What it costs
What does web hosting cost?
Four ways to keep a website online, priced next to each other: the plan that is cheap until it renews, the server you have to patch yourself, the bill that moves with your traffic, and the one already inside a builder's plan. The ranges below are ordinary 2026 market rates in US dollars, with the variables that decide where in each range you land.
Hosting a small-business site usually costs $0–25 a month, plus $10–20 a year for the domain. Shared plans sit at the bottom and renew at two to three times the first term. A VPS — a server you rent and run yourself — starts near $5 and climbs with memory, plus your own maintenance hours. Cloud bills by usage, so traffic moves the bill. Builders fold hosting into one flat plan. What decides your number: whether the site only shows pages or also takes bookings and orders, and whether you or somebody else keeps the server patched.
Where the money actually goes
| Cost line | Typical range |
|---|---|
| Domain | $10–20 / year |
| The hosting plan | $2–10 / month (shared) |
- Domain
- A name is rented from a registrar by the year, never bought outright. A .com is typically $10–20 a year at renewal, and the one-dollar first year is a discount, not a price — compare renewals. Register it in your own name, in an account you control. This single line decides whether you can change hosts later without asking anyone's permission.
- The hosting plan
- Shared hosting runs about $2–10 a month, usually advertised at the low end on a three-year prepay and renewed at two to three times it. A small VPS is roughly $5–25 a month depending on memory. Static hosting on a mainstream cloud platform starts at a free tier — Cloudflare Pages, Netlify and GitHub Pages have all offered one for years — with first paid tiers commonly around $15–25 per user per month. A builder folds this line into its plan; ours does, and what each plan covers is on the pricing page.
- HTTPS
- Zero, and anything else is a warning sign. Let's Encrypt has issued certificates free since 2015, and every serious host now renews them automatically. A separate SSL line on a 2026 quote is a charge for the host's own automation. Sites published from Naratake are served over HTTPS with nothing for you to install.
- Traffic and storage
- The metered line. Shared and VPS plans quote a monthly bandwidth allowance and throttle or bill you past it; usage-billed cloud charges for every gigabyte your site sends out, with no ceiling unless you set one. A text-and-photo site rarely troubles any of them — the usual culprit is uncompressed images, and mobile visitors pull the same megabytes over a worse connection. Video and downloadable files are a separate budget.
- Somebody's time
- On a VPS this is the real cost, and it never appears on the invoice: operating-system patches, web-server config, certificate renewal, backups you have actually tested restoring, and someone reachable when the site is down at two in the morning. Budget a few hours a month at what your hour is worth. On shared, managed-cloud or builder hosting, the provider does this work and it is already inside the fee.
Three routes, one live site
| Route | Typical range |
|---|---|
| A builder, hosting included | $49 / month, $468 / year |
- A builder, hosting included
- One plan, one bill, no server to patch. Naratake works this way: 40 industry starting points that already carry the sections a trade expects — menu, services, booking, quote, listings — plus 15 design styles, 111 components and 66 color sets. Storefront is $49 a month or $468 a year and publishes one site with hosting, automatic HTTPS and one custom domain. Storefront Pro is $79 a month or $758 a year and adds online ordering, bookings, reservations, customer tools and a download of the complete source. That last line is why this route has no ceiling: on Pro the site is yours as files — a real Next.js project, with a working export public at github.com/ctingyi404-cloud/naratake-export-example. Building and previewing cost nothing and need no card, and the first payment on a plan is refundable for 7 days.
- Hire someone
- A freelancer or agency builds the site and often resells you the hosting. Get three answers in writing first: whose name the domain is registered in, who holds the hosting login, and how long a routine text change takes to reach the live site. Ask what that change costs before you ask what the server costs — over three years it is the larger of the two. If the first two answers are "ours", what you are buying is not hosting, it is a lock.
- Run it yourself
- Rent a VPS or a cloud instance and hold the whole stack. Cheapest in cash, most expensive in hours, and you are the on-call engineer. It suits a business that already has someone technical. Our desktop LocalSite Studio fits this route: a one-time purchase that exports the source code, so the output is yours to host wherever you like.
Lines you can cross off
- A separate SSL or HTTPS charge. Free certificates have been the standard since Let's Encrypt launched in 2015, so a host billing for one is billing you for its own automation.
- A dedicated IP address, sold as "required for HTTPS". It has not been required for more than a decade — the shared address that comes with your plan serves HTTPS perfectly well, and every browser your customers use handles it.
- The large plan, bought up front. "Unlimited" comes with a fair-use clause, and a small-business site rarely approaches even the entry tier's limits. Start at the bottom and move up when a real number in your own analytics tells you to.
- Guaranteed-ranking SEO packages and speed "boosters" sold beside the hosting. A host cannot move you up a results page, and the booster is usually the caching your plan already includes. On a small site, most of the real speed comes from smaller images.
Questions people ask about the price
What should I budget for the first year?
For a straightforward small-business site: $10–20 for the domain, plus hosting of anywhere from nothing to about $300 for the year, depending on the route. Prepaid shared hosting is the smallest cash outlay and the largest renewal. A builder plan is flat and already contains pieces you would otherwise buy separately. Whichever you choose, write the second-year price beside the first-year price before deciding — that gap is where the marketing lives.
Is free hosting good enough?
For a page that only shows information, often yes — several large providers have offered a free static tier for years. The limits are the ones a business runs into: no database, so no orders or bookings; support is a community forum; and a free tier is a commercial decision the provider can revise at any time. Ours is the other shape: building and previewing are free with no card, and $49 a month publishes one site with hosting, automatic HTTPS and one custom domain, with nothing for you to patch and nothing to move when the business grows into ordering. Free is a reasonable place to start and a poor place to leave something the business depends on.
What happens when traffic suddenly spikes?
The four modes fail in different ways, and knowing which one you are on tells you what to expect. On shared hosting you hit the plan's processing limit and the host slows you down: visitors see a site that crawls, or an error page instead of your menu, and a sustained spike can get the account suspended. On a VPS, memory runs out, processes are killed and the site goes down — while the bill does not move. On usage-billed cloud the site stays up and the bill climbs, which is why a budget alert belongs there on day one. On builder hosting the pages are served from a delivery network at a flat price, and the plan's limits are the limits. Static pages absorb a spike far better than database-backed ones do.
Can I move to a different host later?
That is settled before launch by two things: whether the domain is registered in your name, and whether you can get the site's files out. Keep the domain in your own registrar account and switching hosts is a change to where that name points, measured in hours rather than in a negotiation. On our side both answers are written down: one custom domain on either cloud plan, and Storefront Pro downloads the complete source — that export is exactly what you would hand a new host.
Before you price a host, price the whole site. Our free website cost calculator puts a builder, an agency and your own hours on one three-year total, with no sign-up. Once you have your number, the pricing page shows what our plans cover and where they stop.