Why your web designer would love to keep your hosting

Because the website gets paid for once and the hosting gets paid for every year, and for a small studio that second bill may be what keeps the shop open. I don't think that's a plot. I think it's the steadiest money in the job, and there's a survey that hints as much.

One price page, read slowly

One Malaysian studio's price page starts its sites at RM1,980.² Further down, shared hosting is RM470 a year and a .com domain is RM85.²

So that's RM555 every year, and by my sum it passes the price of that cheapest build in under four years.² Of its monthly marketing and maintenance packages, the same page says: "Renewal rates are well above 80%".² That's the studio's own claim about its own clients, and I can't check it.

I'd guess most owners renew because moving a site sounds like a weekend they don't have, and nobody at the studio has to sell them on that.

The sellers I read don't agree what it should cost

I'd love to hand you a fair number. The only figures I can find come from companies selling websites or hosting, so hold them loosely, and they don't agree with each other.

Looking after a site for a year, in ringgit, by who's telling you

The agency guide gives its RM1,200 to RM6,000 with no workings beside it.³

GoDaddy's guide sells a cheaper way to build the thing, so it has every reason to make designers look dear. Its own rows don't quite reach its ongoing figure either: I get about RM1,940 against its RM2,076.¹

Still, one thing in that example surprised me. Hosting isn't the biggest line. Maintenance is, at RM943.60 a year against RM635.88.¹

What's the hosting costing them?

I couldn't find a number for what a Malaysian studio pays per site. GoDaddy's own plans run from RM10.99 to RM49.99 a month, leaving aside its private and dedicated servers, and my guess is that a studio pays less than that per site, because many sites can share one account.¹

The word "hosting" also covers a lot of ground. That studio's cloud plans start from RM2,300, so I'd want to know which one I was paying for.²

So I'd guess a fair slice of a hosting fee is margin. The usual advice online is to take your hosting away and pocket the difference, which at retail prices might save you a few hundred ringgit a year.

That advice is right about the money. It leaves out who you'll be calling at nine at night when the site falls over, because it'll be you.

Why a studio wants it so much

The best number I found isn't Malaysian. The Admin Bar's 2026 survey of six hundred-odd WordPress agency owners and freelancers says: "Agencies with no recurring revenue are unprofitable nearly 60% of the time".⁴ Once recurring revenue reaches a quarter of the total, that drops below 10%.⁴

The median team in that survey was one person, including the owner.⁴ I keep coming back to that, because a one-person shop that's just finished a build has no income until it sells the next one.

Hold this loosely too. It's self-reported, worldwide and WordPress-only, and it can't tell me which way the cause runs. Perhaps steady firms simply get round to selling care plans.

Now a sum. Say a studio looks after forty sites at about RM2,000 a year each, which is GoDaddy's rough figure.¹ That's about eighty thousand ringgit turning up before anyone has built a thing, and I'd want that too.

Is it worth paying for?

Often, yes, and this is where I'd stick up for them. Patchstack, which sells WordPress security so weigh it accordingly, counted 11,334 new vulnerabilities in the WordPress world in 2025.⁵ About nine in ten were in plugins, and 46% had no fix out by the time they were made public.⁵

So if your site runs on WordPress with a pile of plugins, someone ought to be looking at it, and that someone probably isn't you. A person who knows your site and picks up the phone when the contact form dies is worth real money.

What I'd object to is a bundle I can't see into. That same studio charges RM200 per technical task, so GoDaddy's maintenance line buys under five of them.²

If I'd only need a couple of jobs a year, I'd rather pay per job. If things break often, I'd take the plan.

Before I said yes to either, I'd ask:

• What's the hosting alone, the domain alone and the upkeep alone?
• What did the upkeep fee actually cover on a site like mine?
• Whose name is on the hosting account?
• If I leave, how do I get a full copy of the site out?

The domain I'd keep in my own name whatever they say, and I've gone on about that in how I'd choose a web designer.