08 Sep Web Design Pricing
When you get ready to start pricing a website design project with your web development vendor, be sure to keep in mind the extras that can increase the price initially and over time. They may seem to be small, but they can add up over time and should be factored into your budget, and weighed for how much they benefit your S.M.A.R.T. Goals.
Website Hosting
One of your biggest ongoing expenses in website design pricing can be website hosting. when you start your project, your developer should help you with a consideration and review of current and future traffic demands. Once you have reviewed those numbers, you should choose a hosting solution that best matches your traffic.
Hosting solutions range from a shared server that hosts several hundred or thousand websites at one of the major providers, to a virtual private server (VPS), to dedicated cloud servers.
Shared servers have the benefit of extremely low cost, and should be considered for low traffic websites that don’t need a lot of horsepower. Their cost is usually in the range of $3-9 a month.
Virtual private servers are servers that you lease a portion of their memory, processor and disk space. Those resources are guaranteed for your website, but can sometimes be compromised if another user on the server abuses their resources – intentionally or unintentionally. Their cost is usually in the range of $20-200 a month.
With the rise of cloud servers and their decrease in costs, the cloud is becoming a very competitive option for website and applications from very large down to single medium traffic sites. Cloud servers can be provisioned quickly from a provider such as Amazon, and is a step above the VPS in reliability and power. Your business can utilize anything from a single 0.5 GB server to redundant systems made up of hundreds or 32 GB servers in an array. Their cost starts out at $10 a month and can go into the millions with a large enough application. At a price point that low, however, they start to look like a great solution for websites that have more than 1000 visitors a month.
Domain Name
An extra expense that can be range from a few dollars a year up into the millions is your domain name or URL. Websites like Namecheap offer domain names that are available starting at less than $1 a year.
Domains that are already purchased by other companies might be available for purchase. Their prices will depend on traffic numbers and search engine optimization that has been completed for the current website on the domain name. Domains that are available for transfer often start out around $2,500.
If you have a need for a domain name with a lot of intellectual property or brand value, however, prices shoot up quickly.
A small extra cost add-on that you might want to consider is privacy protection. For around $2 a year, many domain registrars will hide your contact details to shield who owns the domain name and block you from receiving spam.
Cloudflare – DDOS
A Distributed Denial of Service Attack is a security risk that is cropping up more and more often. During a DDOS attack, hundreds or thousands of compromised computers are used to direct so much traffic towards a server or system that the system is unable to handle the onslaught and is vulnerable to hackers. Another reason you might be hit with a DDOS is economic, if your website is down you competitors benefit.
Pricing ranges from a free service for the most basic protection to several thousands of dollars per month. You really have to take a look at the cost versus benefit. If you get caught in the middle of a DDOS, you might have to spend several hundred dollars or more to change server configurations or mitigate damage.
Maintenance and Security
One of the most forgotten expenses when it comes to VPS or Cloud servers is ongoing maintenance and security. A small amount of monthly work can help to avoid costly downtime and rebuilding later.
You should consider a monthly maintenance agreement with your website developer to make sure that your web server and content management system are kept up to date. Patches are regularly released to fix issues that could be used maliciously, or to improve performance. You should take advantage of those patches to make your website faster and more secure from attack.
My final recommendation in this article is to use an SSL or Secure Socket Layer Certificate. SSL’s range from $10 a year to $200, depending on their features. Search engines, like Google, prefer secure servers and will give you bonus ranking points in the search engine ranking algorithms. It will also raise your customers’ perceptions of your website when they see the secure icon. SSLs will also help secure your data during transmission, which will help protect customer information and make hackers’ jobs more difficult.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the list of extra website design costs that you might not have considered can be fairly long. But, but weighing the benefits of these against their cost you can begin to form a long term plan to help your investment perform better over time.