What Does a Website Cost?

There can be wide reasons for having a website. The real cost depends on various purposes. A simple blog may not need high functionality but the need for the functionality and the level of design requirements is more for companies. We offer affordable price and discounts for personal blogs, non-profit organizations and small-scale local businesses. We charge on the project basis and our pricing is not based on hourly work.

The website can be owned by anybody. You don’t need to own a business to have a website. You can have your own blog, biography or online resume on the personal website. Technically, every doctor, lawyer or any service providers should have the personal website to communicate with their present and future customers. All large or small business on any particular niche or broad theme needs to have a website.

It is always good to know the real cost of owning a website. There is some extra cost involved to maintain the website over time. A good client-centric website should be easily navigated with responsive design. Ease in updating website is also a key of the successful design. Designing website with content management system provides individuals tools to update the website with little or no knowledge of HTML and CSS.

The total investment in a great website and internet marketing is always a tiny fraction when compared with the level of business and reach it provides. This article gives you a comprehensive idea of all costs.

• Purchase a domain ($10-100 per year): The first step to own a website is always purchasing a domain. It is always good to purchase the domain with your own account login so that all the ownership will remain with you. However, you can outsource purchasing to any company with proper paperwork indicating purchase is only for your business. A typical .com domain is generally available at $10-$20 per year at GoDaddy which is the largest ICANN-accredited registrar on the Internet. However, if you like a particular domain name and if it is registered by somebody then you can purchase the ownership from that person.
• Web hosting ($2-$1000 per month): After owning a domain name, you need to keep your content somewhere on a server which should always be online. You need a web host for this purpose. There are different types of hosting like Dedicated, Virtual Private Server (VPS), Shared and free. There are few servers which are free but all impose many restrictions which restrict your website design and functionality. Shared hosting is next best option where many websites are hosted on the same server with the same IP but you cannot install any software on shared hosting. However, you can use all the installed software. Shared hosting is offered at $2-$10 by different good web hosts. You will not have any problem as long as traffic to your website is low. You will start getting notices from web host to shift to VPS or dedicated server in case of high traffic. This is because the high traffic to your website creates the unnecessary load to other websites hosted on the same server. VPS and dedicated server give the flexibility of superuser-level access to the operating system where you can install almost any software required for your business. VPS accounts generally start at $50 and dedicated server at $100. Self-operated servers will be little cheaper compared to the server with customer support. Now a day, most popular web hosting are cloud-based where the same contents are stored at different locations (servers) and it results in faster loading of the website as the content is downloaded from the nearest server. All cloud-based hosting generally charge on the basis of total downloaded data so if traffic to the website is high then the real charge will be more that month. In other words, monthly price will be variable depending on monthly traffic to the website. There are some additional charges for SSL (Secure Socket Layer certificate) or static IP Address in case you want to have those.
• Custom web design ($500-$10,000+ one time): In simple words, the organization of contents on the website is called as web design. The design should give a good feeling on visitors and it should be easily navigable. It should also have the simple way to search contents. It should open properly on desktops, laptops, tablets, and mobile and a responsive theme is best for this purpose. A basic web design for blogs doesn’t involve including lots of functionalities. However, the business may need to include following functionalities at additional costs.
• Shopping cart integration: If you want to sell products on the website then you need to include shopping cart functionality. This involves product display design and integration of payment gateways. One can use PayPal, Skrill, Payza, Cryptocurrency payment gateway (BitPay, LitePay, Coinbase Commerce etc.) or any other payment gateways.
• Contents of the website ($10-$100 per page or hourly): once website design is ready then next step is including your contents. It is always good to be ready with contents. However, if you hire people to get contents. The price varies among the freelancers and companies. A high-quality article will always cost more.
• Web management ($50-$200+/month): Once the website is ready and launched, it needs to be updated regularly for better search engine ranking. The easy interface is required to update content which can be done easily with a content management system. The web management also involved continuously monitoring web analytics. It means you need to get information about your visitors and the performance of your website on different popular search engines. These things can be easily done by anybody with normal skills and some spare time. A more professional way is to outsource this work to a good web design and development company. It may also involve advertising your business on AdWords and social media.
• Social Media Management - ($50-$500 per month): Today is the time of social media and the best way to attract customers is getting them via social media. It takes a lot of time to be active on social media. You need to regularly update your business profiles on different social media to attract more and more visitors. This work can also be done by yourself or you can hire somebody to do so. Many big companies also have their own personal social media team.

I have very good expertise in all of the above areas and will be happy to answer your questions. Although Steemit is one of the good platforms to start blogging. But some of you guys may be interested in getting own personal or business website. Please get back to me in case you need any help on making your website.

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