What Cloud Hosting Actually Costs a UK Small Business

Hosting quotes are difficult to compare because everyone includes different things. One supplier quotes £40 a month and means the server. Another quotes £180 and means the server, the database, the backups, the certificate, the monitoring and someone answering the phone.

This article gives real monthly figures for three shapes of business, states what each includes, and lists the four things that reliably push a bill above expectations.

This article is part of our guide to cloud hosting explained for business owners.

Scenario one: a brochure website

Ten to thirty pages, a contact form, a few thousand visitors a month, no login, no database to speak of.

Item	Monthly
Managed static or shared hosting	£0 to £20
Domain (annual, spread)	£1 to £3
SSL certificate	£0, included on any modern platform
Form handling	£0 to £15
Backups	£0 to £5
Total	£1 to £45

If you are paying materially more than this for a brochure site, you are paying for something you are not using. This is the single most common overspend we see, and it usually dates from a decision made years ago on a different platform.

Scenario two: a content site with a database

A few hundred pages, a blog, a CMS, search, maybe 20,000 visitors a month. Images but not video.

Item	Monthly
Managed platform hosting	£20 to £60
Managed database	£15 to £50
CDN and image delivery	£0 to £25
Media storage	£2 to £10
Backups with retention	£5 to £15
Monitoring and error tracking	£0 to £25
Total	£42 to £185

Most UK SMEs with a proper website and a blog sit in the £60 to £120 range. The spread comes mostly from image handling and whether monitoring is paid or free-tier.

Scenario three: a customer-facing web application

User accounts, data people depend on, integrations with other systems, a few thousand active users.

Item	Monthly
Application hosting, two environments	£60 to £200
Managed database with backups	£40 to £150
File storage	£5 to £40
CDN	£10 to £60
Transactional email	£10 to £40
Monitoring, logging, error tracking	£20 to £80
Authentication service	£0 to £50
Total	£145 to £620

Real applications at modest scale typically land at £200 to £400. The range widens quickly with file storage and outbound email volume.

Notice what is not in these tables: anyone's time. Someone has to apply updates, respond when it breaks and keep an eye on the bill. If that is not you, it is a support arrangement costing somewhere between £200 and £2,000 a month, and it is usually the largest line once you count it honestly.

The four things that push it up

Video and large images served directly. The single most common cause of a bill that triples without warning. Egress is charged per gigabyte leaving the provider, and video leaves a lot. A CDN in front almost always costs less than the egress it prevents.

Environments nobody switched off. A staging server from a project two years ago. A database spun up for a migration. A quarterly review of what is actually running commonly recovers 20 to 30 per cent. The same discipline applies to dark data storage.

Sizing for the peak. Paying for Black Friday capacity in February. Either scale automatically or run a smaller baseline you can grow.

Snapshots with no retention rule. Automated backups that are never deleted grow indefinitely. Set a retention period on day one.

What to compare when you get quotes

Ask every supplier to state, explicitly: the environments included, whether the database is managed or self-hosted, backup frequency and retention, whether a CDN is included, egress allowance and the price beyond it, monitoring, and what support response you actually get.

Two quotes that look £100 apart are frequently the same price once you normalise for those seven things, and occasionally the cheaper one is more expensive.

The honest answer about saving money

For most SMEs the saving is not in changing provider. It is in three things: switching off what you are not using, putting a CDN in front of your media, and right-sizing a setup that was specified for a business considerably larger than yours.

Those three typically take a day and save more than a migration would, without the risk. Migration is worth considering when your current provider has stopped being competitive or is genuinely blocking something, not as a cost exercise.

Key Takeaways

• A brochure site should cost under £45 a month. Paying materially more is the most common hosting overspend.
• A content site with a database typically runs £60 to £120. A real web application typically runs £200 to £400.
• Someone's time to maintain it is usually the largest line and is missing from every hosting quote.
• Four things push bills up: media egress, forgotten environments, sizing for peak year-round, and backups with no retention rule.
• Most savings come from switching things off and adding a CDN, not from changing provider.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is our hosting bill so much higher than these figures?

Usually one of three reasons: you are on a full cloud platform with components sized for a much larger business, you are serving media without a CDN, or the figure includes support and maintenance that these tables do not. Ask for an itemised breakdown. Suppliers who resist itemising are telling you something. See red flags in a technology proposal.

Should we move from AWS to something simpler?

If you are a small business running a standard web application on AWS and paying someone to manage it, a managed platform is frequently cheaper in total once you count the management. If you have specific compliance, data residency or integration requirements, the complexity may be earning its keep. See AWS vs Azure vs Google Cloud for UK small businesses.

Is the cheapest option ever the right one?

For a brochure site, frequently yes. For anything customers depend on, the relevant question is what happens when it breaks at nine on a Monday. Cheap hosting with no support is a false economy on anything that generates revenue.

How often should we review this?

Quarterly for what is running, annually for whether the overall shape still fits. Set a billing alert at 120 per cent of your expected spend so you find out about a change within days rather than at the end of the month.

---

Want someone to look at your hosting bill and tell you what to switch off? Talk to Halo Technology Lab. Our strategy and scoping service includes exactly that, and the recommendation is often to spend less.