What hosting actually is
Hosting is renting space on a computer that is switched on permanently and connected to the internet, so that when someone types your address the pages that make up your website are there to be sent back. You are not buying the website. You are buying the machine, the electricity, the connection and somebody to keep it running.
The domain name — the address itself — is a separate annual purchase, though most hosts sell you both together. That separation matters more than it sounds, and it is the subject of do I own my website.
There are four kinds, and which one you need is decided by how your site was built, not by how big your business is.
- Shared hosting. Your site sits on one machine alongside a few hundred others. This is what every “£1.49 a month” advert is selling, and for a local business brochure site it is genuinely fine.
- VPS. A guaranteed slice of a machine, reserved for you — but you usually maintain the server software yourself. Only relevant if a developer is looking after it for you.
- Managed WordPress. Hosting with the WordPress-specific work done for you. WP Engine's entry plan is $28 a month billed annually, in dollars, for one site and 25,000 monthly visits.
- Static hosting. If your site is plain pages with no database, the files can simply be served from a global network. Nothing to patch, nothing to hack in the usual way, and often free. See below.
What UK hosts actually charge
Every figure below comes from the host's own pricing page, checked on 15 September 2026. VAT treatment is stated only where the host states it, because several don't.
| Host | Advertised | Renews at | VAT |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mythic Beasts Web 25 | £2.50/mo | £2.50/mo | Excludes |
| Kualo Solo | £6.99/mo | £6.99/mo | Excludes |
| Krystal Amethyst | £7/mo | £7/mo | Includes |
| 20i Startup | £1 first month | £10/mo flat | Not stated |
| GoDaddy UK Economy | £3.99/mo | £8.99/mo | Not stated |
| Hostinger Single | £1.49/mo (48 months prepaid) | £7.99/mo | Excludes |
| Fasthosts Grow | 99p/mo | £8/mo | Page text contradicts itself |
| IONOS UK Plus | £1/mo | £9/mo | Excludes |
| Names.co.uk Beginner | 99p first month | £9.99/mo | Includes |
| SiteGround UK StartUp | £1.99/mo | £13.99/mo | Excludes |
| 123-reg Economy | £1.99/mo (3 years prepaid) | £251.64/year | Excludes |
The advertised price is usually not the price
Rather than assert this, I counted it. Of the eleven UK hosts above, seven advertise an introductory rate that rises on renewal, three charge one flat price, and one (20i) offers a genuine £1 first month with no hook after it.
The step-ups are bigger than the market generally admits:
- 123-reg — “£1.99/month” is a three-year prepayment, renewing at £251.64 a year. That is about £20.97 a month, roughly ten and a half times the advertised figure.
- Names.co.uk — 99p to £9.99, about ten times.
- IONOS — £1 to £9, nine times.
- Fasthosts — 99p to £8, eight times.
- SiteGround — £1.99 to £13.99. A customer pays £23.88 + VAT in year one and £167.88 + VAT in year two for exactly the same service.
The pattern in the sample is worth noticing. The seven hosts using introductory pricing are the largest and most heavily advertised brands. The three charging one flat price — Krystal, Kualo and Mythic Beasts — are smaller UK independents. Mythic Beasts puts it in writing: “We charge the same price for renewals of our Web & Email Hosting as for new accounts”, and notes its standard price “has remained unchanged since the company was founded in 2000”.
Eleven hosts is a sample, not the whole market. But it is eleven more than most cost guides check.
The mechanism is simple once you see it: the advertised monthly figure is often a long prepayment divided by the number of months. Three words tell you what you're looking at — term, renews at, and you pay today. If a page shows you a monthly price and a much larger “you pay today” total, you are being quoted a prepayment.
Hosting on Wix, Squarespace, Shopify and WordPress.com
There is no separate hosting price on any of these, because hosting is inside the subscription and cannot be bought on its own. In their own words:
- Squarespace: “All Squarespace plans include bandwidth and hosting for your site and its content.” They add that they “don't provide hosting for content built on other platforms”.
- Wix: “We offer free and secure hosting for every Wix website.”
- Shopify: every plan includes “quick, reliable and unmetered hosting” with “unlimited bandwidth”.
- WordPress.com: “Every WordPress.com plan, including the free plan, comes with hosting included.”
The trade-off is the exit. Squarespace's own export documentation lists what comes out — layout pages, one blog, text and image blocks — and what doesn't: store pages, portfolios, custom styling, custom CSS. It states flatly: “It's not possible to export content from one Squarespace site and import it into another.”
One distinction that trips everyone up: WordPress.com (a subscription service) and WordPress.org (free software you install on hosting you buy separately) are different things. People searching for “WordPress hosting” almost always mean the second. GoDaddy is the odd one out in this list because it sells both a bundled builder and standalone hosting you can point any site at.
Free hosting that genuinely works — and the two that ban business use
This is the most under-reported part of the market, and the finding is not the one you'd expect. Two of the four best-known free static hosts explicitly forbid business use in their own written terms. Almost every “best free hosting for small business” article recommends them anyway.
Vercel's free Hobby plan states: “Hobby teams are restricted to non-commercial personal use only. All commercial usage of the platform requires either a Pro or Enterprise plan.” Its own definition of commercial use includes “advertising the sale of a product or service” and “receiving payment to create, update, or host the site”. By that definition, a plumber's website advertising plumbing is commercial use — and so is any site a designer was paid to build.
GitHub Pages prohibits use as “a free web-hosting service for running an online business”, as “an e-commerce site”, or as “a website primarily directed at facilitating commercial transactions”. That wording is narrower than Vercel's, and whether a simple brochure site for a local trade falls foul of it is genuinely arguable — which is exactly why it's a bad place to put a site that matters.
Cloudflare Pages is the one that holds up. Its documentation states: “On both free and paid plans, requests to static assets are free and unlimited.” The free plan allows 500 builds a month, up to 20,000 files, 100 custom domains, and a 25 MiB limit per file. No commercial-use prohibition appears in its published limits or pricing documentation. One real restriction does apply, from Cloudflare's service terms: it reserves the right to limit accounts serving “video or a disproportionate percentage of pictures, audio files, or other large files” without a paid plan. Normal photographs are fine; hosting your video showreel there is not — put it on YouTube and embed it, which is better practice anyway.
Netlify has changed materially and most comparisons are out of date. It now runs on credits: the free plan gives 300 credits a month, and bandwidth costs 20 credits per GB with production deploys at 15 credits each. That works out at about 15GB of bandwidth a month if you spent every credit on bandwidth and never deployed — and twenty deploys alone would use the lot. Articles still quoting Netlify's old “100GB free” figure are quoting a plan that no longer exists.
So can a small business host free? Yes — a brochure site of text, photographs and a contact form, built as static pages, on Cloudflare Pages, costs nothing and carries no commercial-use restriction I could find. Two honest caveats: the site has to be static, which is a developer workflow rather than a point-and-click one; and free static hosting gives you no email mailboxes at all. Budget from £3.10 a user a month for that — see what business email costs.
As for AWS and Google Cloud free tiers: these aren't hosting products, they're raw infrastructure. AWS now gives new customers $100 in credits and closes the account “6 months after you open it or when your credits run out, whichever comes first”; Google Cloud gives $300 in credits plus narrow always-free limits. There's no control panel, no one-click install and nobody watching your site. The risk isn't a surprise bill — both have made that harder — it's complexity and abandonment.
What actually makes hosting cost more
Six things drive the price list. A small brochure site genuinely needs two of them.
| Feature | What it ranges across | Does a brochure site need it? |
|---|---|---|
| Bandwidth | 100GB to 1.5TB (Mythic Beasts £2.50–£40) | No. A local business site with a few hundred visits a month won't approach 50GB. The most oversold spec there is. |
| Storage | 5GB to 400GB | No. Fifty photographs is well under 1GB. |
| Email mailboxes | Unlimited at Mythic Beasts and Krystal; 10 on 20i Startup; none on free static hosts | Yes. This is the one that genuinely matters. |
| Backups | Daily at 20i and Krystal; 4-hourly at Krystal from £19 | Yes — daily is plenty. The failure mode is total, so it's worth having. |
| Staging | Mostly a managed-WordPress feature | No, for a site that changes a few times a year. |
| Support hours | Krystal gates emergency phone support at £37/mo; Vercel's free plan has no email support at all | Depends on consequence — see below. |
That last one is the only genuine judgement call. If your website being down for a day costs you nothing, buy cheap. If your phone stops ringing when your website stops working, what you're really buying at the higher tiers is the ability to reach a human on a Sunday.
What's free now, and what you shouldn't be charged for
SSL — the padlock — should be free. Let's Encrypt is a non-profit certificate authority which states that “anyone who owns a domain name can use Let's Encrypt to obtain a trusted certificate at zero cost”. Mythic Beasts, Krystal, 20i, Cloudflare and Netlify all include it. Certificate lifetimes are getting shorter, too — Let's Encrypt is moving from 90 days toward 45 by 2028 — which makes manual renewal impossible and automation compulsory. So “SSL management” as a monthly line item on somebody's invoice is a hosting function, not a human one.
One exception found, and it's worth checking your own: Names.co.uk includes free SSL only on its middle and upper plans, and its own wording says the offer “does not apply to renewals or transfers” and is “for the first billing period only”.
What hosting does not include, though people assume it does: the domain name, the website itself, email on free static hosts, updates and security maintenance on self-managed setups, and — importantly — anyone watching the site. An uptime guarantee is a refund mechanism, not a monitoring service. Krystal's own service level agreement requires that “the Customer must notify Krystal via support ticket within 7 days”. You have to notice the outage yourself.
Is cheap hosting actually worse?
The honest answer starts with an admission: there is no independent, non-commercial testing of UK web hosting performance. Every comparison in existence is published by a site earning affiliate commission from the hosts it ranks. That doesn't make the data worthless, but it should be reported with the conflict attached.
The most rigorous available is HostingStep's, which discloses its affiliate relationship and publishes its method: 23 providers, ten months from November 2025 to August 2026, around 436,000 checks per host at 60-second intervals, on real accounts bought with their own money, with the purchase invoices published. Its results are not what the “you get what you pay for” story predicts — Hostinger, one of the cheapest and most aggressively discounted hosts in the market, recorded 99.99% uptime with fewer outages than the top-ranked pick.
So cheap hosting is not reliably worse at staying up. Where it is reliably worse is measurable from the price list alone: price transparency (seven of eleven), out-of-hours support access, and backup frequency. You don't need a speed test to see any of those.
What to do this week
Find your last hosting invoice and look for the words term and renews at. If the renewal figure is several times what you thought you were paying, you have until that date to decide whether to move — and moving hosting is a smaller job than people fear, provided the email is planned for first.
Then check one thing: is your site actually WordPress? If it's a set of plain pages, you may be paying for a machine you don't need.
Common questions
- How much does website hosting cost per month in the UK?
- At a UK host that charges one price all the way through, a small business site costs roughly £2.50 to £20 a month. Mythic Beasts starts at £2.50 + VAT, Krystal at £7 including VAT, 20i at £10 and Kualo at £6.99 + VAT. Hosts that advertise £1 or £1.99 a month are quoting a first-term promotion; their renewal prices run £5.75 to £20.97 a month.
- Why does my hosting bill go up after the first year?
- Because the advertised price was an introductory rate. Of eleven UK hosts checked in September 2026, seven advertise a price that rises on renewal, by between 2.25 and about 10.5 times. IONOS goes from £1 to £9 a month, Fasthosts from 99p to £8, Names.co.uk from 99p to £9.99, and 123-reg's ‘£1.99 a month’ is a three-year prepayment that renews at £251.64 a year.
- Can I host a business website for free?
- Yes, if the site is a set of static pages rather than WordPress. Cloudflare Pages hosts static sites with unlimited requests to static assets on its free plan and no commercial-use restriction in its published limits. But check the terms before you choose: Vercel's free Hobby plan states it is “restricted to non-commercial personal use only” and defines commercial use to include “advertising the sale of a product or service”, and GitHub Pages prohibits use as “a free web-hosting service for running an online business”.
- How much does hosting cost on Wix, Squarespace or Shopify?
- There is no separate price, because hosting is inside the subscription and cannot be bought alone. Squarespace states “all Squarespace plans include bandwidth and hosting for your site and its content”; Wix says “we offer free and secure hosting for every Wix website”; Shopify says every plan includes “unmetered hosting”. The trade-off is that you generally cannot take the site elsewhere.
- Is cheap hosting worse?
- Not reliably, on the evidence. There is no independent non-affiliate performance testing of UK hosting at all. The most rigorous testing available — ten months, around 436,000 checks per host, on accounts the testers bought themselves — recorded 99.99% uptime for one of the cheapest hosts in the market, with fewer outages than the top-ranked pick. Where cheap hosting is reliably worse is price transparency, out-of-hours support and backup frequency.
- Should I pay extra for an SSL certificate?
- Almost never. Let's Encrypt provides certificates free and states that “anyone who owns a domain name can use Let's Encrypt to obtain a trusted certificate at zero cost”. Every host checked here includes free SSL, with one exception worth knowing: Names.co.uk includes it only on its middle and upper plans and only “for the first billing period”.
The rest of this set
Prices checked 15 September 2026 from each host's own pricing page: Mythic Beasts, Krystal, Kualo, 20i, GoDaddy UK, Hostinger UK, Fasthosts, IONOS UK, Names.co.uk, SiteGround UK, 123-reg, WP Engine. Platform statements quoted from Squarespace, Wix, Shopify and WordPress.com support documentation. Free-tier terms quoted from Vercel's fair-use guidelines and Hobby plan documentation, GitHub Pages limits, Cloudflare Pages limits and Cloudflare's service-specific terms, and Netlify's pricing and credit documentation. SSL position from Let's Encrypt. Performance data from HostingStep, which discloses affiliate commission and publishes its methodology and purchase invoices; no independent non-affiliate testing of UK hosting was found. Fasthosts' and GoDaddy's VAT positions could not be established from their pages and are marked as such.