SiteGround Discount Codes: The Same $2.99 That Costs Four Times More
There’s a discount to be had at SiteGround, and it’s real. It’s also the same $2.99 that Hostinger advertises — and three years later one of those costs $2.99 a month and the other $12.99.
That gap has nothing to do with which code you find. It comes entirely from how long the discounted rate lasts.
Year one versus year two
Read from SiteGround’s own pricing page. The renewal rate is printed on the plan card, which is more than most of this industry manages:
| Plan | Storage | Year one | Renews at | Increase | Year two costs |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| StartUp | 10 GB | $2.99 | $17.99 | 502% | $215.88 |
| GrowBig | 50 GB | $4.99 | $29.99 | 501% | $359.88 |
| GoGeek | 100 GB | $7.99 | $44.99 | 463% | $539.88 |
The consistency is the finding. Roughly 460–500% across every tier — so the cliff isn’t a quirk of the entry plan designed to get you in the door. It’s the pricing model. Upgrading doesn’t escape it.
And the promotional rate runs 12 months, not 36 or 48. So year two arrives quickly.
The comparison that makes the code irrelevant
Both hosts advertise $2.99. Here’s what that buys:
| SiteGround StartUp | Hostinger Premium | |
|---|---|---|
| Advertised | $2.99 | $2.99 |
| Promotional term | 12 months | 48 months |
| Renewal | $17.99 | $10.99 |
| 3-year effective | $12.99 | $2.99 |
Same headline, 4.3× the real cost. And the first-year saving between them is exactly zero — you pay $2.99 either way. The entire difference materialises in month 13.
So the useful question isn’t “is there a SiteGround code?” — it’s whether SiteGround is worth $84 a year more than Hostinger from year two onward, which is a judgement about support and platform rather than about discounts. We laid out the market-wide version of this, where the ranking inverts completely once you account for term length.
The date that actually matters
Since the promotional term is 12 months, your renewal arrives about a year after signup and it is a 502% increase. Two things follow:
Diarise it on the day you sign up, for roughly six weeks before the anniversary. That’s the window in which you can decide rather than discover.
The arithmetic, concretely. Sign up on 1 March and your promotional term ends 28 February the following year. Working backwards from that date:
| When | What to do |
|---|---|
| Day 1 | Set the reminder. This is the only step people skip |
| ~6 weeks before | Decide: stay, negotiate, or migrate |
| ~2 weeks before | If migrating, start it — a move takes a weekend, not an evening |
| Renewal date | $17.99/mo begins, prepaid for 12 months |
The cost of missing it is a full year, not a month. SiteGround’s renewal is prepaid for 12 months, so an unnoticed anniversary commits you to $215.88 on StartUp — and that’s assuming the entry tier. On GoGeek it’s $539.88.
Auto-renewal is how this happens, and it’s the default across this industry rather than anything specific to SiteGround. The reminder is the whole defence.
Know which shape SiteGround’s refund window is before you need it. We’ve read Bluehost’s and Hostinger’s policies in full — one allows a refund only in the 15 days before a renewal charges, the other allows 30 days after it. We have not verified SiteGround’s renewal-specific window, only that it advertises a 30-day money-back guarantee. Check it yourself before the anniversary, because those two shapes require opposite behaviour.
What SiteGround is actually selling
This isn’t a “never buy SiteGround” article, and the honest case for it is specific.
Support quality. It’s the reason people stay, and it’s the reason we’ve recommended it for booking and payment sites where downtime has a direct revenue consequence. If a site earns money on a Monday morning, $10/month more for support that answers is not the variable to optimise.
Transparency. SiteGround prints “Renews at $17.99/mo. Prepaid for 12 months” on the plan card. Nothing about the cliff is concealed — it’s disclosed more clearly than at hosts with gentler increases.
Storage is where the tiers earn their money. 10 GB, 50 GB and 100 GB respectively — and the value per gigabyte improves sharply as you climb:
| Plan | Storage | Renewal | Per GB/month |
|---|---|---|---|
| StartUp | 10 GB | $17.99 | $1.80 |
| GrowBig | 50 GB | $29.99 | $0.60 |
| GoGeek | 100 GB | $44.99 | $0.45 |
The 10 GB entry allowance is the constraint to check first — a media-heavy site or a store with product images will hit it, and StartUp is the worst value per gigabyte by four times. The upgrade costs $4.99 now and $29.99 later, so if you know you’ll need the space, buying it in year one is the cheaper mistake.
Where it doesn’t stack up: a brochure site that will sit there for three years. You’d be paying four times Hostinger’s cost for support you’ll never call.
The providers
SiteGround — $2.99, $4.99 and $7.99 for StartUp, GrowBig and GoGeek, renewing at $17.99, $29.99 and $44.99 after 12 months, with 10/50/100 GB storage. Buy it for support quality on a site that earns money, with the renewal date in your calendar from day one. The discount is genuine; the term is the catch.
Hostinger — the same $2.99 entry price on a 48-month term renewing at $10.99, giving a $2.99 three-year effective cost. The catch is different: that rate means $143.52 charged upfront, and it’s largely non-refundable outside the guarantee window. Cheaper to own, more committed at purchase.
The honest split: if you’ll call support, SiteGround. If you won’t, the arithmetic isn’t close.
How we checked this
The prices are primary-sourced and verified today. We read SiteGround’s own shared hosting page on 17 August 2026 and extracted the renewal figures directly from its markup — “Renews at $17.99/mo. Prepaid for”, and the same construction at $29.99 and $44.99 — along with promotional prices of $2.99, $4.99 and $7.99 and storage allowances of 10 GB, 50 GB and 100 GB. This is the first time we’ve verified SiteGround’s full shared range rather than just its entry plan, and the 502% figure we’d previously published for StartUp is confirmed.
One methodological detail worth stating, because it affected what we could read. Our research machine egresses from Germany, and SiteGround geo-locks by IP — it served us the German site regardless of locale and language headers, and its German pages did not expose the price markup. We re-ran the request from our US server in Ashburn, which returned the dollar pricing quoted above. If you’re comparing prices from outside the US, expect to see a different page.
The plan-to-price mapping is our inference. The page yields three promotional prices and three renewal prices in consistent order, and we’ve matched them to StartUp, GrowBig and GoGeek accordingly. That ordering is near-certain but we did not see the plan names adjacent to the figures in the markup we parsed.
What we have not verified: SiteGround’s renewal-specific refund window, its cancellation flow, whether any discount code stacks with the landing-page rate, and whether the storage allowances changed recently — the brief for this article said SiteGround “trimmed storage allowances”, and we can report the current figures but have no before-and-after to show a reduction.
We tested no discount codes. As with every host in this series, we won’t script a checkout behind bot protection, so we’ve published the term and renewal data that determines your cost instead of codes we couldn’t verify.
Hostinger’s figures are from our research across this series, with its 48-month term confirmed on its own pricing page on 17 August 2026.
The host links above are affiliate links. This article says one of them costs four times more than the other over three years, and names the circumstances in which that’s still worth paying.
FAQ
Is there a SiteGround discount code?
The entry discount is applied by the landing page rather than a code — $2.99 for StartUp. The more useful question is the term, which is 12 months before a 502% increase to $17.99.
How much does SiteGround cost after the first year?
$17.99/month for StartUp, $29.99 for GrowBig and $44.99 for GoGeek — $215.88, $359.88 and $539.88 respectively for year two.
Why is SiteGround so much more expensive than Hostinger if the price is the same?
Because Hostinger’s $2.99 runs for 48 months and SiteGround’s for 12. Over three years that’s $2.99/month against $12.99 — the same headline, 4.3 times the cost.
Does upgrading to GrowBig avoid the renewal jump?
No. The increase is roughly 460–500% on every tier, so it’s the pricing model rather than an entry-plan tactic. GrowBig goes from $4.99 to $29.99.
How much storage does SiteGround give you?
10 GB on StartUp, 50 GB on GrowBig and 100 GB on GoGeek. The 10 GB entry allowance is the constraint most likely to force an upgrade.
When should I cancel to avoid the renewal?
Set a reminder about six weeks before your anniversary. Check SiteGround’s own renewal refund window first — some hosts only refund before the charge lands, others after, and the two require opposite timing.
Is SiteGround ever worth it?
Yes, when support quality has a revenue consequence — a booking site or a store where downtime costs money. For a brochure site that will sit untouched for three years, the arithmetic strongly favours the cheaper option.
