For Website hosting, the market has become very competitive with a wide range of prices and services offered. The cost of providing a good webhosting service is mainly based around:

• How many times your website is viewed
• What customer support you require. (especially phone support)
• Heavy use of video or graphics (eg YouTube)
• Sites which are dynamically generated, and thus require computer processing and database queries before sending the page to the viewer

Some of the cheaper webhosting deals on offer achieve this low price by compromising on their network and server capacity, resulting in long delays when calling up your website. They may also have poor customer service, with long call waiting times to access an offshore call centre.

Typical costs for webhosting are in the region of £60 to £100 per year with a shared service. Where more complex services are required, then it may be several times more. Large companies may have dedicated computer servers which cost many times more.

Recommended Providers

Website hosting is a highly competitive market, with a strong focus on low cost. We would recommend you consider whether you need good support or not, and whether this is for commercial presence or just a hobby.

For domain names, good large providers include 1and1.co.uk and 123reg.co.uk (owned by fasthosts.co.uk).