Imagine a small-business brochure site. Static HTML, little enough volume and bandwidth to not hit limits for “entry level” hosting. There’s a registered domain name (.co.uk) and it needs to be “competent” for levels of quality, support etc.What does it cost? Specifically, what does annual web hosting cost? I’m assuming that name reg charges are all much of a muchness these days (£10 / year).
Why I ask is that I’ve been approached yet again to host something, piggybacked on my own developer account, and the customer is squeaking that my trivial extra cost is “too much”. Now I know you can get it cheaper (or free) but only by dealing with cowboys. In my experience people who quibble over this often don’t understand enough about business to be in business. If they get by it will be more by luck than anything else. Personally I wouldn’t host an important business web site for anything less than £10 a month, let alone per year. If your web site makes you money then you want to be sure that the people who provide it are there for you when it counts. Anyone whose business fails because of £100 a year spent on hosting has the wrong model IMHO.
While I’m making a blanket statement here, I’ve found that generally decent hosting tends to cost about $10 (CDN or US) a month. Before a client of mine let me host all my stuff on his server (which he bills between $10- 40 CDN a month for other client hosting), I tended to stick with Verio; Expensive, to be sure, but those sites just plain *did not* go down. Customer service from them, surprisingly enough for a massive company, has always been phenominal. (Current client has a couple of load-balanced, dedicated machines on the Verio/NTT network and tech support is amazing).