Development
Most small business sites can be hosted well for £5 to £30 a month. What you are paying for, what hosting is not, and how to check if you are overpaying.
Website hosting is the space your site sits in, and it is one of the few genuinely small numbers in running a business online. Most small business sites can be hosted well for somewhere between about £5 and £30 a month.
The reason people find it confusing is not the price. It is that hosting gets bundled with domains, email, security certificates and maintenance, so the invoice rarely says what any single part costs. Here is what you are actually paying for.
| Type | Typical UK price | Suits |
|---|---|---|
| Budget shared hosting | £3 to £8 a month | A small brochure site with modest traffic. Slow at busy times |
| Good shared or managed WordPress | £10 to £30 a month | Most small business sites. Where we would put almost everyone |
| Premium managed WordPress | £25 to £80 a month | Busy sites, shops, anything where downtime costs real money |
| VPS or dedicated | £40 upwards | Rare for a small business. Usually a sign of an unusual requirement |
| Free hosting | £0 | Nothing you are running a business on. See below |
Watch the renewal price rather than the headline. The advertised figure is very often a first year offer that doubles or triples on renewal, and hosting companies rely on you not noticing. Check what year two costs before you commit.
The difference between £4 hosting and £25 hosting is real, it is just invisible until something goes wrong.
Hosting is also the floor on how fast your site can ever be. If you have compressed the images, cut the plugins and added caching and it is still slow, hosting is usually what is left. That is the last step in improving WordPress site speed.
These get billed together and are separate things.
| Thing | What it is | Typical cost |
|---|---|---|
| Hosting | The space the site sits in | Monthly |
| Domain | Your address, rented yearly | A few pounds to about £20 a year |
| SSL certificate | The padlock. Free on any decent host | Usually £0 |
| Business email | you@yourbusiness.co.uk | Often separate, a few pounds per mailbox |
| Maintenance | Updates, backups, someone to ring | Separate again, if you want it |
Two of those are worth knowing about specifically. You should not be paying for a basic SSL certificate, because free automatic ones give the same padlock and the same encryption. And your domain renewal is the cheapest thing you own and the one that takes the website and the email with it if it lapses.
Not for a business. The trade is always one of these: adverts on your pages, someone else’s branding, a subdomain instead of your own address, no backups, no support, or the account disappearing when the free tier changes.
Hosting is not where to save money. The gap between free and adequate is about a tenner a month, and adequate is the difference between a site that works and a site that is a liability.
Our own website maintenance plan is £49 a month with hosting inside it. That is deliberate, and worth explaining rather than just stating.
Splitting hosting from maintenance sounds tidier but works badly in practice. When something breaks, the host says it is the site and the site people say it is the host, and the business owner sits in the middle of it. Owning both means there is nobody to point at.
It also stops the double payment. Plenty of people pay a host and separately pay someone to look after the site, which is two invoices for one outcome.
To be clear, you do not have to buy hosting from whoever builds your site, and you should not feel pushed into it. It is your website. If you would rather host it yourself, that is completely reasonable, and a decent designer will hand it over cleanly.
Not necessarily, but it is usually the right answer for a small business, because it moves the tasks people forget onto someone else: updates applied and tested, daily backups, caching configured properly, and support who know the platform.
The alternative is cheaper hosting plus your own attention. That is a genuine option if you are comfortable and will actually do it. Our guide to backing up a WordPress site covers the part that matters most.
That last one catches people out more than the price does. It is on our website audit checklist along with the rest of what is worth knowing before you need to know it.
Hosting is one line in a larger budget. For the whole picture, including the build itself, see how much a website costs in the UK.
The price bands are from what we pay, what we quote, and the invoices clients show us when they ask whether they are being overcharged. They are ranges rather than survey data.
We should be straight about our position, because we sell a plan with hosting in it. We make almost nothing on the hosting itself, and we will say so on the phone if you ask. The reason we include it is not margin, it is that when a site breaks and the host and the web company each blame the other, the business owner is the one stuck in the middle.
The warning about who the account is in the name of is not hypothetical. We have taken on a client whose previous web company had gone quiet and was still taking his hosting payment every month, and he could not reach anyone to stop it.
Budget £10 to £30 a month for hosting that will not let you down. Do not pay for an SSL certificate. Keep your domain in your own name. Check the renewal price, not the offer price. And decide deliberately whether you are maintaining the site yourself or having someone do it, because the gap between those two is where sites quietly rot.
If you would rather have hosting, updates and backups arrive as one thing you never think about, that is what our website maintenance service is. If you just want to know whether you are currently overpaying, send us what you are on and we will tell you straight, whether or not you move to us.
Most small business sites can be hosted well for between about £10 and £30 a month. Budget shared hosting runs £3 to £8 but is slow at busy times, and premium managed WordPress hosting runs £25 to £80 for busy sites and shops. Always check the renewal price rather than the headline offer, because first year pricing very often doubles or triples in year two.
Server speed, support that actually knows the platform, daily backups kept for weeks, security patching at server level, and where in the world the server sits. Cheap hosting packs many sites onto one machine, so your site is quick when they are quiet and slow when they are busy, which you cannot control or predict.
No. Hosting is the space your site sits in and is usually billed monthly. Your domain is your address, rented yearly for a few pounds to about £20. They are often on the same invoice, which is why people confuse them. An SSL certificate, business email and maintenance are three further separate things.
For most small business websites, no. Free automatic certificates from Let's Encrypt are issued by nearly every reputable host and give exactly the same padlock and the same encryption as a paid one. If you are being charged for a basic certificate, ask your host whether the free option is available instead.
Not for a business. The trade is always adverts on your pages, someone else's branding, a subdomain instead of your own address, no backups, no support, or the account disappearing when the free tier changes. The gap between free and adequate is about ten pounds a month.
No, and you should not feel pushed into it. It is your website. Bundling hosting with maintenance does avoid the situation where the host blames the site and the site people blame the host, but if you would rather host it yourself that is completely reasonable and a decent designer will hand it over cleanly.
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