Short answer: cheap UK web hosting is usually cheap for one term only. As at September 2026 the entry plans from the biggest UK names advertise between £1.99 and £5.59 a month — and the very same pages state renewal figures of £251.64, £413.63 and £575.64 for the term after that. What the low price buys is typically one website, one or two mailboxes and a three-year commitment. This is an honest look at what your money gets you, including where the cheap hosts beat us.
Every competitor figure below was read from that provider's own UK pricing page on 14 September 2026. Where a page does not say whether VAT is included, we say so rather than guess.
The price you compare on and the price you pay for most of your time as a customer are rarely the same number. That is not a scandal — the renewal figures are printed on the same pages as the offers — but hardly anyone compares them, because it takes arithmetic the marketing is not designed to make easy.
Here is the entry-level plan at four UK hosts, worked out over a first three years and the three years after that.
| Host and entry plan | Advertised price | First 3 years | Next 3 years | Mailboxes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 123 Reg Economy | £1.99/mo, 3-year term | £71.64 | £251.64 | 1 |
| IONOS Standard | £3/mo for 6 months | £198 | £216 | 1 |
| IONOS Plus | £1/mo for 12 months | £228 | £324 | 2 |
| GoDaddy Economy | £5.59/mo, 3-year term | £201.24 | £413.63 | Not stated |
| UKBox Starter | £4.79/mo, rolling | £168.65 | £172.44 | 10 |
Two honest readings of that table. First, 123 Reg Economy really is the cheapest way to put a small website online for three years — less than half what we charge — provided you commit to the term and one mailbox is genuinely enough. We are not going to argue with arithmetic. Second, the gap reverses in the second term, and it reverses hard: £251.64 against our £172.44, for a plan that still gives you one email address rather than ten.
Our figures include the £1 first month and then thirty-five months at £4.79; the second three years are simply thirty-six months at the same price.
This is where the cheapest plans pinch hardest. 123 Reg Economy includes one email account; IONOS gives one on Standard, two on Plus, four on Premium and five on Ultimate. For a sole trader that is fine. For a firm wanting an accounts address, an enquiries address and a mailbox each for three people, you are pushed up the ladder for email rather than for anything to do with your website. Our Starter plan includes ten mailboxes at ten gigabytes each.
GoDaddy's cheap hosting page states that the plan auto-renews in September 2029 at £413.63, and directly after it: "SSL renews annually at £89.99." That second line is easy to skim past, and across three years it is another £269.97 on top of the hosting. SSL certificates are free from Let's Encrypt and free forever on every plan we sell, so a renewing certificate charge is worth looking for on any quote.
The headline prices at 123 Reg and GoDaddy both require a three-year term. GoDaddy's page states Economy as £201.24 paid up front; 123 Reg's £1.99 a month comes to £71.64 across its term. If the service disappoints you in month four, you are not going anywhere. Our plans are rolling monthly and cancel from your client area at the end of the billing period.
Worth saying plainly: this is not a weakness at the budget end. 123 Reg states daily automated backups on the same page as the £1.99 price, and we include daily off-site backups on every plan. The thing to check is not whether backups exist but how far back they reach, and whether one file can be restored without a drawn-out ticket. Ours are copied to a second UK data centre, away from the server they protect.
IONOS bundles 24/7 support on every plan above and says so prominently. We do not match that and will not imply we do. Our UK team typically answers in about ten minutes between 8am and 5pm, with staff around from roughly 5am to midnight seven days a week — honest extended cover, not a guaranteed round-the-clock call centre. Where an hour offline is real money, we sell a separate Priority Support arrangement at £49 a month.
Three things, and none of them are small.
Storage. IONOS gives 100 GB on their entry plan and 500 GB at the top; our Starter gives 10 GB. For a large media library on a tight budget that is a straightforward win for them, and our Business plan at £8.39 is where storage stops being a constraint for us.
Free domains. 123 Reg and IONOS both bundle a domain, at least for the first year. We charge £8.95 for a .co.uk or .uk and £12.95 for a .com, and include one free only on annual Pro billing.
Scale and track record. These are very large companies that will certainly still be trading in a decade. UKBox Ltd was incorporated in September 2023, is profitable with a positive net-asset position, and files accounts at Companies House under number 15154892 — but that is three years of history rather than twenty-five, and you are entitled to weigh it.
Three plans. Every price excludes VAT, with the inclusive figure alongside. Each is £1 for the first month, then held for three full years — written into clause 15.2 of our terms.
| Plan | Price per month | Websites | Storage | Mailboxes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | £4.79 (£5.75 inc VAT) | 1 | 10 GB NVMe | 10 |
| Business | £8.39 (£10.07 inc VAT) | 3 | Unlimited NVMe | Unlimited |
| Pro | £14.39 (£17.27 inc VAT) | 10 | Unlimited NVMe | Unlimited |
Every plan includes cPanel and WHM, LiteSpeed with server-level caching, one-click WordPress through Softaculous, free SSL renewed automatically, Imunify360 malware protection, daily off-site backups, and a free migration in which we move the site, databases and every mailbox and check the counts match before anything switches. The hardware is ours, in London, Coventry and Maidenhead.
Our 99.9% uptime figure is a target rather than a credit-backed service level agreement. "Unlimited" on the Business and Pro plans means normal business use is never metered or billed for overage, with the boundaries set out in plain English in our fair usage policy — it does not mean the laws of physics have been repealed. And standard support is extended hours, not round the clock, as above.
Four numbers, all on any host's own pages: the price after the intro ends, the term the headline price requires, the mailboxes included, and whether SSL renews at a charge. Multiply the renewal by thirty-six and compare that, not the first-year figure. Our three-year cost calculator does it using published renewal prices rather than intro offers.
For a single small business website, between £2 and £9 a month excluding VAT is the realistic range once introductory pricing is stripped out. Below that you are usually accepting a long prepaid term, a single mailbox, or a price that steps up sharply at renewal.
No, and we would be wrong to suggest it. 123 Reg Economy at £1.99 a month is genuinely cheaper than us across a first three-year term, includes daily backups and a free domain for the first year, and will host a brochure site perfectly well. The questions to ask are what happens in year four, and whether one email account is enough.
Because the price we advertise is the price we intend to keep charging. There is no introductory rate to fall off, and ten mailboxes come at the entry level rather than one. If the lowest first-term number is your requirement, we will lose that comparison — and we would rather you knew now.
Not for three years — it is written into clause 15.2 of your contract, and we have never raised an existing customer's price. The £1 first month applies once per new customer on any monthly plan; from month two you pay the standard price shown above.
We copy everything across while your existing site stays live, verify the file and mailbox counts match, then change the DNS at a quiet time you choose. A typical small site completes within a day or two, and migration is free on every plan.
Our UK web hosting plans start at £4.79 a month, first month £1, price held for three years. If mailboxes rather than a website are driving the decision, our business email hosting starts at £4.99 a month flat for ten. Before committing to anybody, including us, put their renewal figure into the calculator.
— The UKBox team
Prices correct as at September 2026, read from 123 Reg web hosting, IONOS UK web hosting and GoDaddy UK cheap web hosting. 123 Reg and IONOS both state that their prices exclude VAT; GoDaddy's page does not state its VAT treatment. UKBox prices exclude VAT unless shown otherwise.
