If you've been looking at website hosting options, you'll have seen everything from £2/month budget plans to fully managed services at ten times the price. Here's what the difference actually means in practice.
DIY hosting: what you're taking on
Budget hosting providers — SiteGround, Hostinger, GoDaddy, and others — sell you access to a server and leave the rest to you. That means:
- Configuring your server settings
- Installing and renewing your SSL certificate
- Setting up backups (and testing that they work)
- Keeping WordPress and plugins updated
- Diagnosing and fixing problems when they arise
- Monitoring uptime and dealing with downtime
For a developer or someone with technical knowledge, this is manageable. For a small business owner who just needs a website to work, it's a significant ongoing responsibility — and problems usually surface at the worst possible time.
Managed hosting: what you get instead
With managed hosting, the technical side is handled entirely by the provider. Server configuration, security updates, SSL renewal, backups, performance monitoring — all of it is managed on your behalf.
You don't log into a server. You don't run updates. If something goes wrong, you contact your provider and they fix it.
Which is right for a small business?
For the vast majority of small businesses, managed hosting makes more sense. The cost difference is modest, but the time and stress saved is significant. Your website runs, it's secure, it's backed up — and you're not the one responsible for keeping it that way.
The risk with DIY hosting isn't usually the initial setup — it's the months and years afterwards. Plugins go out of date. SSL certificates expire. Security vulnerabilities appear. Without someone managing these things, problems accumulate quietly until something breaks.
NC Digital managed hosting
Our website hosting and security service is fully managed — £20/month or £220/year for custom and WordPress sites. SSL, CDN, daily backups, and 99.9% uptime are all included.
Pair it with our website maintenance package for complete ongoing cover, or see how hosting is built into our managed starter websites.
Get in touch if you'd like to move your site to properly managed hosting.