The short answer

The honest answer is between £1 and £10 a month for the shared hosting most sites need — but the advertised number is rarely the number you end up paying, and the gap between the two is where this industry hides its margins.

For a typical small website — a blog, a portfolio, a small business site, a WordPress shop doing modest volume — shared hosting is the right product, and in the UK in 2026 it genuinely costs somewhere between £1 and £10 a month, plus £8–£12 a year for a .co.uk domain.

Everything above that price range is buying either more resources than a small site uses, management services, or marketing. Everything below it is subsidised by one of the mechanisms this article exists to explain.

Why the advertised price rarely survives renewal

The dominant pricing pattern in this industry is the intro/renewal gap. A plan is advertised at, say, £1.99 a month — and the small print reveals that this rate applies only if you pay two or three years upfront, after which it renews at £7.99 or more, billed as another multi-year lump.

Nothing about this is illegal, and the intro years can be genuinely good value. But it has two effects worth naming. It makes honest comparison nearly impossible, because the headline numbers describe different things. And it selects for inattention: the business model works best on customers who do not notice the renewal.

So when comparing hosts, do the arithmetic on the renewal price over three years, not the sticker. A £1.99 plan renewing at £8.99 costs more over three years than a flat £4 plan, and considerably more than a flat £0.99 one.

What the money buys at each level

£1–£3 a month gets real, usable shared hosting at the honest end of the market: enough storage and bandwidth for a small site, a control panel, one-click installers, free SSL, email on your domain. The corners cut at this level are typically support depth and resource headroom, not the fundamentals. This is the level almost every personal and small-business site should start at.

£4–£10 a month buys more of everything — more storage, more simultaneous processes, more sites per account — and often server-level caching such as LiteSpeed, which does more for WordPress speed than any other line item. Worth it once a site has traffic; premature before it does.

£10–£30 a month is managed WordPress territory: someone else handles updates, staging and performance tuning. You are paying for operations, not hardware, and for an agency or a busy commercial site that is a fair trade.

£5–£40+ for a VPS buys a slice of a server that is yours to administer. More power, more responsibility, and the wrong first purchase for anyone who has to ask whether they need one. Our shared hosting guide covers where the boundary actually sits.

The costs beyond the hosting line

A realistic annual budget has more than one line on it, and knowing which extras are legitimate stops the checkout page ambushing you.

The domain: £8–£12 a year for .co.uk, £10–£15 for .com, paid to a registrar. Beware “free domain” hosting bundles — free in year one, above-market at renewal, and awkward to transfer away.

SSL: should be £0. Let's Encrypt made basic certificates free years ago, and any host still charging for one is charging for something the industry gives away. Paid certificates exist for genuine reasons (organisation validation), none of which apply to a normal site.

Email: should be included on any real hosting plan. Some budget hosts have started unbundling it; check before you buy rather than after.

Backups: hosts keep operational backups, but restore fees and retention windows vary enormously. Whatever the plan says, take your own copies too — that advice never changes.

How to read a pricing page

Five questions, all answerable from the page or the terms it links to, and the pattern of answers tells you what kind of company you are dealing with.

What is the renewal price? If you have to hunt for it, that is itself the answer. What term does the headline price require? A monthly price that demands 36 months upfront is a loan, not a subscription. Are the resource limits real numbers? “Unlimited” storage always resolves to a fair-use clause; a host publishing actual figures is telling you more. Is there a money-back window, and does it cover everything? Domains are usually excluded — another reason to register yours separately. What do the terms say about price changes? The right to raise prices mid-term with an email's notice appears in more terms documents than you would hope.

What we charge, for comparison

Since this article asks other hosts to show their arithmetic, here is ours. Traxio is £0.99 a month, flat — the renewal price is the price, there is no multi-year prepayment to unlock it, and the first 30 days are free without card details, so the decision to pay is made after you have used the thing rather than before.

We can hold that price because the plan is deliberately specific: one plan, published limits, DirectAdmin rather than more expensive panel licensing, and you bring your own domain rather than us bundling loss-leader registrations we would have to claw back later. It suits small sites well and large applications badly, and we would rather say so than sell you the wrong thing.

Whether or not it is us, the principle travels: the best-value host at your budget is almost always the one whose pricing page needed no decoding. The comparison table shows how the free and budget tiers across the market stack up on exactly these questions.