I encounter numerous complaints daily regarding hidden hosting costs, such as fees for activating backup features, transferring services between users within the same provider, and more. However, the most unusual charge I've come across is a fee for resending login information for the hosting control panel. What’s the strangest hidden cost you have ever encountered?
they accidentally deleted one of our clients websites, we noticed and opened ticket. They said one of their stuff accidentally deleted the site with its contents and dns records and they asked us to pay to recover it.
A few that caught me out over the years: 1. Bandwidth overage. The plan looks cheap until a traffic spike or someone hotlinking your images burns through the monthly allowance. Putting a caching reverse proxy or CDN in front of static files and setting sane Cache-Control headers cut my origin traffic a lot. 2. Backups. Many hosts include them but only keep a few days, or charge for restores. Keep your own offsite copy and actually test a restore once. 3. Renewal pricing. The intro price is for the first term only, so check the renewal rate before you prepay several years. 4. Add-ons on VPS plans. Extra IPv4 addresses and control panel licenses are more and more often billed separately. Read the AUP and the overage section before signing, not after.
The restore fee after the host deletes your site is the one that gets me, it feels like paying to fix their mistake. That's why I'd always keep an offsite backup of your own so nobody can hold your site hostage.