SiteGround vs Hostinger: Identical in Year One, 4.8× Apart by Year Four

Put the two entry plans side by side and they cost exactly the same: $2.99 a month.

Follow them for four years and one costs $143.52 and the other $683.52.

Neither number is hidden. Both are on the vendors’ own pricing pages. They just sit in different places — one in the headline, the other in the small print under it — and almost every comparison of these two hosts quotes the first and ignores the second.

Considering other options too? SiteGround alternatives has the full renewal arithmetic — a 6.0× multiple, the steepest we’ve measured — plus a feature-by-feature matrix of what actually replaces the things you use daily.

The verified numbers

SiteGround, prepaid for 12 months:

Hostinger, prepaid for 48 months:

Look at the dropdown above those cards: “48 months plan.” That’s the term the $2.99 requires. Change it and the monthly figure rises. Hostinger states the rest plainly underneath — “Get 48 months for $143.52 (regular price $575.52). Renews at $10.99/mo.”

SiteGround’s page is equally clear in its own way: “Prepaid for 12 months” under the price, and “Renews at $17.99” beside the button.

What that means over time

And the tiers above it:

Year one is a genuine tie. That’s not a rhetorical flourish — $35.88 against $35.88 on the entry tier, and $95.88 against $95.88 at the top. If you intend to host something for twelve months and then reassess, these two hosts cost identical money and you should choose on other grounds entirely.

Everything after month twelve is where they separate, and the separation is driven by two different mechanisms:

• SiteGround’s renewal is 64–77% higher than Hostinger’s. $17.99 vs $10.99, $29.99 vs $16.99, $44.99 vs $25.99.
• Hostinger defers its renewal by four years by requiring a 48-month prepayment. You don’t get a cheaper renewal so much as you get much longer before you meet it.

That second point cuts both ways, and it’s the honest catch in Hostinger’s favour: $143.52 is real money committed up front for a site you haven’t launched yet. SiteGround asks for $35.88. If the project might not survive the year, SiteGround’s commitment is a fifth of the size, and its 4.8× disadvantage never materialises because you were never going to reach year four.

Where SiteGround’s price actually goes

SiteGround’s defence has always been support quality and in-house engineering — SG Optimizer, its Ultrafast PHP setup, Site Tools instead of cPanel — rather than specs per dollar. That defence deserves to be taken seriously, and it deserves to be tested rather than repeated.

We did not test it, and I’d rather say so than imply otherwise. The plan for this article was three identical support tickets to each host — a slow site, a broken plugin, an email deliverability problem — with response times and resolution quality published. That requires paid accounts on both and a controlled comparison we haven’t run. Every claim you’ll read about SiteGround’s support, including favourable ones, is either someone’s anecdote or a vendor’s marketing, and ours would have been the former.

What can be verified is the resource ceiling, which is the thing that actually catches SiteGround users out. From SiteGround’s own FAQ:

“SiteGround web hosting handles from 10,000 to 400,000+ monthly visits depending on your plan: StartUp supports around 10,000 visits, GrowBig handles approximately 100,000, and GoGeek manages 400,000+ monthly.”

StartUp is a 10,000-visit plan. That’s roughly 330 visits a day. For a new site it’s plenty; for anything that finds an audience it isn’t, and the upgrade path from $17.99 to $29.99 arrives sooner than the storage numbers suggest. SiteGround is transparent about this — it’s in their FAQ, not buried — but it reframes what the entry plan is for.

Worth crediting SiteGround on one point: it states that “all crucial features — including automatic backups, free SSL, CDN, and security tools — are available on every plan, so you’re not locked out of core functionality at lower price points.” Feature-gating the cheap tier is a common tactic in this market and SiteGround doesn’t do it.

The decision

Choose Hostinger if you’ll still be running this site in two years. The four-year arithmetic isn’t close, the renewal is 64–77% cheaper, and at $2.99/month for the entry tier it’s the same money as SiteGround for year one anyway. The condition is that you’re comfortable committing $143.52 today.

Check Hostinger pricing → · Read our Hostinger review

Choose SiteGround if the commitment matters more than the total, or if support is genuinely load-bearing for you. A twelve-month prepay of $35.88 is a much smaller bet than four years, and if you’re not certain the project will outlive the year, the cheaper long-run option is irrelevant. It’s also the right call if a support failure costs you more per hour than the price gap costs per year — for a shop turning over real money, that calculation looks very different than it does for a blog.

Check SiteGround pricing → · Read our SiteGround review

Choose neither if you can run a server. Or, before either — check whether you need to move at all: VPS vs shared hosting gives four tests, and for a lot of sites the honest answer is to stay put. Both are managed shared hosting with the markup that implies. A VPS at $5 or under gives you more resources than either for less money, at the cost of maintaining it yourself — and if you’d rather not, Hostinger’s own VPS range sits between the two models.

How we picked

Every price here was read from each vendor’s US pricing pages in August 2026 and verified in their page source rather than taken from a comparison site: SiteGround’s StartUp/GrowBig/GoGeek at $2.99/$4.99/$7.99 introductory against $17.99/$29.99/$44.99 renewals with “Prepaid for 12 months,” and Hostinger’s Premium/Unlimited/Cloud Startup at $2.99/$3.79/$7.99 on 48-month terms of $143.52/$181.92/$383.52, renewing at $10.99/$16.99/$25.99. The visit allowances are quoted from SiteGround’s own FAQ.

The multi-year totals are our arithmetic on those figures: intro rate for the prepaid term, renewal rate thereafter. They assume you don’t renegotiate, don’t churn to a new introductory offer under a different email address, and don’t hit a resource ceiling that forces an upgrade — the last of which is likelier on SiteGround’s StartUp than the table implies.

A note on how these were checked, because it affects what you’ll see. Both hosts geolocate their pricing. From a European address, SiteGround redirects to its German storefront in euros and Hostinger serves its German site; the figures above were captured through a US connection to get the dollar pricing most readers of this article will be quoted. If you’re browsing from outside the US, your prices will differ — sometimes materially, since VAT is included in European pricing. Check your own storefront before committing.

That same constraint is why there’s only one screenshot here: SiteGround redirects to a localised site before a page capture can complete from our location, so we’ve quoted its figures from the US page source rather than show you a German screenshot with the wrong currency on it.

What we did not do: we did not submit support tickets to either host, run a load test, or measure page speed. Those were in the plan for this article and all three require paid accounts and a controlled setup; publishing impressions instead would be worth less than admitting the gap. If support quality is what’s deciding this for you, both hosts offer a 30-day money-back guarantee — buy the cheap tier on each, send the same real question to both, and you’ll have a better answer in a week than any published comparison will give you.

Both links above are affiliate links. Hostinger wins the cost comparison on our own arithmetic; SiteGround’s case rests on support quality we haven’t measured, which is exactly why we haven’t claimed it either way.

FAQ

Is Hostinger cheaper than SiteGround?

Over any period longer than the first year, substantially. Year one they’re identical at $35.88 for the entry tier. Over four years Hostinger Premium totals $143.52 against SiteGround StartUp’s $683.52 — 4.8× — driven by SiteGround renewing at $17.99 against Hostinger’s $10.99.

Why does Hostinger look so cheap?

Because the advertised $2.99 requires a 48-month commitment: $143.52 paid up front, against a regular price of $575.52. It’s a real price for four years of hosting, but it is not a monthly rate you can leave whenever you like.

What does SiteGround renew at?

$17.99/month for StartUp, $29.99 for GrowBig and $44.99 for GoGeek, after a 12-month prepaid introductory term. That’s 64–77% above Hostinger’s equivalent renewals.

How much traffic does SiteGround StartUp handle?

Around 10,000 visits a month by SiteGround’s own estimate — roughly 330 a day. GrowBig handles approximately 100,000 and GoGeek 400,000+. It’s the entry plan’s real constraint, more than its 10 GB of storage.

Is SiteGround’s support worth the extra money?

We haven’t tested it, so we won’t claim either way — and be sceptical of comparisons that do without showing their method. The honest framing is a threshold: if an unresolved support problem costs you more per hour than the roughly $7–19/month price gap costs you per year, the premium is rational. For most personal sites it isn’t; for a store taking orders it may be.

Which is better for WordPress?

Both run WordPress well and both include the essentials. SiteGround ships its own SG Optimizer and a custom PHP setup; Hostinger includes a one-click installer and its own performance tooling. At the entry tier the more relevant question is the visit ceiling and what you’ll pay in year two.

Can I get the introductory price again by re-signing?

Introductory pricing is for new customers, and hosts increasingly detect returning ones. Plan on paying the renewal rate, which is the basis for every figure in this article.