Moving your website to cheaper hosting, safely

Many small business websites are a few pages of text and photos, yet cost a monthly bill for shared hosting, another for the domain, and more for paid plugins. An intern can move a site like that to a free or low-cost host in your own account, check it page by page with you, and set up a simple care routine. Nothing goes live, and nothing is cancelled, until you say so.

Start with what you pay

List the charges for your website: hosting, the domain, a website builder, paid plugins or themes. Add each one in the subscription review as its own line, under "Website, hosting, domains and plugins", with the amount from your own bill. That is your "before" number.

You list or export these charges yourself. Your intern never reads your email or your bank statements to find them.

Which kind of host

• A site of text and images can go on a static host, such as Cloudflare Pages.
• A site with logins, bookings or payments needs an app platform, such as Firebase.

Free plans have limits. When we read the providers' own pages on 8 October 2026: Cloudflare's Pages limits page listed a Free plan with 500 builds a month and up to 20,000 files per site; Firebase's pricing page said its Spark plan needs no payment method, with 10 GB of hosting storage and 360 MB of transfer a day. Plans change, so your intern reads the host's page again on the day and writes the date next to what it says.

What you approve

Each of these waits for your yes:

1. The preview. Your intern sends a preview link of the moved site. Check every page, form and photo against your current site.
2. The change plan and go-live. A short written plan: which settings change, from what to what, when, and how to undo it.
3. Cancelling the old hosting. Only after a quiet period you choose, with a full copy of the site kept in your own account.

Your email stays as it is

Your domain's settings say two separate things: where your website is, and where your email goes. Moving the website changes only the website part. The email settings (called MX, SPF, DKIM and DMARC) stay exactly as they are, unless you ask for a specific change. Before anything changes, your intern saves a full copy of the settings, then compares them afterwards to prove the email part is identical. Then they send a test email to you and you reply.

Moving the domain's settings to Cloudflare as well is optional; the site works without it. If you choose it and a setting called DNSSEC is on, you turn it off at the company you bought the domain from before the switch and on again after. Your intern walks you through it on a call.

Your passwords stay yours

Create the new host account in your business's name, with your own card, and invite your intern as a member. If a step needs your own login, do the clicks yourself with your intern on a call. Never send a password.

Keeping costs low

• Turn on a billing alert at the new host that emails you. An alert warns you; it does not stop charges.
• No job that runs every minute, and no passwords or keys in the site's code.
• Keep a full copy of the site in your own account, so it can go back up elsewhere if a host takes it down.

After the move

Your intern hands over a care log: a monthly check for broken links, the billing alert and any updates, with every change you approved written down. To keep someone on it, see Keeping your intern on a retainer.

The workflow your intern follows is Move your website to low-cost hosting in the workflow library.