What Website Hosting Costs, and What You Need

Website hosting is the one line item almost every business owner underpays attention to and then overpays for. It's boring, it renews automatically, and the price you signed up at is rarely the price you're paying two years later.

Here's the short answer. A small business website in Canada runs comfortably on hosting somewhere between roughly $15 and $50 USD a month, depending on whether you're on shared hosting or managed WordPress hosting. Most hosts advertise a much lower number than that, because the advertised price is an introductory rate that renews at two to six times what you first paid. Most plans under about $10 USD a month are entry level shared hosting, which is fine for a brochure site and a weaker choice for a site your business depends on. Price is a rough signal rather than a guarantee, so treat it as one.

This article covers what you're actually buying, where the pricing traps are, and how to tell whether your current hosting is costing you customers.

What hosting actually costs, honestly

Nearly every hosting company advertises a promotional rate for the first term and renews at a much higher one. This is the single biggest gap between what people think they pay and what they pay. As an example, at the time of writing SiteGround's entry plan advertises around $2.99 USD a month and renews near $17.99 USD. That's roughly a six times increase, and the same pattern repeats across the industry and across tiers.

That's not unique to one host, it's the industry norm. Treat the number on the pricing page as an introductory offer rather than as what you'll actually be paying in year two.

For managed WordPress hosting, which is what most of our clients end up on, entry pricing generally starts somewhere between the mid teens and the low thirties per month in US dollars, depending on the provider and whether you commit annually. Providers change their pricing often enough that any specific figure printed here will drift, so check the provider's own pricing page rather than trusting a comparison article, this one included.

Two things worth flagging for Canadian businesses. Nearly all of this pricing is in US dollars, so your actual cost includes the exchange rate and often a foreign transaction fee. And check how many sites a plan actually covers before you assume. Some entry plans are single site, while others advertise unlimited sites sharing the same server resources. If you run a second site for another location or brand, that difference matters more than the headline price.

Shared, managed, or bundled: what you're actually choosing between

Shared hosting puts your site on a server with a large number of other sites. It's cheap because you're splitting the cost. The trade is that you're also sharing the resources, so a traffic spike on someone else's site can slow yours down, and support tends to be thin. For a five-page brochure site that nobody's business depends on, it's genuinely fine.

Managed WordPress hosting costs more and buys you a specific set of things: faster infrastructure tuned for WordPress, automatic backups, staging environments, better security, and support staff who actually know WordPress rather than reading from a general script. The real value is that when something breaks at an awkward moment, someone competent picks up.

Bundled hosting is what you get on Squarespace, Wix, or Shopify. It's included in the subscription and you never think about it. That's a genuine benefit. The trade is that you can't tune it, and you can't lift the hosting out and take it elsewhere. These platforms let you export content and data, but the running site stays where it is.

The honest framing is that shared hosting is a cost, managed hosting is an investment in reliability, and bundled hosting is a convenience you pay for by giving up portability.

What "unlimited" and "free" usually mean

"Unlimited bandwidth" and "unlimited storage" are marketing terms, governed by a fair use policy buried in the terms of service. In practice there's a threshold, and if you cross it you'll hear about it. For a typical small business site you'll never come close, so it isn't something to worry about. It's just worth knowing the word doesn't mean what it says.

"Free domain for the first year" is real, and it's also how hosts make switching awkward, because your domain registration ends up tangled with your hosting account. We'd rather see clients register their domain separately, in their own name, at a registrar they control. It costs a few dollars more and removes a genuine headache later.

"Free SSL" is now standard and should not be a selling point. If a host is charging extra for an SSL certificate, that tells you something about the host.

Does your host need to have servers in Canada?

For most businesses, no. Server location has a small effect on speed, and a content delivery network largely neutralises it anyway. A site hosted in the US serving customers in Ontario is not meaningfully slower in a way your visitors will notice.

Where it does matter is if you handle personal information subject to data residency expectations, which comes up most often in healthcare and some professional services. If a regulator, an insurer, or a client contract says Canadian data stays in Canada, that's a requirement rather than a preference, and it narrows your options more than people expect. Several of the best known budget hosts have no Canadian data centre at all, so meeting a residency requirement usually means choosing a Canadian provider or a managed or cloud host that lets you select a Toronto or Montreal region. Confirm the actual server location in writing rather than assuming it's available. And get the requirement itself in writing from whoever imposes it before you architect around it, because the actual obligations are often narrower than the folklore.

Hosting is not the same as a care plan

This trips people up constantly, and it's worth being precise about, because paying twice for the same thing is a real risk.

Hosting is the infrastructure. It's the server your site lives on, and it typically includes server-level backups, uptime, and security at the infrastructure layer.

A care plan is the labour on top. It's someone checking that an update didn't break your booking form, watching for problems, and fixing them when they appear.

The line between the two has moved. Good managed hosting, ours included, applies security updates automatically, so patching is largely handled for you rather than being something you pay a human to remember. What hosting doesn't do is open your site afterwards and confirm the contact form still submits. That's the part a care plan covers, and whether you need it depends on how much your site does.

You need both. We've written separately about what a website care plan should include and what it should cost, so this article stays on the infrastructure side of that line.

When cheap hosting gets expensive

The argument for spending more on hosting isn't really about the server. It's about three things that cost you money elsewhere.

Speed affects whether people stay. A slow site loses visitors before they read anything, and page speed is a factor in how Google ranks pages. Cheap shared hosting is one of the more common reasons a site is slow, and it's one of the harder ones to fix with plugins.

Downtime happens at the worst time. If your site is down for a few hours on a weekday and your business depends on enquiries, you've lost more than the hosting saving for the entire year.

Support quality is what you're really buying. When something is broken and you don't know why, the difference between a host with competent support and one without is the difference between a bad afternoon and a bad week.

None of that means the most expensive option is right. It means the cheapest option has costs that don't appear on the invoice.

What we actually put clients on

For most of the local service businesses we work with, managed WordPress hosting in the range described above is the right answer. The reliability and support are worth the difference, and the difference is small relative to what a single lost customer costs.

We don't recommend the cheapest shared hosting for a site the business relies on, and we don't recommend the premium enterprise tiers for a small business site that gets modest traffic. The middle of the market is where the value is.

If you're on shared hosting and your site is fast, stable, and generating enquiries, there's no urgency. Hosting is worth revisiting when you're rebuilding anyway, or when the site is slow and you've ruled out the obvious causes. We also handle hosting for the sites we build and maintain, so if you'd rather not manage this yourself it can be someone else's problem.

What we charge, since this is an article about pricing

It would be a bit rich to write all of this and stay vague about our own number. We charge $480 a year plus tax, in Canadian dollars, for managed hosting. That works out to roughly $40 a month, and unlike most of the pricing in this article it isn't a US figure you need to convert and pay a foreign transaction fee on.

That covers automated security updates, malware scanning, daily backups, uptime monitoring, and SSL. It also includes automated visual regression testing, which is worth explaining because most people haven't come across it. After an update runs, the system compares your key pages against how they looked beforehand. If something has shifted, it rolls the update back and flags it for us to look at. A bad update doesn't get to sit live on your site while everyone waits for a human to notice. If we build your site on WordPress, the first year of hosting is included.

Here's the limit, and it matters more than the feature list. Visual regression testing sees the page, not the plumbing. It catches a layout that has broken. It will not tell you your contact form has stopped delivering, because a broken form usually looks perfectly normal. Checking that things actually work is care plan territory, and if you're not on a care plan, we aren't doing it. We would rather say that plainly than have you assume you're covered.

We're not the cheapest option and we're not trying to be. You can find shared hosting for a fraction of that. What you're paying the difference for is that the updates, the scanning, and the checking happen without anybody having to remember.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much should a small business pay for website hosting?

Roughly $15 to $50 USD a month covers most small business needs, depending on whether you're on shared or managed WordPress hosting. Be aware that advertised introductory rates typically renew much higher, so budget against the renewal price rather than the signup price.

Why did my hosting bill go up so much?

Almost certainly because your introductory term ended. Most hosts advertise a heavily discounted first term and renew at their standard rate, which can be several times higher. It's worth checking your renewal rate now rather than being surprised by it.

Is managed WordPress hosting worth the extra cost?

If your business depends on the website for enquiries, generally yes. You're paying for speed, backups, staging, and support that understands WordPress. If the site is a simple brochure that rarely changes, shared hosting is a reasonable choice.

Do I need Canadian hosting for a Canadian business?

Usually not. Server location has a modest speed effect that a content delivery network largely offsets. It becomes a real requirement when data residency obligations apply, which is most common in healthcare and some professional services. Confirm the actual obligation before designing around it.

Does hosting include website maintenance?

No. Hosting is the infrastructure. Maintenance is the labour of updating your site and checking nothing broke. Some managed hosts automate core updates, which is not the same as someone verifying your forms still work afterwards. You need both.

Can I switch hosts without losing my site or rankings?

Yes. Moving a WordPress site between hosts is routine, and your URLs stay the same, so your rankings aren't affected the way they are in a platform change or redesign. The risks are downtime during the move and email if it's tied to your hosting account, both of which are manageable with planning.

If you're not sure whether your hosting is holding your site back, that's one of the things we check in our free website audit. We'll look at how fast your site actually loads, whether the infrastructure is a genuine bottleneck or a red herring, and what it would take to fix it. You'll get a straight answer, including when the answer is that your hosting is fine and the real problem is somewhere else. Request your free website audit here.