Network Solutions Alternatives

My first domain name was registered through Network Solutions, because for a long stretch of internet history there was essentially no other place to register one. They were the original registrar — the company that handed out domain names when the web was still measured in thousands of sites. I say this because it explains almost everything about using them for hosting in the current era: Network Solutions is a company built on a legacy, and legacy cuts both ways. The billing works. The name is recognized. The product you get today is, charitably, behind the market.

I've tested their shared hosting and helped readers migrate off it, and the recurring email in my inbox goes like this: "I've had my domain here for twenty years and I just noticed I'm paying $8-plus a month for hosting with 10 GB of storage. Is that normal?" At time of writing, roughly, yes. Their Starter plan has been advertised around $2.99/month on an annual purchase and renews in the neighborhood of $8–9/month, with review coverage (Tom's Guide, PCMag and others) consistently documenting the pattern. It's not the worst deal on the internet. It's just not a good one — and the gap is what this guide exists to document.

Hosting and domains are different products

The single most useful thing I can tell a Network Solutions customer is this: your domain registration and your web hosting are two separate products that happen to live in one account, and you can move one without touching the other. I've watched people endure years of mediocre hosting because they believed moving the website would risk their domain, or their email, or both. It doesn't. The domain is a registration record pointing at nameservers; the hosting is where the files live. Changing where files live is a DNS update away.

Network Solutions made its name as a registrar — for years, essentially the registrar — and domain services remain the core of the business. Their hosting exists to keep customers inside the account. That's not a conspiracy; it's ordinary product strategy and every registrar practices some version of it. But it explains the shape of what you get: hosting that's good enough not to leave, priced to renew, sitting next to domain renewals that at time of writing are themselves worth checking against the wider market (compare your annual domain charges with any price table; the difference funds a lot of the discounting elsewhere).

So plan any move as two separate decisions. Decision one: where does the website live? Decision two: where are the domains registered and the mailboxes hosted? You can answer them differently, months apart. Nearly every reader who's followed this path moved the hosting first and discovered the domain could stay exactly where it was.

When it makes sense to leave Network Solutions

Renewal pricing that triples quietly

The intro price on Network Solutions' shared hosting is genuinely low — around $2.99/month at time of writing on an annual Starter purchase. The renewal lands around $8.83/month according to Tom's Guide's tracked pricing, roughly a tripling. I'll give them one specific credit: reviewers have noted the renewal rate is shown during checkout rather than buried, which is more transparency than much of the industry offers. But transparency about a bad price doesn't make it a good price. Renewing at $8–9/month for one website, 10–15 GB of storage, and a handful of email accounts is paying modern managed-hosting money for 2014 shared-hosting specs.

Run the three-year number before you decide anything. At renewal rates, three years of Starter costs more than three years of several materially better hosts on the list below. Add the domain renewal price while you're at it — if your domains are also here, you may find that the domain renewals alone are above market rate, and domains are trivially portable.

Product and control panel age

This is the part that's hard to capture in a spec table. The account management interface, the site builder, the installers, the email console — they all carry the accumulated weight of a product that's been extended rather than rebuilt. Common specifics from hands-on work and reader reports: limited control over PHP versions and server settings, a one-click app library that's smaller and staler than mainstream cPanel hosts, backup tooling that reads like an upsell catalog, and a checkout flow where add-ons (site security, email boxes, privacy services) are pre-selected in ways that reward careful reading. If you are technically inclined, you will feel the walls quickly. If you're not technically inclined, the interface will make simple things feel harder than they are elsewhere.

Resource ceilings in 2026 terms

Starter gives you a single website and roughly 10–15 GB of storage depending on when and how you bought; the plans above it add space and sites but keep the same aging foundation. Meanwhile, hosts at half the renewal price ship NVMe storage, staging environments, server-level caching, and free SSL as table stakes. The question isn't "can my site run here" — it can. The question is what you're paying per unit of what you get, and by that measure Network Solutions is one of the weakest propositions in mainstream hosting.

Support and upsell pressure

Support experiences are mixed in the reports I see: fine for billing and domain questions, less impressive when the problem is "my site is slow" or "this installer failed." The bigger complaint pattern is commercial rather than technical — renewal charges landing for services people didn't realize they'd enabled, and add-on prompts that follow you around the account. I'm not calling this fraud; it's the standard playbook of registrar-era monetization. But if you've ever been surprised by a charge here, that's data.

The refund window is short

Worth checking before you buy anything from them: Network Solutions' refund terms for hosting and related services are tighter than the industry-standard 30 days — coverage has described windows as short as a few days for some products. Verify the current policy at checkout and keep the receipt. A short refund window tells you what the company expects its own customer experience to be.

When you should stay

• The domain lives here and you want it simple. If you have twenty years of domains at Network Solutions and the renewal prices on those are acceptable to you, keeping the domains and pointing DNS elsewhere is a fine outcome. You don't have to leave everything at once.
• You're on legacy pricing. Long accounts sometimes hold negotiated or grandfathered rates that beat anything on the open market. Check what you actually pay before assuming it's the list price.
• The site is tiny and the total cost is trivial. If you're paying for one small site and the difference between this and the best alternative is a coffee per month, the switching effort may not pay for itself this year. Set a reminder and revisit.
• Institutional constraints. Some organizations have procurement history, contracts, or "the domain has always been here" inertia that makes a switch a bigger project than the hosting is worth. That's a real constraint, not a delusion — just price it honestly.

The alternatives

These are shared and budget hosts I'd actually move a Network Solutions site to. Pricing is at time of writing — always confirm the renewal line before you buy.

Hostinger EU — the modern budget default

For most Network Solutions customers, this is the straightforward swap: same low entry price (around $2.99/month at time of writing on long terms), a genuinely modern control panel, free SSL, WordPress tooling that works. Yes, the renewal jumps (I document roughly a 167% increase on the entry plan, renewing around $7.99/month) — but that renewal is still comparable to what Network Solutions charges at renewal, for a materially better platform. This is the difference between two hikeds where one is worth the money.

GreenGeeks Pro — US-based, renewable-powered, room to grow

GreenGeeks sits one rung up: more resources per account than the budget tier, nightly backups, a migration team that will move your site for you, and data centers in North America and Europe. At time of writing their Pro tier runs in the mid-single-digit dollars monthly on intro terms — verify the renewal rate at checkout, since promotions vary. For a small business site that's outgrown "Starter plan" thinking but doesn't need a server, this is the pick I make most often from this pool.

Krystal — flat pricing, no renewal games

Krystal's defining policy is the one this whole site exists to reward: the price you sign up at is the price you renew at. They're UK-based and powered by renewable energy, with shared plans at time of writing in the £5–6/month range depending on tier. If you're tired of doing renewal arithmetic every year, that tiredness has a cure. Support is small-team and human, and the infrastructure is modern (NVMe storage, proper caching). The main consideration is geography — UK data centers serve US audiences slightly less ideally than a US host, though the difference is small for content sites.

Hetzner Webhosting — maximum honesty, minimum price

Hetzner's managed webhosting starts around €1.60/month at the entry tier at time of writing with no introductory discount theater — you pay the real price from day one. Storage and traffic allowances are sensible, and the platform is well-run. The caveat for a typical Network Solutions customer: Hetzner is self-service oriented. If you want hand-holding, look at GreenGeeks or SiteGround. If you want the best price-to-product ratio in the market and can follow documentation, this is it.

SiteGround UK Servers — paying for support on purpose

SiteGround renews at prices that make budget buyers wince — I won't pretend otherwise, and their intro-to-renewal jump is real. What you get in exchange is the support experience I trust most in shared hosting, plus managed WordPress features (staging, caching, automatic updates) that simply don't exist at Network Solutions. For a revenue-critical small business site where an hour of downtime costs more than a year of the price difference, that trade is easy to justify.

JustHost — a like-for-like budget option

If what you want is simply a traditional cPanel shared host at a familiar price shape without anything fancy, JustHost is the closest like-for-like name in this pool — a conventional budget host with standard shared plans and cPanel, at time of writing priced in the same budget band as the others here. Read their renewal terms closely before buying (budget hosts in this class share the intro/renewal structure), and use them as a baseline to compare against the better picks above rather than a first choice.

How to switch without downtime

Most Network Solutions customers have both hosting and domains here, so this migration has two tracks. Run the website track first and leave the domain alone until it's boring.

1. Export and back up everything. Website files and database from the hosting control panel, plus an export of your email if you're moving mail too. Download copies locally. Also grab your DNS zone records (screenshots count) — you'll want the MX/TXT records later.
2. Build the site on the new host while the old one serves traffic. Use a temporary URL or hosts-file override to verify the migrated site completely: pages, forms, images, admin access, SSL. Most hosts on the list above will migrate a standard site for free — let them, then verify their work yourself.
3. Move or rebuild the mailboxes. If your email is on Network Solutions, create the accounts on the new side first and test. Email is where quiet breakage happens.
4. Lower DNS TTLs a day or two before cutover. Then update the A record (or nameservers if you're moving DNS wholesale) to point at the new host. Leave the domain registration where it is — that's fine and normal.
5. Keep the hosting account alive for two weeks. DNS caches, old links, someone's saved password to your old webmail — give it time. Watch the new host's logs for 404s pointing at pages you forgot to migrate.
6. Then cancel hosting and evaluate the domains. Turn off auto-renewal on the hosting product and confirm the billing stopped. Separately, decide whether to transfer the domains — you can do that any time later with zero downtime, and registrars transfer with the authorization code and the transfer lock removed.

How we evaluate hosting providers

On HostingSpotter, the renewal price is the headline, because the headline price is the marketing department's number and the renewal price is yours. We compare signup versus renewal rates, check what the storage, sites and email limits really are, test support with real problems, and note whether the platform has been maintained or merely billed. Where I'm citing a figure I haven't re-verified this week, I say "at time of writing" and name the source. We don't accept payment for placement — the whole point of this site is that someone in the industry finally tells you the second-year price.