What a small business website actually costs to run

A website is not a thing you buy once. It is a thing you own, and owning it costs a small amount every month forever. That is not a catch — it is the same as a business phone line — but it becomes a catch when nobody tells you until the first invoice arrives.

So here is the full list of what a five-to-ten page business website actually costs to keep alive in the UK, what each item is for, and where the money goes if you are paying more than this.

The domain: £10–20 a year

Your address. A .co.uk is usually cheaper than a .com and, for a business trading in Britain, does no harm at all. Buy it in your own name, on your own account, with your own card. This is the single most important sentence in this article.

If your developer registers the domain on their account as a convenience, they own the front door to your business. Most are honest and will transfer it when asked. The ones who are not have you completely, and the leverage arrives at exactly the moment you want to leave.

Hosting: £0–30 a month, and mostly it should be near the bottom

This is where the biggest gap between what things cost and what people are charged appears. A modern static or server-rendered business site — a few pages, a contact form, some images — puts almost no load on anything. Hosted properly it costs single-digit pounds a month, and on some platforms genuinely nothing at that size.

What you are paying for above that is not capacity. It is somebody being responsible when it breaks: certificates renewing, dependencies patched, backups actually existing, and a person who answers when the site is down on a Sunday. That is a real service and worth paying for. Just know that is what you are buying, rather than believing your brochure site needs a server.

Email: £0–6 per mailbox per month

Email on your own domain is not the same product as your website and is usually not included. Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 both charge per mailbox per month. Some hosts bundle basic mailboxes free.

Do not let anyone put your business email on the same shared hosting as your website unless you have asked what happens to your mail when you move the site. Untangling that later, mid-migration, is how businesses lose years of correspondence.

SSL certificate: £0

The padlock. It has been free since Let's Encrypt, and every competent host issues and renews it automatically. If a quote has a line item for an SSL certificate at £80 a year, that is not a technical charge, and it tells you something about the rest of the quote.

The things that are genuinely worth paying for

• Someone keeping the software current. A site built on a framework or on WordPress accumulates security updates whether you look at it or not. Unpatched plugins are how small business sites end up serving somebody else's content.
• Backups that have been restored at least once. An untested backup is a belief, not a backup.
• Uptime monitoring that tells a human, not a dashboard nobody opens.
• Small changes without a fight. Prices change, a service is added, a member of staff leaves. If every edit is a quote and a two-week wait, the site quietly goes stale and stops being true — which is worse than looking dated.

So what does it come to?

For a normal small business site, £30–40 a month covers hosting, the domain, the certificate, monitoring and keeping it patched and current. That is what we charge, and it is roughly what the honest end of the market charges, because it is roughly what the work costs.

Above about £100 a month you should be getting something specific and nameable in return — active SEO work, content written for you, a real support agreement with response times, or software that does something. If nobody can tell you what the extra is buying, it is not buying anything.

The questions to ask before you sign

• Is the domain registered in my name, on an account I control?
• What exactly is the monthly, and what happens to the site if I stop paying it?
• Who owns the code and the content, and can another developer pick it up?
• How do I make a small text change, and what does that cost?
• Where are the backups, and when was one last restored?

A developer worth hiring will answer all five without hesitating, because the answers are all obviously in your favour and they know it. Hesitation on any of them is the useful signal — much more useful than the price on the front of the quote.