How much does UK Web Hosting Cost in 2026? (Updated)
Written for the person paying the invoice: an owner, marketing lead or office manager at a UK small business, working out what a website should cost to keep online and whether the current bill is fair.
Most UK small-business websites cost £10 to £40 a month to host, once you use the renewal price rather than the introductory offer. Add VAT, a domain, business email and backups on top.
- Shared hosting
- £2 – £25brochure sites, portfolios, blogs
- Managed WordPress
- £7 – £120+business sites and WooCommerce
- VPS, unmanaged
- £3 – £40only with a developer on hand
- VPS or cloud, managed
- £30 – £150+you are buying the person, not the CPU
- Dedicated server
- £50 – £300+high traffic or known-hardware compliance
How we know. Every figure on this page was read off the provider’s own pricing page on 9 September 2026. Prices are monthly and exclude VAT unless stated. See the method and sources.
On this page
The 2026 UK hosting price ladder
Why the same word covers a £2 bill and a £300 one.
Hosting is one of the few website costs that spans two orders of magnitude. A personal blog and a Magento store are both “a website”, and one of them costs a hundred times more to host. What you are buying as the price rises is not disk space. It is isolation from other tenants, and someone whose job it is to keep the thing up.
What UK hosting actually costs, by type
Monthly price ranges, ex VAT, September 2026
The renewal trap: the advertised price is not the price
The most expensive thing people get wrong, and almost no competing page shows it.
“From 99p a month” is an introductory rate on a fixed term. What matters is the renewal price, the figure that lands in month 13. It is published, usually in smaller text beside the offer, and it is the number you should be comparing.
Introductory price against renewal price
UK shared hosting, monthly, ex VAT, checked 9 September 2026
Before you buyA three-year introductory term is a three-year commitment to a renewal price you have not looked at. Find the renewal figure on the provider’s own page, multiply it by 36, and compare that total instead. On the plans above, the gap between the two readings is between roughly £170 and £700 over three years.
What each hosting type costs, and who it suits
Five categories, with the buy-it and do-not-buy-it line for each.
Shared hosting — £2 to £25 a month
Your site sits on a server with hundreds of others. Fine for a brochure site, a portfolio or a low-traffic blog. The ceiling is higher than most guides admit: Krystal’s mid-tier shared plan is £19 a month and SiteGround’s standard rates run past £30.
- Buy it if you have one site, under roughly 10,000 visits a month, and no ecommerce.
- Do not buy it if you run a WooCommerce checkout, a members area, or anything where an hour of downtime costs money.
- Check the renewal price, the mailbox limit, and the fair-use clause underneath “unlimited” storage.
Managed WordPress — £7 to £120+ a month
Two different markets share this label, which is why published ranges are usually wrong. Budget managed WordPress from a mainstream registrar starts around £7 a month. Genuine managed WordPress platforms start near £14 (WP Engine Lite) and run to £260 (WP Engine Scale) or $450 (Kinsta’s upper business tiers). Anything advertising premium managed WordPress at £10 a month is shared hosting with a WordPress installer bolted on.
VPS — £3 to £40 unmanaged, £30 to £150+ managed
A reserved slice of a server, with root access. The gap between those two ranges is not hardware, it is a person: patching, hardening, backups, monitoring, and someone to call at 2am. An unmanaged £4 box that nobody updates is not cheaper than a £40 managed one. It is a liability with a smaller invoice.
Dedicated servers — £50 to £300+ a month
An entire physical machine. Worth it for high-traffic ecommerce, heavy databases, or compliance requirements that need known hardware. Below roughly 100,000 monthly sessions, a well-built managed cloud setup almost always wins on both price and resilience.
Cloud and hyperscalers — metered, not priced
AWS, Azure and Google Cloud do not sell hosting packages, they sell resources. A tiny app on Google Cloud Run can cost pennies; the same app with a managed database, backups, a CDN and a support plan is a different conversation entirely. Treat any “cloud hosting is £15 a month” claim as a category error. If you want cloud without a sysadmin, Cloudways starts around $11 a month and manages it for you.
Real UK provider prices, September 2026
Compare the renewal price, not the introductory badge. It is the figure you will pay for as long as you stay.
| Provider and plan | Intro, per month | Renewal, per month | Change at renewal | Storage |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fasthosts Start | £1.00 | £5.75 | 5.8× higher | 100GB SSD |
| Fasthosts Grow | £0.99 | £8.00 | 8.1× higher | 250GB SSD |
| Fasthosts Pro | £1.00 | £20.50 | 20.5× higher | 500GB SSD |
| IONOS Standard | £3.00 | £6.00 | 2.0× higher | 100GB NVMe |
| IONOS Plus | £1.00 | £9.00 | 9.0× higher | 200GB NVMe |
| IONOS Ultimate | £12.00 | £24.00 | 2.0× higher | 500GB NVMe |
| Krystal Amethyst | No intro offer | £7.00 | No increase | 10GB NVMe |
| Krystal Ruby | No intro offer | £11.00 | No increase | 25GB NVMe |
| Krystal Emerald | No intro offer | £19.00 | No increase | Unlimited NVMe |
| WP Engine Lite (managed WordPress) | No intro offer | £14.00 | No increase | 10GB |
| WP Engine Startup (managed WordPress) | No intro offer | £30.00 | No increase | 10GB |
What we see in practiceAcross the WordPress and Magento sites we support, hosting is rarely the biggest line in a website budget and is regularly the most expensive mistake. The pattern that costs clients real money is not a cheap server. It is a cheap server nobody is responsible for: no tested backup, no PHP upgrade path, no monitoring, and no one to call when checkout stops taking payments on a Friday afternoon.
Not sure whether hosting is really your problem?
A slow site is more often a plugin, an unoptimised database or a missing cache than a cheap server. Send us the URL and we will tell you which it is, before you spend more on hosting.
Takes about a minute. No card, and no sales call unless you ask for one.
The costs nobody puts on the pricing page
The plan fee is roughly half the real bill for a business site.
| Cost | Typical 2026 | What to check |
|---|---|---|
| VAT | +20% | Most UK hosts quote ex VAT; 34SP quotes inc VAT. A £10 plan is £12 in real cash if you cannot reclaim it. |
| .co.uk domain | £10–£13/yr | The renewal price, not the £1 first year. Transfers out should be free. |
| Business email | £3–£12 per user | Whether mailboxes are included and their storage cap. Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace are separate per-user costs. |
| Backups | 0–30% of plan | DigitalOcean charges 20% of the server price for weekly backups, 30% for daily. Retention matters as much as frequency, and an untested backup is not a backup. |
| SSL certificate | £0 | Let’s Encrypt is free and fine. Only pay if you specifically need an OV, EV or wildcard certificate. |
| Storage overage | ~£1 per GB | 20i charges £1 per extra GB. “Unlimited” almost always has a fair-use clause underneath. |
| Migration | £0–£500 | Free migration is common but usually one site and best-effort. Complex Magento or multisite moves are project work. |
| Maintenance | £50–£400 | Updates, security patching, uptime monitoring, and someone accountable. The line most budgets forget entirely. |
Which one do you actually need?
Four questions. Answer them in order and stop where they stop.
1.Does the site take payments or hold customer accounts?
NoBrochure site, portfolio or blog. Shared hosting or budget managed WordPress. £6–£20 a month
YesGo to question 2. Do not put a checkout on entry-level shared hosting.
2.Is it WordPress or WooCommerce?
YesManaged WordPress. Staging, daily backups and a real support desk earn the premium. £14–£50 a month
No, it is Magento, Drupal or customGo to question 3.
3.Do you have a developer or agency on retainer?
YesUnmanaged VPS or cloud is viable and cheap. £3–£40 a month, plus their time
NoManaged VPS or managed cloud. You are buying the person, not the CPU. £30–£150 a month
4.Over roughly 100,000 sessions a month, or handling regulated data?
YesDedicated, or a properly architected cloud setup with a UK data centre if residency matters. £50–£300+ a month
NoStay where question 3 put you. Scale when the metrics say so, not before.
Ranges are hosting only, ex VAT. Add domain, business email, backups and maintenance from the table above.
What your CMS needs
A starting point by platform, before the questions above narrow it.
| Platform | Sensible hosting | Typical monthly |
|---|---|---|
| WordPress, brochure site | Shared or budget managed WordPress | £6–£20 |
| WordPress, business site | Managed WordPress | £14–£50 |
| WooCommerce | Managed WordPress or managed cloud | £25–£100 |
| Magento / Adobe Commerce | Managed cloud, VPS or dedicated | £80–£300+ |
| Drupal | VPS or managed cloud | £30–£150 |
| Umbraco / .NET | Windows VPS or Azure App Service | Metered, quote required |
Questions people ask
Seven questions, answered in full. Nothing is hidden behind the toggles that you need in order to decide.
How much does web hosting cost per month in the UK?
Between £2 and £25 a month for shared hosting, £7 to £120 or more for managed WordPress, and £50 to £300 or more for a dedicated server. Most UK small businesses pay £10 to £40 a month once the introductory period ends. All figures ex VAT.
Why does my hosting bill go up after the first year?
Almost every mainstream UK host sells the first term at a discount. On the plans we checked in September 2026, renewal prices were between 2 and 20.5 times the advertised introductory rate. Fasthosts Pro moves from £1 to £20.50 a month. The renewal figure is published, usually in smaller text beside the offer.
Do UK hosting prices include VAT?
Usually not. IONOS, Fasthosts, 123 Reg and Krystal all quote ex VAT; 34SP quotes inc VAT. If you are not VAT registered, add 20% to every ex-VAT figure to get your real cost.
Is cheap shared hosting good enough for a small business website?
For a brochure site under about 10,000 visits a month, yes. It stops being enough the moment you take payments, hold customer accounts, or cannot tolerate an hour of downtime. The upgrade trigger is risk, not traffic.
How much should WooCommerce hosting cost?
Budget £25 to £100 a month for hosting alone. A checkout needs staging, daily backups with tested restores, and a support desk that answers at the weekend, none of which entry-level shared plans provide.
Do I need a UK-based data centre?
Only if you have a data residency requirement, or your traffic is overwhelmingly UK and you are chasing the last few milliseconds. GDPR does not by itself require UK hosting, and a good CDN closes most of the latency gap.
Is it cheaper to let an agency manage hosting?
The invoice is higher and the total cost is often lower. What you buy is patching, tested backups, monitoring and accountability. The saving shows up as the outage that did not happen, which is why it never appears in a price comparison.
How we checked these prices
Everything here is checkable. Here is exactly how, and where.
On 9 September 2026 we opened each provider’s own pricing page and recorded the lowest visible plan price, the renewal price where shown, storage, and the provider’s stated VAT position. Promotional prices are listed separately from renewal prices throughout. Providers who price in US dollars are left in dollars rather than converted, because the exchange rate moves and the provider does not bill in sterling. We hold no affiliate relationship with any provider named on this page, and nobody paid to be listed.
Sources, all checked 9 September 2026:
- Fasthosts web hosting pricing — intro and renewal prices, storage, VAT statement
- IONOS UK web hosting pricing — four plans, intro terms and renewal rates
- Krystal web hosting pricing — six plans, no introductory discount
- WP Engine plans — managed WordPress tiers
- Kinsta pricing — managed WordPress, priced in USD
- DigitalOcean Droplet pricing — unmanaged VPS floor, backup surcharges
- Cloudways pricing — managed cloud entry price
- 20i web hosting — autoscaling tiers, storage overage rates
- 34SP hosting — UK provider quoting inc VAT
Send us your URL and we will tell you whether hosting is really your problem
We build and support WordPress, Magento and Drupal sites for UK businesses. We look at your hosting signals, Core Web Vitals, CMS setup, backups and obvious technical risks, then tell you plainly whether you need better hosting, better optimisation, or neither.
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