Why cheap website hosting could be costing your small business more than you think

How much are you paying to host your website?

A fiver a month? Ten quid? Perhaps you’ve got absolutely no idea because it’s included in whatever your web designer charges you.

If you’re only paying a few quid a month to host your website, you could be silently undermining its chances of being found in search results and mentioned in AI conversations. We recommend you spend at least £35 per month on hosting to ensure your website runs effectively and efficiently for your business.

Here’s another question. Do you know what you’re actually paying for?

Website hosting is one of those things that small business owners tend to forget about. You pay someone to build your website, arrange the hosting, point your domain name in the right direction and get on with running your business.

That’s perfectly understandable. You have a business to run, and worrying about servers, PHP versions and website caching probably isn’t high on your list of priorities.

However, there’s a rather important problem with this approach.

Your website might be the most important marketing tool your business owns, but if it’s sitting on a cheap, overloaded server with nobody looking after it, you could be wasting much of the money you’ve invested in it.

I’ve been building, fixing and optimising WordPress websites for years, and hosting is one of the first things I investigate when somebody comes to me with a slow or unreliable website.

Sometimes, moving a website to better hosting can make a substantial difference without changing the design or content. Other times, the hosting is only part of the problem, but it’s still an important place to start.

Let’s look at why decent website hosting matters, what you should expect from your hosting provider and why paying a little more can save your business money.

Contents.

1. Why small businesses choose cheap website hosting.
2. Good hosting makes your website faster.
3. Better hosting can help your SEO.
4. Faster websites can generate more enquiries and sales.
5. Reliable hosting keeps your website available.
6. Proper hosting helps protect your website.
7. Reliable backups can save your business.
8. Managed hosting helps keep WordPress updated.
9. You get technical support from someone who understands your website.
10. Better hosting can support your business as it grows.
11. Good hosting helps prevent technical problems that affect other services.
12. Proactive monitoring helps catch problems early.
13. Managed hosting gives you time back.
14. What does cheap hosting actually cost your business?
15. What should small businesses look for in a hosting provider?
16. Is £35 per month expensive for managed website hosting?
17. Your website deserves better than bargain-basement hosting.

Why small businesses choose cheap website hosting.

Before I get into the reasons for investing in decent hosting, let’s look at why so many small businesses end up with cheap hosting in the first place.

In most cases, it comes down to four things:

• They don’t understand what website hosting involves.
• They assume all hosting providers offer basically the same service.
• They want to keep ongoing business costs as low as possible.
• They don’t know how to tell whether their existing hosting is any good.

None of these is particularly surprising.

If you’re running a plumbing business, accountancy practice or small online shop, why would you know anything about web servers?

You probably don’t know how the engine management system in your van works either. You just expect it to start every morning and get you where you need to go.

Your website should be much the same.

Unfortunately, the hosting industry doesn’t make things particularly easy for business owners.

Providers advertise incredibly cheap introductory prices, unlimited bandwidth, free domain names and one-click WordPress installations.

That all sounds fantastic, but what does it actually mean?

In many cases, you’re simply renting a small amount of space and resources on a server that hosts hundreds or potentially thousands of other websites.

You’re then responsible for looking after much of the software that runs your website.

Some cheap hosting services are perfectly adequate for small, uncomplicated websites. The problem starts when business owners assume that paying for server space is the same as paying someone to manage their website.

It isn’t.

There’s also the issue of priorities.

I’ve seen businesses invest thousands of pounds in a new website and then question whether they really need to spend another £20 or £30 a month on decent hosting.

They’ll happily spend money on Google Ads, printed brochures or social media marketing but are reluctant to spend a few pounds making sure the website receiving all that traffic actually works properly.

It doesn’t make much sense when you think about it.

Here are 12 reasons why investing in proper website hosting is worth considering.

1. Good hosting makes your website faster.

Website speed is probably the most obvious reason to invest in decent hosting.

When somebody visits your website, their browser requests information from your server. The server processes that request and sends back the files needed to display the page.

The quicker this happens, the sooner your visitor can start using your website.

With WordPress, the server may need to run PHP code, communicate with a database and generate the page before sending anything back to the visitor.

If your hosting environment is overloaded or poorly configured, this can take longer than necessary.

Cheap shared hosting is particularly vulnerable to resource limitations. Your website shares processing power, memory and other resources with other websites.

Although responsible hosting companies manage these resources to prevent individual customers from affecting everyone else, performance can still vary considerably between providers and hosting packages.

Better hosting can offer several advantages:

• Faster server response times.
• More suitable server resources for your website.
• Modern PHP versions and properly configured software.
• Server-level caching to reduce unnecessary processing.
• Faster database performance.
• Better management of traffic and resource usage.

However, there’s something important to understand.

Good hosting won’t magically fix a badly built website.

If your WordPress website uses an enormous page builder, 40 unnecessary plugins, badly optimised images and several megabytes of JavaScript, moving it to a faster server won’t solve every problem.

I’ve written extensively about the problems that poorly developed WordPress websites can create, and these problems don’t disappear simply because you throw more server resources at them.

What good hosting does is remove one of the major obstacles to achieving decent website performance.

It also makes subsequent optimisation work far more effective.

If you’re serious about improving your website’s speed, you need to examine both the website itself and the server running it.

2. Better hosting can help your SEO.

Here’s one that should interest any small business owner who relies on Google to generate enquiries.

Your website’s hosting can affect its technical performance, and that performance can contribute to how well your website performs in search results.

Google uses Core Web Vitals to assess important aspects of the experience people have when visiting websites.

These include:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): How quickly the main content becomes visible.
• Interaction to Next Paint (INP): How quickly your website responds when somebody interacts with it.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): How much the content moves around unexpectedly while the page loads.

Google recommends an LCP of 2.5 seconds or less, an INP of 200 milliseconds or less and a CLS score of 0.1 or less.

Your hosting environment can make a meaningful contribution to loading performance, particularly when server response times are poor.

However, hosting is only one part of the equation. Your website’s code, images, fonts and JavaScript also affect its Core Web Vitals.

It’s also worth clearing up a common misconception.

Moving your website to an expensive server will not automatically improve your Google rankings.

Google uses many ranking signals, and relevant, genuinely helpful content remains essential. Excellent hosting isn’t going to compensate for a website that fails to answer the questions potential customers are asking.

What better hosting can do is give your SEO work a stronger technical foundation.

If you’re already investing in SEO, why compromise that investment by running your website on an unsuitable hosting package?

You can read more about Google’s recommendations in its Core Web Vitals documentation.

3. Faster websites can generate more enquiries and sales.

Getting people onto your website is only half the battle.

Once they arrive, you want them to do something.

That could mean completing an enquiry form, calling your business, booking an appointment or buying a product.

If your website takes an age to load, you’re making life unnecessarily difficult for potential customers.

Imagine somebody searching for a local electrician.

They find your business on Google, click through to your website and then sit looking at a blank screen while the page loads.

Meanwhile, three other electricians are only a click away.

Do you think they’re going to wait patiently for your website to finish loading?

Some might. Others will simply return to Google and try somebody else.

The same applies to online shops. Slow product pages, sluggish searches and delays during checkout all create unnecessary obstacles between your customers and their purchases.

Of course, website speed isn’t the only thing that affects conversions. Your content, design, pricing and the quality of your services all matter.

However, slow hosting is one problem you can do something about.

If your website generates even a handful of valuable enquiries each month, losing a potential customer because of poor performance is an unnecessary expense.

4. Reliable hosting keeps your website available.

A website that doesn’t work isn’t much use to anybody.

Unfortunately, hosting companies experience technical problems. Hardware fails, software develops faults and servers occasionally need maintenance.

Even expensive hosting isn’t immune to outages.

The important difference is how your hosting provider works to minimise these problems and what happens when something goes wrong.

Reliable hosting providers invest in suitable infrastructure, monitoring and processes that help keep websites available.

Many providers advertise uptime guarantees, commonly expressed as percentages.

These figures are worth understanding.

A 99.9% uptime target sounds almost perfect, but it still allows for approximately 43 minutes of downtime over a 30-day month.

For some businesses, that’s an acceptable level of availability. For others, particularly those processing online transactions, an unexpected outage could cause significant problems.

You should also check what an uptime guarantee actually covers. Planned maintenance, network problems and other circumstances may be excluded.

More importantly, find out what happens when your website goes offline.

Will your hosting provider notice?

Will somebody investigate the problem?

Or will you discover that your website has been unavailable for several hours when an annoyed customer finally calls your office?

Good hosting is about much more than a percentage advertised on a provider’s homepage.

5. Proper hosting helps protect your website.

Small businesses often assume that nobody would be interested in hacking their websites.

After all, why would somebody target a small local business when there are much larger organisations out there?

The problem is that many attacks are automated.

Attackers use software to scan websites for known vulnerabilities, weak passwords and outdated software. They’re not necessarily interested in who owns your business or what you do.

They’re looking for opportunities.

WordPress is a popular target because it powers so many websites, and poorly maintained installations can contain vulnerabilities.

A suitable hosting environment should provide appropriate server security and processes for keeping the underlying software updated.

Depending on the service, additional protection might include:

• Firewalls and malicious traffic filtering.
• Malware scanning.
• Secure server configuration.
• Regular server software updates.
• SSL certificate management.
• Controls that help isolate websites from other hosting customers.

However, don’t confuse secure hosting with complete website security.

Your WordPress installation, themes, plugins, user accounts and passwords also need attention.

This is where properly managed hosting can offer a significant advantage.

Instead of assuming that everything is fine because your website appears to be working, somebody can take responsibility for agreed maintenance and security tasks.

That doesn’t eliminate every risk, but it’s considerably more sensible than ignoring your website until something breaks.

6. Reliable backups can save your business.

Let’s imagine your website disappears tomorrow.

Not just a temporary outage. Your website’s files and database have been damaged, deleted or compromised.

How quickly could you get it back?

Do you have a recent backup?

Do you know where it’s stored?

Have you ever tried restoring it?

These are questions I suspect many small business owners would struggle to answer.

Backups are one of the most important aspects of maintaining a business website, particularly if you regularly add new content, receive enquiries or process transactions.

However, having a backup isn’t the same as having a reliable backup and recovery process.

There’s little point in discovering that your last backup was taken six months ago or that the files needed to restore your website are missing.

A suitable backup arrangement should consider:

• How frequently your website needs to be backed up.
• Whether the backups include both website files and databases.
• Where the backups are stored.
• How long backups are retained.
• Whether backups can be restored successfully.
• Who is responsible for restoring your website if something goes wrong.

For an uncomplicated brochure website, a daily backup might be perfectly adequate.

For a busy WooCommerce website processing orders throughout the day, you may need considerably more frequent backups to avoid losing valuable transaction data.

It’s also sensible to keep suitable backups away from the server that hosts your live website.

If the server itself fails, you don’t want all your recovery options disappearing with it.

This is something you should discuss with any hosting company before entrusting it with your business website.

7. Managed hosting helps keep WordPress updated.

WordPress is software, and software needs updating.

The same applies to your WordPress theme and any plugins installed on your website.

Updates can introduce security fixes, resolve bugs, improve performance and maintain compatibility with newer versions of other software.

Ignoring updates can eventually cause problems.

However, blindly clicking every update button isn’t always a sensible approach either.

I’ve worked on plenty of WordPress websites where somebody has updated a plugin and promptly broken something else.

Sometimes, the problem is caused by an outdated theme. Other times, it’s a conflict between plugins or an issue with the PHP version running on the server.

This is particularly common with poorly developed websites that rely on a collection of third-party plugins and heavily modified commercial themes.

A properly managed WordPress service should have an agreed process for handling updates, including suitable backups and a plan for dealing with compatibility problems.

More involved websites may also benefit from testing significant updates on a separate staging installation before applying them to the live site.

It’s important to establish whether these tasks are included in your hosting arrangement or charged separately.

A hosting provider that offers a one-click WordPress installation isn’t necessarily offering WordPress maintenance.

There’s a rather large difference between the two.

8. You get technical support from someone who understands your website.

This is one of the biggest advantages of choosing a managed hosting service rather than buying cheap server space.

When something goes wrong with your website, you want someone who understands the problem and can fix it.

Unfortunately, the support offered by some hosting companies is limited to the hosting infrastructure.

If your server is running correctly but a WordPress plugin has crashed your website, you might find yourself being told that it’s a problem for your developer.

You contact your developer, who tells you that it’s a hosting issue.

Wonderful. You’re now stuck between two companies, neither of which wants to accept responsibility.

Meanwhile, your website still doesn’t work.

I’m sure there are plenty of small business owners who’ve experienced this particular frustration.

Working with somebody who understands both WordPress and the hosting environment can make troubleshooting considerably easier.

They can investigate the server, look at error logs, check your WordPress installation and determine where the problem originates.

Of course, the level of technical support included in managed hosting varies between providers.

Some services cover server management only. Others include WordPress maintenance and troubleshooting.

Make sure you understand exactly what you’re paying for.

For a small business, knowing who to contact when something goes wrong can be just as valuable as the hosting infrastructure itself.

9. Better hosting can support your business as it grows.

Your website might be relatively small today, but what happens when your business starts growing?

Perhaps you add more products to your online shop, publish considerably more content or invest in a marketing campaign that brings hundreds of additional visitors to your website.

Will your existing hosting cope?

Every hosting package has resource limits, even those advertised using terms such as unlimited bandwidth or unlimited websites.

Websites need processing power, memory, storage and database resources.

As your website becomes busier or more demanding, its hosting requirements can change.

An inexperienced hosting provider might simply suggest upgrading to a larger package.

However, throwing additional resources at a website isn’t always the correct solution.

Sometimes, an inefficient plugin, badly configured caching or excessive database queries are responsible for the problems.

An experienced WordPress developer can investigate what’s happening before recommending an upgrade.

If you genuinely need more hosting resources, you should also have a straightforward route to upgrading without rebuilding or unnecessarily disrupting your website.

For most small businesses, there’s no reason to pay for enormous amounts of unused server capacity.

You need hosting that’s appropriate for your website today and can accommodate reasonable growth tomorrow.

10. Good hosting helps prevent technical problems that affect other services.

Your website doesn’t exist in isolation.

It may depend on several connected services, including your domain name, DNS records, email, payment systems, third-party applications and other technical components.

When something changes, these services can occasionally stop working as expected.

For example, moving your website between hosting providers can involve changing DNS records.

If these changes aren’t handled correctly, you could accidentally interfere with other services that use your domain.

Email is a particularly common concern.

Your website and business email don’t necessarily need to be hosted by the same company. In fact, using a dedicated email provider can be a sensible arrangement.

However, incorrect DNS configuration can prevent messages from reaching the correct email servers or cause email authentication problems.

Website contact forms can also experience delivery problems if the necessary email settings haven’t been configured correctly.

These issues aren’t always caused by poor hosting, but they’re examples of why technical knowledge matters when managing your website.

If you’re moving your website, changing DNS settings or configuring new services, it’s useful to work with somebody who understands how everything fits together.

You don’t want to discover that your contact forms have stopped sending enquiries or that business emails aren’t arriving because somebody made an incorrect DNS change.

11. Proactive monitoring helps catch problems early.

Here’s another important difference between basic hosting and a comprehensive managed service.

With basic hosting, you’re often responsible for discovering problems yourself.

Your website might develop technical errors, become unusually slow or stop responding altogether.

Unless you’re regularly checking it, you might have no idea that anything is wrong.

Some hosting providers offer monitoring that can identify certain problems automatically.

Depending on the service, this might include:

• Checking whether your website is responding.
• Monitoring server resources.
• Identifying unusual traffic or resource usage.
• Detecting certain security problems.
• Monitoring the expiry of SSL certificates.
• Identifying recurring server errors.

Monitoring is useful, but it doesn’t solve problems on its own.

Somebody still needs to investigate an alert and take appropriate action.

It’s also worth remembering that basic uptime monitoring won’t necessarily identify every problem with your website.

Your homepage could load perfectly while your contact form, checkout or appointment booking system has stopped working.

For business-critical website functions, you may need additional monitoring or regular functional checks.

Before paying for a managed hosting service, ask what it monitors and what happens when it detects a problem.

The important thing isn’t simply receiving an email that tells you something is broken.

It’s having an effective process for getting the problem fixed.

12. Managed hosting gives you time back.

This final point is particularly relevant to small business owners.

How much is your time worth?

If you’re running a business, I suspect you have considerably better things to do than spend an afternoon trying to understand why your WordPress website has suddenly started displaying error messages.

However, that’s exactly what can happen when you buy cheap hosting and take responsibility for everything yourself.

You end up dealing with software updates, backups, security warnings, technical problems and support tickets.

Even if you’re reasonably comfortable with technology, it’s unlikely to be the most productive use of your time.

Let’s say you save £25 a month by choosing a cheaper hosting arrangement.

That’s £300 a year.

Now imagine spending four hours investigating a problem with your website.

If your time is worth £75 an hour, you’ve just spent the equivalent of your entire annual saving fixing one issue.

Of course, paying for managed hosting doesn’t mean you’ll never encounter a problem, and you should check exactly which tasks your provider handles.

However, a properly managed service can remove a significant amount of routine technical work from your shoulders.

You can get on with running your business while somebody else looks after the agreed technical requirements of your website.

For many small business owners, that’s worth considerably more than the hosting itself.

What does cheap hosting actually cost your business?

Let’s put some figures against this.

Imagine you’re paying £5 per month for basic website hosting.

That’s £60 a year, which sounds like an absolute bargain.

However, your package might provide very little beyond the server space needed to run your website.

You could still be responsible for updates, security, backups, troubleshooting and dealing with any technical problems.

Now compare that with a properly managed hosting service costing £35 plus VAT per month.

The difference is £30 per month before VAT.

That’s £360 over a year.

Whether the additional cost is worthwhile depends on the service you receive and how important your website is to your business.

However, if your website generates enquiries, supports your customers or processes sales, it shouldn’t take much to justify an extra £30 a month.

Let’s look at a hypothetical example.

You’re a local business that earns £500 from an average new customer.

You’ve invested in a professional website, spent time writing your content and perhaps allocated some money to Google Ads.

If better website management helps you avoid losing just one customer over an entire year, that single customer could cover the additional hosting expense.

That isn’t a promise that changing your hosting will generate more customers.

It’s simply a reminder that the cost of hosting should be considered alongside the commercial value of the website it supports.

There’s another cost to consider, too.

Technical problems often arrive at the least convenient moments.

Emergency development work can be expensive, particularly if somebody unfamiliar with your website needs to investigate a problem before they can fix it.

A managed service with an agreed maintenance and support arrangement can help reduce your exposure to certain problems and unexpected costs.

Just make sure you understand what’s included and what would count as additional development work.

What should small businesses look for in a hosting provider?

Hopefully, you’re beginning to see why choosing a hosting provider based entirely on the cheapest advertised monthly price isn’t a particularly good idea.

However, you don’t need an expensive dedicated server or an enormous enterprise hosting package to run a relatively straightforward small business website.

You need something appropriate for your requirements.

For a typical small business WordPress website, I’d suggest asking potential hosting providers the following questions:

• Performance: Is the hosting environment suitable for WordPress, and what performance optimisation is available?
• Security: What security measures are included, and who’s responsible for keeping WordPress secure?
• Backups: How frequently are backups created, where are they stored and who restores them?
• Updates: Does the service include WordPress core, theme and plugin updates?
• Support: Can the provider investigate WordPress problems, or does support stop at the server?
• Monitoring: Will somebody notice if your website stops working?
• Growth: Can your hosting accommodate additional traffic and website development?
• Ownership: Can you access and move your website if you decide to change providers?
• Costs: What is included in the monthly fee, and what would incur additional charges?

I’d pay particular attention to that final question.

Some hosting providers advertise low monthly prices and then charge extra for backups, security features, technical support or other services.

By the time you’ve added everything together, the original bargain might not look particularly attractive.

Equally, don’t assume that a service described as managed hosting includes everything on the list above.

Ask the provider to explain exactly what they manage and what remains your responsibility.

You should also ask whether you’re tied into a long-term contract and what happens if you want to move your website elsewhere.

Your website is a business asset. You should retain control of it rather than finding yourself unnecessarily dependent on one hosting provider.

Is £35 per month expensive for managed website hosting?

Obviously, I’m going to have an opinion on this one because I provide managed hosting for small businesses at £35 plus VAT per month.

However, I’m also the first to acknowledge that paying more for hosting doesn’t automatically mean you’re getting a better service.

You need to look at what you’re buying.

There’s a big difference between paying somebody £35 a month to resell you a basic hosting package and paying £35 a month for a managed service provided by somebody who understands WordPress development and website performance.

My approach is based on the latter.

I’ve worked with WordPress since 2008 and have spent years building, fixing and optimising websites for businesses of all sizes.

That experience is important because I understand how your website and its hosting environment work together.

If your website is slow, for example, there’s little point in moving it onto a more powerful server without first establishing what’s causing the problem.

It could be your hosting. It could be your theme, plugins or an inefficient database. Quite often, there are several contributing factors.

Good technical management involves understanding these issues rather than simply selling somebody a larger hosting package.

For £35 plus VAT per month, my small business managed hosting service is intended to provide a sensible, affordable option for businesses that want their websites properly looked after.

The aim is straightforward: give small business owners reliable hosting, professional management and access to genuine WordPress expertise without charging them enterprise-level prices.

I’ll also be straight with you about what your particular website needs.

Some websites are inherently more demanding than others. A small brochure website and a busy WooCommerce installation processing hundreds of daily transactions aren’t going to have identical hosting requirements.

And if your website has underlying development problems, those may need additional work before it can perform as well as it should.

There isn’t a hosting package on the planet that can compensate for every poorly built website.

What matters is having somebody who knows the difference and can explain what needs fixing.

At £35 plus VAT per month, my service costs £420 plus VAT annually.

For a small business that relies on its website, I think that’s a sensible investment.

Your website deserves better than bargain-basement hosting.

Your website is an important part of your business.

It works outside office hours, explains your services, answers questions, generates enquiries and potentially processes sales while you’re busy doing something else.

Yet it’s surprising how many businesses spend thousands of pounds building a website and then invest almost nothing in keeping it working properly.

Cheap hosting isn’t automatically bad, and expensive hosting isn’t automatically good.

The real question is whether your hosting arrangement is appropriate for your website and the role it plays in your business.

If your website is simply a personal project that gets a handful of visitors every month, basic hosting might be all you need.

However, if your website supports a business that depends on attracting customers, building trust and generating revenue, I’d suggest treating hosting as an investment rather than an expense to minimise at every opportunity.

With my managed WordPress hosting starting at just £35 plus VAT per month for small businesses, getting professional help doesn’t need to cost a fortune.

And if you’re not sure whether your existing hosting is holding your website back, get in touch.

I’ll happily have a look at what you’re running, explain where any problems might be and let you know whether moving to a managed hosting service would be worthwhile.

You might be surprised at how much better your existing website could perform without spending thousands of pounds rebuilding it.

Talk to me about managed WordPress hosting.