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What is the cost of
a small business Website
What should a small business
spend on a website?
Buying a website is a lot like
buying a car, you can buy a compact for $15,000, save on gas, buy
a pickup if you need to haul something from $15,000 to over $100,000
or buy a luxury car for $50,000 to over $200,000. Of course cars
can cost as much as $2 million dollars for high end sports cars.
Websites are the same. You can
spend $600 Million on healthcare.gov, $200 Million on a Twitter
or a Facebook or even $1Billion on a Youtube. Just running
Youtube is estimated at almost half a billion dollars a year, so
this game can get expensive fast. Spending $10 million on a
corporate website today is pretty common. But most small business
website even with ecommerce can get deals for under $200 a month
all inclusive.
Think of it like building a
brick and mortar store. You can build a small building for $200,000
or a big corporate store and office building for tens of millions.
It all depends on what you need and what you can pay.
So website cost is more about
what you need, what you can afford and what you want it to do for
you.
When it comes to a
business website, ask yourself what do you need?
Domain
Registration Annual Charge
Website
Hosting
Bandwidth
Programming
Website Design
Graphics,
Logos and Digital Media
Management
Interface or Software
Support
Is there a better
option?
pageBuzz.com do it
yourself website builder
Large retail sites,
ebay.com amazon.com, sears.com
Domain Registration
There is one thing that every
website needs and that is the domain registration. That is the
address that the website will use on the Internet. With nearly
1000 domain registrars offering domain registrations all
competing for your business there are some great deals out there.
Typically domains should cost around $10-$15 a year with ICANN
getting about $7 of that in fees. So anything over $7 leaves some
profit for the registrar.
To get your business, just
like retailers, registrars can often offer domains as loss
leaders even giving away domain registrations. I have seen
registrar.com offering domains for $0.50 and Godaddy, Yahoo and 1and1
offering domains for Free as long as you get your website hosting
with them.
But be careful, companies such
as Yahoo charge $35.00 when they automatically renew the domain
the following year, so maybe the free was not such a good deal
when you overpaid for hosting services and now you are over
paying for the domain name.
Where you register the domain
is not that important as long as you use an ICANN accredited
registrar because the domain can be hosted at any company that
offers website hosting services.
Website Hosting
Here is another wide range
item. What you spend is really dependent on what you need, what
you will be storing and how much traffic you plan on having.
Just like a physical store, do
you need security, how many parking spaces, how much floor space,
how many cashiers to handle traffic volumes, what do you need to
sell to cover overhead?
Planning your website is the
same process. You have the same considerations, how much space,
how much bandwidth or room for traffic, how much CPU time / sales
staff cashiers etc. Also, what type of information will you be
storing? Health or medical records? Credit card or financial data?
Or maybe just product information.
Planning a website with
commerce is just like planning any other business, it is detailed
and requires more than just advertising on craigslist as taking
the first person willing to d the job for $100.
Most commercial website
companies offer very inexpensive website hosting, some as low as
$1.99/month and up to around $10/month. However, despite the
claims of unlimited everything, they are severely limited and
restrict websites to very low traffic levels and CPU time. So
unless you are hosting a personal blog or homepage for your kids
sports team, they are not a great option.
There are VPS plans or Virtual
Private Servers which are popular with webmasters because they
are cheap and offer some of the same abilities of dedicated
servers. Dedicated servers offer full use of the entire server
without the risk of being turned off as well as offering more
security than shared hosting because you don't have other people
with access to the server. Dedicated servers vary just like cars
from 1 to 64 CPUs and can cost from $1000 to $100,000 just for
the hardware. So plans will vary in cost depending on what you
need. Most small businesses can live with a VPS for about $25 a
month or a basic dedicated server for about $100 a month usually
without any up front costs.
Of course, when we say basic
we mean supporting a few thousand visitors a month. When you get
into millions a month or millions a day, then you need a bigger
store and that means more money. Larger traffic means more
resources and often multiple dedicated servers for load balancing,
so you can take those numbers and multiply them based on the
number of users you expect.
But wait, lets say you collect
credit cards or run a doctors office and want users to fill in
their medical history on the website to save time. You may be
required by law to encrypt the data usually over multiple servers
to prevent a single server breach from putting you out of
business. So even if you are small and have just a few customers,
you still may need dedicated or multiples of dedicated servers.
Bandwidth
Just like server resources you
have to consider data transfer. You probably have a broadband
connection at home and maybe you bought the $200 a month plan or
the $25 a month plan depending on how much you use it. You pay
for unlimited plans on your cell phone as well depending on how
much you use it.
Unfortunately with servers and
websites you can really get an unlimited plan because unlike a
cell phone, servers can have hundreds of connections using
bandwidth, so the amount you need is dependent on how much
traffic your website will have. A small store might only need a
small bandwidth plan, while a website like youtube will need to
pay millions of dollars each month just for bandwidth alone.
Of course the type of media
you intend to transfer will also impact that quite a bit. Even a
small website showing video can use up a 100Mbit connection often
costing thousands of dollars a month. While most basic ecommerce
store use very little as they only transmit small amounts of data.
Programming
Well we all saw President
Obama spend $600 million dollars of our money on healthcare.gov
so we should all be painfully aware of how much it can cost to
have website programed. If you have something unique or need
custom programming, then the sky is the limit on how much you
will spend.
Even something as building a
basic shopping cart, using an existing program or open source
software can easily cost $200,000 and take a year to complete.
Now merchants that are smart
will use commercial software that is being developed by outside
companies and pay monthly fees for using it. That way, the costs
are shared over all the users and there are no up front costs,
but finding one of them might not be easy particularly if they
need something unique or less common.
Of course it is always cheaper
to buy something ready to go than to build it yourself, but in
many cases applications just don't exist or the ones that do
where built by the users.
You really have to look at one
simple factor when it comes to software, how long will it take?
If you pay a programmer $50 an hour, how many weeks, months or
years will it take to do what you need. These projects are not 1
or 2 hour page designs, they require thousands of lines of code,
server integration and integration with the front end or website
pages.
I get calls all the time from people
asking where I got the software to run buzztrader.com,
an automotive classified website. They want to buy it and run
one like just it. I have to explain that took 8 moths of
programming runs on 2 dedicated $20,000 servers and requires
considerable monthly bandwidth. "OH, Never mind"
they say, and then hang up.
Just because you see someone
else doing it, does not mean that it was cheap to build. In fact
most of the popular websites that people use cost well over a
million dollars just for programming.
Website Design
That brings us to the website
design.
Again, if you plan on paying a
designer it seems like they have priced themselves out like they
are programmers, doctors or lawyers at $50 and $100 a hour. A
basic 5 page website can cost between $500 and $3000 and as you
start integrating a shopping cart or ecommerce component the
price goes up from there depending again on how many hours you
need to pay that webmaster or designer.
Larger websites mean more
hours and hence more money. So the more you get, the more it
costs. Dream big, pay big.
Graphics, Logos and
Digital Media
Of course the website designer
will need graphics and digital media which you might have to hire
a graphic designer to create. You will need some type of look for
your website, logos, images and media to get your message across.
You might hire a video
production company to make a couple videos which can cost $500 to
$2000 or just just hold up your phone camera and record yourself
talking. In any case, you will need some content for the
webmaster to add to the website.
if you already have a business,
chances are you already have a logo, colors and graphics you can
give the webmaster. But if you are starting the website as your
business, be prepared to spend what it takes to get the look you
are after.
You might choke when you start
calling graphic designers and find out what they charge.
Management Interface
or Software
Now you need some type of
software of CMS or Content Management System so you can make
updates, add products or change the pages of your website. If you
webmaster is building the website in PHP you will need tools to
edit the PHP.
What is that? You don't know
PHP? Then plan on keeping that $50/hour webmaster on speed dial
because every time you need a change you will be digging into
your wallet.
Hopefully the webmaster used
some type of CMS so you have some online access to update the
website yourself, but some of those can be as complicated as
building the website in the first place.
So if you are paying for
design, plan on paying for everything from now on.
That brings us to the last
part.
Support
What happens when the website
is offline? Who do you call? Who knows what to do?
If the webmaster set you up
with a good website host you can call them and they will make
sure the server is running when it goes offline and you notice it.
But that is about where the support ends because they did not
build your website, they don't know how it works and they wont
fix it.
If the programing cannot
handle the traffic or the server cannot handle the programming
that is your problem.
Getting back to healthcare.gov,
that is exactly what happend to them, the programming just did
not work. It looked like it did, until they went to use it $600
million later.
The same can happen to you
because when you use so many vendors to create a complete project
you become the general contractor with everyone pointing the
finger at the other guy.
Webmasters need cash, so the
rush things through, take shortcuts and give you a less than
adequate product. Now you are sitting there needing support and
each person you used says they did what you paid them for.
So what is the answer
for the small business on a limited budget?
pageBuzz.com
pageBuzz.com offers a complete
solution for small business, all inclusive for just $20/month.
You get hosting, programming, design, support and all the tools
you need all in one package.
This is the business model
that all of the major companies are adopting from Godaddy to Web.com,
they have all followed in the footsteps of pageBuzz offering
their own do it yourself tools and online software to manage
websites, ecommerce and even collect credit cards.
Obviously, developing a
website from start to finish is expensive, complicated and can
end in disaster as we see with healthcare.gov. If you don't know
what you are doing, then don't attempt anything of that magnitude.
Start small with something
like pageBuzz, get 7 day a week support as you build your
business online into something bigger over time. Use a shopping
cart that would cost you millions to develop on your own and
tools that took years to create.
For your webmaster /developer
to build a content management system like pageBuzz it would take
years and years and cost millions of dollars but you get to use
it all for just $20. Why pay to reinvet the wheel when you can
buy one cheaper?
Commercial solutions are the
better option for most small businesses because they offer no
bandwidth or usage constraints, no development costs and no
continued webmaster or developer costs. They are cheaper and in
every case more advanced than what you can build on your own.
Small business owners can
littlealy build websites overnight and start selling products or
services online with little cost. They can develop pages, content
and take advantage of the search engine traffic without paying an
arm and a leg.
Of course, these site builders
are not custom applications, they don't offer the flexibility of
open hosting, but 99% of the small business just don't need that
or the added headaches and expense that come with it. So all in
one solutions like pageBuzz are becoming the most popular option
for smaller businesses.
Large Retail Sites
Tis is a similar business
model of ebay and their Pro Stores, Amazon and even Sears.com.
Companies offer full stores, with exposure on their main shopping
sites and even offer fulfillment and manufacturing along with the
website.
So small business owners have
loads of options besides hiring expensive webmasters and
programmers to develop their websites.
Cloud servers allow for more
processing power, better software packages and less expense as
well as 24-7 support when problems arise.
It really all parallels the
real world. If you own a building and the roof starts leaking,
you have to hire someone to fix it. But if you lease space in
mall and there is a problem, they fix it and they bring you
traffic and they cover your heat air and other expenses that
saves you money.
In Conclusion
There is no way to give anyone
a firm number on what a website will cost or should cost. There
are so many variables in spite of most people thinking a website
is a website. Google.com is a simple website, but it has 100,000
servers running it. Heathcare.gov is a website but it cost $600
million. thenameofyourbusiness.com is a website but it cost just $20.
So evaluate what we explored
in this article and try to consult with some professionals to
figure out the right tools and budget for what you want.
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