What you are actually choosing between

“Should I use Wix or get web hosting?” is really a question about who operates your website: a platform, on its terms — or you, on yours. Both answers are legitimate. The expensive mistake is not knowing which one you gave.

A website builder — Wix, Squarespace, Weebly, GoDaddy's builder — is a closed platform. The editor, the hosting, the templates and your site are one inseparable product operated by the platform. You rent the result.

Web hosting is open infrastructure: a server that runs whatever you put on it — WordPress, another open-source application, or plain HTML you wrote yourself. The site is a pile of files and data that you own and can take anywhere.

Every meaningful difference between the two routes — cost curves, flexibility, lock-in, learning curve — flows from that single structural fact.

Where builders genuinely shine

Speed to a decent-looking page. A person with no technical background can have a presentable five-page site live in an evening, and the editors have become genuinely good: drag, drop, type, publish. Design, hosting, SSL and updates are all somebody else's job, permanently.

For a site that is essentially a brochure — a restaurant's menu and opening hours, a tradesperson's portfolio and phone number — and an owner who will never want more than that, a builder is a defensible choice, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. The monthly fee buys the absence of every operational thought this blog otherwise writes about.

Where builders cost you

The exit does not exist. This is the big one. A builder site cannot be exported as a working website — the platform's pages only run on the platform. Leaving means rebuilding from scratch elsewhere, which in practice means most people never leave, which the pricing quietly reflects. Contrast a WordPress or HTML site, where moving host is a mechanical afternoon's work.

The price only moves one way. Builder plans that remove ads, connect a domain and unlock basic business features typically land at £10–£25 a month — £360–£900 over three years, against perhaps £60–£150 for domain plus shared hosting over the same period. And selling anything adds platform transaction fees on the cheaper tiers, a cost that scales with your success.

The ceiling is real. Need a feature the platform has not built — a specific booking flow, a membership structure, proper multilingual content, a particular integration? There is no plugin directory to reach for. The answer is whatever the platform's answer is.

SEO within limits. The builders have largely fixed their historical technical-SEO problems, but you optimise within what the platform exposes. On your own site, nothing about the output is off-limits.

Where hosting your own site shines

Total cost, past the first year. Ownership, absolutely: files and database you can copy, back up and move at will. Capability without ceilings: the entire open-source ecosystem installs onto ordinary shared hosting. And skills that transfer — time spent learning WordPress or HTML is invested in something no platform can deprecate.

The honest costs on this side: the first evening is setup rather than design, since domain, DNS and installation come before the fun part; and maintenance — updates and backups — is yours, automatable but not delegable. Anyone claiming this route matches a builder's zero-thought experience is selling something.

The middle path most people actually want

WordPress on your own shared hosting sits deliberately between the extremes, which is why it runs some forty percent of the web. Block editors and page-builder themes now offer most of the drag-and-drop experience; the software installs in one click through Softaculous; and underneath it remains an open application on open infrastructure — every plugin available, every file yours, every exit open.

The realistic comparison in 2026 is not “easy builder versus hard hosting”. It is a builder's polish and its permanent fee and closed doors, versus WordPress's near-polish, lower cost, and open ones.

A decision framework

Choose a builder when the site is a simple brochure, will stay one, the £10–£20 monthly fee is untroubling, and you place no value on portability. Go in with open eyes about the exit and it is a fine product.

Choose your own hosting when the site might grow, will sell things, needs anything specific, or when three years of builder fees against £0.99 a month arithmetic offends you. Accept one setup evening and a few minutes of monthly upkeep as the fare.

When torn, test the open route first — it is the only one that offers a free trial with a real exit. Thirty days on Traxio costs nothing and takes no card details: install WordPress, build a few pages, and see whether the operational side is the burden you feared or the fifteen minutes it usually turns out to be. If you end up on a builder anyway, you have lost an evening. If a builder turns out wrong three years in, you lose the site.