The Annual Bill Nobody Quotes You

Everybody quotes the build. Almost nobody quotes the year after it, which is how a business ends up with a website that vanishes on a Tuesday because a card on file expired in March.

So here is the plain version: what actually renews, roughly what each thing costs, what is worth paying for, and what is padding.

The things that genuinely renew

The domain — roughly $15 to $25 a year

Cheap, boring, and the single most catastrophic thing to lose. A lapsed domain does not just take the site down; it takes your email with it, and if it drops long enough someone else can register it.

Put it on auto-renew, on a card that is not about to expire, in an account whose login you actually possess. That last point is not a joke — a good share of the domain emergencies we see are not about money. Nobody can find the account.

Hosting — anywhere from $60 to several thousand a year

The widest range on the list, and where most of the confusion lives. Cheap shared hosting genuinely works for a small brochure site. It stops working when you have traffic, a store, or a bad neighbor on the same server.

What you are actually buying at the higher end is not disk space. It is the site staying up during your busiest hour, backups that exist and can be restored, and somebody answering when it breaks. If your site earns you real money, hosting is a strange place to save $80 a year.

SSL — usually free, sometimes $50 to $200

Modern hosts include it. If you are being billed separately for a basic certificate, ask why — free, automatically renewing certificates are the industry norm and perfectly legitimate.

What matters more than the cost is the renewal. An expired certificate replaces your homepage with a full-screen browser warning about an unsafe site. Customers do not read past it.

Plugins, themes and licenses — $0 to $500+ a year

Mostly a WordPress concern. Page builders, form plugins, booking systems, and premium themes typically sell annual licenses. Let one lapse and you usually keep the software but stop getting updates — including security updates, which is how sites get compromised months later.

Worth auditing annually. Most sites carry licenses for things nobody has used in two years.

Maintenance — the one with no honest fixed answer

Somewhere between nothing and a few hundred a month, depending entirely on what your site is. A static site built on modern infrastructure genuinely needs very little. A WordPress site with a dozen plugins and a store needs regular updates by someone who will notice when one breaks the checkout.

Be suspicious of a maintenance retainer that cannot tell you what it does each month. "Monitoring" that amounts to an automated uptime email is not worth a monthly fee.

What is usually padding

• "SEO maintenance" with no deliverable. If nobody can say what changed on the site this month, nothing did.
• Paying for a basic SSL certificate when your host issues them free.
• Premium licenses for plugins you no longer use. Cancel them; the site will not notice.
• Hosting "upgrades" sold after a slow-site complaint when the site is slow because of oversized images rather than the server. Faster hosting makes a bloated site marginally less slow at considerable expense.

A realistic total

For most small trade businesses, running a website honestly costs somewhere between about $200 and $1,000 a year, depending mostly on hosting and whether you are on WordPress. Anything dramatically above that should come with a clear explanation of what the extra buys.

That is genuinely modest against what a single recovered job is worth. The problem is almost never the amount. It is that nobody wrote it down, so it arrives as a series of surprises — and the worst surprises arrive as outages.

The twenty minutes that prevents most of this

Once a year, ideally not during your busy season, write down four things:

1. Where the domain is registered, and who can log in.
2. Where the site is hosted, and who can log in.
3. What renews and when, with the card on file noted.
4. Who to call when it breaks.

Keep it somewhere that is not only in your email. Most of the genuine website emergencies we get called into are not technical disasters — they are access problems. The site is fine; the person who set it up is unreachable and nobody knows where anything lives.

If something has already lapsed and the site is down or throwing warnings, that is the emergency queue. If you would rather someone simply held the whole thing — hosting, renewals, updates, and the phone call when it breaks — the numbers are published rather than quoted after a discovery call.