What does it cost to host a website?
By: Richard Detering
Tags: Web Hosting Services, Web Hosting, Web Hosting Review, Web Hosting Company, Web Hosting Provider

Photo by Jp Valery on Unsplash

For most websites, web hosting costs between $2 and $20 per month. This is valid for shared hosting, the cheapest type of hosting. Dedicated hosting, on the other hand, can cost up to $1,000 per month.

Between these two extremes, however, you will find countless intermediate forms. There are many types of hosting you can choose from. There are also quite a few variables that determine exactly which hosting you need for your site and how much it will cost.

In this article I discuss all types of hosting and how much is web hosting per month. In addition, after reading this article you will know exactly what type of hosting you need for your site.

Table of Contents.

What does web hosting cost: types of web hosting and costs

Shared hosting

What does shared hosting cost?

For which websites is shared hosting suitable?

VPS hosting

How much does VPS hosting cost?

For which websites is VPS hosting suitable?

Cloud hosting

How much does cloud hosting cost?

For which websites is cloud hosting suitable?

Dedicated hosting

How much does dedicated hosting cost?

For which websites is dedicated hosting suitable?

WordPress hosting

Extra web hosting costs to take into account

Domain Name Registration

Email service

How much does it cost to change web host?

Why you shouldn’t always want to pay as little as possible for hosting

What does web hosting cost: types of web hosting and costs.



Shared hosting.

With shared web hosting you share a web server with other websites. This makes it the cheapest form of hosting you can find. Most websites run on this type of hosting.

What does shared hosting cost?

Shared hosting costs between $2 and $20 per month. The exact costs depend on the quality of the hosting provider and the hosting package that you purchase.

For which websites is shared hosting suitable?

For most websites, shared hosting is the best solution. If you’re starting a website for the first time, it’s a good idea to use shared hosting. I myself use it for all my new sites and only transfer a site to another type of hosting from about 20,000 monthly visitors.

VPS hosting

VPS stands for Virtual Private Server. Just like with shared hosting, you share a physical server with other websites, but you get your own virtual partition on this server.

How much does VPS hosting cost?

You can get the cheapest VPS from about $10 per month. For a quality VPS you pay a little more, usually $25 per month. The heavier VPS hosting packages cost more than $100 per month.

For which websites is VPS hosting suitable?

A VPS is suitable for medium-sized sites, from 50,000 monthly visitors. However, this is not an exact science: for ecommerce sites that use a lot of resources, for example, it can be logical to set up a VPS with much fewer visitors.

A VPS is also a smart choice for websites that handle a lot of sensitive data.

Remember, you do need some technical knowledge to set up a VPS. It’s not as simple as using shared hosting.

Cloud hosting.

With cloud hosting, your website is distributed across multiple servers. This makes it a more robust solution than both a VPS and shared hosting. Should a server fail, other servers can immediately take over the hosting task.

How much does cloud hosting cost?

It depends on how many resources you use. Count on at least $50 a month and this varies from month to month, depending on what you’ve used.

For which websites is cloud hosting suitable?

Cloud hosting is a good choice for larger, fast-growing websites that need flexibility in resources. Cloud hosting can be scaled up and down quite easily. For example, if you expect a large traffic wave, you can quickly configure more server resources to accommodate this wave.

It’s usually a few years before websites really need cloud hosting.

Dedicated hosting.

With dedicated hosting you have a server all to yourself. You do not share resources with other websites.

How much does dedicated hosting cost?

For dedicated hosting you usually pay $500 per month or more. Some sites pay thousands of dollars per month for their dedicated hosting.

For which websites is dedicated hosting suitable?

Generally websites that receive millions of visitors per month. Or websites of large multinationals.

For most people, dedicated hosting will never come up.

WordPress hosting.

You may have come across the term “WordPress hosting”. WordPress hosting can be shared hosting, but it can also be cloud hosting, for example.

Actually, the term refers to extra service that a hosting provider offers to make their hosting more suitable for WordPress sites. Such as extra security, automatic updates and a helpdesk full of WordPress experts.

Extra web hosting costs to take into account.

Web hosting often comes with some “hidden” costs that you may not immediately think of when you start a site. Here are the main ones.

Domain name registration.

Usually costs between $8 and $15 per year.

You can register a domain name with most web hosting providers. Some hosting providers give you a free domain name for a year.

Email service.

Usually costs between $7 and $10 per month per user.

Many hosting providers give you free email, but this email service is often not the best.

How much does it cost to change web host?

It’s free if you do it yourself. Some premium web hosting providers will do it for you in the form of a free move. Other hosting providers can also do it for you, but charge about $20.

Why you should not always want to pay as little as possible for hosting

It makes sense that you want to save on hosting as a new entrepreneur or when you set up a site as a hobby project.

However, when you are making significant turnover, it is no longer logical to pay the lowest hosting fees. At such a time, please spend more than a few dollars per month on your web hosting. Then you have at least the guarantee of good quality.