Web hosting adverts are everywhere, and they all say roughly the same thing: get a website for £1 a month. Sometimes it's 99p. Sometimes it's even free. If you're a small business owner comparing options, that looks very appealing compared to paying £20 or £30 a month for managed hosting.
Here's what's actually going on, and why the true cost is rarely what the headline says.
what cheap hosting actually means
Cheap hosting is almost always shared hosting. Your website lives on a server alongside hundreds or thousands of other websites. When those sites get traffic, your site slows down. When one of those sites gets compromised, the server's reputation suffers. You share the resources, the IP address, and the consequences.
The introductory price is also almost never the long-term price. £1 a month for the first year becomes £8 to £15 a month on renewal. That's still not expensive, but it's not what was advertised either. And once your site is set up on a platform, moving it is a project that most people don't want to take on.
the performance problem
Page speed is a Google ranking factor. It also directly affects whether visitors stay on your site or leave. A site that takes four seconds to load loses roughly half its visitors before they've seen a single word. A site that loads in under a second keeps them.
Cheap hosting produces slow sites. Not always. Not every day. But consistently enough that it shows up in Google Search Console, in bounce rates, and in missed enquiries. You don't necessarily see it yourself because your browser has the page cached. Your customer on a phone in Bury, visiting for the first time, sees the full load time.
the security problem
When something goes wrong on a shared server, it affects everyone on it. The most common scenario with cheap hosting and WordPress sites is an out-of-date plugin getting exploited. Someone's compromised theme becomes a vector for malware. Google blacklists the IP address. Your site starts throwing security warnings. By the time you notice, enquiries have stopped and the damage to your Google ranking has been done.
Recovering from a hacked website is not a £50 job. It's a morning of someone's time, usually at emergency rates, followed by weeks of rebuilding any search ranking trust that was lost. The maths on "cheap hosting is fine" can shift very quickly when you factor in a single incident.
the support problem
Cheap hosting support is typically a ticket system with a 24 to 48 hour response time. If your site goes down on a Friday afternoon before a bank holiday weekend, you wait. If something breaks during a campaign you've been planning for weeks, you wait. The support that comes with managed hosting is different in kind, not just in quality.
The question isn't what hosting costs per month. The question is what it costs you when your site is down, slow, or compromised at the wrong moment.
what good hosting actually costs
Managed hosting for a small business website typically costs between £15 and £40 a month. For that you get a server that's properly configured for performance, a CDN that delivers your content quickly to visitors across the UK, SSL handled for you, regular backups, and someone who actually monitors the thing.
When I host a client's site as part of a managed package, it's on a server I manage, behind Cloudflare's CDN, with automatic backups. If something goes wrong, I know before the client does. That's a different product from a £1/month shared server, even if both are technically called "web hosting".
when cheap hosting is fine
To be fair: cheap hosting is fine for some things. Personal projects, hobby sites, very low-traffic information pages where downtime isn't a business problem. If your website isn't doing commercial work for you, the difference between fast and slow hosting doesn't matter much.
But if your website is supposed to generate enquiries, if customers are supposed to find you through it, if it's a meaningful part of how your business presents itself, then hosting is infrastructure. You don't buy the cheapest pipes when building something that needs to stay watertight.