The honest answer: GoDaddy is a perfectly reasonable place to buy a domain and put a first website live. What sends UK small businesses looking for a GoDaddy alternative is what happens afterwards — the renewal price on hosting, and the per-mailbox price on email. UKBox charges a flat £4.79 a month for hosting and £4.99 a month for ten mailboxes, ex VAT, with the price held for three years in writing. Below are GoDaddy's current UK figures taken from its own pages as at September 2026, the sums for a five and ten-person business, and an honest account of where GoDaddy still beats us.
GoDaddy's UK web hosting page lists Web Hosting Economy from £3.99 a month on a one-year term, with 25 GB of NVMe storage, one website and a free domain. Deluxe is £5.99 a month for 50 GB and ten websites, and Ultimate is £7.49 for 75 GB and twenty-five. Hosting for WordPress Basic sits alongside Economy at £3.99 with 10 GB.
The interesting number is on GoDaddy's cheap web hosting page, because it publishes the renewal. There, the same Economy plan is priced at £5.59 a month on a three-year term — £201.24 up front — and the page states the three-year renewal at £413.63. That works out at about £11.49 a month, or roughly double what you paid to join.
Neither page states whether the figures are ex or inc VAT, so check that at the checkout before you compare anything to a price quoted ex VAT.
Email is where the gap gets wide, because GoDaddy sells it the way Microsoft and Google do: per mailbox, every month, for as long as that person works for you. GoDaddy's UK email pricing lists Microsoft 365 Email Essentials at £5.99 per mailbox a month on an annual term (£71.88 up front) renewing at £125.88 a year — about £10.49 a month per mailbox — with 10 GB of storage. Online Business Essentials is £10.98 renewing at £191.76 a year, and Business Professional is £11.98 renewing at £239.76 a year, both with 50 GB. Advanced Email Security is an extra £3.99 per mailbox a month.
This is the whole argument in one table. The renewal column is the one that matters, because year one is the discount and years two onwards are the price.
| Plan | Joining price | Renewal per mailbox | Ten mailboxes, renewal year |
|---|---|---|---|
| GoDaddy M365 Email Essentials (10 GB) | £5.99/mailbox/mo | £125.88/yr (£10.49/mo) | £1,258.80 |
| GoDaddy Online Business Essentials (50 GB) | £10.98/mailbox/mo | £191.76/yr (£15.98/mo) | £1,917.60 |
| GoDaddy Business Professional (50 GB) | £11.98/mailbox/mo | £239.76/yr (£19.98/mo) | £2,397.60 |
| UKBox Starter Email (10 mailboxes, 10 GB each, 100 GB pooled) | £4.99/mo for the whole business | Held three years | £59.88 |
A five-person firm on Email Essentials pays £359.40 in its first year and £629.40 in its second. The same five people on our Starter plan pay £59.88 a year, and the plan has room for another five without the price moving. Pay annually and you get two months free.
That is not clever pricing on our part. It is simply what happens when you charge per business instead of per head.
| GoDaddy Web Hosting Economy | UKBox Starter Hosting | |
|---|---|---|
| Joining price | £3.99/mo (1 yr) or £5.59/mo (3 yr, £201.24 up front) | £1 first month, then £4.79/mo ex VAT |
| Stated renewal | £413.63 per three-year term (~£11.49/mo) | Price held three years in writing |
| Storage | 25 GB NVMe | 10 GB NVMe |
| Websites | 1 | 1 |
| Mailboxes | Free email included; term not stated on the plan page | 10 mailboxes included |
| Where it runs | Not stated on the plan page | Our own UK data centres: London, Coventry, Maidenhead |
| Support | 24/7 phone support | UK humans, ~10-minute replies 8am–5pm; staff on ~5am–midnight, 365 days; not guaranteed 24/7 |
| VAT | Not stated on the pages above | All prices ex VAT |
We would rather tell you this than have you find out after switching.
Round-the-clock phone support. GoDaddy's UK contact page states 24/7 support on a London number. We do not match that, and we will not pretend otherwise: our people typically reply within about ten minutes between 8am and 5pm, and someone is usually around from roughly 5am to midnight, 365 days a year. That is a good service, but it is not a 24-hour call centre.
More storage on the entry plan. 25 GB against our 10 GB is a real difference if you host a media-heavy site.
Everything under one login. Domains, a website builder, payments, marketing tools, Microsoft 365 licences. If you want one supplier and one bill for the lot, that has genuine value.
Office apps. If your team needs Word, Excel, Teams and SharePoint, you need Microsoft 365 — from GoDaddy, from a reseller, or direct from Microsoft. We say the same thing on our own pages. Our email plans are email, calendars and contacts, not an Office suite.
Size and history. GoDaddy has been trading since 1997 and owns 123 Reg. UKBox Ltd was incorporated in September 2023 (company number 15154892). If length of track record is your first filter, that is a fair point against us.
If your website is a brochure, a booking page or a small shop, and your real dependency is email, the maths above is the argument. You are paying per head for mailboxes that mostly hold conversations, and paying it again every year at a higher rate.
What you get instead: a flat price per business, a three-year price hold in writing rather than a first-year discount, no setup fee and no contract, free migration handled by us, cPanel with LiteSpeed and NVMe, free SSL, Imunify360 and daily off-site backups. Our uptime figure is a 99.9% target published alongside a live status page — it is not an SLA with service credits, and we say so on the plan pages.
Find your current renewal date and renewal price, not your joining price. Count your mailboxes and note how much mail each one holds, because that decides which plan you need. Check who controls the domain and where its DNS is answered from. And confirm that whatever quote you are comparing is on the same VAT footing.
If you would rather see the numbers for your own team size, our three-year cost calculator does the sums against the major providers' published renewal prices.
Email moves first and it moves copied, not cut: we sync every message, folder and flag into the new mailboxes while the old ones keep receiving, then switch the MX records once you are happy. Nothing is deleted at the old provider by us, so there is always a way back. We do migrations out of hours where a business cannot afford a wobble in the working day.
Domains are separate from hosting. A .co.uk moves by changing its IPS tag, which does not cost a transfer year. A .com or other gTLD needs an authorisation code from GoDaddy and normally adds a year to the registration — ours are £8.95 for .co.uk and .uk, and £12.95 for .com. You can also leave the domain exactly where it is and just point it at us.
No. It is a large, competent registrar and host with excellent availability of support. The complaint we hear is not that it breaks; it is that the second invoice is much larger than the first, and that email is priced per person.
On email, on any team above one or two people, almost always — that is arithmetic, not marketing. On hosting in the first year, not necessarily: GoDaddy's £3.99 introductory price undercuts our £4.79, and it gives you more storage. The difference appears at renewal.
It should not. Mail is copied while the old mailboxes stay live, so nothing is in flight with nowhere to land. Our email deliverability page sets out how SPF, DKIM and DMARC are configured on our platform and what we can and cannot see when a message goes missing.
Sell you Microsoft 365 with the Office apps, run a website builder and a payments product, and answer the phone at 3am. We also do not offer mailing-list software or email archiving — if either is a requirement, we are the wrong choice and would say so on a sales call.
No. Migration of websites and email is included, there is no setup fee, and there is no minimum term.
Prices and specifications for both sides of the business are published in full: UK web hosting from £4.79 a month, and business email from £4.99 a month for ten mailboxes. If you would like someone to look at your current GoDaddy invoice and tell you honestly whether moving is worth the disruption, call 0330 088 2279 and ask.
GoDaddy's figures above are taken from its UK web hosting page and its UK email pricing page, checked in September 2026. Prices change — check them yourself before deciding.
— The UKBox team
