Best WordPress hosting UK 2026: which plan to choose by what it costs in year two, VAT included, not by the launch price

Every WordPress hosting price you see on a UK pricing page is before VAT, and all six pages in this guide say so in their own words: SiteGround prints “Ex. VAT” on each plan card, Hostinger writes “Prices are listed without VAT”, IONOS writes “All prices exclude VAT charged at 20%”, Krystal shows its prices with an “Include VAT” switch turned off, Kinsta writes “Prices exclude tax and are in USD” and WP Engine warns that “Taxes and overages may apply during checkout”. So the price on the front of each of these pages is the price before VAT.

Whether that 20% is a cost depends on one question, and it is not whether you are a company. HMRC makes VAT registration compulsory once taxable turnover goes over £90,000 in twelve months, and voluntary below it. A new site, a sole trader or a small business under that line usually is not registered, so it pays the 20% on hosting and cannot reclaim it. A registered business reclaims it and should compare prices before VAT. That is why the calculator below asks the question instead of assuming the answer.

Hosting is not bought for what it costs today but for what it costs in two years, because a site that works does not move. So the question is not which plan is cheapest, but which is cheapest once the offer ends. To answer it we opened the UK pricing pages of six hosts, SiteGround, Krystal, Hostinger, IONOS, Kinsta and WP Engine, and noted five things for each of their 16 WordPress plans: the advertised price, the renewal price, the months you must commit to get it, whether VAT is included and whether email comes with it.

The three hosts in the census without a card on this page. Krystal, a UK company registered in London, publishes one price per plan and bills monthly, from £7 a month before VAT on Amethyst; its own blog puts it as “The price you see is the price you pay – no hidden fees, no intro gimmicks”, and it gives 60 days to ask for your money back. If the renewal line is what worries you, we recommend looking at Krystal first: its plans include unlimited mailboxes, and its domain is free from Ruby upwards. IONOS has the widest gap in the census: its 50 GB plan is £1 a month for twelve months and then £10. And Hostinger is the cheapest over three years, on the condition explained in the next section.

The cheapest plan in the census over three years is Hostinger Premium: £2.99 a month before VAT for 36 months is £107.64, less than a third of SiteGround StartUp's £359.64 over the same window. The condition is printed on the same card, and it is the one that changes the decision: “Get 48 months for £143.52”. What is advertised as a monthly price is a four-year payment made on the first day, £172.22 once VAT is added, and after those 48 months it renews at £10.99.

Below it, the three-year order is set by two things: how many months the launch price lasts and how far it jumps afterwards. IONOS's 25 GB plan, at £3 for six months and £5 after, comes to £168 over three years. Krystal Amethyst, with no offer at all, comes to £252, and that figure does not change on the day you renew. A plan whose offer lasts twelve months and then multiplies by seven spends 24 of its first 36 months at the higher price.

Three of the six hosts name a UK location in their own documentation. SiteGround lists London (UK) among its eleven data centres, Kinsta lists “London, United Kingdom” among 30, and Krystal describes itself as a UK-based company with a UK-based data centre. The pricing pages of Hostinger, IONOS and WP Engine read on 28 September 2026 do not name a UK location, which does not mean they lack one: it means you should ask before you buy.

What a nearby server changes, in results rather than adjectives, is the time to first byte: how long the server takes to start answering, which is the part of loading a page a host is directly responsible for, because nothing else starts before it. Images, themes and plugins are yours, and no plan fixes them. For the rest there is a checklist that is not an opinion: WordPress.org recommends a host that supports “PHP version 8.3 or greater”, “MariaDB version 10.11 or greater OR MySQL version 8.0 or greater” and “HTTPS support”. Open the control panel of the host you are considering and check that it lets you pick those versions.

Four of the six hosts in this guide sell shared hosting: your site lives on a machine with others and you pay for space and resources. Kinsta and WP Engine sell managed hosting and size it in another unit, visits a month, with the platform, the backups and the staging environments included. Kinsta's Launch plan covers an estimated 75,000 visits a month and WP Engine's Essential 25,000, and both bill in US dollars before tax.

The practical border is not technical, it is traffic and staff. If your site gets a few hundred visits a day and you run it yourself, shared hosting does the job for a fraction of the price. If it gets tens of thousands and someone technical is behind it, managed hosting saves hours. What almost nobody says before you sign up is in the next block.

What that means in practice: if you cancel the hosting, the domain is still yours until its registration runs out, but only if it is registered in your name and you can log in to the account that manages it. Check both before you leave, move the domain or point it at the new host while the old account is still open, and put the domain's renewal date in your calendar, because it rarely matches the hosting's.

Changing host without changing domain is not the same as moving a site to new URLs, and Google documents the two separately: its guide to site moves without URL changes is the one that applies here. If the addresses stay the same there are no 301 redirects to make, and that is the good news: what moves is which machine the domain points at, not which pages exist.

The order that avoids a fright: copy the site to the new server and check it on the temporary address most hosts provide; lower the TTL of your DNS records a few hours before, so the change spreads quickly; change the records; and keep the old hosting running for a few days, because during propagation visitors will reach both. SiteGround lists free site migrations on all its plans and Kinsta unlimited free migrations, so before doing it by hand, ask for it.

And a tip that comes out of the census: Krystal's 60 days and the 30 days of SiteGround, Hostinger and IONOS are exactly the window to try the move without risk. It is the most profitable use of a money-back guarantee.