How Much Should Website Hosting and Maintenance Cost?

By Midas Blog

June 23, 2017

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Building a website is easier than ever before, but a great website doesn’t maintain itself.

Keeping your website up and running efficiently takes work and, by proxy, money!

How much does quality website maintenance cost? It all depends. There are a number of variables to consider when calculating your overall price tag.

Even if you’ve already made the decision whether to hire professionals or DIY for building your site, you still need to have a maintenance plan lined up post-launch. Here is a breakdown of the components that make up your website maintenance costs:

Buying A Domain

First things first: Your visitors need somewhere to go, right?

Buying a domain name is pretty cheap, as most domain names start between $10 to $20 dollars a year.

Some companies will even offer discounts on multiple-year contracts. The type of web address you choose also plays a role in your yearly costs.

Hosting Service

Hosting, like your domain, is another recurring cost.

Most web hosting services will make you commit to a multi-year contract with prices ranging from around $3 to $200, or even more per month.

Choosing the right hosting service depends largely on your business needs.

While cheaper options are, well, cheaper, they fall short in areas like security, up-time, and storage. For larger businesses with multiple servers and data centers, the cost for hosting can climb even higher as well.

While there are free hosting options available, most of these are riddled with ads. Furthermore, they have severely limited customization options, so their name will be plastered all over your website.

Licenses and Software

Depending on what your website is for, you may need to purchase a few licenses. E-commerce websites, for example, must have an SSL license for security purposes – costing between $50 to $600 a year.

Unless you choose to write all of the HTML and CSS code yourself, you probably will end up using some content management software (CMS), too. Open-source CMS providers like WordPress and Drupal are free, while other options may have licensing fees upwards of thousands of dollars.

Updates and Website Maintenance

To add more functionality to your site, most CMS software will have a myriad of updates and plugins. But these, too, will cost money.

True, there are free plugins as well. But as your site becomes more complex and your traffic increases, chances are you will need to shell out some cash and subscribe to a service for extra functionality. And don’t forget about content upkeep and analysis!

Costs of updates and plugins range vary greatly, from $5 to $35 a month to one-time payments of $40 to $100 dollars.

Backing Up

It’s never a bad idea to have some backup insurance.

Hackers and malicious malware programs are a constant threat to your website. You can ensure your site is protected by purchasing backup services. These can start at around $5 a month and increase depending on the amount of protection and backup needed.

Technical Services

Hiring a graphic designer, IT expertise, or web developers will also add costs to your website maintenance. How much they add is contingent on your website needs, but chances are that you will need help from at least one of these professionals down the road.

On average, these services will run you between $50 to over $150 dollars an hour.

So How Much Should Website Hosting and Maintenance Cost?

Long story short: There is no set cost for website maintenance.

Depending on how your costs break down, a small business can expect to pay anywhere between $1500 to $3000 dollars a year. Smaller, single person websites can get by with under $1000 dollars while larger websites may be looking at a price tag of over $5000.

Feel more confident about your website costs?

To get an even better estimate on website maintenance for your site, request a quote from us today!

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