Domains, hosting and SSL, explained
Three things every website needs, sold with enough jargon that people routinely pay four times what they should for them. Here is what each one actually is, what it should cost, and the one check worth doing today.
The analogy that makes it click
- The domain is your address. yourbusiness.co.uk. You rent it, annually, from a registrar.
- The hosting is the building your site sits in. A computer somewhere, switched on all the time, handing out your pages.
- The SSL certificate is the lock on the door. It encrypts the connection, and it is why the browser shows a padlock instead of “Not secure”.
- DNS is the phone book that connects the address to the building.
They are four separate things and can be bought from four different companies. Buying them together is convenient; being unable to separate them later is not.
Domains
What it should cost: a .co.uk is typically £8–£15 a year, a .com £10–£20. If you are paying £60 a year for a domain, you are paying for somebody’s admin time.
Which to buy: for a UK business serving UK customers, .co.uk is fine and often preferable. Buy the .com too if it is cheap and available, and point it at the same site. Avoid the novelty endings unless there is a real reason.
The bit that matters: the registrant — the legal owner — must be you or your company. It is entirely normal for a designer to register it for you. It is not normal for them to register it to themselves, and the difference only becomes visible when you want to leave.
Search for your domain on Nominet’s WHOIS for a .co.uk, or any WHOIS lookup for a .com, and see whose name is on it. Then try logging into the registrar account yourself. If you cannot, ask your web person for access today — not during a disagreement, when it will be considerably harder.
Hosting
What it should cost: £5–£15 a month for decent shared hosting; £15–£40 for managed hosting where somebody else handles updates, backups and security. Under £3 a month means hundreds of sites on one overloaded machine, and your page speed pays for it.
What to look for: servers in the UK if your customers are here, free SSL included, daily backups you can actually restore, and a renewal price stated up front. Introductory hosting deals routinely triple at renewal.
What “managed” should mean: somebody is responsible for applying updates, monitoring uptime and fixing it when it breaks. If it just means a control panel and a ticket queue, it is not managed — it is hosting with a nicer login page.
SSL certificates
What it should cost: nothing. Let’s Encrypt provides free certificates and every competent host supports them automatically. A basic SSL certificate sold at £80 a year is pure margin.
Expensive certificates do exist and are occasionally justified — extended validation for banking, wildcard certificates for many subdomains. A brochure site for a plumbing firm needs neither.
The one thing to watch: that it renews automatically. An expired certificate makes browsers show a full-page red warning, and it takes down a site as effectively as the server failing.
Email is a separate thing
The most common confusion we see. Your website hosting and your email hosting do not need to be the same company, and generally should not be. If your email runs on Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, moving your website changes nothing about it — different DNS records entirely.
Free hosting-bundled mailboxes are a false economy for a business: limited storage, poor spam filtering, and awkward to move later. Budget a few pounds a month per mailbox for something proper.
What it all costs together
| Item | Sensible price | What you may be charged |
|---|---|---|
| Domain (.co.uk) | £8–£15/year | Up to £60/year |
| Shared hosting | £60–£180/year | £30 introductory, £120 at renewal |
| Managed hosting | £180–£480/year | — |
| SSL certificate | £0 | £50–£150/year |
| Business email, per mailbox | £50–£70/year | — |
On our plans all of this is inside the monthly fee, which is the main reason we can quote one number and mean it. There is a fuller breakdown in the hidden costs of a cheap website.
Questions
Can I move my website without losing my email?
Yes. Website hosting and email use different DNS records — the A record points to your website, the MX records point to your mail provider. A competent migration changes the first and leaves the second untouched, so your email carries on without interruption. Always confirm explicitly that your MX records will be preserved before anyone changes anything.
What happens if I forget to renew my domain?
Your website and any email on that domain stop working, usually within a day. There is then a grace period — around 30 days for .co.uk — during which you can renew normally, followed by a redemption period with a much higher fee. After that it is released and anyone can register it. Set the domain to auto-renew and make sure the card on the account is current.
Is free hosting ever worth it?
Not for a business. Free hosting usually means adverts on your pages, no backups, no support, and no guarantee the service will exist next year. The genuine exception is static hosting on a platform's free tier for a simple site — that is a real, reliable service — but you still need a domain, and you still need somebody responsible for it.
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