How Much Does A Website Cost Per Month?
It’s common practice in the web hosting industry to display pricing to visitors as a set price per month. In reality, most hosting companies charge for the full year upfront. They often state on their website that a particular package will cost a set price per month, but once you move forward and fill out your information, you might be surprised to see the cost for the full year. It can be a little confusing at times, and you always need to read the fine print. Another common characteristic you’ll find with hosting providers is that a lot of them offer a discount in the first year in the range of 40 to 70%. This discount is fantastic for your first year, but you need to factor in the ongoing costs from year two onwards as most businesses would plan on having their website for much longer than one year. In this article, we aim to address the question, how much does web hosting cost in 2019?
There are four main categories of cost that go into the running of a website and these include:
Domain Name Registration Costs
When going down the path of getting a website built one of the first costs you’ll be likely to encounter is domain name registration. The big domain name registrars such as Namecheap and GoDaddy are often running promotions for domain names. You may be able to pick up a quality domain for as little as £1 for the first year. But most of the time you are looking at somewhere in the range of £7 to £10 for the year. If you do happen to sign up with Namecheap, you get the added benefit of free whois protection for the first year. Whois protection blocks your details from public view. Otherwise, they would normally be available on websites like whois.com. To get a sense of what I mean here, I would encourage you to visit whois.com and type in the website address for a local website to see what details are displayed.
Web Hosting Costs
After purchasing a domain name, the second cost you’ll encounter is finding a suitable service to host your website. For your site to be live on the Internet 24 hours a day, 365 days a year it needs to be hosted on a server capable of running non-stop. The purpose of a web hosting company is to store all the files of your website on their server, so your site is available to customers 365 days a year. If this is one of the first websites you are building then shared hosting will most likely be sufficient however there is always the option of hosting your site on Google Cloud.
You Can Always Use A FREE WordPress Theme
Another consideration is the cost involved in building a website. Are you going to hire a web designer to do this for you or if you could have a crack at it yourself? Many free training videos on youtube will show you how to create your website using the free content management system – WordPress. If you do decide to go down this route, it may be worth investing a bit of money into purchasing a premium theme which might set you back around $40 to $50 as a one-off.
The Cost of Regularly Updating Content For Your Website
Assuming you opted for the WordPress design you need to decide whether a blog is a good option for you. There is no point having a blog on your website unless you update the content of your blog every once in a while.
Some questions that are worthwhile asking yourself before you make this decision are:
- Who can we get to write the content for the blog?
- How much will they charge for this content?
- Do we have anyone internally that could write content?
You are much better off to plan out how much your website is going to cost you per month, so you are aware of all the individual cash outflows. This way you shouldn’t run into any nasty surprise