You can host a website for £3 a month. You can also host it for £30. Both will put your site on the internet — so what's the extra £27 buying? In short: speed, security, backups and a person who fixes things. Here's the detail.
What Shared Hosting Actually Is
Shared hosting puts hundreds (sometimes thousands) of websites on one server. They share the processor, memory and network. When one site gets a traffic spike or gets hacked, everyone on the server feels it. Support is usually a ticket queue staffed by people who have never seen your site.
It's not inherently bad. For a hobby site or a placeholder page, it's fine.
What Managed Hosting Adds
- Dedicated resources — your site isn't competing with strangers for CPU.
- Server-level caching and a CDN — pages load from a location near your visitor.
- Automatic daily backups with one-click restore.
- Security — firewalls, malware scanning and patched software.
- Monitoring — someone knows when your site is down, often before you do.
- Human support from people who understand your setup.
The Real Costs of Cheap Hosting
1. Lost sales from a slow site
Server response time on crowded shared servers is often 800ms–2s before a single image loads. Google treats speed as a ranking factor, and visitors treat it as a trust signal. We've written about exactly how much speed costs you.
2. Downtime you don't hear about
Without monitoring, the first sign your site is down is often a customer telling you. For an online shop, a four-hour outage on a Saturday can easily cost more than a year of good hosting.
3. Clean-up after a hack
Malware removal, blacklist removal and restoring from backup (if you have one) typically costs £300–£1,000 — and that's before lost rankings. If backups weren't running, you may need professional data recovery.
4. Your time
Every hour spent on a support chat explaining your problem is an hour not spent on your business.
Side-by-Side Comparison
| Shared (£3–£8/mo) | Managed (£9–£49/mo) | |
|---|---|---|
| Resources | Shared with hundreds of sites | Isolated / dedicated |
| Typical load time | 2–5s | Under 1.5s |
| Backups | Weekly, sometimes paid extra | Daily, included |
| Security | Basic | Firewall, scanning, patching |
| Monitoring | None | 24/7 uptime checks |
| Support | Generic ticket queue | People who know your site |
Which Should You Choose?
Shared hosting is fine for personal sites, portfolios with little traffic, or temporary landing pages.
Choose managed hosting if your site generates leads or sales, if you run WordPress with plugins (which need patching), or if downtime would cost you money or reputation.
Our managed hosting starts at £9/month. For WordPress specifically, our WordPress hosting is tuned for WP with staging sites and plugin updates included. Running Node, Python or Docker apps? See full-stack hosting.
Not sure what your current host is costing you? We'll check your server response time and security setup as part of a website audit.