This first question is always:"What is it going to cost?"
There are two types of costs:
- Fixed costs
- Variable costs
Fixed Costs
Domain name:
- $9-$35 per year. Depends on the number of years you pay for, the company you get it from, etc.
Hosting Company:
- A hosting company supplies a web server, backup, technical support, email servers, ftp servers, etc. The cost varies from free to thousands per month. Many large companies have their own with their own staff. For the rest of us, there are companies that can do this for you. Typical costs are $25/month for low end up to $65/month for a host with e-commerce, shopping carts, etc. We have a reseller’s agreement with one of the largest and can offer hosting for a low as $10/month. See our Hosting Fee Schedule.
Setup Fees:
- A one-time fee charged by a hosting company to get everything going. Typically, $40-$50. This includes setting up your empty web site on a server, getting your domain name to point to this empty site. Setting up an email server to allow the creation of email accounts.
Per-Transaction Fees:
- Fees changed by merchant accounts, credit card companies, pay-check, pay-pall, etc. From a few cents to a few % of the transaction.
Your fixed costs are about $150 per year, with an extra $50 dollars the first year to get things setup.
Variable Costs:
- There is only one variable cost; paying for the time it takes to do what you want.
This is the cost that can get out of hand. Everything you want on a site takes time, every change you request takes time, and every addition takes time.