Countless providers offer email and website hosting, with prices from a few pounds to hundreds per month. Each lists so many features and specifications that even an expert struggles to compare value for money. Here's how to be sure you're getting a good deal - without getting too technical.
Email hosting
We've never sold email hosting; there are great providers, and we'd rather teach clients to manage it without hassle.
The biggest easy saving is email forwarding. For group addresses like info@ or contact@, every provider offers forwarding for free - so instead of paying monthly for 3–4 extra mailboxes, forward them to addresses you already pay for and save £70–£90 a year.
- Cost-effective email - for a one-person business address, buy from your domain registrar; with the domain purchase they typically offer email at around £1–£2 per address.
- Small business - with under 10 users who also need documents, spreadsheets and file sharing, Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 is best; the monthly price includes the Office apps, so no separate licence.
- Just email - registrars (GoDaddy, Fasthosts, 123-reg) resell Microsoft Exchange cheaper than Microsoft 365, with smaller mailboxes (2–10GB). For pure cloud email, Amazon WorkMail starts at $4 per month for a 50GB mailbox with no upfront fees or contract.
Note that email hosting is not connected to website hosting - they only share the domain. Email is about storage and cost; websites are about speed and uptime.
Website hosting
Hosting cost is mainly decided by your technology stack, and ranges from £2–£3 to hundreds per month.
- Cost-effective hosting - fine if you only need an online presence. Anything under £10–£20 per month means sharing a server with potentially hundreds of other websites: slower (which hurts SEO), and one attacked site can affect the rest. Quick tip: sign up free at uptimerobot.com and you'll get an email whenever your site goes down. If it does, change your hosting.
- Dedicated servers - £30–£40 up to £200 per month, with full control and only your sites on the machine. Self-managed, so it needs continuous maintenance; useful when multiple websites can split the cost.
- Cloud hosting - the most versatile and scalable, though monthly costs fluctuate with traffic, storage and services. If you currently pay over £100, cloud can cut that drastically - we've migrated smaller infrastructures and halved the bills.
AWS offers a 12-month free tier to help you migrate, plus real extras: a free SSL certificate (saving £200–£400 a year if you currently pay for one), Amazon S3 file storage (5GB free) as a OneDrive/Dropbox alternative, and a whole ecosystem - BI platforms, CDNs, worldwide SMS - once your data is in.
Share your current hosting and email bills and we'll return a proof-of-concept migration plan showing exactly what you'd save.