Your agency told you to renew hosting with them - at triple the market rate

What hosting actually costs

Hosting is renting space on a computer somewhere that keeps your website online. That is all it is. For a five-page site for a plumber, therapist, or cafe, the real cost is small.

Here are the going rates in May 2026:

• Shared hosting on Krystal, SiteGround, or 20i: £5-15 a month, with a real human on the support line
• A small server on AWS or Hetzner: £4-10 a month
• Static site hosting on Cloudflare Pages or Netlify: free for a site your size

If your agency is charging you £45-150 a month for hosting and calling it premium, dedicated, or managed, ask them what makes it worth three to ten times the going rate. The answer will be vague.

Why agencies can charge triple

Because you have never checked. That is the whole answer.

Most small business owners signed up years ago, were told a monthly figure, and have paid it ever since. The agency knows you will not phone three hosting companies to compare prices, and they know moving feels scary. So the markup sits there, year after year, quietly funding their office rent.

The hosting line on your invoice is the easiest profit margin in the business. It requires no work from them once the site is live.

What they tell you vs the truth

When you ask about hosting, you tend to hear one of these:

• "It has to be on our servers because we built it." Untrue. A website is just files. Those files run on any standard hosting.
• "Our hosting is enterprise-grade and optimised for your site." Usually it is a shared reseller account on the same hosting company you could buy direct for a fifth of the price.
• "If you move, we cannot support the site." Translation: they would rather you stay where the margin is.
• "Moving the site is complicated and risky." For a brochure site, moving hosting takes a couple of hours. It is not risky if the person doing it knows what they are doing.

The hosting markup is rarely itemised. It is bundled into a vague monthly figure so you never see the maths.

How to check what you are paying

Pull out your last invoice. Look for a line that says hosting, server, or platform fee.

If it is bundled with maintenance or support, email the agency and ask for a breakdown: "Can you tell me how much of my monthly bill is hosting and how much is support?" An honest agency will tell you. An evasive one will tell you it cannot be separated, which is itself an answer.

Then compare the hosting figure to the going rates above. If you are paying more than £20 a month purely for hosting a small brochure site, you are being overcharged.

How to move your hosting

Moving hosting does not mean rebuilding your site or changing your domain. The site stays the same. Only the computer it lives on changes.

The steps are:

• Get a copy of your site files and any database from the current host
• Set up the new hosting and put the files there
• Update your domain so it points to the new host
• Switch over, usually with no downtime

For a five-page site, this is a few hours of work. The hardest part is often getting the current agency to hand the files over, which is a separate conversation - and one they are legally required to cooperate with.

Your domain name does not need to move with the hosting. You can leave the domain where it is and just repoint it.

What to look for instead

You want three things from whoever takes over:

• A clear monthly figure that itemises hosting separately, so you can sanity check it
• Hosting that costs roughly what hosting costs - not a markup with no explanation
• The ability to leave with all your files and access, no drama

SkipTheAgency's Hosted plan is £40/month and includes hosting, security, monitoring, domain management, and up to 3 small content changes a month. The Maintained plan at £65/month adds more changes and same-day response. Whichever plan you are on, you can leave with everything after the three-month minimum. The price is the price - there is no hidden hosting markup because there is no agency to feed.