Quick summary
Hosting that fits your business
Shared hosting (£1–£5/month) shares server resources, so your site can be slow or inconsistent, hurting user experience and Google rankings. Only use it if your website isn’t key for sales.
Business hosting (£15–£50+/month) gives dedicated resources, steadier speed, better security, and quicker support – ideal for lead-driving sites. UK firms should host in the UK for faster local loads.
Bottom line: if your site matters, invest in better hosting.
Generally speaking, there are two types of hosting: Shared hosting and Business hosting.
What is shared hosting?
When web hosting is very cheap (such as £1 to £5 per month), this is usually an indicator for shared hosting.
Shared hosting in simple terms: Imagine you move into an apartment in a high-rise building. You don’t know how many apartments there are in total.
Furthermore, there might be apartments with only 2 people in it, and some may have 20 or even 500 people.
You’ve moved in and you’ve paid the rent for the next year (it was cheap after all!).
However, every time you want to use the lift, you have to wait for 20 minutes because there are so many people wanting to use the lift too and you have to wait your turn.
In website terms – you would have a slow website. This means, the website is displayed slowly to the person who wants to see the content.
Google will also notice this and then penalise you for living in such a cheap flat and will not show your website in the search results very high up, but much further down the list.
For that reason, shared web hosting should be chosen with care and only be used by businesses or individuals, who do not rely on their website as the main source of income or for client conversions.
What is business hosting?
Sticking with the apartment analogy: You’d be renting the penthouse of an apartment block, but you have your own private lift, which is always available to you. No waiting. Ever!
This means your website is fast and easily accessible.
You obviously have to pay for this service, but business hosting packages have come down in price over the years.
If you want the hosting company to look after the security and provide backups (highly recommend), you would pay for that accordingly.
Better hosting services are available from £15-£20 per month and you can usually “build” your own server.
This means you can set the RAM, server space, Operating System etc. You are basically furnishing your own apartment, and you determine the quality of the furnishings.
The main differences between shared hosting and business hosting
- Price – shared hosting is very cheap – depending on the provider, you may be able to buy shared web hosting for as little as £5 per month.
- Website Average Speed – The hosting companies usually advertise with benefits such as 99.9% up time. But up-time doesn’s say how fast your website ultimately is – ie. how many seconds a website visitor has to wait. Why is speed important? If you have a slow website – google will punish your website and won’t show it high up in the search results! -You can check your website speed on Google’s Page Speed Tool. You can also enter your competitor’s website in the search 🙂
- Website Speed Variations throughout the day – When you sign up with a very cheap web hosting company, chances are the the speed of your website can vary drastically during the day. It might be totally fast at 4 AM, but grinding to a hold at 8 PM. Usually you don’t know when or if this will happen until your website is live. This might happen in the exact time window when most of your customers want to access your site – and ultimately giving them a bad experience. (Imagine Happy Hour – everyone wants to go to the bar at the same time, and there are long queues!)
- Customer Support – A company offering cheap hosting can obviously not provide premium customer support (ignore the adverts!! It’s not possible, you cannot buy Premium for £5 a month!). There will be a ticketing system and you get a reply when your ticket reaches the top of their support queue. This might be today, or tomorrow, or next Monday. If you business depends on your website working ALL THE TIME – you need to look for a better hosting provider.
- Support Type – Cheaper providers will provide ticketing support. You will have to log in to your hosting dashboard, possibly wade through a lot of FAQs before they allow you to contact them or raise a ticket. Professional hosting providers usually offer a ticket system and if you buy a premium hosting package, you may also have an emergency phone number which can be called 24/7. But this won’t be part of a £5 hosting package. There are also two main ticket system version. The one-category is usually offered by cheap providers, whereas the two-category system by premium providers. These are not standard industry terms, I simply named them one- and tw-category for easy of understanding:
- One-category ticket system – this means regardless of the urgency of your request, your question is answered when it reaches the top of the queue.
- Two-category ticket system – this mean you can log a call / raise a ticket / ask for support for any kind of support, but you have the option to tick a box to alert the hosting provider that your website is down. This will then bump your ticket to the top of the queue and it should be sorted much quicker. Beware of this option though: If you abuse it and say your site is down when in fact it isn’t, your account gets marked and any “down” requests are ignored in the future. This is obviously bad, because if it actually is down, you won’t get the support you need.
- Functionality – When you buy cheap hosting, they might either give you a lot of functionality and you won’t know where to start, or they might push their website builder and you should use that to build your website. However, cheaper providers might not allow you to amend certain settings that allow you to “tune” your website. If your website is not business critical, then that would be totally fine.
How much does web hosting cost?
Here’s a short overview of what is likely included in the package:
| Monthly Cost | £5 | £20 | £50+ |
| Hosting Type | Shared | Shared | VPS |
| Average Speed | OK | OK | Fast |
| Speed Variations | Hourly | Frequent | Never |
| E-Mail Support | Yes, but slow | Yes | Yes Receive a reply within 30 minutes or less |
| Tel Support | No | No | No Likely to have an emergency telephone number for outages |
| Functionality | Restricted | Better | Everything |
| “Easy” Website Builder provided by Hoster | Likely | Possibly | Standard one-Click installations will be available, such as WordPress. |
How to choose a hosting company?
The first question should be: What country is your business serving? Are you a UK business? Then you should buy your hosting from a UK company.
Do not buy cheap US hosting. Your website would be located in the US, and if people from the UK are trying to access your website, the data needs to travel a long way for it to be accessible to the UK website visitor.
Even though the internet is getting faster all the time, but delivering website content across the Atlantic still takes longer than requesting the same content from a UK data centre.
Furthermore, Google rewards faster websites with higher search rankings. So it’s an important consideration.
How much should you pay?
Shared web hosting is cheap for a reason.
Avoid web hosting companies who offer web hosting for free, or for a tiny fee, such as £1 per month.
Usually, they need something in exchange for the small fee. This could mean they will place a logo on your website that advertises their hosting company and the logo can be quite prominently displayed and you have no control over it.
Also, cheap hosting packages will not have many features included in the package.
Private web hosting is available from between £15 to £20 per month and allows you more control on how your server is “built”.
Are you unhappy with your existing hosting provider?
Send us an email via the form below and we can help you move your website.
If you are looking for web hosting for your new business website – get in touch and we can help you set everything up.
If you are looking for the re-design of your existing website and consider moving away from a website builder system that is provided by a cheaper hosting company, send us an email and we might be able to help.
Please choose good quality web hosting from a reputable hosting provider and consider what your plans for your website are.
