The costs of owning a website

This article will look at the costs associated with owning a website.

But don’t panic! It’s not rocket science.

Basically there are two types of recurring fees that you have to pay to keep a website alive:

1. Domain name
2. Hosting

Let’s talk about domain names first.

A domain name is comparable to a house address (e.g. Fear Street) and consists of two parts.

Let’s use the example of Brave, a private web browser. In their case:

1. “brave” is the name of the website.
2. “.com” is the top-level domain (TLD). There are many types of TLD’s (.org, .net, etc.). You can look here for a complete list.

In order to obtain a domain name, you would use what is commonly known as a “registrar”. Simply put, a registrar is a tech company which allows you to reserve a domain name. A good rule of thumb for anyone interested in starting a business is to reserve their domain name of choice as soon as possible because that domain name might not be available in the future.

Listing all the existing registrars would be an impossible task as there are countless companies that offer such a service. In general, most registrars charge around the same fee, as dictated by ICANN. Huge discounts are not unusual when you order a domain name for the first time. However, be aware that the normal price will be applied the following year.

The registrar I use for jerdef.xyz is called Porkbun. Not only do they offer great customer support but also they haven’t had a single data breach since their inception, which is unfortunately not the case for some registrars (I’m looking at you, Epik). Let’s keep our fingers crossed for them that it stays that way.

Please note that, while a yearly fee is usually people’s preference, it’s possible to reserve a domain name for 5 or 10 years or even longer. Personally I don’t recommend this practice because, in the case of a data breach, you would want to switch over to a different registrar as quickly as you can. And you don’t want that precious money of yours to be lost forever!

Next topic of discussion is hosting. Hosting comes in different forms. Let’s look at all the available options:

1. Virtual private server (VPS).
2. Own server in your house.
3. Traditional webhosting (usually offered by internet service providers).
4. Free hosting.

Let’s get straight to the point, the only option I recommend people to use is a virtual private server (VPS) and the reasons are as follows:

• Most people don’t have a server in their house that they can connect to the internet 24/7. Also, please do note that using your own server requires a static IP address from your internet service provider (ISP), which can be more expensive than a traditional internet subscription. And last but not least, if you misconfigure your router, this could leave you open to attacks.
• Free hosting, such as Netlify, lacks flexibility in that choosing a personalized domain name is not always possible. As a business owner, you want to have your own independence outside of big corporations whose nature can be quite volatile and with ever-changing user policy.
• Traditional webhosting is old-fashioned and the price-quality ratio is not competitive. A VPS, however, offers you total freedom. It’s even possible to host multiple websites on a single VPS, hereby seriously reducing your costs. Interesting, right?

The VPS provider I use is Linode. One of the reasons is that they offer a Gentoo build, which very few VPS providers do - kudos to them for standing out!

I hope this article gave you a somewhat understandable overview of the costs associated with running a website.