What a small business website costs to run, line by line
Once a website is built it costs something every year to keep online. Two lines cannot be avoided, one is free, and the rest depend on what you choose. Prices here are examples in the currency each company publishes, with the sums worked out.
The short version
A small business website has two lines you cannot avoid: the domain, renewed every year, and somewhere to host the site. The https padlock is free (Let’s Encrypt). Business email is charged per person: Google Workspace Business Starter is $7 a user a month on an annual plan (Google Workspace Help). Booking tools have free starter plans. The trap is the first-term price: Hostinger’s shared hosting is $2.49 a month if you pay for 48 months upfront, then renews at $10.99 a month (Hostinger). Worked through for a café with a .com and two people on Google Workspace, that comes to about $15 a month on free static hosting, or about $26 on shared hosting at its renewal price. Prices checked 22 October 2026.
People searching for what a website costs per month are usually asking one of two things: what a builder subscription costs, or what a site that has already been built costs to keep online. This article is about the second. The build is a one-off; the running costs are the lines that come back every year.
There are six of them. Two you cannot avoid, one is free, and three depend on what your business needs. Each section below names the line, what it usually costs, and the small print worth reading. The prices are other companies’ published prices, in the currency they publish, and they are linked so you can check them. If you pay in £, € or ₹ the figures will look different, but the shape of the bill is the same.
A note on where we stand: we build sites that are paid for once and hosted for free, so we are not neutral on this. The sums below work the same whoever builds your site. If you are deciding between a monthly package and a one-off build, the pay monthly article is the companion piece.
Six lines, and only two of them are unavoidable.
Every website, however it was made, needs an address and somewhere to live. Everything else is a choice. The table sets out the six lines and how each is usually billed; the sections after it go through them one at a time.
| Line | How it is billed | Can it be free? |
|---|---|---|
| Domain name | Yearly | No |
| Hosting | Monthly or yearly, often paid years upfront | Sometimes, for a simple site |
| https padlock (SSL certificate) | Should not be billed at all | Yes |
| Business email on your own domain | Per person, per month | Forwarding, often; a full mailbox, usually not |
| Booking or appointment tool | Monthly, if you need more than the basics | Starter plans, yes |
| Updates and fixes | Depends on how the site was built | Sometimes |
The domain: a small yearly bill, and the one never to miss.
The domain is your address, such as yourcafe.com, and it is rented a year at a time. The registry that runs each ending sets a wholesale price, and the registrar you buy from adds its own margin. For .com, Verisign is raising the wholesale fee for “each new and renewal .com domain name registration” “from $10.26 to $10.97 effective Nov. 1, 2026” (Verisign, SEC filing, 23 April 2026). For .uk, Nominet charges its registrars “£3.90 per annum” before VAT (Nominet).
What you pay depends mostly on the registrar. Some sell at cost: Cloudflare says its registrar “does not mark up domain prices at all” (Cloudflare). Some charge the same every year: Porkbun lists .com at $11.08 for registration and renewal alike, with “no inflated first-year rates, no surprise renewal hikes” (Porkbun). That is Porkbun’s price before Verisign’s 1 November rise, so expect it to go up by about the 71 cents Verisign is adding.
Others advertise a cheap first year. IONOS lists a .com at $1 as an “Intro offer” (IONOS); Hostinger lists one at one cent for the first year, “applicable when you choose a 3-year term” (Hostinger). Neither page puts the renewal price beside the offer. A free domain bundled with hosting is the same idea: “After the first year, the domain will automatically renew at the then current rate” (Bluehost). None of that is wrong. It just means the first-year price is not the price.
Try this now
Log in to wherever your domain is registered and find two things: the renewal price, not the price you first paid, and whose name is on the registration. It should be yours or your business’s, not your web designer’s. Then turn on auto-renew and check the card on file.
Hosting: read the renewal price, not the first one.
Hosting is the computer your site lives on. For a small business there are two kinds, and they cost very different amounts.
The first is shared hosting, the usual choice for WordPress and similar sites. At both hosts in the table below, the advertised monthly price is for the first term, paid upfront, and the renewal is between two and a half and four and a half times higher. Hostinger’s small print is plain about it: “All plans are paid upfront” and “The monthly rate reflects the total plan price divided by the number of months in your plan” (Hostinger).
| Plan | First term | Renews at |
|---|---|---|
| Hostinger Premium (US) | $2.49 a month, 48 months paid upfront ($119.52) | $10.99 a month |
| Hostinger Premium (UK) | £2.39 a month, 48 months paid upfront (£114.72) | £10.99 a month |
| Hostinger Premium (India) | ₹139 a month, 48 months paid upfront (₹6,672) | ₹449 a month |
| Bluehost Starter (US) | $3.99 a month, 36 months paid upfront ($143.64) | $9.99 a month |
The second kind is static hosting, for a site that is a set of finished pages rather than software that runs on every visit. Many brochure sites for a café, a salon or a trade can be built this way, and on some hosts the hosting costs nothing. Cloudflare says “Requests to static assets are free and unlimited” (Cloudflare Docs), within limits on the number and size of files that a small site does not come near (Cloudflare Docs).
Free is not the same everywhere, though, and the terms matter for a business. Vercel’s free Hobby plan is “restricted to non-commercial personal use only” (Vercel). GitHub Pages “is not intended for or allowed to be used as a free web-hosting service” for an online business, an online shop or a site mainly there to sell (GitHub Docs). Netlify’s free plan works on monthly credits, and “your sites will automatically pause if they exceed monthly limits” (Netlify Docs). Ask whoever builds your site which host it will be on, and whether that host’s free plan allows a business.
The https padlock should cost nothing.
The padlock in the address bar comes from an SSL certificate, and it has been free for years. Let’s Encrypt, a non-profit certificate authority, puts it simply: “Anyone who owns a domain name can use Let’s Encrypt to obtain a trusted certificate at zero cost” (Let’s Encrypt). Most hosts set it up automatically.
It is not optional any more. Since October 2026, Chrome shows a warning before opening a public site that is not on https (Google, 21 Oct 2026); the Business Profile changes article has a quick way to check yours. If a host or a package lists the certificate as a paid extra for an ordinary small business site, ask what you are getting that the free one does not give.
Email on your own domain is charged per person.
An address like hello@yourcafe.com reads better on a van than a free webmail address, and it is the line most likely to grow, because it is billed per person. Google Workspace Business Starter is “$7 USD per user” a month on an annual plan. On the flexible plan it is $8.40, and you can cancel “at any time without a penalty”. On the annual plan you commit to the full year, and still owe the rest of it if you cancel early (Google Workspace Help). In India the Starter plan is listed at ₹270 a user a month with a one-year commitment, before tax (Google Workspace India).
Microsoft’s equivalent was due to rise this summer. In December 2025 Microsoft announced a price change “across all purchasing channels effective July 1, 2026” (Microsoft Partner Center), and The Register reported that “Business Basic will increase from $6 to $7 per month” (The Register, 5 Dec 2025). Check Microsoft’s own pricing page for the figure in your currency.
So a business with two people on email pays two seats. If only one person reads the mail, one mailbox with a second address pointing at it is usually enough. Ask before adding a seat for everyone who might send an email once a year.
Booking tools and updates: optional, and often where the creep starts.
A booking tool is worth paying for when it fills the diary, and many start free. Calendly’s free plan is “Always free” with “One event type” (Calendly). SimplyBook.me’s free plan includes up to 50 bookings a month for one provider (SimplyBook.me). A one-person business with one kind of appointment may never need more. The bookings article covers what the booking page itself should say.
Updates depend on how the site was built. WordPress itself is free: “WordPress is open source software” (WordPress.org). The paid parts are the extras around it, and they are usually yearly licences. Yoast SEO Premium is “$118.80 / year (ex VAT)” (Yoast); the Divi theme is “$89 billed yearly” (Elegant Themes). A site with several of these carries several renewals, plus someone’s time to apply the updates.
A static site has far less to update, because there is no software running on the server to patch. The trade-off is that changing a page usually means asking whoever built it, rather than logging in yourself. Decide which matters more to you before the build, not after. The planning article works through that choice.
Add it up: what a simple site costs a month.
Here are the sums for a café with a .com, two people on email and a free booking plan. The first column uses shared hosting at its renewal price; the second uses free static hosting. They use the prices linked above, in US dollars.
| Line | On shared hosting | On free static hosting |
|---|---|---|
| Domain, .com, one year | $11.08 | $11.08 |
| Hosting, at the renewal price | $10.99 × 12 = $131.88 | $0 |
| https padlock | $0 | $0 |
| Email, two people on annual Workspace | $7 × 12 × 2 = $168 | $168 |
| Booking, free plan | $0 | $0 |
| A year | $310.96 | $179.08 |
| A month | About $26 | About $15 |
Two things stand out. Most of the bill is email, not the website. And the biggest swing is the hosting, which is why its renewal price is worth reading before the first term, not at the end of it. Neither total is large. The point is to know which lines you pay for, and which ones can go up at renewal.
Before you sign up for anything monthly.
- You know the renewal price of the domain, not just what you first paid, and it is registered in your name.
- Auto-renew is on for the domain, and the card on file is valid.
- You know the hosting’s renewal price and how many months the first term locks you in for.
- If the hosting is free, the host’s terms allow a business to use it.
- The https padlock is on, and nobody is charging you extra for it.
- You pay for email seats only for the people who need their own mailbox.
- Any booking tool, plugin or theme licence has its renewal date in the calendar.
- You have added up a year of running costs and divided by twelve, honestly.
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A few common questions.
How much does a small business website cost per month to run?
For a simple site with two people on email, roughly 15 to 26 US dollars a month once it is built, and most of that is email. A .com domain is about 11 dollars a year, shared hosting renews at around 10 to 11 dollars a month at two of the big hosts, the https certificate is free, and Google Workspace is 7 dollars per person a month on an annual plan. The lower figure is a site on free static hosting; the higher one is shared hosting at its renewal price. Builder subscriptions are priced differently, as one fee.
Why did my hosting bill go up so much after the first term?
Because the advertised price was the first term, usually paid upfront for three or four years. Renewal is at the standard rate, which at the two large hosts checked here is two to four times higher: one plan sold at 2.49 dollars a month renews at 10.99. Check the renewal price on the host's pricing page before you sign up.
Do I have to pay for the https padlock?
No. Let's Encrypt issues trusted certificates at no cost to anyone who owns a domain, and most hosts set them up automatically. Since October 2026 Chrome shows a warning before opening a public site without https, so make sure it is on, but it should not be a paid extra.
Can I host a business website for free?
Sometimes. A site made of finished pages can sit on a free static host, but read the terms: Vercel's free plan is for non-commercial personal use only, GitHub Pages does not allow free hosting for an online business, a shop or any site mainly for selling, and Netlify's free plan pauses a site that goes over its monthly credits. Ask whoever builds the site which host it will use and whether the free plan allows a business.
Is the domain included in my hosting or builder plan?
Often for the first year only. Bundled free domains usually renew at the normal rate after year one. Find the renewal price, and make sure the domain is registered in your name, so you can move the site later without losing the address.
What is the cheapest line to cut?
Usually email seats. Each person with their own mailbox is billed every month, so a business where one person reads all the mail can often use one mailbox with extra addresses pointing at it. The domain is the line never to cut: if it lapses, the website and the email both stop.
