What are the costs of having a website?

The best way to explain what the costs are in having and maintaining a website are as follows:

1. Domain name registration
   This is the www.yourbusinessname.com.au web address (URL) of where your website and it's related services will be found once live in the internet.  It has an initial registration fee and a RE-registration fee every year it is active.
   
   
2. Email hosting
   This is the server (or service) that runs your email and also archives it for future reference. This fee is normally yearly and includes a certain number of email addresses and a certain amount of storage. It allows you to have personalized email addresses on your business domain name eg: info@yourbusinessname.com.au
   
   
3. Web hosting
   The last of the yearly fees. This is where your website ‘lives’, or the server that holds your website files. These days it regularly also includes a self editing system, known as a CMS (content management system), that allows you to edit your own website text and images.

For these first three items you can expect to pay around $600 per year in Australia with reputable companies offering these services.

A word of warning to avoid the internet ‘specials’ that offer you heavily discounted services for the business critical items listed above.

These discount services are always with overseas budget businesses whose customer service - especially to Australians - is often poor. Email and your website are key elements to promote and work within your business. You don’t want to be in the situation where you can’t get hold of your domain registrar and your email and website go down for a period of days or weeks.

The last cost is the website design and build. This is often a once off cost with a website designer and can vary greatly depending on what your website needs to do. For example, an online store will be more expensive than a simpler brochure style information-only website. This part normally includes training by the web designer for you and your staff to be able to update the website content yourself.

The last thing that may invoke additional ongoing costs is maintenance and updates. As previously mentioned most websites are built in systems that now allow you to update the site yourself.  However, in our experience, most clients opt for us to make ongoing changes as it's one less thing to think about.  Simply email the updates to us and we'll make the changes for you for our normally hourly rate. This allows you to keep working in your business (at what you do best) while someone else updates the content on your website.  We'll also ensure that things are done correctly, so that search engines index it correctly, and your prospective customers can find you easily.

Gavin Nash

M Group Marketing