Hosting comparisons are written around storage allowances, bandwidth limits and how many databases you may create. Almost none of that affects a business website, and the things that do affect it are rarely on the comparison table.
What actually matters
Response time under real conditions
Not the marketing claim about speed. How quickly the server begins responding when several people are on the site at once.
Cheap shared hosting places hundreds of sites on one machine. Yours is fine until a neighbour has a busy afternoon, and then it is not. This is the single biggest practical difference between £3 a month and £25 a month, and it never appears in a feature list.
Page speed affects search ranking and it affects whether people wait. Both are real costs.
Backups you can actually restore
Every host advertises backups. The questions worth asking are how far back they go, how quickly you can restore, whether you can do it yourself and whether they are stored separately from the server.
A backup on the same machine as the site is not a backup — it protects you from a mistake, not from the server failing or being compromised. The same principle as backups everywhere else.
Who answers when something is wrong
The difference you will actually feel. Test it before you buy: raise a pre-sales question on a Sunday evening and see how long a reply takes and whether it was written by somebody who read the question.
When your site is down, the difference between a four-hour reply and a twenty-minute one is the whole value of the hosting.
Whether somebody keeps the software updated
Content management systems and their plugins need patching. An unpatched site is found by automated scanning within weeks, and compromise usually shows up as spam being sent from your domain or as your site quietly serving something to visitors.
Managed hosting includes this. Unmanaged hosting does not, and the difference in monthly price is far less than the cost of a compromise.
What matters less than people think
Storage and bandwidth allowances. A typical small business site uses a fraction of even a modest allowance. Unlimited claims are marketing, since every host has fair use terms.
UK data centre location. Latency differences within Europe are small and a content delivery network removes most of what remains. It genuinely matters when a contract or a client specifies data location, which is increasingly common in public sector and regulated work — but as a compliance requirement rather than a performance one.
Control panel brand. Relevant only if you administer the server yourself, which most businesses should not.
The three types
Shared hosting. £2 to £10 a month. Many sites per server. Fine for a personal site or a very low-traffic brochure page. Not appropriate for a site your business depends on.
Virtual private server. £15 to £80 a month. Guaranteed resources, and you are responsible for the server — patching, security, configuration. Only sensible if somebody in or around your business genuinely does that work.
Managed hosting. £20 to £100 a month for a small business site. Guaranteed resources plus somebody maintaining the server, monitoring it and handling backups. The right answer for most businesses, because it is the option where somebody else is accountable.
The question is not how much server you are renting. It is whether anybody is responsible for it being patched, monitored and restorable at three on a Sunday afternoon.
The ownership question
The most important thing in this article and the one least often discussed at the point of purchase.
Your hosting account and your domain should be registered to your business, in your name, with your billing details. Your agency or developer gets access, not ownership.
Domains and hosting registered in an agency's name are one of the commonest ways a business discovers it cannot move its own website. It is rarely malicious — the agency set it up on their account because it was convenient — and it is a serious problem when the relationship ends or the agency does.
Check yours today. A domain lookup will tell you who the registrant is.
Questions to ask before signing
- What is your uptime record for the last twelve months? Not the guarantee. The record.
- How far back do backups go, and can I restore one myself?
- Who patches the server and the platform?
- What are your support hours, and what is a realistic response time?
- What happens if my site is compromised? Do they help, or suspend it and hand you the problem?
- How do I leave? Can I export everything, and will you help?
Question five is worth pressing on. Some hosts suspend a compromised site and leave you to sort it out, which is precisely the moment you needed support.
What to budget
£10 to £50 a month for a small business brochure site on decent managed hosting. £50 to £200 for a busy site or an application.
Against the cost of a day of downtime, or a compromise that puts your domain on a blocklist, the difference between the cheapest option and a good one is not a meaningful saving.
We host the sites we build on our own managed platform, with patching, monitoring, backups and a named person who answers. If you would like your current hosting assessed honestly, our web hosting team will tell you whether it is fine as it is. Get in touch.
