What Are the Costs After Building a Website?
As with many things, websites aren’t just a one-time fee. Recurring website fees consist of hosting, domain renewals, and SSL (Secure Socket Layer) certificates. Of course, additional fees might exist depending on your websites needs. Examples of this can include licensing, consultation fees, and more. If you built your website with some website builder like WordPress or others, these might already be factored in. As mentioned before, website builders typically produce less than ideal business websites as they force templates on the website and restrict what your website can do.
Think of hosting as renting a home, you must pay your landlord for providing the house, while you live in it. Unfortunately, like the other three costs, hosting is practically unavoidable. You could host your website on a computer in your house and not have to pay for web hosting. However, that’s a bad idea for several reasons. The first being availability. Your home internet, if acting as the server for your website, will almost certainly be less available than what a hosting provider will be. That is assuming your web hosting provider meets basic credibility standards.
Domains are even more unavoidable than web hosting fees. Domain registrars distribute domains to owners like yourself, but you can’t just go out and declare you own some domain name. You must pay and registrar that domain name with the domain registrars. Prices do vary between registrars, but this annual fee will always exist and be at the mercy of whatever the registrar wants to charge. Fortunately, these fees remain constant and reasonable (less than twenty dollars annually).
SSL certificates aren’t required to have a website, but they are pretty important for the security of your website. Without these certificates, the information being transmitted to and from your website isn’t fully secure. This means that malicious users can actually read information being sent to and from your website if they can manage to get these “messages” or packets of information being transmitted. I won’t go into details, but this isn’t difficult to do as it just requires being near a website customer and installing some software on your computer.
While the costs of a website might seem overwhelming, the reality is that these fees should be less than a few hundred dollars a year. A business website should certainly be making more money than that or you might want to reconsider if you actually need a website in the first place. As previously mentioned, you might discover other costs of website ownership, but you will need to discuss them with whoever manages or creates your website. You should talk to a friendly local web developer to help you understand the costs before investing in your business website to be sure your investment will be worth it in the long term.
