Creating a website is no longer an expensive thing to do. There are plenty of options to create a good website at low cost or also even for free.
Keep reading to know what could be the costs if you consider to build a website by your own.
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Building a website is a really simple and easy thing to do know a days.
There are plenty of options to create a website in just minutes.
Websites like Wix, Weebly or Webflow are tools that can help you to start easy for free.
Also WordPress has a free option if you want to start your blog, or a simple website.
For all those options you will need one of the most basic and simple thing that you should buy if you want to have the name of your brand in the URL and it is the Domain name.
Also, some of those mentioned platforms include the hosting, and in that way it could be explained why they are higher in price. If you want to build it on your own host, there are some options that even start for a 2 USD per month.
And basically that is what you need if you want a simple website Domain and Host. But for sure if you want a website with more features, than you should think in some more add-ons.
Getting a Domain name is really simple and easy to buy.
Most of the domain names providers have a search bar that can help you to find out if the name that you want is available or they will suggest another one.
In some website, they will include you one year of free domain if you pay their hosting plan. But honestly, I do recommend better to buy them separately and don’t go with this marketing technique, since renewals of domains can get more expensive.
I use NameCheap, and is actually one of the cheapest name providers that you can find online.
I do recommend you to really find out if your name could be also registeres as a trademark, to avoid any future problems with having to register again the domain due to these issues.
I prefer to buy domains for the long run, and with Namecheap I paid $90.60 for 10 years, also using some of their discounts. So that is $9.06 per year.
Depending on the sales season, you can find deals for almost $6.
Sometimes the renewals are twice the price, therefore, it will be better to pay for at least 3 years.
There are different Hosting service providers that you can select from.
And there will be some bad, good and best hostings available at different prices.
The good thing of the recent years is that accesing a good, reliable and fast hosting is not expensive at all.
There are VPS, virtual private servers, that work as a dedicated virtual server that can deliver better performance than any shared hosting service.
Vultr, Linode and Digital Ocean are cloud hosting providers where you can have access to VPS services at a low price.
Vultr has a starting price of $2.50 with a very simple hosting, and as your website grows you can increase easily the capacity of the server.
WordPress is a free open source content management system.
It has been one of the most used platforms worldwide to create webistes.
With WordPress you can use free themes, therefore you don’t have to spend a cent to start the web design.
But if you want to add more features, such as design, or e-commerce capabilities, then you will have to install some plugins.
Elementor is one of the most known Page Builders that can help you to build up websites.
They offer a free plugin plan, which will help you with basic website building.
Also Envato Elements is another plugin that offers WordPress Templates that can help you to start building the website from presets.
Of course both plugins have their paid version and if both are combined, you can create more good loking websites.
Therefore if we take as example the cost for the Domain Name $9 per year and the basic VPS hosting plan of Vultr $30 per year, then the total cost of the basics of a website would be the $39 per year.
Of course, there might be more or less costs according to the different providers, but those will be initial costs of building a website.
Here we are not considering the labor expense, since if you are building it by your own, then the expenses of a web designer are not calculated.
WordPress has a learning curve, and it does require to invest time to learn how to use it, but if you are willing to dig deeper into the WordPress world, it worths the time.
