When most UK small business owners think about website cost, they think about the build. The monthly cost gets brushed off as "£10 a month for hosting" because that's the headline price most providers advertise.
The real monthly cost of running a small business website is roughly 3 to 10 times that, depending on how you count and what's included. This post breaks it down across the four most common arrangements, with honest numbers.
TL;DR
The real monthly cost of running a UK small business website:
- DIY template site (you maintain it): £15 to £35 subscription + 1 to 4 hours of your time. Real cost: £45 to £150 a month including time.
- Custom build, self-hosted: £20 to £50 hosting + £100 to £300 for occasional edits. Real cost: £35 to £80 a month if you don't make many changes.
- Custom build, agency retainer: £50 to £150 hosting (often with markup) + £100 to £400 ad-hoc edits or £200 to £500 retainer. Real cost: £150 to £600 a month.
- Pay-monthly plan (Orchestrix style): £50 flat. Hosting, monitoring, backups, SSL, small edits all included. Real cost: £50 a month.
The headline "£10 a month hosting" is one line of a longer ledger. The full monthly cost is the part most providers don't itemise.
What "running a website" actually means
A live, working business website needs all of the following every month:
- Hosting: a server that serves the site to visitors
- Domain: the yourname.co.uk registration that resolves to the hosting
- SSL certificate: the padlock in the browser bar, required for trust signals and SEO
- Backups: regular off-site copies so a server crash or accidental deletion is recoverable
- Security patches: keeping the underlying stack (CMS, server, libraries) current with security updates
- Uptime monitoring: knowing when the site is down before customers tell you
- Content edits: text changes, phone numbers, opening hours, photo swaps, new staff bios
- Software updates: WordPress plugin updates, CMS version upgrades, framework patches
- Performance maintenance: keeping Core Web Vitals green as you add content or third-party scripts
Each of those has a cost, in either money or your time. The £10-a-month hosting line covers only the first one.
Tier 1: DIY template site, the unaccounted hours
Wix, Squarespace, GoDaddy, Hostinger. The subscription is genuinely £15 to £35 a month and covers hosting, domain, SSL, basic backups, and security patches.
What it doesn't cover: your time on edits.
A small UK business typically needs the following edits per month:
- Phone number, address, or opening hours change: 5 to 15 minutes
- Adding a new service or product: 30 to 90 minutes
- Updating photos for a seasonal campaign: 20 to 60 minutes
- Fixing something that broke when the platform updated: 15 to 45 minutes
- Adding a blog post or news item: 30 to 90 minutes
Total: 1 to 4 hours a month of your time. At a notional £30 to £50 an hour for owner-operator time, that's £30 to £200 in unaccounted labour.
Real monthly cost on a DIY template site: £45 to £235. Most owners don't count the time, which is why this tier feels cheaper than it is.
The cost compounds. Over 5 years, even at the low end, the time cost is £1,800 of unaccounted owner labour. Over the same period the subscription is £900. The time is the bigger number, but only one shows up on a bank statement.
Tier 2: Custom build, self-hosted
You've paid £3,000 to £5,000 for a custom build and you host it yourself on Vercel, Netlify, Cloudways, or a UK provider like Krystal or Fasthosts.
Hosting cost: £20 to £50 a month depending on traffic and provider. Domain: £1 a month. SSL: free (Let's Encrypt is standard).
What you still need to handle:
- Backups: depends on the host. Vercel and Netlify handle most of this; cheaper hosts don't. Budget £0 to £10 a month if your host doesn't include them.
- Monitoring: free tools like UptimeRobot for basic monitoring. £0.
- Security patches: for a static site, almost nothing. For WordPress, plugin and core updates need attention monthly. Budget 1 to 2 hours a month or £50 to £150 to hire someone.
- Content edits: 30 minutes to 2 hours a month on average. Either your time or £50 to £200 to a freelancer or your original developer.
Real monthly cost on a self-hosted custom build: £35 to £250 depending on how much editing you need and whether you hire it out.
This tier is the cheapest for owner-operators who don't change the site often. It's also the tier most likely to grow stale because nobody's actively maintaining it. The £20 a month becomes £20 forever and the site looks the same as it did 2 years ago.
Tier 3: Custom build, agency retainer
You've paid £4,000 to £10,000 for a custom build and the agency hosts and maintains the site.
Hosting: £50 to £150 a month, often with a markup over the underlying cost. Sometimes itemised, often bundled.
Maintenance: £100 to £400 for ad-hoc edits at an hourly rate, or £200 to £500 a month on retainer for ongoing changes.
Total: £150 to £650 a month depending on how the retainer is structured.
This tier is comfortable. Someone else handles everything. The cost reflects that, and the agency's overhead. It also reflects that hosting markups (the difference between what the agency pays for hosting and what they charge you) are typical and often unmentioned.
Real monthly cost on an agency retainer: £150 to £650.
When this earns its keep: businesses that need frequent content changes, run multi-channel marketing campaigns, want a single accountability point, and don't want to think about the site between meetings.
When it's overpriced: 4-to-20-person UK businesses that need a handful of edits a quarter. £6,000 a year on agency retainer is £30,000 over 5 years; the website doesn't earn its keep at that ratio unless it's directly generating significant revenue.
Tier 4: Pay-monthly plan, flat fee
A pay-monthly plan (the £50-a-month Orchestrix model is one example, but similar offerings exist from a few UK providers) bundles everything into a single flat fee:
- Hosting on UK infrastructure
- Domain registration in your name
- SSL certificate
- Monthly off-site backups
- Uptime monitoring
- Security patches
- Small content edits (text, phone numbers, hours, photo swaps)
- The original build cost recovered over the term
For the Orchestrix plan specifically: £50 a month, 24-month minimum, then rolls onto a 30-day rolling basis at the same rate.
Real monthly cost: £50. Flat. No add-on hosting fees, no edit-by-edit billing, no retainer surprise. The price is the price.
This tier is the most predictable. It is not the cheapest if you have a static site that never needs touching (a self-hosted custom build at £20 a month is cheaper for the do-nothing case). It is the cheapest if you do anything that involves editing the site.
Hidden costs across all tiers
Three monthly cost lines that show up in every tier and are usually missed:
- Email: business email at yourname.co.uk costs £4 to £10 per mailbox per month if it's not bundled. Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, or Fastmail. The bureau's Custom Websites plan does not include business email; that's a separate question.
- Analytics: Google Analytics is free. Plausible or Fathom for privacy-conscious analytics: £5 to £15 a month. None of the plans above include this; budget for it.
- CDN and image optimisation: bundled into modern hosting (Vercel, Netlify, Cloudflare). Not bundled in cheap hosting (£0 to £10 a month extra).
A realistic full monthly cost including email and analytics:
- DIY template: £55 to £250
- Custom self-hosted: £50 to £270
- Custom agency retainer: £170 to £675
- Pay-monthly plan: £65 to £75 (£50 plan + £10 to £15 email + £5 to £10 analytics)
What good monthly cost discipline looks like
A few rules that apply across tiers:
- Count your time. If the website costs you 3 hours a month, that's £90 to £150 of opportunity cost. Add it to the cash cost before comparing tiers.
- Watch hosting markups. If the agency hosts your site, ask what they pay for hosting. The honest answer should be roughly 60 to 80% of what they charge you. Anything more is a markup you can question.
- Plan for edits. A site that never changes loses relevance. Budget for either your time or someone else's time to keep it current.
- Don't pay for things you don't use. Premium hosting tiers, agency retainers with allotted hours you never use, plugins you forgot you subscribed to. Audit the website's monthly spend annually like any other operating cost.
Where the £50-a-month plan fits
The Orchestrix £50-a-month plan exists specifically for UK SMBs who want a flat predictable monthly number with no surprises. It's not the cheapest option (a self-hosted custom build with a developer-friendly owner can run for £20 a month). It's the option with the fewest hidden lines: hosting, SSL, domain, backups, monitoring, security, and small edits all in one number.
For 4-to-20-person UK businesses that want a real website, want it maintained, and don't want to think about it between meetings, this is usually the cheapest tier once the time cost and the agency markup are honestly counted.
If you're auditing what your current site actually costs you each month, bring the numbers to the bureau's discovery call. Fifteen minutes, honest comparison against the £50-a-month plan. No pitch.