Are you planning on starting a new business? Are you confused on how to get a website built?
Are you wondering if you would need a hosting plan or, even, what hosting or a domain name is? Let me cover this all for you in this brief guide as non-techie acquaintances often ask me about these kinda questions.
First off, let’s get the absolute basics out of the way.
Hosting: That’s like the raw piece of land that your digital house (i.e. your website) is to be built upon.
Domain Name: That’s akin to the address of your house.
Website: That’s, the house online that others get to see.
You wanna make sure you own the rights to all the above. Meaning you wanna buy all these with your name and card.
Costs
- Domains can typically cost $1-$30. Usually $20. But if you are buying, say, shoes.com or newyork.com the costs can go very high. The domain Business.com (which I have had been a columnist for) was sold for about $360 million. I typically buy my domains at Namecheap.com.
- Hosting costs can vary as well depending on your needs. I was a customer of Web Hosting Hub for about 10 years, with the cost being about $130-ish per year. I’ve also used WPX Hosting (more expensive at $25/month) and WPengine (more expensive). I’ve recently moved to Hostinger which I am liking so far.
- The hosting plan that I use: If you are just starting out, I would say try Hostinger’s cheapest plan (at $1 or $2 per month, depending on the number of months you pay for). You can get a further 20% off using my referral link.
- Website Design Costs: It can be anywhere from about $50 to $20,000 depending on your needs etc. I would say typical small sized websites can cost around $2,000 but I’ve not got a website build recently. You can also go down the DIY route and build one yourself especially considering the promulgation of all the AI tools out there.