Your hosting directly affects your website’s speed, security, and reliability. Bad hosting makes fast websites slow and secure websites vulnerable. Here’s what you need to know.
How much does it cost to host a website per year in the UK?
About £60 to £300 a year on standard shared hosting, and about £240 to £480 a year (£20 to £40 a month) on managed WordPress hosting, both at renewal prices before VAT. The first year is usually far cheaper because of introductory deals, which is why so many people are surprised by their second bill. Here is what the main UK hosts were charging when we checked.
| Host and plan | Introductory price | Renewal price | A year at renewal |
|---|---|---|---|
| IONOS Web Hosting Standard | £3 a month for 6 months | £6 a month | £72 |
| IONOS Web Hosting Plus | £1 a month for 12 months | £9 a month | £108 |
| Hostinger Single | £1.49 a month, paid as £71.52 for 48 months | £7.99 a month | £95.88 |
| Hostinger Premium | £2.99 a month on the 48 month term | £10.99 a month | £131.88 |
| Krystal Amethyst | No intro deal, £7 a month billed monthly | £7 a month | £84 |
| SiteGround StartUp | £1.99 a month, 12 months prepaid | £13.99 a month | £167.88 |
| SiteGround GrowBig | £3.99 a month, 12 months prepaid | £23.99 a month | £287.88 |
| Krystal Emerald | No intro deal, £19 a month billed monthly | £19 a month | £228 |
| 20i Plan 1 | £1 for the first month | £20 a month | £240 |
| 20i Plan 2 (3 websites) | £1 for the first month | £40 a month | £480 |
All prices checked October 2026 on each host’s UK site. IONOS, Hostinger and SiteGround state their prices exclude VAT, and Krystal’s page shows prices without VAT unless you tick its VAT switch. The 20i page we checked does not say either way, so confirm at checkout. The “year at renewal” column is simply the monthly renewal price multiplied by twelve.
How much does website hosting cost per month?
£6 to £24 a month at renewal for shared hosting, and £20 to £40 a month for managed WordPress hosting, before VAT. The headline figures you see advertised, £1 to £4 a month, are introductory prices that usually need a long term paid up front: Hostinger’s £1.49 a month is a 48 month plan at £71.52, and SiteGround’s £1.99 is 12 months prepaid. After that the renewal price applies. A fair monthly comparison always uses the renewal figure.
What is the average website hosting cost per month?
About £16 a month at renewal, before VAT, across the ten UK plans in our table above, with the middle plan nearer £12.50. One plan drags the average up: 20i’s £40 plan covers three websites. Take that out and the other nine average about £13. The cheapest renewal we found was IONOS at £6 a month, and the cheapest with no introductory deal at all was Krystal at £7. When you see an “average” of £2 or £3 a month quoted elsewhere, it has almost always been worked out from first term prices that expire after one to four years.
How much does it cost to host a website for a year?
As little as £12 for the first year, but £72 to £288 a year once shared hosting renews, before VAT. The gap between year one and year two is the part most people miss. Here is the same set of UK plans worked out both ways, using the prices in the first table.
| Plan | First year | Each year after the deal ends |
|---|---|---|
| IONOS Web Hosting Plus | £12 (12 months at £1) | £108 |
| SiteGround StartUp | £23.88 (12 months at £1.99) | £167.88 |
| SiteGround GrowBig | £47.88 (12 months at £3.99) | £287.88 |
| IONOS Web Hosting Standard | £54 (6 months at £3, then 6 at £6) | £72 |
| Hostinger Single | £71.52 paid once, covering 48 months | £95.88 |
| Krystal Amethyst | £84 | £84 |
| 20i Plan 1 | £221 (£1, then 11 months at £20) | £240 |
Add 20% if you are not VAT-registered. Krystal is the only one here that costs the same every year, which makes it the easiest to budget for.
Do UK hosting prices include VAT?
No, not usually. Most UK hosts advertise prices before VAT because many of their customers are VAT-registered businesses. If you are not VAT-registered, add the standard rate of 20% (GOV.UK, checked October 2026). On SiteGround GrowBig, for example, £23.99 a month becomes £28.79 a month with VAT, or £345.46 a year.
How much does hosting cost for a small business website?
£60 to £300 a year keeps a simple brochure site online; £20 to £40 a month is what we would budget once the site is a real source of enquiries. Both figures are honest, they just describe different tiers, and it is worth being clear which one you are buying:
- Shared hosting, roughly £60 to £300 a year. This is the floor quoted in our UK website cost guide. Your site shares a server with many others. It is fine for a five page site that changes rarely and gets modest traffic.
- Managed WordPress hosting, roughly £20 to £40 a month. This is the tier we recommend further down this guide. You pay more for speed, daily backups, staging copies and support that understands WordPress, which matters when a slow or broken site costs you customers.
If your budget is tight, start on good shared hosting and move up when the site starts earning. Moving later is a routine job.
How much does WordPress hosting cost in the UK?
About £14 to £35 a month at renewal on SiteGround’s WordPress-ready plans, or £10 to £40 a month on 20i’s autoscaling plans, before VAT. SiteGround’s three plans renew at £13.99, £23.99 and £34.99 a month after a 12 month introductory price of £1.99 to £5.99, and all include managed WordPress auto-updates (SiteGround UK, checked October 2026). 20i’s plans run from £10 a month for its Startup plan to £20 and £40 a month for Plans 1 and 2 (20i, checked October 2026). The WordPress software itself is free; our WordPress cost guide covers the full yearly bill.
How much does it cost to host a website on Vercel?
$0 on Vercel’s Hobby plan, but Hobby is for personal, non-commercial use only. A business site needs the Pro plan at $20 a month per developer seat. Pro includes $20 of usage credit each month, and heavier traffic is billed on top. Hobby includes 100 GB of data transfer a month. Vercel adds tax to invoices where the law requires it, so UK buyers should expect VAT on top (Vercel pricing, checked October 2026). Vercel suits sites built with frameworks such as Next.js; it is not a home for a standard WordPress site.
How much does it cost to host a website on Framer?
£0 on Framer’s Free plan, but a site on your own domain needs a paid plan: £8 a month for Basic or £23 a month for Pro billed yearly, or £10 and £35 a month billed monthly. Those are the pound prices Framer’s pricing page showed us from the UK, and the page says any applicable sales tax is added at checkout based on your location (Framer pricing, checked October 2026). The Free plan runs on a Framer domain with 1 GB of bandwidth. Basic includes a free custom domain and 50 GB of bandwidth, and Pro raises that to 100 GB and adds staging and site redirects. There is no separate hosting bill on Framer: the plan price is the hosting price.
How much does it cost to host a website on AWS?
$0 for up to 6 months on the AWS Free plan, which gives new customers up to $200 in credits: $100 at sign-up and up to $100 more as you try key services. The Free plan account closes after 6 months or when the credits run out, whichever comes first, unless you move to the Paid plan, where you are billed for what you use (AWS Free Tier, checked October 2026). There is no fixed monthly price for a dynamic site on AWS. The bill depends on the services, traffic and storage you use, which is why AWS makes sense for applications with engineers looking after them, and rarely for a small business brochure site.
If you want a fixed monthly figure on AWS, its Lightsail virtual servers are the simplest route. $5 a month buys the smallest Linux bundle with a public IPv4 address (0.5 GB of memory, 20 GB of SSD storage and 1 TB of transfer), $7 a month doubles the memory to 1 GB, and $12 a month gives you 2 GB (Amazon Lightsail pricing, US dollars, checked October 2026). You still install, secure and update the server yourself, and that time is the real cost of a dynamic site on AWS.
How much is website hosting with Bluehost?
$3.99 a month for Bluehost’s Starter shared plan on a 36 month term, renewing at $9.99 a month. Business is $6.99 a month, renewing at $13.99, and eCommerce Essentials is $14.99 a month, renewing at $21.99. All three are on 36 month terms, priced in US dollars, with VAT not included (Bluehost shared hosting, checked October 2026). At its renewal price Starter comes to $119.88 a year. Because Bluehost bills in dollars, the pound cost moves with the exchange rate, whereas every host in our UK table bills in pounds.
How much does it cost to host a website on Shopify, Squarespace or Wix?
Nothing on top of the plan: Shopify, Squarespace and Wix all build hosting into the monthly price, so the plan is your hosting bill. Shopify says its plans include hosting so you do not need to buy it separately, Squarespace says all its plans include managed cloud hosting, and Wix lists web hosting on every plan. What differs is the plan price.
| Platform | Cheapest plan | Billing shown | Source, checked October 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Shopify Basic | £19 a month, or £25 billed monthly | GBP, yearly or monthly; 3 days free, then £1 a month for 3 months; VAT not stated | shopify.com/uk/pricing |
| Squarespace Basic | £12 a month, or £16 billed monthly | GBP, annual or monthly; 14 days free; VAT not stated | squarespace.com/pricing |
| Wix Light | $17 a month | USD shown “for reference only”, yearly subscription paid in full, excludes tax | wix.com/plans |
Wix also has a free plan, but a business wants its own domain, which needs a paid plan. Squarespace Basic adds a 2% fee on online store sales. Our website builder costs guide compares every plan tier side by side.
How much does it cost to host a Lovable website?
£0 to start: Lovable says that for most smaller or new apps, publishing and keeping the app running is covered by the free grant that comes with every plan. Its Free plan is £0 a month on lovable.app addresses. A custom domain and removing the Lovable badge need Pro, at £22 a month billed monthly or £19 a month billed annually. Lovable adds that apps with significant traffic or size can start costing more than the included grant, taken from your credit balance (Lovable pricing, GBP, checked October 2026; the page does not say whether VAT is included).
Does web hosting include a domain name?
Sometimes, for the first year. Hostinger’s Single plan and SiteGround’s plans list a free domain, and Krystal includes one from its Ruby plan upwards (checked October 2026 on each host’s page linked above). The free part normally covers the first year only, then the domain renews at the registrar’s normal price. Our guide to how much a domain name costs in the UK has current renewal prices.
Can I move my website to another host?
Yes. You can move a website to a different host at any time, as long as you have access to your files, database and domain. Some hosts do the move for you: SiteGround lists free website transfer on all its plans (checked October 2026). Lower the risk by keeping the old hosting live until the new copy is checked, then switching the domain’s DNS and cancelling the old plan once traffic has moved over.
Can I move my Squarespace website to another host?
Partly. Squarespace can export some of your content as an XML file made for importing into WordPress, but the design and many page types stay behind. According to Squarespace’s own help centre, the export takes layout pages, one blog page with its posts and comments, and text and image blocks. It does not take store pages, products, album, index, portfolio or calendar pages, audio or video blocks, drafts, style settings or custom CSS (Squarespace Help Center, checked October 2026). Squarespace also warns that WordPress may only pull links to your images rather than the files, so the images break once the Squarespace site is closed. Download them yourself before you cancel. In practice, moving off Squarespace means rebuilding the design on the new platform and importing the written content.
Can I move my Wix website to another host?
No. Wix says a Wix site must run on Wix’s own servers and cannot be hosted anywhere else. Its help centre explains that the content belongs to you, but the platform relies on Wix’s own technology to work (Wix Help Center, checked October 2026). You can move your domain, and you can copy your text and images out by hand, but the site itself has to be rebuilt elsewhere.
What is the best hosting alternative to Squarespace?
For most businesses leaving Squarespace, WordPress on managed hosting at £20 to £40 a month is the natural move, because Squarespace’s own export file is built for WordPress. You keep the blog posts and basic pages that export, you can choose and change your host freely, and the site files are yours to take anywhere later. If the site is a shop, Shopify is the other realistic option, from £19 a month on its yearly Basic plan. Either way, the design has to be rebuilt, which is where a fixed-price build such as our Business website package at £1,495 for up to 15 pages saves the guesswork.
Types of Hosting
Shared Hosting (about £5 to £25 a month at renewal)
Your site shares a server with hundreds of other websites. It is the cheapest option and usually the slowest. It is fine for personal blogs and simple brochure sites with modest traffic, and a sensible starting point if budget is tight, but a site that brings in most of your enquiries deserves the managed tier below.
Managed WordPress Hosting (£20 to £40 a month)
Servers optimised specifically for WordPress. Includes automatic updates, daily backups, staging environments, and expert WordPress support. This is what we recommend for most business websites.
Top providers: Kinsta, WP Engine, Cloudways, SiteGround (GoGeek plan).
VPS Hosting (£20 to £100 a month)
A virtual private server gives you dedicated resources on a shared physical server. More control and better performance than shared hosting, but requires technical knowledge to manage.
Cloud Hosting (£30 to £200+ a month)
Scalable infrastructure that grows with your traffic. AWS, Google Cloud, and DigitalOcean are the main players. Best for high-traffic sites or applications that need to handle unpredictable traffic spikes.
What Matters Most
- Server location: Choose a UK-based server (or at minimum European) for the best performance for UK visitors.
- Uptime guarantee: Look for 99.9% minimum. Anything less means your site could be down for hours every month.
- Daily backups: Non-negotiable. Your host should back up your site automatically every day.
- SSL included: Free SSL certificates should be standard.
- Support quality: You need fast, knowledgeable support when something goes wrong at 2am on a Saturday.
Our Recommendation
For most UK business websites, managed WordPress hosting at £20 to £40 a month is the sweet spot. You get excellent performance, automatic security, and expert support without the complexity of managing a server yourself.
We help all our clients choose and set up the right hosting as part of the build process. Talk to us about your hosting needs.
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