Are you paying too much to keep your website alive?
Ask a small business owner what their website costs and you usually get one number: the hosting bill. It is rarely the real answer. The real answer is spread across four or five invoices that arrive on different days, from different companies, and nobody has ever added them up in one place.
This post does that sum with an example you can copy, then looks at the cost that never appears on an invoice at all.
A worked example
The figures below are round numbers for a typical brochure site, a traditional website on WordPress, Concrete5 or similar, with a handful of pages, a news page, a contact form and a few changes a year. They are an example, not a quote and not a survey. Your own invoices will differ, and that is the point of doing the sum.
- Managed hosting: £25 a month, so £300 a year.
- A maintenance plan: £60 a month for updates and backups, so £720 a year.
- Plugin and theme licences: £210 a year, renewing on different dates.
- Domain name: £15 a year.
- Changes outside the plan: six a year at £60 each, so £360.
That comes to £1,605 a year, before the days you spent chasing anyone, and before anything goes wrong.
Now the same site as a static site on Stillsite, with the figures from our pricing page: hosting is £14.99 a month plus VAT, which is £17.99 with VAT, so about £216 a year. If you also ask Stevie, our AI web developer, for your changes, and pay the entry price once Stevie’s beta ends, it is about £432 a year with VAT. The domain stays yours, at your registrar’s price. We have not made the example site cheaper by leaving something out: the maintenance plan has gone because there is no software left to maintain, and the plugin licences have gone because there are no plugins.
That is not a promise of what you would save. It is a reason to find out.
The cost nobody invoices you for
The sum above has an item missing, and it is usually the largest one: the changes you did not make.
Think about the last time you wanted to add a new service, change an opening time or put a price rise on the page. If you thought “it is not worth the hassle of getting it done”, that was a cost. The page stayed wrong, a customer rang to ask something the site should have answered, and the change went onto a list that never got shorter.
A site that takes a week and a quote to change gets changed less often than it should. A site you can ask in one email, and see the result on a private address before anything goes live, gets kept right. For a business that lives on being found and trusted, the second is worth more than the monthly saving, and it is the part that no spreadsheet shows.
Leaving is another cost that never shows on a bill, because some providers keep the site when you go, or charge to hand it over. With Stillsite you can leave at the end of any twelve month term, with 30 days’ notice and no fee. You get your whole site as files, every page, picture and document, and your domain stays registered to you; if we look after it for you, we transfer it to the provider you name. Ownership and leaving in the help centre says how.
What you are paying for
If the site really is a brochure, almost all of that £1,605 buys machinery rather than anything your customers see: a database, an admin login, a stack of plugins and the people paid to keep them patched. A static site has none of it to keep going. Its pages are built once and served as plain files, which is why they open quickly and why there is nothing to attack. The Why static page shows this in about a minute, so we will not repeat it here.
Which way of working suits your site
Every site is rebuilt the same way. What differs is how you want your changes made.
- A site that changes most days, with news, offers or listings going up all the time, suits Stevie Max: the largest monthly allowance of changes, with Stevie on Claude Opus, Anthropic’s most capable model.
- A site that hardly changes suits Hosting only. It stays fast, secure and online, every version is kept, and the odd change is quoted before we start. There is no need for Stevie.
- A shop, a members’ area, bookings or anything else that needs something running behind the pages is built for you as an add-on and looked after the same way. Nothing is ruled out: ask, and we will tell you what it involves.
Most sites sit between those, with a handful of pages, news, documents and a contact form, and Stevie Base or Stevie Extra fits how often they change. Whatever your site does today, say so when you send the address.
Questions to put to your provider
Whether or not you ever move, these are fair questions, and the answers tell you a lot.
- What exactly am I paying for each month, itemised?
- How long does a simple change take, and what does it cost?
- Who owns my files, my domain and my content?
- If I left tomorrow, what would I get and in what form?
- What happens if a plugin or the server software has a security problem?
If any of those answers are vague, that is worth knowing too.
If you want the sum done for you
Send us your website address. We read every page and reply within two working days with what a rebuild involves and what it would cost. You see the new site on a private address first, nothing goes live until you say yes, and your files and your domain stay yours.
This website runs on Stillsite too, so the change you are reading about has been tried here first.