A five-page brochure site nobody edits costs about £180 a year: domain, modest hosting, one mailbox. A WordPress site three people edit is roughly £768 before anyone is paid to maintain it. A shop taking £15,000 a month runs to several thousand, mostly card fees.
These are the ranges I see setting these accounts up, not a survey, and every third-party figure moves. Check any line that changes your decision. Add VAT to most of it: if you are not registered, that 20% is a real cost rather than paperwork. Mine carries none, as noted on the facts page.
Nine lines, and most sites need six. The figures are ranges I see rather than a survey, and worth checking on the day. The largest is at the bottom, because almost nobody writing about running costs includes it at all.
The band matters more than the brand, and this is the line where saving money costs money. It shows up as a slow server response rather than on the invoice.
A care plan is a service bought on top of something you already own: the domain registered to you, the hosting in your name with your card on it, the code in your repository. The plan can stop without the site stopping. Cancel it and you lose me, not the website.
A website from £99 a month is usually a rental, and the arithmetic says so before anyone admits it. A fee that size cannot fund a build and then let you walk off with it, so the site is the security on the fee. That is not a scam. The problem is that hardly anybody is told which of the two they bought.
Do the sum honestly, because it does not flatter me. £99 a month for three years is £3,564 and you own nothing. The same site built by me at £1,950 with the smallest care plan is £4,290. The rental is cheaper, and I would rather say so. The lines cross in month 58: by five years it is £5,940 against £5,850, and you own something you can take anywhere.
Five of the six are answerable this afternoon on a site you already have. Somebody running a service answers them without flinching.
A WHOIS lookup takes ten seconds. Nominet publishes the registrant on a .co.uk registered to a business; a .com is usually redacted, and a registrar privacy service hides either. It should be your business, on an email address you control, and a hidden record is a fair thing to ask about.
Not whether you have a login. Whether you can see the invoices, change the card and cancel it yourself. A user inside a reseller account feels the same until it matters.
Ask this week, no reason given, for the database and files, or the repository. A service sends them. A rental asks why.
Twelve, twenty-four and thirty-six month terms are the ones I keep running into. Ask what the fee becomes afterwards: if it does not change, you have finished paying for a build that is not yours.
The single most useful question here. If the site comes down it is a rental, at any monthly figure. If it stays up and you take over the hosting bill, it is a service.
Plugin licences, the analytics property, the Google Business Profile. On your provider’s account, your updates depend on somebody else’s card not expiring. This one bites when a provider retires.
Every input is written down so you can take the sum apart. First a five-page brochure site nobody edits.
Then a WordPress site three people edit, the shape of most custom WordPress builds I do.
Then a shop, on the same inputs as the platform comparison elsewhere on this site.
Look at where that money goes. The biggest running cost a small shop has is the payment processor. Switching provider is the main lever, and it moves the rate by fractions of a percent, so everything a developer affects is the smaller half of the bill.
Care plans are £65, £145 and £295 a month, covering hosting, SSL, updates, offsite backups, monitoring and a change allowance. Or hourly at £65 with no minimum. Plenty of clients take neither: hosting, a domain and two hours of my time a year is about £238.
Every hosting account, domain and licence goes in your name, billed at cost. That is a safety decision about a one-person business rather than generosity: if I am ill, or busy, or you hire somebody better, nothing expires because I stopped paying for it. A studio holding your accounts has made itself hard to leave.
The one-off figure and what moves it is on how much a website costs in the UK, and every price I charge is on pricing. To judge whether the site you have is worth spending any of this on, score it out of 100 first. No email address required.
Yes, at all three tiers, along with SSL, updates, offsite backups and uptime monitoring. The hosting account is in your name with your card on it, so cancelling the plan does not take the site down: you carry on paying the host directly and nothing stops working. Domains and plugin licences sit outside the plan, billed at cost in your name, because a licence on my invoice is a licence that expires when I stop paying it.
A static site on a free hosting tier with a £12 domain, so roughly £12 a year plus a mailbox if you need one. That is genuinely available and I will build one that way when it suits the site. What you do not get is anybody watching it, updating it, or having a plan for the week something breaks. For a five-page brochure site that is often a fair trade, and I would rather say so than sell you a plan you do not need.
Almost certainly not. Let’s Encrypt issues certificates free and every host worth using installs and renews them automatically. Paid certificates are a real product with real uses, mainly organisation validation for larger companies that want their registered name inside the certificate, and none of those uses applies to an ordinary small business website. If SSL is a separate annual line on your invoice, ask which kind you are buying. The answer tells you a good deal about the rest of the bill.
Because it is a percentage of everything you sell and nothing else on the bill is. On £180,000 a year through a checkout, card fees at a published UK rate of about 1.5% plus 20p an order come to roughly £3,300, which is more than hosting, licences and maintenance put together. Very little can be done about it. Raising your average order value shaves the pence per transaction, and processors will discuss custom rates at volumes well above that one.
Yes, in writing, with no notice-period games. The hosting account, the domain and the code are already yours, so leaving means I stop being the person who looks after them rather than the site going anywhere. I hand over documentation, the repository and any access you do not already have. If you are going because something went wrong I would rather hear why, but the answer is the same either way. A plan you cannot leave is not a service.
Run a WHOIS lookup on it. For a .co.uk, Nominet publishes the registrant; for most other extensions the registrar does. You want your own business name against an email address you control. If it shows your web company instead, ask for a transfer in writing before anything else on this page matters. Transfers are routine, usually free, and take a few days. A provider who will not do one has told you what kind of arrangement you are in.
Not on my own servers. I set up hosting with an established provider, in your name and on your card, and I manage it as part of a care plan if you take one. Reselling hosting would mean adding a margin to infrastructure I do not own and making myself the single point of failure for a site I might not be looking after in five years. Being straightforward to replace is a feature of a one-person studio rather than a weakness.
About five hours a year of attention plus the licences, so call it £300 in renewals and an afternoon spread across twelve months. That is a fair choice if you are comfortable taking a backup before you press update and reading a changelog when something looks odd. The risk is not the routine month. It is the one where a plugin update breaks the contact form on a Friday and nobody notices until Monday.
Real numbers from your device and connection, not a screenshot of a score I chose. Nothing is sent anywhere. The measurement happens in your browser and stays there. If one of these ever reads amber on my own site, you will see it, which is rather the point. I audit these for £650.