How much does it cost to keep a website running for a year: domain, hosting, maintenance

The site gets built — and the invoices do not stop there. This rarely comes up during the sale, so a year later people are surprised to discover that the domain has to be renewed, the hosting paid for and the plugins updated. Let us lay out the full annual budget: what you must pay, what is optional, and what you should not be paying for at all.

The short answer

The mandatory minimum is around $60–70 a year: domain plus hosting. That is everything without which the site physically will not open. The rest is maintenance, and how much of it you need depends on what kind of site you have and whether anyone is looking after it. A realistic annual budget runs from under $200 for a simple business-card site to several thousand for a store under active development.

The mandatory part

• Domain — from about $14 a year for a .com. Country zones are usually cheaper. Paid directly to the registrar.
• Hosting — from about $4 a month for an ordinary site, so from roughly $50 a year. A store with a large catalogue and real traffic needs a bigger plan.
• SSL certificate — $0. A free Let's Encrypt certificate covers the needs of almost any business site and renews itself. A paid certificate is needed in a handful of cases, and if someone is selling you one "because it is unsafe without it", that is not true.

We do not resell these services: you pay the provider directly and see the real figure. Adding a margin on someone else's hosting is a common practice, but not ours.

Maintenance: what the monthly fee buys

Here is where the choice starts. A site can run for years with no intervention at all — and then break one day precisely because nobody looked at it for years.

Our maintenance packages:

• Basic — from $80 a month. Backups, uptime monitoring, CMS and plugin updates, small changes up to 2 hours.
• Standard — from $175 a month. Up to 5 hours of changes, SEO monitoring, analytics, 4-hour response.
• Premium — from $350 a month. Up to 10 hours of changes, full SEO monitoring, A/B tests, 1-hour response.
• No subscription — from $35 an hour, billed as the work comes up.

If the site is static, sells nothing and has no admin area, we say so plainly: you do not need a subscription, pay by the hour. One month of support is included with every build, which is usually enough to see the real volume of changes.

What actually breaks without maintenance

This is not a scare story to sell subscriptions — it is the list of things people come to us with most often:

• An old WordPress core or plugin. The most common cause of hacked sites is not a genius attacker but a hole in an extension that was patched six months ago and never updated on your installation.
• An expired domain. The site disappears, and so does the email on that domain. It can be recovered, but there is a window in which the domain is free for anyone else to take.
• No backup. After any failure the choice is simple: with a backup you are up again within the hour; without one, you rebuild the site.
• The site went down quietly. With no monitoring, you hear about it from a customer three days later.
• The form stopped sending email. Everything looks fine, the button clicks, and the enquiries go nowhere. Without a check this goes unnoticed for months — we once lost eleven days of enquiries that way ourselves, which is why we say it out loud.

Three realistic annual scenarios

A business-card site that sells nothing. Domain $14 + hosting $50 = about $64 a year. Changes twice a year, billed hourly. Total under $200 a year. No subscription needed.

A corporate site that brings in enquiries. Same domain and hosting, plus basic maintenance at $80 a month = $960, plus a few hours of content changes. Roughly $1,100–1,300 a year. Here the subscription earns its place: the site is a working tool and downtime costs enquiries.

An online store. Heavier hosting, standard or premium maintenance, regular work on the catalogue and payments. From about $2,500 a year upwards. Plus SEO separately if you run it — from $170 a month for a single city, from $350 for national coverage.

What you should not be paying for

• A "website retainer" with no list of work. The invoice should show what is included and how many hours.
• Hosting with a margin on it. It is fine for a contractor to help you choose and configure it. It is not fine to pay them double the plan price you could pay yourself.
• A paid SSL certificate for an ordinary site.
• "SEO" with no report. If what arrives every month is an invoice rather than a report with positions and work done, you are paying for silence.
• Updates that never happened. Easy to check: ask to see the date of the last backup and the list of components updated.

Frequently asked questions

Can I pay nobody at all after launch?

Not for the domain and hosting — those are compulsory. Everything else is optional if the site is simple and you accept the risk: when something breaks, you pay for the repair. For a business-card site that is sensible economy; for a store it is not.

How much is it just to renew the domain and hosting?

From about $14 a year for the domain and from about $4 a month for hosting. You pay the provider directly from your own account — no intermediary is needed.

We do not use the site but we keep paying for it. What should we do?

Three options. Keep the minimum — domain and hosting — so the address and the rankings survive. Shrink the site to a single contact page: cheaper, and it does not look abandoned. Or release the domain if the business has closed. The worst option is paying for a site that has shown out-of-date information for years: it damages your reputation more than it helps.

What does the warranty cover, and how is it different from maintenance?

The warranty covers mistakes on our side: if something does not work the way we agreed, we fix it free. Ours runs for six months under the contract. Maintenance is new changes and routine upkeep — the things that were not part of the original agreement.

Is it cheaper to keep the site on a website builder?

Over a short distance, yes; over a long one it depends on the task. But the comparison has to be honest: a builder subscription is also paid every month and never ends, and the site is still not yours. We went through that in website builder or custom development.

In short

The floor is $60–70 a year, and without it the site simply does not open. Everything above that is a question of what your downtime costs and whether anyone is around to press "update". For a business-card site maintenance really is unnecessary. For a site that brings in enquiries, saving on maintenance usually costs more than the maintenance would.

Want the figure for your specific case? Write to us through contacts — we will look at what you have and name a sum with no padding in it. The full price list is on the pricing page.