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Website hosting for an Irish business: what the price buys, and what to ask
Hosting is the rented computer your website runs on. The cheap part is the computer; what differs between plans is what happens when something goes wrong, and who is doing the updates in the meantime.
By Oscar CobbeCurrent as at 3 minute read3 sources
Three ways hosting is sold
The published prices on Irish sellers' own pages fall into three kinds.
- 1Shared hosting: a plan on a server shared with other customers, with email and a control panel. You, or your web designer, look after the site itself.
- 2Hosting bundled with the site: one yearly or monthly price for the website and the server it runs on, from the business that built it.
- 3Upkeep: hosting plus somebody doing the updates, the backups and the checks, sold as a monthly service.
Published prices
As each seller published them on 29 October 2026, with their own VAT wording.
| Who | Published price | What is in it |
|---|---|---|
| Blacknight, Mega | €5.49 a month on a yearly plan (€65.89 billed annually), excluding VAT | One website, 30GB, five mailboxes, a free SSL certificate; backups extra, from €1.99 a month; hosted in Ireland |
| Blacknight, Giga | €10.07 a month on a yearly plan, excluding VAT | Five websites, 100GB, ten mailboxes; backups extra, from €3.99 a month |
| Nua, hosting renewal | €79 + VAT a year | Hosting and email for a site Nua built, after its first free year |
| Web60 | €60 a year excluding VAT | The website and its Irish WordPress hosting together, with backups every twelve hours kept for seven days |
| FourWinds, upkeep | €45 a month | hosting, updates, backups, forms tested monthly and 30 minutes of changes |
The questions that matter more than the price
Ask each of these before you compare monthly figures.
- 1Are backups included, how often, and has anyone ever restored one? On Blacknight's plans backups are an extra; on others they are in the price. Backups that count explains the restore test.
- 2Who applies updates to the website software and its plugins? On a shared plan, unless the plan says otherwise, you do.
- 3Who notices when the site goes down, or when the contact form stops sending, and how?
- 4Is email on the same plan? If the hosting lapses, does your email go with it?
- 5Can you leave? Ask how you would get a full copy of the site and its database, and whether the domain is registered separately, in your name.
Does hosting need to be in Ireland?
For speed, a server in Ireland or nearby in Europe is close to Irish visitors. How to test a site's speed shows how to measure what your visitors get.
For the GDPR, the location matters where personal data goes: the names and emails your contact form collects sit on the server. A host whose servers, backups and support all stay in the EU keeps that data in the EU. A host in the United States is a transfer outside it, which is allowed on the right footing; sending personal data to the US covers what that footing is.
What we include
Our upkeep is €45 a month for a site we built: hosting, updates, backups, the forms tested every month, and half an hour of changes. The full running cost of a site, domain included, is in what a website costs in Ireland, and the website cost calculator adds it up for the site you want.
Sources
Free, and no account needed
Work out the yearly running cost
Add upkeep, changes and your domain to the build price, and see what the site costs to run each year, from our published list.
Run the free checkHosting with somebody looking after it
Upkeep at €45 a month covers the hosting, the updates, backups and a monthly test of every form, with half an hour of changes included, for a site we built and handed over to you.
See the Websites pageWho wrote this
Oscar Cobbe · Founder, FourWinds Digital
Writes and maintains the legal explainers on this site, and does the compliance work behind them. Every date and article number here is checked against the legislation itself before it is published, and each article shows the date it was last checked.
More about how we work →Read next
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Written on 29 October 2026; it describes the law as FourWinds read it on that date. This is general information about how the rules work, not legal advice on your situation. Where you need a solicitor, we say so. How we check the law.