Hosting Updated 22 September 2026 5 min read

Why cheap hosting costs tradies more

Cheap hosting is genuinely cheap until something breaks. The costs that matter are not the monthly fee — they are the days your site is down, the rankings lost to a slow server, and the weekend you spend cleaning up a hacked site because nothing was backed up.

What you are actually buying

A $10/month shared plan puts your site on a server with hundreds of others. That is fine, right up until one of those neighbours gets busy or compromised. You have no control over that, and on the cheapest plans you often have no backups older than yesterday and no monitoring to tell you anything happened.

Managed hosting is not a faster version of the same thing. You are paying for someone to be responsible: updates applied, backups tested, security monitored, and a person to call who already knows your setup.

The costs that do not appear on the invoice

Downtime. If your site is your main source of enquiries, a day offline is a day of lost work. Two or three of those a year outweigh the saving.
Speed. Server response time is part of how Google ranks you, and it is the first thing a slow site fails on. An overloaded shared server is slow at exactly the times you most want to be fast.
Getting hacked. Most compromises are automated and target outdated software. If nobody is applying updates, that is a question of when. Cleaning up costs real money and, worse, Google may flag your site as unsafe.
Your time. The hidden cost. An afternoon on hold with an overseas support queue is an afternoon not quoting jobs.

What “managed” should actually include

The word is unregulated, so ask what it covers. On our own plans it means these things specifically, and the difference between tiers is mostly how often and how far back.

Backups that are actually restorable. Daily, kept seven days on the standard plan and thirty on the performance one. A backup nobody has ever restored is a hypothesis, not a backup.
Updates applied. Monthly on the standard plan, weekly on the performance one. This is the single thing that prevents most automated compromises.
Monitoring. We target 99.9% uptime, check it from outside our own network, and tell you when we miss it. There is no automatic credit attached and we are not going to imply one.
An SSL certificate that renews itself. No expiry to diarise and no browser warning on a Sunday night.
A person who already knows your site. Not a ticket queue that asks you to describe your setup first.

The full list and every price are on the hosting page, along with what the domain side involves.

Where your server actually sits matters

If your customers are in Perth and your server is in Texas, every request makes a round trip across the Pacific. It is not catastrophic, but it is measurable, and it is free to avoid by hosting in Australia. Ask any host where the server physically is; if they cannot tell you plainly, that is informative.

Moving is less painful than people assume

The usual reason for staying on bad hosting is fear of the move — that the site will go down, or the email will break, or something will be lost. Done properly the site is copied and tested on the new server first, and the switch is a DNS change made once everything already works. Visitors do not see a gap.

Two things worth separating while you are at it. Email is not website hosting, even when the same company sells you both, and moving one does not have to mean moving the other. And your domain should be registered in your name, whoever manages it — that is the piece that is genuinely painful to recover later if the relationship ends badly.

When cheap hosting is the right answer

It often is, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. If your site is effectively a business card that people look at after they have already decided to call you, if you do not take bookings or payments through it, and if a day offline would annoy you rather than cost you, then $10 a month is a sensible decision and the upgrade is not urgent. Just make sure there are backups you could actually restore — that is the one thing a cheap plan should never skip, and it is why our own Starter Care plan includes daily backups.

Not sure whether what you pay now is fair? The hosting bill checker compares it with what is included, in about thirty seconds.

The calculation changes the moment the site becomes the thing that produces the work. At that point the monthly saving is small against one lost week of enquiries, and the question stops being about hosting and starts being about what the site is worth to you.

How to judge whether you need it

Be honest about what the site does for you. If it is a business card that people find after you have already spoken to them, cheap hosting is a reasonable decision and we would tell you so. If enquiries come through it, the calculation changes: at that point you are not buying hosting, you are buying the site being available when someone is ready to call.

A quick sanity check: if your website went down right now, how long before you noticed? If the answer is “when a customer told me”, monitoring alone is worth the upgrade.

What to do on the day it does go down

Every host has an outage eventually, ours included. What separates a bad hour from a bad week is having decided the order beforehand.

Check whether it is actually down or just down for you — try mobile data with wi-fi off before you ring anyone.
Check the host’s status page if they have one. If they do not have one, that is itself an answer.
Raise it with the host before you start changing things. Editing DNS in a panic turns a two-hour outage into a two-day one.
Put a note on your Google Business Profile and your socials. Customers forgive an outage; they do not forgive silence.
Afterwards, ask what caused it and what changed as a result. A host that cannot answer that will have the same outage again.

Questions worth asking your current host

How often are backups taken, how long are they kept, and has a restore ever been tested?
Where is the server physically located?
Who applies software updates — you, or me?
What happens if the site is compromised? Is cleanup included?
How do I reach a human, and what are the hours?

If those answers are uncomfortable, our managed hosting includes free migration — and you can check your current site’s speed with the free website check first.