A Perspective on Website Costs

People automatically assume if they see a website that they can afford the same website, but the fact is websites can cost from a few dollars to many hundreds of millions of dollars.

Now that is quite a range and I think I can bring it into perspective.

There are a few very expensive elements in running a website:

  • Labor: Design & Programming

  • Hardware: Servers and Firewalls

  • Operational Costs: Bandwidth and Network Services

First, we have to examine the labor costs of a website.

Of course, if you build a website yourself, your cost is only your own time, but can you do it all?

Can you write code, create programs and build graphics? Well you can using a system like pageBuzz, but your results will be based on your ability. Since you are not a seasoned professional, it might not be as refined as a professional would build.

But you have to look at your budget. Do you have $10,000 to pay for design? Do you have $20,000 or $100,000 to pay for programming?

If not, you will have something very basic which is fine, unless you expect to have a million dollar website.

pageBuzz is focused on basic, functional and useful websites that never cost over $20 a month. We realize that 99% of the people that need websites fit into that segment.

But making those people understand that is another issue entirely.

Most people know they cannot afford a RollsRoyce, but that is only because Rolls has a reputation for being expensive. If the same people see a car driving down the street and don't know what the brand is, they don't assume the car costs $1million dollars, they assume they can also afford one.

This is the problem with websites. People just don;t have any perspective when it comes t prices and website costs.

They see 10,000 TV ads from Godaddy and Web.com saying "get a website for $1" and now I see Hostgator advertising unlimited websites for just one penny.

Anyone that has called these companies and asked to have a website set up know the actual cost is more like $1500 and up. And that is just for a basic page or two.

So most business owners are in limbo. They need a website but they think it should only cost a few dollars, be as easy as click 1,2,3! And not be complicated or involve any extra fees.

So they just keep searching for the $1 website even though they never find it or when they do, it is worth every penny they pay for it and I mean that litteraly. It is worth pennies or nearly worthless.

The think to remember is that even if you hire one person at just $10 an hour, a website can take hundreds of hours to complete and cost you thousands of dollars.So there is just no way to get around labor costs.

Even a small website with 200 products might take 100 hours just to enter the product data for the shopping cart. Even paying someone minimum wage to do that can still be over $1000 and you have not even started the website design costs.

The other huge labor cost is programming.

Programmer, at least good ones get top dollar and programs take even more hours to create than the actual design or data entry. So building anything custom can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

In most cases, companies can use prewritten programs like we have at pageBuzz.com and rather than paying a programmer to build one, you can lease one for $20 a month. That is a huge cost savings, but you are limited to what the program was written to do.

If you decide your business needs a custom program, get out the wallet and be prepared to pay for it.

It is kind of funny because we get people asking us all the time what software we run. They want to start a business like pageBuzz and run it themselves. I have to tell them we have created our own programs at a cost of several million dollars just for programming and design work. And even after I do, they still ask, where they can get a copy of it.

People just don't understand the time involved in writing programming code and building software. They all assume they can go to the local computer store and buy a CD with what they need for $20.

But that is not how it works and it is not very likely that could ever happen.

It is just a case of hours and hours of work that add up to be huge amounts of money. You can't get 2000 hours or more for a few dollars no matter how you try to figure it out. Labor is expensive and will be a huge factor in how much a website costs.

Cost Of Hardware

Secondly, we have hardware costs. For most people, they assume again, there is no hardware cost, just signup at godaddy for $1 and you don't have to worry about anything else.

And if your business can run on a $1 website that is true, but most cannot.

If you are developing your own software you need dedicated servers for a few reasons.

  • Security

  • CPU Resources

  • Drive Capacity

  • Backup Ability

  • General Network Access

If you are spending tens of thousands of dollars creating programming you don't want that on a shared server where anyone can access it. You also, don't want credit cards or financial data on a shared server so you need a dedicated server at least.

But now you have t look at website resources and architecture. Do you want to be able to scale the website? Allow for more than a few users at a time when you get bigger?

Then you have to plan for that and in those cases you typically need more than one server to manage the architecture you need. You also need general network access so you can network those server together on the back end and have firewalls so only you can access them via the admin functions.

All of this hardware costs money.

We run servers that cost $100,000 each, so if you needed 4 or more of those, you see that adds up fast. Switches at $3,000-5,000 each and miscelaneous things like KVM over IP, monitor and networking components.

Don't forget, this hardware has to be someplace with Internet access, backup generator and climate control that can manage the huge amount of heat put out by the equipment.

Typical datacenter space for a single rack in a shared facility is around $1000 a month before the bandwidth costs.

So that $1 website is not costing half a million just for hardware and that is not actually a big number when it comes to hardware for a website.

While the average person does not pay that because they can't, they can use a company like pageBuzz who has spent considerably more and leases space for $20 a month.

But that is for a small business website with no access to the server admin or root functions.

So if you need custom, you better be prepared to fork out some serious cash for hardware.

Of course, if you only need 2 servers, one for a basic site and one for backup or failover in case the primary fails, then you cost might only be a few thousand dolls, but that does not leave room for expansion as you grow.

Now, maybe you think I am exaggerating this somehow but I am not. Hardware is expensive and it is equally as expensive to run it. Forget that you just spent half a million on hardware, now you need a system administrator to keep it running, manage the network and deal with issues like DDOS attacks and hackers breaching the servers.

Ever server on the Internet has multiple hacking attempts ever single day, so you have to deal with it and keep it running. Again, more labor.

Important to Remember

It is important to remember that just because you don;t see it, does not mean that it is not there.

We don't see all the 100,000 or more servers running google.com, but without them, it would not work. So while sites like google seem simple and easy to build, they are immensely expensive and have huge back ends. In fact in google case, they have multiple datacenters around the world all with massive numbers of servers to manage loads of world wide traffic.

I can promise you that google cannot run on a $1 website at godaddy no matter what the support people over there tell you. If that was the case, there would be just one server on the Internet and everything would run off of that. We know that is not the case, so you have to understand not all websites can run on $1 website hosting.

Not to Scare You About Website Costs

I am not trying to scare you about website hosting costs at all, in fact most websites can run on $1 website hosts or $20 websites in our case.

The point is to tell you that not all do, so assuming that what you see is always possible for just a few dollars is misguided and incorrect.

Most small businesses don't need anything custom, but they often assume they ca get something custom because hey see other people doing it.

I have written so many articles addressing the topic of website costs just because it is such a struggle for non tech savvy people to grasp. Yet it easy to understand that not everyone can afford a 10,000 square foot mansion or a 200,000 square foot retail space.

Most people live in small rented homes or apartments but that means you are bound by what the owners have down with the property.

The same is true of hosting at a system like pageBuzz.com. You get in for pennies on the dollar, but you have to live with what you get and can't make all the changes you might like. But the cost in comparison to building your own website or home from scratch is huge.

Renting an apartment, owning a website, the concept is the same. I hope hope that brings website costs into perspective for you.

 

 

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