Is £300 a month too much for a tradesperson's website?

A fair monthly fee can cover hosting, a security certificate, and someone fixing a phone number when you change it. That is a small job. It does not need a price in the hundreds.

The expensive pitch usually bundles a template site with a promise: page one on Google, a stream of Facebook leads, or a directory listing. The site is the thing you can see. The promise is the thing you are paying for, and it often is not written into the contract. If the seller will not put the ranking or the lead numbers in the terms, you are paying for the template.

Google's own hiring guidance says nobody can guarantee first place. If that promise is why the price is £300, read what a ranking promise can and cannot mean before the direct debit starts.

Do these on the paperwork, not on the phone call.

1. The minimum term, in months, and the date it ends.
2. What you owe if you cancel in month two. Some terms keep charging until the end of the minimum term.
3. The notice period after that, and whether notice has to be in writing.
4. Whether the price can rise, and how much notice you get.
5. What happens to the website, the domain and the email on the day you stop paying.

A rolling month with 30 days' notice is a normal managed-site deal. A 12, 24 or 36 month term, with the rest of the balance due if you leave, is how a cheap-looking monthly price becomes £3,600 you cannot stop.

You are usually buying as a business. Business-to-business advertising has to be truthful, and a seller has more room in a contract with another business than with a householder. There is often no automatic 14-day cooling-off period of the kind a consumer gets on a doorstep sale. If you signed it, the term you signed is the starting point.

The call is arranged so the lock-in feels like the price. "This rate is only on 24 months." "I can only hold it if you sign now." "Everyone in your trade is on this." None of that means you have to accept it. A managed trade site exists with no minimum term. Ask them to price the same package on a rolling month with 30 days' notice. If that price disappears, the discount was the charge for not being able to leave.

An aggressive exit fee is the rest of the term, plus an admin charge, plus them keeping the domain. A contract with no cancellation step, or a cancellation step that is only a phone number nobody answers, is the same trap. So is a renewal that starts another year unless you catch a short window. Say no on the call. Once the direct debit is running, the term you signed is what you are in.

You can end the call, get the terms by email, and decide the next day. A seller who will not send the term, the notice period, and the exit sum before you pay is telling you the exit is the part they do not want read.

Look the domain up on Nominet if it ends in .uk, or on the registrar's whois if it does not. The registrant should be you or your company. If the registrant is the web company, they can refuse to move it, or they can let it expire when you argue.

Ask two questions in writing. Can I move this domain to a registrar I choose, and will you give me the files or a redirect if I leave? A hosted platform can keep its own templates. That is ordinary. What is not ordinary is a site you cannot leave with your name and your photos.

"We register it for you" is fine when the name is in your account and the renewal reminder comes to you. It is a problem when the only login is theirs.

Read the term and the notice clause before you cancel the direct debit. Stopping the payment on its own can put you in arrears while the contract still runs. Send the cancellation the way the contract asks for, keep a copy, and follow the phone call with an email that states the date.

Keep the sales messages: the Facebook ad, the email, the text that promised page one or a set number of leads. If those claims are not in the contract, you still have a record of what you were told.

A misleading advert can go to the Advertising Standards Authority. Outright fraud, money taken and nothing delivered, is a report to Action Fraud. Neither of those is a shortcut out of a signed term. Get advice on the contract if the remaining balance is large. The steps above are the order to work in. They are not a promise that the payments stop.