From 11 March 2016 some of our prices are changing. We know that generally that’s shorthand for “We’re putting all of our prices up” but in this case it isn’t – some have risen, some remained the same, and we’ve cut the price of some of our domain registrations as we are working with a better value supplier.
All of the prices below are exclusive of VAT which is charged at 20%.
Liberal Democrat websites
Our Foci website platform for Liberal Democrat organisations and individuals will continue to cost £17 per month including hosting, support, backups and one free .uk domain name.
Website design and development
Our hourly rate for small jobs will increase from £50 to £75. Our day rate for larger jobs will stay unchanged at £400*. Our minimum fee for a small job will reduce from 1 hour to ½ hour (ie £37.50).
Most of our bespoke work is done on a day rate basis so this change is unlikely to have much impact on costs to our customers.
For guidance, this means a basic website in WordPress, Drupal, or similar will continue to cost around £2,000.
* An earlier version of this article contained a mistake where our current day rate was incorrectly listed as £300.
Hosting
Our hosting charge remains unchanged at a competitive £120 per year for a straightforward website. We regret that for security reasons we can only provide hosting for websites we have developed.
Support
When we develop and host a system for you, we offer phone and email support, bugfixing, offsite backup, and we keep any third party libraries and systems up to date. We typically charge 15% of the total build cost of the project to provide this service annually. Where we already provide you with this service, the annual price you pay is staying the same.
Domain names
The .uk domain name registry, Nominet, has increased its wholesale price and as a result we have increased our price for .uk domains from £5 per year to £6.25*. We typically register and renew .uk domains for 2 years at a time.
We have moved provider for our other top level domains. As a result our wholesale prices have reduced and we have been able to automate more of our registration and renewal processes. This will allow us to reduce our prices for most other domains. The list below is not exhaustive but covers all the domains we currently have registered on behalf of clients. We typically register and renew these domains for 1 year.
£15 per year: .biz, .com, .eu, .info, .name, .net, .org (were £17.50)
£20 per year: .me, .mobi (were £17.50)
£30 per year: .co (was £35), .tv (was £70)
We only provide domain name registration services to existing customers. We know how important your online identity is to you, so we automatically renew all domains unless you tell us in advance that you no longer need the domain. You’ll receive a reminder email the month before the domain is due to be renewed.
* An earlier version of this article contained a mistake where our new .uk domain price was incorrectly listed as £7.50.
Secure certificates
The high wholesale price of SSL certificates continues to be a barrier to maximising the privacy of customer data online and we are watching the development of free provider Let’s Encrypt with interest. At present, its incompatibility with Windows XP prevents us from migrating all of our certificates which would dramatically reduce cost and potentially allow us to provide HTTPS hosting on all our sites as standard.
For the time being, our prices remain unchanged at £115 for 1 year, £165 for 2, or £200 for a 3 year certificate.
Email hosting
We continue to provide email redirection free of charge for our customers. Hosted mailboxes cost £25.20 a year with an additional charge for storage exceeding 512MiB.