Hosting is the small number. Here is the honest annual total for four kinds of site, including the costs nobody quotes for.
People ask what hosting costs and are told £5 a month, which is true and misleading. Hosting is rarely the largest line in running a website — it is just the only one with a published price.
The full cost list
| Line | Typical annual cost | Skippable? |
|---|---|---|
| Domain | £8–15 | No |
| Hosting | £60–400 | No |
| Email (2 mailboxes) | £0–140 | Sometimes — forwarding is free |
| SSL | £0 | Free via Let's Encrypt everywhere |
| Theme or template | £0–80 once | Yes, free options are fine |
| Premium plugins (forms, SEO, bookings) | £0–250 | Often |
| Backups to your own storage | £5–12 | No, and it is the cheapest insurance you will buy |
| Maintenance (updates, monitoring, fixes) | £0 DIY, or £300–1,800 paid | Only if you do it yourself, properly |
| Content and photography | £0–2,000 | Depends entirely on you |
| Build cost (one-off) | £0 DIY, £500–1,500 freelance, £3,000–15,000 agency | — |
Four realistic annual totals
1. The DIY brochure site — about £85/year. Domain £10, Krystal shared hosting £72, free theme, free plugins, backups to Backblaze £5, email forwarding free, and you do the updates yourself. Genuinely all-in, and perfectly respectable for a tradesperson or consultant.
2. The builder site — about £270/year. Wix Business at £22/month covers hosting, SSL and the editor; add a domain if not bundled. Nothing to maintain, nothing to learn, and no way out. For many small businesses this is a rational purchase of convenience.
3. The maintained business site — about £1,100/year. Hosting £150, domain £10, Google Workspace for two people £130, premium plugins £150, backups £10, and a modest maintenance retainer at £50/month. This is what a serious small business site actually costs, and it is the figure most people are not quoted.
4. The small shop — about £2,400/year. Managed WooCommerce hosting £480, plugins and extensions £300, email £130, backups £15, maintenance £900, plus payment processing at roughly 1.5% of turnover. Shopify lands in a similar place by a different route — see the comparison.
The three costs people forget
Maintenance. Either you spend an hour a month on updates, backups and checking things still work, or you pay someone £50–150/month to. There is no third option where it simply does not happen — there is only the option where it does not happen and the site is compromised in eighteen months.
Renewals. Year one is a marketing price. Budget year two at two to three times year one for most mainstream hosts, or choose one of the flat-priced UK independents and avoid the problem.
Your own time. The DIY route at £85/year is real, but it costs perhaps twenty hours in year one and a few hours a year after. That is a genuine cost even though no invoice records it.
Where to spend and where not to
- Worth paying for: decent hosting with honest renewals, proper email, off-site backups, and either maintenance or your own disciplined hour a month.
- Rarely worth paying for: premium SSL certificates, "SEO packages" sold by hosts, security add-ons duplicating free plugins, and paid page builders you will not learn.
- Worth paying more for than you expect: photography and words. A £3,000 site with stock photos and placeholder copy performs worse than an £85 site with real pictures of your actual work.
If someone quotes "£5 a month" for a business website, they are quoting one line of the invoice. The honest range for a small business site that stays working is £250 to £1,200 a year all-in, and most of that is not hosting.
Published 9 September 2026. Prices and ownership change — check the comparison table for current figures, and the provider's own site before buying. No affiliate links anywhere on this site.