Your domain is your address (psychecreative.co.uk), your hosting is the land your website stands on, and the website itself is the building. They're three separate things, usually paid for separately: a .co.uk domain costs around £10–£15 a year, small-practice hosting £5–£30 a month, and the website is the one-off build cost. The single most important rule: the domain must be registered in your own name, not your web designer's — it's the one part of your online presence you can never rebuild if someone else owns it.
The house analogy
Think of your online presence as a property. The domain is the address — the thing people type to find you. The hosting is the plot of land the building stands on. The website is the building itself. And DNS — one more term worth knowing — is the signpost system that tells the internet which plot your address points to.
Three separate things, three separate costs, and — crucially — three things that can be moved independently. You can rebuild the house without changing address. You can move the house to better land. What you cannot ever replace is the address, which is why it gets the strongest warning in this guide.
The domain: the one thing that must be in your name
A domain like yourpractice.co.uk is rented annually from a registrar — companies like Namecheap, GoDaddy, 123-reg or Cloudflare. A .co.uk should cost roughly £10–£15 a year. Anyone quoting dramatically more is bundling in something else.
Here is the part that matters more than everything else on this page: the domain must be registered to you — your name, your email address, your registrar account. Not your web designer's. Not your agency's. Yours.
The saddest situation we encounter is a therapist who has spent years building a practice around an address someone else owns. The designer disappears, or falls out with them, or simply invoices extortionately for its return — and every business card, directory listing, backlink and client bookmark is hostage. A website can be rebuilt in weeks. Years of an address's reputation cannot.
- —Check today: log in to the registrar and confirm the account is yours. If you don't know where your domain is registered, look it up on a WHOIS search and ask whoever built your site — in writing.
- —If a designer registered it 'to make things easy', ask for it to be transferred into an account you control. A reputable one will do this without fuss.
- —It's fine for your designer to manage the technical settings. Management is not ownership — they can hold keys without holding the deeds.
Hosting: where your website actually lives
Hosting is a computer, permanently online, that serves your website to anyone who asks. You rent space on it. For a therapy practice the realistic options are: shared hosting (from ~£5 a month — fine for a simple site, slower and less reliable at the cheap end), managed WordPress hosting (~£15–£30 — the host handles updates, backups and security), and modern static hosting on a global network, where a pre-built site is copied to servers worldwide and served from whichever is nearest. That last kind is what our sites use — it's extremely fast, extremely hard to hack (there's no database or admin login to attack), and it scales without drama.
One distinction that catches nearly everyone: website hosting and email hosting are different services. Your @yourpractice.co.uk email usually runs on Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, entirely separately from the website. Moving your website does not move — or threaten — your email, whatever an incumbent provider implies while trying to keep your business. The two meet only at the DNS signpost.
Custom-coded, builders, or WordPress?
The website itself gets built one of three broad ways, and 'custom-coded' is the term quotes throw around with the least explanation.
Website builders (Wix, Squarespace)
You assemble pages from templates in the platform's own editor, and the site lives inside that platform — design, hosting and tooling in one subscription. Genuinely the right call for a brand-new practitioner on a tight budget, with two caveats: technical SEO control is limited, and the site can never be exported. Leaving means starting again.
WordPress
Open-source software installed on your hosting, powering roughly forty percent of the web. Enormously flexible, portable between hosts, and the sensible platform for many practices — but it's a machine with moving parts. Plugins and themes need updating; neglected, they're how therapy sites get hacked or grind slow. Budget for maintenance or pay someone to own it.
Custom-coded
The site is written as code by a developer, built precisely to purpose, with nothing generic underneath. Done properly — ours are built with Next.js, the framework behind some of the largest sites on the web, then pre-rendered so every page is generated in advance rather than assembled per visit — you get the fastest possible pages, no plugins to break or patch, a fraction of the attack surface, and complete control over the technical SEO and structured data that search and AI systems read. The honest trade-offs: higher upfront cost than a template, and day-to-day edits go through a workflow rather than a click-around dashboard — which is why we hand over how-to videos and keep an affordable maintenance plan rather than charging by the tweak.
There's no universally right answer. A newly qualified counsellor doesn't need custom code; an established practice competing for search visibility usually outgrows a builder. What matters is choosing deliberately rather than inheriting whatever your designer happened to sell.
What a fair setup looks like
- —Domain: registered in your name, at your registrar, roughly £10–£15 a year. Non-negotiable.
- —Hosting: a named monthly figure you understand — ours is £30 a month including maintenance, and it's optional, not compulsory.
- —The build: a fixed one-off price. Ours run £600 to £2,500 depending on the size of the practice.
- —Files: everything handed over — design files, code, content. If you leave, you leave with your website.
- —Email: on Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, in your own account, untangled from whoever hosts the website.
And the red flags, from years of inheriting other people's arrangements: a domain 'included free' that quietly stays in the agency's name; hosting bundles you can't itemise or leave; per-edit charges with no self-service option; and any reluctance to answer, in writing, the question 'what exactly do I own?'
For what the build itself should cost — and why quotes for the same site range from £300 to £5,000 — we've broken that down separately. Read: How Much Does a Therapist Website Cost in the UK? →
If you'd like someone to look over your current setup — who owns what, what you're paying, whether it's fair — that's a free call, and we'll tell you straight if everything's already in order. See our Web Design service →
Adam works with UK therapy practices, EMDR trainers and mental health organisations on websites, social media and digital campaigns. He started Psyche Creative to give clinicians a marketing partner who understands the sector — and won't compromise on professional standards to get results.
