The process of building your website doesn’t stop once the website has launched. The process continues down a never-ending path of web maintenance and upgrades. Depending on the vision of your website, web maintenance costs can vary. To ensure you don’t expend all your resources on unnecessary website costs, here is a breakdown of the essential costs associated with web maintenance.
WEB HOSTING
The first item you should expect to pay for is web hosting. It’s important to understand that every website needs a web host. Without going into technical detail, think of the cost of hosting your website as paying a property tax on the land you own. The bigger the building you want want, the more property it requires. This is true for your site. Your site is the building and your land is the web hosting service.
The cost of service from your web hosting provider will vary (depending on how large of a website you expect to host). One thing that is common among web hosts is the way they will charge you. There is typically an annual charge for web hosting so plan accordingly.
DOMAIN NAME
Another must-have item for your site is a domain name. To give you a simple definition of a domain name, I will use QuintonWash.com as an example.
QuintonWash.com is my personal domain name. It’s what a visitor would use to find my website, similar to someone putting an address into the GPS to find my home. And just like a street address has drive, street, or avenue at the end of its name, a domain name has the option of .com, .net, or .org at the end of its name.
When paying for your domain name, you will be billed annually. One thing to note is that .com prices will vary in compared to .net or .org domain names.
LICENSES
Licenses are a big deal in the world of the Internet. It’s so big that there are licenses for everything these days and the cost can really add up if you’re not careful. Because the topic of licenses can be rather in-depth, I will save the deep dive for a later time. I will tell you the main licenses you need to watch out for are platform licenses and security licenses.
The good news is, if you’re deciding to use the WordPress or Drupal platform for your site then the price will be free. These two platforms are not only free but also the most popular platforms available on the internet. Here is a hint, go with WordPress!
The bad news is, if you decide you need to boost the security on your website then you will have to pay for an SSL. Once again, I will save the technical details for later but if you do need an SSL then set an annual budget aside to tackle this expense as most of the companies who offers SSLs does so at a premium price.
LABOR
Labor is a pretty obvious cost but for some reason everyone forgets about it. Labor cost will vary depending on if you’ve hired someone or decided to do the work yourself. If you decide to take on the maintenance tasks yourself, you’ll still paying for labor. You’re just paying yourself instead of someone else’s time.
WRAP UP
The cost of web maintenance is something every site owner should be aware of before starting to build their website. If you’re not careful you could run into financial trouble before your site gets rolling.