Save money on email and website hosting

There are so many providers offering email and website hosting, with prices and features varying from a few pounds up to hundreds. Each is providing a large list of features and specifications that even for an expert it makes a hard job to compare and find the best value for money.

How can we be sure we get a good value without getting too technical. Here are a few tips to use and some tools that may help.

Email Hosting

We have never provided email hosting, there are great providers and it is easier for us to guide our clients to learn how to do their management without hassle.
One of the biggest savings on email hosting is the usage of Email Forwarding: for group emails like [email protected], [email protected], all providers are offering email forwarding for free. So instead of creating 3-4 email addresses and pay monthly, you can forward these to an existing list of emails (which are already paid). In this case you can save £70-£90 each year.

1. Cost-effective email hosting: for a business email address that is used by one person, including an info or contact email address the easiest option is to purchase this from your Domain Registrar. Usually when you purchase the domain they will offer promotions for email and usually costs around £1/£2 per email address.
2. Small business: if you have less than 10 users and are using Documents / Excels / File Sharing, the best option is to use Google Business or Microsoft 365. In the monthly price it includes access to Office Apps so you won’t need a separate license for these.
3.  Just emails: most of the domain registrar providers (Godaddy, Fasthosts, 123-reg) are using Microsoft Exchange, they may have offers that are cheaper than Microsoft 365 as it doesn’t include the additional Office license. But these come with less mailbox space (2GB – 10GB).
   If you are looking only for an Email hosting in the cloud, a solution can be Amazon Workmail. It provides a corporate email infrastructure (email and calendar services) with no upfront fees or long-term contract, starting from $4 per month for 50GB for mailbox storage.

Email hosting is not connected with website hosting. All they have in common is the domain, while on email the most important aspects are storage and cost, on websites it is important the speed and uptime.

Website Hosting

The website hosting is mainly decided by the technology stack used. While on Email hosting the pricing between providers is quite similar, a website hosting can start from £2-£3 up to hundreds per month.

• Cost-effective website hosting: if you only need an online presence, without plans to monetise it, this could be a solution. This type of hosting is slow and may affect your SEO. A website is hosted on a server, a powerful computer. Imagine the electricity needed to keep that up all the time.
  So anything under £10-£20 per month goes in this section because these type of hosting are using the same server for multiple websites. On one server there can be hundreds of websites. Without knowing, if one website is attacked, it can affect all other websites.
  A quick tip is to check if your website is up all the time. You can use tools like uptimerobot.com, which is free to sign up and without any technical expertise by entering the domain you’ll receive email notifications when the website is accessible. If the website goes down, then you should change your hosting.
• Dedicated servers: this varies from £30-£40 up to £200 per month. As the name says, we have full control and only our websites are hosted on. It comes with various specifications depending if it needs power, storage, fast traffic. We are working with various providers, each having their advantages and disadvantages in: customer support, uptime, security and services provided.
  This type of hosting is self-managed and it requires continuous maintenance. This hosting is useful when having multiple websites as it can split the cost.
• Cloud hosting: one of the most versatile and easy to scale hosting. The harder part with Cloud hosting is to calculate the monthly cost. This can fluctuate depending on: traffic, storage, additional services used.
  If an existing hosting costs over £100 then Cloud hosting can cut the cost drastically. We also migrated smaller infrastructures and cut the hosting costs by 50%, so it depends on each technical stack.  

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is offering a 12-months free tier, to help on migrating in cloud. There are some additional benefits on using AWS for website hosting:

• free SSL certificate: if your website pays for a SSL certificate, you may use your proprietary certificate. Or using the Amazon Certificate it can save you around £200 – £400 per year.
• Cloud File Storage: if you are using OneDrive / Dropbox, it can be cheaper to use Amazon S3 (on sign-up it offers 5GB on free tier).
• AWS offers all sorts of additional services, once you have your data in it you may connect a BI platform, a Content Delivery Network, or send mobile text messages worldwide.