First sign up to a new web hosting company, and you’ll likely be impressed by just how much the leading providers pack into their web hosting plans, and how little they charge for them.

Over the years, the increasingly stiff competition among leading web hosting providers has created something of an industry standard practice for offering rock bottom rates to new customers. As such, when you first come to launch your website, you’ll likely find that you can get a full year’s hosting for about the same price as you’d pay for a few cups of coffee.

Not bad, right? Of course it isn’t. As a result of these cheap deals on quality web hosting plans, more and more people are taking to the web to start their own business or simply share something their passion about.

Yet then comes the bad news. Once that first term is over, you’ll no longer be able to enjoy the same dirt cheap rates, as most of the leading web hosting companies then begin to follow another standard industry practice: Increasing their prices once you come to renew your hosting plan.

When this happens, you’re left to take one of two routes: Pay up and stay with the current provider, or start looking around at switching to another web hosting provider by comparing the best web hosting deals, we suggest you use a site like this one.

Which option you take will largely depend on a number of factors. If you’re coming to the end of your current plan and find yourself at fork in the road, with one direction marked ‘stay’ and the other ‘switch,’ here’s an argument for both that we hope will go someway towards helping you make up your mind.

Stick with your current web hosting provider

The argument for staying with your existing web hosting plan even after the discount first term isn’t all that complicated: It’s absolutely the easiest way to keep your website up and running.

When it comes time to renew, you’ll need to do little more than head to your dashboard, click a button and, if you’re paying with the same method you used for that first term, just confirm that you’re happy to pay again.

In some cases, it’s easier than that. Most hosting companies like to trigger automatic renewals, so providing you’ve got the money in your account, you don’t even need to remember to renew.

This is the ideal route if you’re happy with everything you’re currently getting from your plan. Yes, it costs you more than it once did, but even if you switch over to a new host, the same thing is only going to happen again somewhere down the line, and do you really have it in you to keep dragging your website around to different hosts every time the first term runs out?

Stick with your current host, and you get everything you need to run a successful website, with none of the headaches of time-consuming chores of singing up to a new provider and migrating your site across.

Switch to a new web hosting plan

As easy as it is to stay where you are, there’s of course plenty of valid reasons for packing up and moving on.

It may be that the renewal rates your existing host is planning to charge are far too big when compared with how you actually use your hosting space. It may be that you’ve outgrown the plan you first paid for, and that moving into a bigger solution, such as VPS or dedicated hosting, is going to cost you far more with your current host than it will elsewhere, or it may well be that your company hasn’t really lived up their end of the bargain.

If you’ve been experiencing lots of downtime with your current site, if the customer support leaves a lot to be desired, or if you’ve generally been feeling that you’re not getting what you’re paying for even at a discount rate, it may well be time to switch and move on.