How much does website hosting cost?

If you’re wondering how much you should be paying for hosting every month or year, this is the article for you. As with many of our FAQs there’s an element of ‘it depends’ in the answer but as a very rough guide, you should be paying somewhere between $100 - $600 a year for a run-of-the-mill business website.

There’s a few things that will impact on the cost of your hosting and that’s the type of hosting you need for your website along with things like bandwidth, storage, email accounts, type of support and other additions. Let’s look at the two main types of hosting available for a majority of websites – Apache hosting and IIS hosting.

Apache Hosting

This is the most common type of hosting for websites as website content management systems like Joomla, Wordpress and Drupal all run on Apache servers. If your website is running on an Apache server hosting tends to be very affordable.
Apache costing usually costs anywhere between approximately $60 and $350 per year.

IIS Hosting

IIS hosting is for running applications or websites that run on .net or .asp (Microsoft languages) and content management systems like DotNetNuke. IIS hosting is usually a little more expensive.  IIS costing usually costs anywhere between approximately $80 and $600 per year.

Other elements that may impact on the cost of your hosting

There are other things that can impact on the cost of your hosting. Some of these won’t incur huge additional costs and others can impact on your yearly budget for hosting considerably. Let’s look at a few of these.

Storage

Storage is the amount of space you have on your web server. Most hosting companies will give you adequate space for a general business website – more and more companies are now offering unlimited space in their hosting packages.

Bandwidth

This is where websites can really find themselves in trouble. Bandwidth is the amount of MB used when users go to your website. For example, if you have a 1MB pdf on your page, every time a user downloads that PDF they will have used 1MB of bandwidth. If you go over your website’s bandwidth limit there’s a good chance your site will go offline and you will be potentially charged additional bandwidth costs. Here’s a list of things that can impact on your bandwidth:-

• Videos that aren’t embedded via Youtube or Vimeo, etc
• Large image files (anything above 500-800KB is pretty big)
• Large PDF files
• Using images instead of CSS
• Large traffic spikes

Support

Sure, there’s cheap hosting suppliers out there but if your website goes down a couple of hours before your big advertising launch, you want to make sure there’s someone on the phone at the other end that can help you – not a ticketing system that takes hours to resolve your issue.

Uptime Guarantee

This is the guarantee a hosting company gives you to ensure your website is ‘up’ and online. Most hosting companies will offer 99.9% uptime, but cheaper hosting may not have this so make sure you read the fine-print!

SSL Certificates

SSL Certificates or security certificates help your website ensure that data transferred through forms or online shopping carts is secure. If a site is secure you will see a little padlock in your browser when navigating through your website. Many hosting companies including this cost with their hosting – others have it as an additional charge.