But over the last few months, I've come to understand a bit more about how cheap hosting actually works. The reality, I've realised, is that all web hosting is effectively free of charge. When you pay a fee for hosting, you're really paying for support - or perhaps more accurately, the promise of support when you need it. An insurance policy, in other words.

Looking back, I can recite instances where a cheap hosting company has suspended accounts unilaterally and without warning, because traffic or other activity hit a notional limit. Or where a global setting was changed on a shared webserver, breaking key functionality on one of my sites. For the vast majority of their clients, these wouldn't have been problematic: most websites won't trouble their traffic limits, or use difficult functionality. But mine did.

Cheap hosting means zero tolerance. You aren't paying them enough to employ someone to get in touch proactively before things go wrong; or to respond to your anguish afterwards. They will employ unilateral limits, and make unilateral changes, based solely on a cold analysis of what will suit the majority of clients. Based on automated tests and calculations, not human beings. I'm not blaming them; you can't really expect them to do anything else.

But that isn't good enough for serious publishing efforts. They do deserve better - advance warnings, responsive support in a crisis, proactive maintenance to stop bad things ever happening. And that comes at a price.

In the context of my crowdsourced business plan, one emerging idea is long-term site support. In a WordPress context, that means updating the underlying technology; updating WordPress itself; updating themes and plugins; and at each stage, testing to make sure everything still works as intended. So I'm talking to some people about the possibility of providing a WordPress-optimised, centrally managed hosting service, aimed at government and corporate usage. We feel WordPress has reached a certain level of maturity, and it's probably time the hosting arrangements did so too.

If we do it, it'll be the best, slickest, smoothest, friendliest, smartest, most tailored solution we can imagine. But it won't be cheap.

There's really no argument with the power of WordPress, its simplicity, and (of course) its price. So the point for debate when I go to pitch a WP-based idea, is where it will sit, how secure it will be there, and who will look after patches and updates. Of course, there are good answers to those questions:

• use wordpress.com, and let Automattic themselves take care of it all;
• self-host, and self-manage;
• some kind of rolling arrangement, where you bring Mr Consultant back in as and when;

but I'm thinking of a brilliant answer. One whereby the supplier pledges to apply additional security measures, and to install any patches / security updates to WordPress, PHP or MySQL as soon as they become available... but still gives freedom to designers / developers to make reasonable use of plugins (etc).

Of course, that doesn't cover you for potential weaknesses in the plugins: and the perfect host would take some responsibility here too - vetting, approving, updating, whatever. I'd be looking for some kind of proactive communication, bringing things to my attention as and when. And of course, let's not forget the inevitable hosting questions of bandwidth, 24/7 monitoring, disaster recovery, and so on.

If such a hosting provider exists, I've yet to find them. I know of several well-regarded services aimed at serious developers; but I haven't yet seen any aimed at the emerging class of designers with reasonable tech skills.

And I'm steadily becoming convinced there are enough of us around, small-scale operators producing customised WordPress sites, to make it a viable business. Clients would unquestionably pay a decent premium annually for managed hosting like this, especially when the base software itself is free of charge.

It's not something a solo operator could take on, but I'm wondering if there are people reading this who could help make it happen. Some kind of cooperative, perhaps? Somebody already in the hosting business, with PHP and MySQL skills, but no WordPress t-shirt yet?

Please, if anyone has any thoughts, suggestions or draft business plans... stick a note in the comments, or drop me an email.

But the unknown in the equation is always: where to host it? You don't have to look too hard to find ridiculously cheap hosting deals in the marketplace: £30/year will buy you enough disk space, bandwidth and support/monitoring for most modest projects, often including automated installation of WordPress and other 'open source' software. But in government, in the midst of 'web rationalisation', it's inevitably a bit more complicated than that.

So here's my problem. At the moment I'm producing (on average) a new WordPress site every month - that's just me alone. And I've got a steady stream of people wanting to do others. These sites have to be hosted somewhere. The normal consultant thing to do would be to buy some cheap hosting in the marketplace, then apply a massive markup. Government ends up paying over the odds, and we end up with countless disparate WordPress installations. Nobody's happy, except greedy consultants.

But we can nip this in the bud. A central server somewhere, offered free of charge to any departments who want to run a WordPress project. It would only cost a few grand a year; put two sites on the same server, and you're probably already saving money. It's not as if we don't already have centralised hosting deals. And most importantly, you've 'rationalised' from day one. (Well, day two anyway.)

This would make my life easier as a supplier. It makes 'the centre's life easier, cos they know where everything is and can ensure it's properly maintained (security patches etc). It's a single migration strategy, if 'the central solution' ever provides equivalent functionality. In every respect, it works out cheaper overall. Everyone wins.

So here's my plea to the Powers That Be. Stop me before I proliferate again. Make me an offer I can't sensibly refuse. And save us all money and effort, now and later.