Every now and then a client forwards me an advert for hosting at a few pounds a month and asks, quite reasonably, why their care plan costs more.
It’s a fair question, and the honest answer is that hosting is only one item on a much longer list. Comparing a hosting deal with a care plan is a bit like comparing the cost of a tank of fuel with the cost of running a car for a year. The fuel matters, but it’s not where most of the money goes.
So rather than talk in generalities, I’ve priced up everything a properly looked-after business website needs over twelve months – as if you were buying each piece yourself for a single site.
Hosting is the smallest part of the bill
Cheap hosting gets your site online. It doesn’t keep it updated, backed up, secure, legally compliant or sending emails reliably. Those jobs still need doing – either by you, by someone you pay, or not at all (which is usually how sites end up hacked, broken or quietly losing enquiries).
The full shopping list
Here’s what goes into a typical site I build and look after, grouped by what each part actually does. The costs are what you’d expect to pay buying for one site at standard retail prices.
| Area | What it covers | Typical yearly cost (one site) |
|---|---|---|
| Foundations | Managed WordPress hosting on UK-based servers | £240 |
| DNS, content delivery and web application firewall | £100 | |
| Transactional email service, so contact form enquiries actually arrive | £60 | |
| Protection | Automated off-site backups with cloud storage | £80 |
| Security monitoring, activity logging and malware scanning | £80 | |
| Uptime monitoring with alerts | £50 | |
| Building blocks | Premium theme and block library licence | £120 |
| Custom fields toolkit (for editable, structured content) | £40 | |
| Professional forms plugin | £50 | |
| SEO plugin | £60 | |
| Performance and image optimisation tools | £85 | |
| Compliance | Cookie consent management | £60 |
| Privacy-friendly analytics | £120 | |
| People | Routine maintenance – updates, checks and testing (roughly an hour a week, 52 hours at £25/hr) | £1,300 |
| Technical fixes and troubleshooting (around 8 hours of developer time at £75/hr) | £600 | |
| Total | £3,045 a year |
Prices are approximate as of October 2026 and set by each provider, so they will change over time.
The tools come to a little over £1,100. The people come to nearly £1,900. That’s the bit the hosting adverts never mention.
Adding it up
My Standard care plan is £125 a month, or £1,500 a year – roughly half of the itemised total above.
That’s not because corners are being cut. It’s because running a group of sites properly is cheaper per site than running one in isolation. Here’s how.
Where the savings come from
Licences bought once, used across every site
Most of the premium tools in that list are sold on yearly subscriptions to individual site owners. Over the years I’ve invested in multi-site and long-term licences that cover every site I look after. You get the same professional tools, without paying full price for each one every year.
Infrastructure set up once, shared by everyone
The servers, firewall rules, monitoring, backup storage and email alerts are built and tuned once, then every client site benefits. If I improve something – say, faster alerts when a site’s email stops sending – every client gets the improvement at no extra cost.
One routine instead of twenty
Updates, checks and security reviews run from a central management dashboard, on a regular schedule, using the same process each time. An hour of maintenance on a single site becomes a fraction of that per site when the work is done in one focused session.
Familiarity
In most cases I built the site, so I know how it fits together, what’s connected to what and where to look first when something misbehaves. A new developer starting cold would bill hours just to get up to speed.
What the spreadsheet doesn’t show
Some of the most useful parts of a care plan don’t fit neatly into a cost table:
- One person to contact. When something goes wrong, you don’t need to work out whether it’s the host, a plugin or your email provider. You get in touch with me and I sort it out.
- Someone local. I’m based in Harrogate and work with businesses across North Yorkshire. If it’s easier to talk something through in person, we can.
- Data handled properly. New client sites are hosted on UK-based servers. Sitecrafter is Cyber Essentials certified and registered with the ICO, which matters if you’re asked about data protection by your own customers or insurers.
- Your time back. A small change that takes me twenty minutes could easily swallow an afternoon if you’re doing it once a year and relearning it each time.
- Not having to think about it. Knowing that updates, backups and security are being handled is hard to put a price on – until something breaks and nobody’s been looking.
Questions worth asking any provider
Whether you’re comparing me with someone else or thinking of doing it yourself, these questions tend to reveal what’s really included:
- How often is my site backed up, where are the backups stored, and when was a restore last tested?
- Who runs updates, and does anyone check the site still works afterwards?
- Are the premium licences in my name or yours – and what happens to them if I leave?
- Where is my website and its data physically hosted?
- What happens, and what does it cost, if my site is hacked?
- How would I know if my contact form stopped sending enquiries?
If a much cheaper option can answer all of those well, great – it may be a genuine bargain. If it can’t, you now know which items on the list you’d be picking up yourself.
The bottom line
Running a professional website properly costs around £3,000 a year if you buy every piece separately. A care plan brings that down by sharing tools, infrastructure and expertise across a group of sites – not by leaving things out.
If you’d like a no-pressure look at what your current setup is costing you, and what it’s actually covering, drop me a line at [email protected].
