Hosting and maintenance get sold as one thing and they are not. Hosting is a commodity, it is cheap, and almost any reputable provider will do. Maintenance is labour. It never finishes, and it is where sites fall over.
Most people overthink the first and ignore the second. This is what each one is, what it costs, and how to work out what you need.
Hosting: mostly a solved problem
Budget shared hosting comes in under £100 a year. Managed WordPress hosting starts around £275 a year, which is Kinsta at $30 a month, the figure I use on my own hosting page as the comparison.
Do not read that gap as cheap versus good. A mid-range shared plan will run a small business site with modest traffic perfectly well. The managed tier buys speed and headroom, which matters when you have real traffic and is otherwise capacity you are not using.
Two practical notes. Shared hosts discount hard for longer commitments, often around 25% for two years paid up front, which is the easiest saving available on any of this. And register the domain in your own name, roughly £8 a year, whoever builds or hosts the site.
When you genuinely need the managed tier: meaningful traffic, an ecommerce site, anything where an hour of downtime costs real money, or a site complex enough that you want somebody else's staging environment and support team. If none of those describe you, the cheaper tier is not a compromise.
Maintenance: the four jobs
Four things happen to every WordPress site, none of them difficult, all of them constant.
01 An update breaks a layout
WordPress and Elementor push updates continuously, and every so often one breaks something. The fix is to test before anything goes live and roll back when it does not work, which requires somebody to be watching on the day it happens.
02 The site gets slower every month
Databases bloat, images pile up, plugins multiply. None of it is visible until somebody mentions the site feels slow, and by then it has been true for months. This needs clearing on a schedule.
03 The site goes offline
On your own that means noticing, raising a support ticket and waiting your turn. With monitoring it means somebody gets an alert, usually before you would have noticed at all.
04 Renewals and logins pile up
Hosting, SSL, plugin licences, all on different dates with different passwords. A lapsed licence stops receiving updates quietly, which is how a site ends up with a known vulnerability nobody knew about.
The cost comparison
Doing it yourself at a managed tier: Kinsta or WP Engine from $30 a month, about £275 a year, plus an Elementor Solo licence at $7 a month, about £66. Roughly £340 a year before VAT, and all four jobs above are still yours.
My managed plan is £270 a year and includes the hosting, the licences and the work. That comparison is deliberately like for like, at the tier I would put a client on.
Where it stops being like for like is the cheap end. If you host on a shared plan and do the maintenance yourself, you will spend well under £100 a year on hosting, plus whatever plugin licences the site needs. The difference between that and a managed plan is who does the four jobs. Anybody telling you a managed plan is cheaper than every alternative is comparing selectively.
What a maintenance plan should include
Worth checking against whatever you are offered:
- Hosting and an SSL certificate
- WordPress, theme and plugin updates, tested before going live
- Daily backups, and a restore that somebody has actually tried
- Fixes when something breaks, without an hourly rate attached
- Security plugins and uptime monitoring
- Premium plugin licences included rather than billed to you separately
And check what is excluded. On mine, design work, content changes and new features are quoted separately, which is normal and worth knowing before you assume "fully managed" means unlimited changes. "Maintenance included" means different things to different providers.
Questions people ask
Do I need a maintenance plan for my website?
If it runs on WordPress and generates enquiries you would miss, then somebody has to do the four jobs above. That somebody can be you. What does not work is nobody.
How much should WordPress maintenance cost?
Mine is £270 a year, which works out at £22.50 a month, hosting and licences included. What other plans charge depends on what is covered and how fast somebody responds, so compare those two things before the headline price.
Is expensive hosting worth it?
For a low-traffic small business site, usually not. Managed hosting earns its money on traffic, complexity and the cost of downtime. If you have none of those three, spend the difference on maintenance instead, because that is where the risk is.
What happens if I do nothing?
Usually nothing, for a while. Then a plugin update breaks a page nobody notices for a fortnight, or a lapsed licence leaves a known vulnerability open. None of it is dramatic, which is why it gets neglected.
Can I move hosting later?
Yes. Hosting is portable and moving a WordPress site is routine work. Domain ownership is what causes trouble, which is why it should be registered in your name from the start.