Hostwinds Basic Shared Hosting: $6.99 Live Page vs $3.29 Official Blog

The live product page and the official blog disagree on price

The current Shared Hosting page lists Basic at $6.99/month. It does not show an introductory-versus-renewal ladder in the visible plan table.

Hostwinds' own August 27, 2026 review says shared hosting starts at $3.29/month and specifically describes it as a standard rate rather than a temporary loss-leader promotion. Because both pages are current and official, this article does not convert $3.29 into a universal checkout price or assume $6.99 is a future renewal guarantee. Save the exact Basic price, billing cycle and cart total shown when ordering.

“Unlimited” hosting still has a one-domain product boundary

Basic currently includes one domain plus unlimited published bandwidth and disk space, SSD storage, free SSL, cPanel, unlimited subdomains, FTP accounts, databases and email accounts.

That makes the plan easy to understand for a single conventional website, but “unlimited” does not turn the account into a backup archive or dedicated server. The most important hard plan boundary visible on the product page is one domain; Advanced moves to four domains and Ultimate to unlimited domains.

A 60-day full-backup history can cost more than the hosting

Backups are a separate paid service for shared hosting. Hostwinds currently charges $3/month for the backup service plus $0.03 per GB per month of object-storage data. Shared-hosting backups run nightly by default, use full non-incremental copies, and default to 60 days of retention; retention can be adjusted from 3 to 364 days.

That design matters because every retained nightly copy counts toward stored data. As a simplified steady-state capacity illustration, an unchanged 10GB account with 60 full retained copies represents about 600GB of stored backup data. At the published $0.03/GB/month rate, that is about $18/month for storage plus the $3 service fee, or roughly $21/month. This is not an invoice prediction—real data size changes over time and billing is based on actual object-storage usage—but it shows why retention length deserves a budget line.

There is also an exit detail: cancelling the hosting service does not automatically delete the associated backup object storage. Hostwinds says customers must manually remove those backups to avoid continuing object-storage charges.

Complimentary migration has a 60-day service window

Hostwinds includes complimentary migrations with managed services, including Shared Hosting, during the first 60 days of service. The team can work from cPanel, Plesk or environments without a control panel, and most migrations are described as taking 24–48 hours, though large or complex sites can take longer.

The policy also says multiple cPanel accounts cannot be merged into a single cPanel account. Keep the old service online until files, databases, applications and email have been validated, then update DNS and wait for propagation before cancelling the previous host.

Refund requests have a much shorter 72-hour clock

Hostwinds' current refund documentation requires the service to be cancelled in the Client Portal first and the refund request to be submitted within 72 hours of the payment transaction. Eligible refunds may be prorated. Domains, software licenses, SSL certificates, IP addresses, hourly services and cryptocurrency purchases are among the listed exclusions.

That makes the refund clock far shorter than the migration window. Do not assume the 60-day complimentary migration period creates a 60-day trial. If price or service fit is uncertain, inspect the account immediately after purchase and record the 72-hour deadline separately from the migration deadline.

Who Basic fits—and what to save before checkout

Basic can fit one straightforward site that wants cPanel, SSL, a managed migration path and a simple one-domain plan, especially if the buyer is comfortable managing backups as a separate paid storage system.

Before paying, save the live Basic cart price, billing cycle, backup add-on state, backup retention setting and 72-hour refund deadline. If the site needs several domains, predictable low-cost long-retention backups, or more than three days to decide whether the service fits, compare another plan or provider before checkout.