Buy a website, or pay monthly?

Plenty of firms will build you a site for nothing up front and charge £40 to £80 a month. On the day you sign it is obviously the cheaper option, and for some businesses it genuinely is the right one.

The question nobody asks at that point is what happens in year four, and who owns the thing if you want to leave.

Where the lines cross

Take a middling monthly deal at £49 a month against buying a business site outright for £1,490 plus £249 a year to keep it running.

Year one: renting costs £588, buying costs £1,739. Renting wins comfortably.

Year three: renting has cost £1,764, buying £2,237. Renting is still ahead.

Year five: renting £2,940, buying £2,735. They have crossed over.

Year ten: renting £5,880, buying £3,980 — and you own it.

So the honest answer is that renting is cheaper for roughly the first four or five years, and after that it never is again. Most trade businesses keep a website longer than five years.

The part that is not about money

When you rent, you usually do not own the site. Stop paying and it goes off. Some contracts also keep the domain in the provider’s name, which means the address your customers know, and any Google ranking it has built up, goes with them.

That is the thing worth checking before the price. Ask two questions in writing: if I leave, do I keep the domain, and do I get the files?

Where renting genuinely makes sense

• You are just starting and cannot put £1,500 anywhere near a website.
• You want somebody else to keep changing it constantly and you would rather that was a subscription than a stack of invoices.
• You are testing a new trade or a new area and might drop it within two years.

None of those are bad reasons. Just go in knowing it is renting, not buying, and check the notice period.

The clause to look for

Minimum term. A monthly price with a 36 or 60 month minimum is not really a monthly price — it is a loan with the total hidden. £49 a month on a five-year minimum is a £2,940 commitment however it is presented on the page.

Also worth reading: what the notice period is, whether the price is fixed for the term, and what counts as a 'change' under your monthly allowance.

What I do instead

I sell the site outright and charge £249 a year for hosting, the domain, the security certificate and backups. Looking after it afterwards is optional and starts at £39 a month, and you can stop it whenever you like without the site going anywhere.

It is not the cheapest thing you will see in year one. It is cheaper than renting from year five onwards, and the site is yours from the first day.

Common questions