How much does web hosting cost in the UK?

Why UK hosting prices are so far apart

UK web hosting prices start at a couple of pounds a month and climb until the invoice stops looking like a bill and starts looking like a salary. That spread is real, and it is not down to greed. Four different products are sold under the same heading, and each one is priced by a different thing.

A business website with its updates, backups and monitoring done for you sits in tens of pounds a month, not single figures. Pay less and you are renting space on a machine and doing the maintenance yourself. Pay more and you are buying more hardware, more resource, or more of the host's attention. Which tier a site actually needs is a separate question, covered in shared, VPS or dedicated hosting.

How each type of hosting is priced

Budget shared hosting

Priced by density. Fit enough websites onto one server and the cost per site drops to almost nothing, so the advertised figure can be a couple of pounds. Support is the other lever: people are the expensive part of a hosting company, so budget hosts keep human contact to a minimum by design. That is a legitimate deal, as long as you understand it.

Managed hosting

The bill here is mostly human time. Disk space gets cheaper every year; sysadmins do not. Most of the gap between single figures and tens of pounds a month is somebody applying your updates, checking the backups landed, and answering when you ring because the site has done something strange. That labour costs roughly the same however many customers a host has, which is why managed prices sit where they do. For WordPress sites, see what WordPress hosting costs in the UK.

VPS

You rent a guaranteed portion of a machine, and the size of that portion sets the price: so much processor, memory and storage. An unmanaged VPS looks cheap because you are supplying the systems administrator yourself, and that person is you at 11pm. Add management back and you are paying for the human again.

Dedicated servers

Here the hardware decides. A whole machine in a UK data centre costs what its processor, memory, storage and power cost, plus the rack it sits in. A quiet machine full of brochure sites and one grinding through AI workloads are not the same purchase, so we quote our dedicated servers after a short conversation.

What the advertised price tends to leave out

The number in the advert and the number on your statement in year two are often different. The usual reasons:

• The renewal rate. Headline prices are commonly first-term prices, often on a multi-year term paid up front. The renewal figure is usually in smaller type further down.
• VAT. Business plans are typically quoted excluding it and consumer plans including it, which makes two adverts look closer than they are.
• The domain. Free for the first year is common. Year two is charged at the standard rate.
• Backups. Often an optional extra, and on some hosts the restore carries its own fee, payable on the worst day of your year.
• Email. Sometimes a separate product, sometimes capped at a mailbox or two, sometimes fine. Check before you assume.
• Moving in and out. Some hosts charge to migrate you in. Most do not charge to let you leave, but they rarely make it pleasant.

None of that makes a cheap host dishonest. It does mean the comparison in your head is probably not comparing the same things. If your renewal has just jumped, see what to do about a hosting renewal price rise.

Where dijihost sits, and why

dijihost Complete Hosting is £1 a day + VAT, which is £365 a year + VAT or £35 a month + VAT. That buys one website, 10 email accounts, daily backups kept for 14 days, free SSL, Cloudflare DNS, one domain registration or renewal a year, free migration, and people whose job it is to look after all of it. Multiple sites, shops, reseller accounts and dedicated machines are quoted individually, because a fixed price for those would be a guess with a pound sign in front of it.

We are not the cheapest host in Nottinghamshire and have never tried to be. There is always somebody willing to charge less by doing less. What we sell is the maintenance and the people, and those have a floor under their price. The figure is published because being told to "contact us for pricing" irritates us as much as it irritates you. Our pricing page lists what it includes.

When the cheap option is the right call

Plenty of websites do not need what we sell. A hobby project, a club site somebody runs for love, a landing page for an idea you are testing this month, a personal blog: budget hosting is fine for all of it. The same goes if you are technical and enjoy the maintenance. Charities and start-ups counting every pound often decide, sensibly, to run cheap and accept the risk.

The line worth watching is the day the website starts producing money. Once enquiries, bookings or orders come through it, a day offline can cost more than a year of the difference in hosting.

How to compare two hosting quotes

Monthly price against monthly price is the comparison most people make, and it never settles anything. What settles it is the total each host will have taken by the end of three years, once the introductory term has run out and VAT is treated the same way on both sides.

1. Use the renewal rate, not the offer rate, and multiply it out over three years.
2. Put both figures on the same VAT basis.
3. Find out who applies the updates and who checks the site afterwards.
4. Ask what a backup restore costs.
5. Check how you reach a person outside office hours, and what happens to your email.

Do it that way and the price gap usually explains itself. Sometimes it explains itself in the cheap host's favour, and that is a fine outcome too.

Related