Over the years I have been doing this I have placed some sites into 3rd party hosting, and moved some sites from 3rd party hosting into my hosting (this is not an advert for my hosting btw). Hosting tends to be quite similar wherever you go, but occasionally you come across a company that does it all differently. In this particular case I am going to refer to 1and1.co.uk. I have worked with one client and reduced their annual hosting and email charges with 1and1 from well over £200 per year to around £60 some years ago.
Paying over the top
I have come across another today. This is a small regional charity, going through difficult times like many others out there, so every penny counts. This group are not hosting with me currently; I offered to replace a website for them and place it in their hosting (not knowing who it was at the time).
I looked at their set up, they had around 13 email accounts and one HTML website which offers little demands on the server, and it was only 4 pages.
In 2014 this charity paid 1and1 nearly £700 for hosting and email. It worries me that organisations such as charities cannot get more professional help from companies like 1and1. After all 1and1 marketing is all about “Cheap Hosting Packages”. So how do they manage to get their prices up? To be honest I don’t know, it is quite clever from a business sense, there seem to be incremental charges coming in, and rather like Ryan Air, everything costs something. In this case there was a repetitive cost every 3 months for 13 email accounts at between £160 – 190 per quarter. Even having a version of PHP (a scripting language that runs on the server) was being charged at £4.57p.a.
So if you use 1and1.co.uk do take care what you are buying and keep an eye on your total bill. If you don’t you may be paying a lot more than you anticipated.
Don’t go in blind, ask for help & ask questions
If you don’t know what you need for your site, then seek help from an IT professional, but make sure they are helping you to look after the pennies too. I have also come across a site where the Chair of the charity organised the hosting. There they were paying around £35/ month just for email. If you have professional business people as trustees, remember they work in a world where nobody would worry about hosting a site for £300 per year, it is small change compared to the turnover of even a very small businesses.
However as a satellite office of a National Charity, you do not need super high performance for your website (and arguably from the examples I have seen they don’t provide it anyway). I have Google Analytics running on all of the sites I have built. The majority receive under 400 hits per month. I run a village site that has 2000 visitors a month.
Hopefully there is going to be a happy ending to this story as they may move into my hosting. In which case they will save nearly £650 per year, get better performance and fewer restrictions.
Broad Guidance
There are many offerings out there with multiple email accounts, MySQL databases, a reasonable amount of memory to run your site in, and a reasonable amount of RAM to run the site in. Emails per hour are over 100 (yes they don’t publish it but in shared hosting practically all hosting companies limit the number of emails you can send per hour or per day, it is not unlimited!). If you have one small site and a client base of say under 2000 users then you should not be paying more than £10 per month, £120 per year for Hosting and Email. For charities and not for profit organisations I host them at less than half of this figure.