The Hosting Industry Is Splitting in Two. Your Website Bill Will Pick a Side.

Easter weekend on the Wild Atlantic Way means every tourism site, gift shop, and restaurant in the country is handling more traffic than it will see again until June. It is also the weekend I sat down to read a hosting industry report that explains where all that traffic, and the bills behind it, are heading.

The WebPros and CloudLinux 2026 Web Hosting Trends Report, based on a survey of 446 hosting providers worldwide, paints a picture of an industry pulling itself apart. Two forces are working in opposite directions, and if you run a business website, the result will show up on your next invoice.

The Two Forces

On one side, SaaS website builders are winning on simplicity. According to the WebPros report, roughly 4 in 10 hosting providers say they are losing customers to platforms like Wix and Shopify. These platforms remove decisions. You do not choose a server. You do not think about PHP versions. You sign up, drag some blocks around, and you have a website.

On the other side, managed WordPress hosting is booming. Around two thirds of hosting providers reported revenue growth in 2025, and the providers growing fastest are the ones investing in performance, security, and automation. Hostinger, to take one example, posted €275 million in revenue last year, up roughly 50% year on year for the fourth consecutive year, with AI handling over 80% of their customer support interactions, according to their published financial results.

The industry is not shrinking. It is splitting.

The Simplicity Tax

Here is where it gets uncomfortable for business owners who chose the easy option.

Wix's entry plan starts at $17 a month. Reasonable enough. Until you need ecommerce (Core at $29/month), add a couple of premium apps ($20 to $60 a month), and factor in transaction fees on every sale. Multiple independent pricing breakdowns put the real first-year cost for a small ecommerce site on Wix somewhere between $500 and $6,500, depending on what the site actually needs to do. One user on social media put it more bluntly: "This price increase is INSANE."

The pattern is the same across SaaS builders. Low entry price. Gradual feature-gating. Renewal that bears no resemblance to the price you signed up for.

And the real cost is not on the invoice. If you want to leave, you cannot take your site with you. The design, the structure, the integrations, they stay on the platform. You start again from scratch. It is the same vendor lock-in pattern that is quietly reducing small business choice across the entire industry.

Where WordPress Fits

WordPress powers somewhere around 43% of all websites on the internet, as W3Techs continues to report month after month. That number has been climbing for over a decade and it is not slowing down. The reason is structural: WordPress is open source, extensible, and portable. You can move a WordPress site between hosts in an afternoon. Try moving a Wix site anywhere.

The skills barrier that kept non-technical business owners away from WordPress is collapsing. AI website builders can now generate a complete, professional WordPress site from a business description in under a minute. No code. No designer. No three-week agency process. The WebPros report notes that over half of hosting providers see AI as the single biggest trend shaping 2026, and the practical reality is already here: the €5,000 agency website is no longer the only path to a professional online presence.

Managed WordPress hosting wraps the technical maintenance, the security patching, the backups, the performance optimisation, into a single predictable cost. No app marketplace. No per-feature charges. No transaction fees taking a percentage of your revenue.

The Honest Caveat

If you are running a business that lives entirely inside a marketplace ecosystem, something like a Shopify-native ecommerce brand with heavy app integrations and fulfilment workflows baked into the platform, staying there genuinely makes sense. The switching cost is real and the ecosystem lock-in works in your favour when the ecosystem is where your customers already are. Not every business needs to be on WordPress.

But if you are running a standard business website, one that needs to load fast, rank well on Google, represent your brand, and not cost more every year, the maths has changed. The SaaS simplicity premium was worth paying when the alternative was learning server administration. It is not worth paying when AI can build you a WordPress site on enterprise-grade managed hosting for €60 a year, everything included.

What Comes Next

The WebPros report projects that hosting providers will continue moving upmarket, expanding managed services and professional support while competing less on raw price. For SaaS builders, the direction is the opposite: more features behind more expensive plans, more transaction fees, more lock-in.

For business owners, the question is straightforward. Do you want a platform that gets more expensive as you grow? Or infrastructure that stays predictable because the model does not depend on taking a cut of your success?

The hosting industry has picked its sides. Your website bill is about to pick yours.

Sources

WebPros and CloudLinux, 2026 Web Hosting Trends Report

Hostinger, Financial Results 2025

W3Techs, WordPress Usage Statistics, April 2026