I have been looking at many of the new products and services being offered in the website hosting marketplace lately. In particular, I’ve been trying to figure out if web hosting prices are going up or down. It’s not as easy to figure out as you might think.

For example – take UK web hosting company 34SP.com. The company used to offer a Personal hosting plan for £17.95 per year. Then they retired that hosting plan and created the new Professional hosting plan for £3.95 per month (which translates into £47.40 per year). So they have raised their prices, right? Well, not so fast. The new package includes many new features and dramatically increased resources. For instance, the new plan includes free spam and virus protection, free SMTP, and free weekly backups. These ”extras” were are charged for under the Personal plan. Also – as you can see in this hosting comparison chart – the new Professional plan has ten times the resources as the older plan. So it ought to cost ten times as much, right? See how difficult it is to compare pricing on hosting plans?

Now consider the case of Rackspace Managed Hosting. A few years ago you couldn’t even dream of getting into a managed dedicated server with Rackspace for less than about $400 per month – and that was on the lower end of the range. Fast forward to today and the company has acquired two new brands: Slicehost and Mosso (now the Rackspace Cloud). Both of these newer brands offer entry level hosting prices of around $20 per month. That’s a dramatic price decrease in terms of minimum price compared to just a few years ago. However, if you look closely at the offerings, you’ll find that Rackspace servers are fully managed and many of the maintenance tasks are included in the price, while the much lower priced offers are in effect unmanaged. That means you have to do more of the heavy lifting yourself. It still look like a price reduction to me though.

Then there is the case of a brand new product from Lime Labs which is a new hosting and domain registration service, LimeDomains. LimeDomains is an ICANN accredited domain registrar and also offers shared hosting products. What makes this relevant for the issue at hand is that the company is offering one of the hosting products for free. Even that isn’t groundbreaking – there are plenty of free hosting companies out there. What is truly different about LimeDomains and the free hosting product is that it looks and feels almost exactly like a paid hosting product.

From the Lime Labs press release, ”All LimeDomains accounts come with access to an extensive catalog of open source web applications ranging from popular blogs such as WordPress, to full-featured content management systems such as Drupal and Joomla. Users can also upload their own files or transfer their existing websites – such as their Geocities pages – to LimeDomains via a built-in file manager, or any popular FTP client. Most popular web design applications, such as Adobe Dreamweaver, are also supported.

Unlike other free hosting services, there are no strings attached to the free hosting offer on LimeDomains. Users do not have to sign-up for any third party services, or submit themselves to a barrage of solicitations (e-mail, or otherwise), or place mandatory ads on their website. Most importantly, the free accounts are not crippled in any way – and receive the same quality of service, performance and reliability that most other hosting services charge a premium for.”

If you’d like to check out the new free hosting account and specifications from LimeDomains please visit: http://www.limedomains.com/hosting.

So now this appears to indicate that the price of shared hosting is going down. I plan to conduct a bit of further research to get to the bottom of the hosting pricing puzzle. Look for more tangible data soon.