UK web hosting prices start at a couple of pounds a month and climb until the invoice stops resembling a bill and starts resembling a salary. That spread is real, and it is not down to greed. Four different products get sold under the same heading, and each of them is priced by a different mechanism.
A business website with its updates, backups and monitoring done for you sits in tens of pounds a month, not single figures. Ours starts at £1 a day + VAT, or £30 a month + VAT. Pay less than that 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.
Why the prices are so far apart
Each tier of hosting is priced by a different thing, which is why two quotes can look like they came from different industries. Which tier a given site actually needs is a separate question, and we have been through that one in shared, VPS or dedicated hosting.
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, because people are the expensive part of a hosting company, so budget hosts keep the human contact to a minimum by design. That is the deal being offered, and it is a legitimate one as long as you understand it.
Managed hosting
The bill here is mostly human time. Disk space gets cheaper every year; sysadmins do not. When you pay tens of pounds a month rather than single figures, most of the difference 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 whether the host has fifty customers or five thousand, which is why managed prices sit where they sit and stay there. If the site in question is WordPress, that labour has a shape of its own, and we have costed it out in 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, so much memory, so much storage. An unmanaged VPS looks cheap on the invoice because you are supplying the systems administrator yourself, and that person is you at 11pm. Add management back on and you are paying for the human again.
Dedicated servers
Here the metal decides. A whole machine in a UK data centre costs what its processor, memory, storage and power cost, plus the rack it sits in. Nobody sensible publishes a single figure for this, ourselves included, because a quiet machine full of brochure sites and one grinding through AI workloads are not the same purchase. Our dedicated servers get quoted after ten minutes of questions.
What the advertised price tends to leave out
The number in the advert and the number on your statement in year two are frequently different numbers. The usual reasons:
- The renewal rate. Headline prices are commonly first-term prices, often on a three-year commitment paid up front. The renewal figure is on the same page, usually in smaller type near the bottom.
- VAT. Business plans are typically quoted excluding it and consumer plans including it, which makes two adverts look closer together than they are.
- The domain. Free for the first year is common. Year two is charged at the registrar’s 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.
- Getting 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 you are doing in your head is probably not comparing the same things.
Where we sit, and why
£1 a day + VAT buys one website, its email, and a person whose job it is to look after both. Multiple sites, shops, reseller accounts and dedicated machines are quoted individually, because a fixed price for any of those would be a guess with a pound sign in front of it.
We are not the cheapest host in Nottinghamshire and we have never tried to be. There is always somebody willing to charge less by doing less, and competing with them is a race you win by becoming the thing we tell customers to avoid. 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. It is on the web hosting page in plain sight, with the list of what it includes sitting underneath it.
When the cheap option is the right call
Plenty of websites do not need what we sell, and pretending otherwise would be daft.
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. Same goes if you are technical and you rather enjoy the maintenance. Charities and start-ups counting every pound often make a sensible decision to run cheap and accept the risk, and we would not lecture anyone for that.
The line worth watching is the day the website starts producing money. Once enquiries, bookings or orders arrive through it, the sums change, because the cost of it being down for a day is suddenly larger than a year of the difference in hosting.
Comparing two quotes
Monthly price against monthly price is the comparison most people make in their heads, and it is the one that never settles anything. What settles it is the total each host will have taken off you by the end of three years, once the introductory term has run out and VAT is being treated the same way on both sides. 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.
Web hosting cost FAQs
How much should a small business expect to pay for web hosting in the UK?
For hosting where the maintenance is done for you, budget tens of pounds a month rather than single figures. Ours starts at £1 a day + VAT for one site and its email, which is around £30 a month + VAT. If you are happy running your own updates and backups, a few pounds a month buys space on a shared server.
Why do UK hosting prices vary so much?
Because the same word covers different products. Budget plans pack many websites onto one machine and keep support costs down. Managed plans pay people to do the maintenance. Dedicated servers are priced by the hardware inside them. When two quotes look wildly apart, you are usually not comparing like with like.
Is the advertised hosting price the price you keep paying?
Often not. Introductory rates usually apply to a first term paid up front, and the renewal rate is set out further down the page. Before signing anything, find the renewal figure and multiply it by three years. That total is the number worth holding up against a managed quote.
Are UK hosting prices quoted with VAT included?
It varies, and that catches people out. Business hosting is usually quoted excluding VAT while consumer-facing plans often include it, so two adverts can look closer than they really are. We quote £1 a day + VAT so there is no surprise later. If a price does not say either way, ask before comparing it.
How do you compare two hosting quotes fairly?
Put both on paper. Use the renewal rate rather than the offer rate and work out three years. Check whether VAT is in each figure. Ask who applies the updates and who checks the site afterwards, what a restore costs, how you reach a person outside office hours, and what happens to your email. Two quotes that looked miles apart usually turn out to be answering different questions.
Get a number rather than a range
Send us what you are running now, how many sites, what they do and where the email lives, and we will put one figure against it rather than a range. It takes one phone call, and the number we give you is the number that turns up on the invoice.
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