Website hosting cost

[Sasquatch]

Our website designers are telling us that our annual hosting cost is increasing from £150 + VAT pa to £420 + VAT.

It's a fairly simple wordpress business website. No commerce element.

£420 seems extortionate to me. Are we potentially getting fleeced?

[Gloommonger]

6 hours ago, OurDayWillCome said:

Can anyone recommend a decent no-thrills web/email hosting company? I’ve got the e-commerce site built, just need hosting and one email account. My brother has built me the site as a favour, but he lives in NZ and doesn’t do hosting.

@spunko Sorry for the @, but I know you’re a fount of knowledge with all of this and I’m a bit overwhelmed with everything.

https://krystal.uk/

 

[goldbug9999]

On 14/08/2020 at 15:53, Sasquatch said:

Our website designers are telling us that our annual hosting cost is increasing from £150 + VAT pa to £420 + VAT.

It's a fairly simple wordpress business website. No commerce element.

£420 seems extortionate to me. Are we potentially getting fleeced?

I use this bunch: https://www.jolt.co.uk/wordpress-hosting/

£15 a year.

[Sasquatch]

8 hours ago, goldbug9999 said:

I use this bunch: https://www.jolt.co.uk/wordpress-hosting/

£15 a year.

Many thanks!

I am still awaiting a response from our website designer/host. Quick to issue a bill, slow to respond it seems.

[goldbug9999]

2 minutes ago, Sasquatch said:

Many thanks!

I am still awaiting a response from our website designer/host. Quick to issue a bill, slow to respond it seems.

It seems a lot of small business web designers pull the trick of reselling the hosting at ridiculous markup rates. To be fair though they often take a loss on the actual dev/design work. Whats needed is a move to a more transparent business model with realistic charges. 

[spunko]

Needs more information. How many visits do you get roughly, is it just a basic WP blog/post site, or are you using WooCommerce, is it heavily customized? etc

For a lightweight Wordpress article based site that gets fuck all visitors, yes it's extortionate. But WordPress VIP for yuge sites costs about £5k a month plus.

Edit: oops just seen you said it has no commerce content. I would ask them to clarify the costs  - is it so-called managed hosting with an SLA etc ?

[Sasquatch]

1 hour ago, spunko said:

Needs more information. How many visits do you get roughly, is it just a basic WP blog/post site, or are you using WooCommerce, is it heavily customized? etc

For a lightweight Wordpress article based site that gets fuck all visitors, yes it's extortionate. But WordPress VIP for yuge sites costs about £5k a month plus.

Edit: oops just seen you said it has no commerce content. I would ask them to clarify the costs  - is it so-called managed hosting with an SLA etc ?

Super basic. Home page, about us page, news page and projects page. We have about 50 construction projects highlighted. All projects are on an initial screen with thumbnails. Click on the thumbnail takes you to a pop up page with a few more photos and some text. 

We will get very few visitors. It's really for us to point new clients to it on occasion. We had a holding page for 4 years before it went live!

I will carry out any updating (new projects, any text changes) from now on. 

I think they are taking the piss but I need to go softly softly as they are in the same building as us and actually nice people. 

[spunko]

18 minutes ago, Sasquatch said:

Super basic. Home page, about us page, news page and projects page. We have about 50 construction projects highlighted. All projects are on an initial screen with thumbnails. Click on the thumbnail takes you to a pop up page with a few more photos and some text. 

We will get very few visitors. It's really for us to point new clients to it on occasion. We had a holding page for 4 years before it went live!

I will carry out any updating (new projects, any text changes) from now on. 

I think they are taking the piss but I need to go softly softly as they are in the same building as us and actually nice people. 

I would just say that the price hike is more than double and you can't afford it "due to COVID". They will understand.

[onlyme]

Ask what has changed proportionately to have  that effect on cost. Most likely they have had look at what is making them money, what is not and what to concentrate on and decided better to scrub the WP hosting / administration or if they are going to do it charge a rate that is proportionate for where they are as a company now to where they were. WP does seem to require more frequent interaction -  plugin/theme updates and security patches, most of the time simply click of a few buttons and no issues but if doing a thorough job they will then check if all working OK, most probably wouldn't bother until reports of issues.  For that price would definitely switch to your own admin but make sure you have a good backup strategy in place and backup each time before applying any updates. 

[spunko]

11 minutes ago, onlyme said:

Ask what has changed proportionately to have  that effect on cost. Most likely they have had look at what is making them money, what is not and what to concentrate on and decided better to scrub the WP hosting / administration or if they are going to do it charge a rate that is proportionate for where they are as a company now to where they were. WP does seem to require more frequent interaction -  plugin/theme updates and security patches, most of the time simply click of a few buttons and no issues but if doing a thorough job they will then check if all working OK, most probably wouldn't bother until reports of issues.  For that price would definitely switch to your own admin but make sure you have a good backup strategy in place and backup each time before applying any updates. 

The very latest big build of WordPress has added automated plugin updates thankfully.

[onlyme]

1 hour ago, spunko said:

The very latest big build of WordPress has added automated plugin updates thankfully.

Does it do the automated checking to make sure the update hasn't buggered anything?  Rhetorical question obviously.

 

[Sasquatch]

Had a response. They will reduce to £240 pa as a gesture. Apparently the cost is for security checks, back ups and plugin updates.

I'll probably accept the lower figure to keep the peace but still feel like I'm getting my leg lifted.

[spunko]

14 hours ago, Sasquatch said:

Had a response. They will reduce to £240 pa as a gesture. Apparently the cost is for security checks, back ups and plugin updates.

I'll probably accept the lower figure to keep the peace but still feel like I'm getting my leg lifted.

It depends really. If they are genuinely checking for bugs, running a staging server or dev environment to test out updates first and/or taking backups as they say, then it's not bad value. It all takes time, admittedly not much, but as with all these things they have to return a profit.

You could learn to do everything they do yourself using the various Wordpress plugins and do it all for free of course... just depends if you can be bothered.

 

[Sasquatch]

59 minutes ago, spunko said:

It depends really. If they are genuinely checking for bugs, running a staging server or dev environment to test out updates first and/or taking backups as they say, then it's not bad value. It all takes time, admittedly not much, but as with all these things they have to return a profit.

You could learn to do everything they do yourself using the various Wordpress plugins and do it all for free of course... just depends if you can be bothered.

 

I can't be bothered!  

We'll pay the £240 pa for now and whilst we are earning decent money. 

Thanks for the input chaps. 

[BoSon]

Sounds like the AA business model. Bump up the renewal fee for the same service and lower it if the punter complains.

If considering moving elsewhere in the future make sure you have control of the domain name, email addresses, and a backup of all content, then moving to a new provider should be relatively simple. Like crypo, if you don't hold it you don't own it. in this case even if you do own it you may have to fight to get control of it if say this company you are using go under suddenly.

Suddenly raising the prices considerably may point to cash flow issues so be wary.

[nirvana]

Wordpress is OTT for most websites methinks....ask em what 'plugins' you're having to pay for...

If it's a simple static website something like Hugo looks easier and quicker to me......mind you I'm not a 'website expert' more a 'keep it simple stupid' guy 

[OurDayWillCome]

Can anyone recommend a decent no-thrills web/email hosting company? I’ve got the e-commerce site built, just need hosting and one email account. My brother has built me the site as a favour, but he lives in NZ and doesn’t do hosting.

@spunko Sorry for the @, but I know you’re a fount of knowledge with all of this and I’m a bit overwhelmed with everything.

Edited September 3, 2020 by OurDayWillCome

[OurDayWillCome]

1 hour ago, Gloommonger said:

https://krystal.uk/

 

That looks good! Thanks Gloommonger.

[Reck B]

Just had a similar price increase notification;

Quote

Your annual hosting for  ////////////////////  is due for renewal on 1^st January 2021.  As you will be aware your annual hosting fee over the last few years has been £250 + VAT per annum however for some time now we have discontinued that deal for new customers.  Wordpress, the platform on which your site is built, release numerous updates throughout the year both essential security patches and feature enhancements.  Each time we implement these updates on your behalf testing that they have not affected any of the themes or plugins that you are utilising and if so fixing before deploying to our production environment.  This requires a reasonable amount of developer and testing resource over the year and as such we changed our entry level offering for new clients to be a monthly fee of £49 + VAT billed annually.  We are now looking to move all existing clients over to this plan from 2021.

We appreciate this represents a significant rise in your annual fee (from £250 + VAT to £588 + VAT) but we still feel it offers excellent value for money given the first class hosting infrastructure and service provided by Rackspace through us and the amount of effort we are taking during the year to carefully assess and apply these updates to your site.  We are emailing you this far in advance so you can consider your options and would be grateful if you could let us know your intentions for 2021.  We will be issuing invoices as per usual towards the end of November.

Seems an extortionate price hike to me.

What are my options? Is it fairly easy to move a website to somewhere cheaper?