How Much Does It Cost To Create A Website?
The Cost Of A Website
The costs of creating and running a website are surprisingly low. Here's an at a glance snapshot of the costs of a typical setup for running a website for a year:
- Domain name - $8/year
- Web hosting - $60
So you can create and run a website for under $70 /year. That's pretty cheap. There are also economies of scale to take advantage of, too. Some web hosting plans give you the facility to host as many domains as you want. They may cost a little more than the bog standard hosting plan, but if it costs the same to host 2 domains as it does to host 50, you can see the savings. In effect, after the first domain extra domains are hosted "for free".
Of course, the costs above are only the visible costs. There are hidden costs when you consider the time you invest in creating your website. If you are creating it by handcoding it from scratch, it may take quite a while. The costs in your own time may be significant. Fortunately, there are ways to minimise the cost in your time of building a website. If you wanted to go the HTML route, you could use one of the many free templates on offer at various template sites. Alternatively, if you wanted to use a content management system, you could use a free blogging platform like Wordpress.
Recommendations For Beginners
For beginners who want to be up and running quickly, I would recommend using Wordpress to run your site. It's free to use, you can use it on your own domain (it doesn't have to be yourdomain.wordpress.com), and the learning curve is quite shallow. Many web hosts provide "one click installs" that make it very easy to install Wordpress, so you don't even have to get your hands dirty with the technical side of things. You do need to learn how to use Wordpress, but it's a lot easier than learning HTML.
If you plan to run more than one website, I would consider buying one of the "multi site" hosting plans. To illustrate the advantages of doing so, site5 offer single domain hosting for $5/month. Hosting for "unlimited" domains costs only $9/month. So even if you only run 2 websites, getting the multi site plan is cheaper than getting 2 single domain plans.
The above are the only necessary costs you need to incur. If you want to splash out though, you could buy a premium theme for your Wordpress blog, you could pay for a designer to create unique logo for your site, and you could even hire a coder to develop a website that has functionality that meets your precise requirements. In fact, if you want to get a headstart on everybody else, you could buy an existing, established site. More on that one later!