21/10/2018
What Does the Cost of a Website Consist of?
Type of website — Websites are not made equally. The price is depends highly on the type of site you are building. A simple blog is easier to set up than an online shop, a small business website has fewer pages than an enterprise site.
Domain&Hosting — Every web presence needs a home and an address you can reach. In terms of websites, that’s a server and a web domain. You can either get those yourself or acquire them as part of a website service.
Basic technology — All websites are powered by some kind of software in the background. This can be pure HTML or PHP files, a content management system like WordPress or something else. Depending on your choice, costs will differ.
Components — The basic technology is not everything. Depending on what functionality you need, you might need additional plugins, apps or third-party services, many of which will cost money.
Setup/Design/Development — Building a website is not just about acquiring the parts, they also need to be assembled. You can do that yourself or hire someone else to do it. If you do the latter, you will have to pay for that.
Maintenance — Additionally, it’s not just enough to build a website, you also need to keep it running. Ongoing maintenance (including marketing) is also a part of your website cost blueprint.
As you can imagine, for many of the factors above, you can either invest money to have someone do those for you or the time to learn to take care of those yourself. Depending on your capabilities, this will also change the final cost of a website. Here are a few scenarios and the final prices of the website.
Option 1: Do Everything Yourself – About $60/Year
The cheapest way is to create a website all by yourself.
“But I can’t code,” you may think.
No problem!
There’s enough technology out there to allow you to create a website without coding, most prominently open-source content management systems like WordPress and Joomla. If you are willing to put in the time to learn the system of your choice, you can have your own website for the cost of just hosting and domain.
In the case of Bluehost that would be $4.95/month including a domain. Multiplied by 12 makes about $60 or the cost of one Starbucks beverage per month. If you opt for a longer contract, you can even reduce hosting costs to about $36/year. Learn how to set up your account with Bluehost now.
This barebone version comes with very few bells and whistles. It will also be the most time consuming for yourself. It’s absolutely possible to create a high-quality site this way and many have done it before.
