What £200 a year of website maintenance actually buys

£200 a year is a number that turns up a lot in small-business web quotes. It sounds like a sensible, modest figure for keeping a website going — about £17 a month, less than a phone contract. It is worth working out what it can actually cover, because the answer is uncomfortable and it explains a category of supplier failure you may have already met.

The floor, before anyone does anything

Running a site costs money whether or not a human touches it. Conservatively, per site, per year:

So at £200 a year the best case is breaking even on infrastructure with zero hours left for anything else. One ninety-minute support call puts that account into loss. The published market floor for maintenance is around £30 a month — £360 a year — and that tier is hosting and patching only, with no human time in it either.

This is not a story about greedy suppliers. It is a story about what happens next.

What happens to a site nobody maintains

The failure is never dramatic on day one. It goes like this:

• Updates stop. The CMS, the plugins and the framework carry on releasing security patches and nobody applies them. This is the most common route into a compromised small-business site, and it is entirely preventable.
• Backups are never tested. A backup nobody has restored is a belief, not a backup. You find out which it was on the day you need it.
• Nothing is watching. The site goes down on a Friday evening and you hear about it from a customer on Monday.
• The supplier goes quiet. Not maliciously. The account has been unprofitable for two years, and unprofitable accounts get answered last.

The cost of that is not the £200. It is the week your site is off, or the recovery bill, or the Google penalty for serving injected spam for a month before anyone noticed.

What the market actually charges

Most small-business sites land at £40 to £100 a month once you include everything. Total running cost for a typical UK small-business site — hosting, domain, maintenance, monitoring — usually falls between £50 and £300 a month.

What we charge, and what is in it

Our care plans start at £45 a month for Essential: UK or EU shared hosting, SSL and domain management, five-minute uptime monitoring, weekly backups kept for thirty days with a forty-eight-hour restore, security patching, monthly malware scanning, and access to the Site Console so you can edit your own content.

Standard is £95 and moves you to performance hosting, one-minute monitoring, daily backups and a twenty-four-hour restore. Pro is £195, with ninety-day backup retention and a four-hour restore. Managed is £395, with high-availability hosting, hourly backups kept for a year, and a one-hour restore.

Two things about that structure are worth saying plainly. The first is that the response and restore times are contractual, not aspirational — the care-plan SLA is published and you can read what we owe you before you buy. The second is that no build is sold without a care plan attached, because a site we built and nobody maintains becomes our reputation problem eighteen months later.

Full details are on the care plans page, and every price including scope modifiers is on the pricing page.

The one question to ask

Whatever you are quoted, ask what happens when the site goes down at 9pm on a Saturday, and ask for the number in writing. A supplier who can answer that has priced their time into the figure. A supplier who cannot has priced it at zero, and zero is what you will get.

Sources

Maintenance ranges are drawn from published 2026 UK research, including Digital Otter and Red Eagle.