Key takeaways
- Website design is the pages. Hosting is the disk those pages sit on.
- The design invoice is usually once. Hosting is monthly. Stop paying for the disk and the live site goes dark, even if you already paid a designer.
- The WordPress Basic plan is $2.99, then $7.99. Public website design starts at $1,499. Those numbers buy different products.
A landscaper in Manchester paid a designer in April. The homepage had last season’s walls. The phone number was right. He vinyl-wrapped the URL on the truck. In October the card on the designer’s hosting account expired. The truck still had the URL. The URL opened a parking page.
He had paid for the pages. He had never paid for the disk in an account with his name on it.
| Website design | Web hosting | |
|---|---|---|
| What you bought | Pages, layout, photos, forms | Disk, SSL, mailboxes, a WordPress install on a host you pick |
| Paid how | Once, as a project | Every month or year, as a plan |
| If you stop paying | You still have the files, if anyone handed them over | The live site goes dark |
| Who does the work | A designer, or you on evenings | The host keeps the server up. You still update WordPress, unless you pay for managed |
| Price we can print | Public website design from $1,499 | WordPress Basic plan: $2.99, then $7.99, 10 GB |
You can own the design files and still have nothing on the internet if nobody is paying for the disk.
What the design invoice buys
Design is labor. Someone decides the layout, writes or places the copy, crops the photos, and builds the form. When that work is done, you should have files: WordPress on a host you control, or at least an export you can hand to another host. If all you got was a link and a PDF, you bought a screenshot of a site, not a site.
Our public website design packages start at $1,499. That number is the build. Legal pages, local SEO on the pages we ship, analytics, and two rounds of revisions sit in that scope. Hosting does not. We quote the plan after intake, on its own card, the same way we would if you arrived with a site someone else already built.
A cousin who “knows computers” is still doing design, even if nobody sent an invoice. The mix-up is the same: the pages still need a disk.
What the hosting invoice buys
Hosting is rent on a machine that answers when someone types the name. WordPress.org’s hosting page says you need a web server to run it. Their requirements are PHP 8.3 or newer, MariaDB 10.11 or MySQL 8.0, and HTTPS. The software is free. The computer it runs on is not.
On WordPress hosting, the WordPress Basic plan is $2.99 a month, then $7.99 when you renew. That card is 10 GB of NVMe, one site, and two mailboxes. Compare the second number, not the teaser. We already made that case in compare hosting on the renewal price.
The name is a third product. A .com here is $16.99 a year. Buying the name does not put pages on a disk. We wrote that split in a domain name is not a website.
A CDN is not hosting either. Cloudflare’s own explainer says a CDN caches copies closer to visitors. It does not replace the origin disk. If the origin plan dies, the cache has nothing honest to serve.
Why one bill still confuses people
Builders put the editor and the disk on one subscription, so the words blur. Squarespace’s help says every plan includes hosting for that Squarespace site, and they will not host a site you built somewhere else. Wix’s help says a free Wix site includes free hosting, and a custom domain needs a Premium plan. That is one company selling the tool and the rent together. It is a fair product. It is not what you get when you pay a designer for WordPress files.
WordPress splits the pile on purpose. You (or a designer) make the pages. You pick a host. If you later want a different host, the files can move. That move is work. It is not a rebuild from the truck wrap. The contract version of that is you do not own that website if you only rent the login.
What a design quote sometimes hides
Some quotes include a year of hosting. Ask where that account lives. If it is the designer’s personal login, you are one expired card away from a parking page. Put the hosting account in the business name. Get the WordPress admin on a mailbox you control. If the designer disappears, you still have the disk.
What to get in writing
Before you pay a designer, or before you pay us to design, get four answers on paper:
Where will the files live on launch day, and whose name is on that hosting account?
Will you receive the WordPress files and the database, not just a URL?
Who pays the hosting invoice after month one, and what is the renewal, not the intro?
Who updates WordPress? If the answer is “you,” stay on a regular WordPress plan and put updates on a calendar. If the answer is “not me,” that is what managed WordPress hosting is for, starting at $19.95, then $24.99. It is still not the design invoice.
Support here is tickets and email, a person in Connecticut. Usual replies land inside a business day. We do not watch the site at 3:00 AM. A design project does not change that.
Do not pick a host because the designer used us last time. Pick a host because the files can live in an account the business controls, and because you can read the renewal before you sign. If you want the pages built here, start on website design. Expect a hosting plan quoted after that conversation, not buried in the project total.
If the pages already exist and you need a disk they can live on, start on WordPress hosting or open the client area.
