers never open a ticket in a given month, and their payments cover the few who genuinely need help in that month. When you pay a fair flat price, part of what you are buying is the day your site breaks at 9 pm and a human being answers.
Payment fees and the small stuff
Card processing takes roughly 3 percent off the top of every payment before the host sees a cent. Add accounting, invoicing, fraud screening, and the occasional chargeback fee, and a few more points go with it. None of this is visible to you as a customer, but it is in the cost stack, and any host whose prices ignore it entirely is doing the math wrong somewhere.
So why do the big hosts open at C$2.99, then renew at C$15.39?
Now the interesting part. If the costs above are real, and they are, how can a giant host open at a price that cannot cover them?
Because the first term is not the product. The renewal is.
Hostinger's own Canadian page, checked November 13, 2026, sells its Premium plan at CAN$2.99 a month if you prepay CAN$143.52 for 48 months. The same page states it renews at CAN$15.39 a month, more than five times the intro rate. GoDaddy's Canadian page sells Economy hosting at C$9.19 a month on a three-year term, C$330.84 paid today, and states it auto-renews at C$771.63 for the next term, with SSL renewing separately at C$159.99 a year. SiteGround's early Black Friday offer opens at $1.99 a month and renews at $17.99 a month, in American dollars. The pattern is the same everywhere you look: the discount is real, and so is the cliff behind it.
The intro price is a marketing expense. It is funded by the renewal, by the add-ons sold along the way, and by the customers who are simply too busy running their business to move. The customer who switches away at renewal time got a subsidized deal. The customer who stays pays for both.
How we price instead
DotMoose charges a flat price and renews at the same price. Shared hosting starts at C$5.99 a month. Managed WordPress starts at C$7.99 a month. A VPS starts at C$19.99 a month. All in Canadian dollars, and the renewal is the number you already know.
That means our first month has to cover our costs the same way our fortieth month does. There is no renewal cliff quietly paying for your signup. It also means we will never win a headline contest against a C$1.99 teaser rate. We are fine with that trade, because the bill you open in year three matters more than the ad you clicked in year one.
The next step
Check what your current plan actually renews at, before it renews. If the number surprises you, our early Black Friday deal is on now: code FILL25 takes 80% off your first 4 monthly invoices, then the regular flat Canadian price after, and it ends November 30, 2026. Assisted migration is free for everyone, always, and we preview your site on our side before anything switches. Start at dotmoose.com, and bring your renewal bill with you. It is the only sales pitch we need.