How Much Does It Cost To Run Your Website?

Someone asked me about what I spent in a year to have the site up. I told them about 10$ a year and they couldn’t believe it with everything that is on here. In fact, if I didn’t care about the URL it would be free. So today, I thought I’d break down how I do it.

The 10$ cost is from the URL, I registered godaddy.com, they charge $9.99 a year for a domain name.

Where you kind of need to get lucky is hosting. When I started up the website I searched for a free host. At first I found some bad hosts, but then I got lucky and found 110mb.com, I got in early enough that they were offering free mysql, php, fsockopen, curl, which are all things you need to get the most out of wordpress (the blogging software that this site is running on). Unfortunately they do not offer this free anymore, except to people who had it at the time, and had helped others in the support forums they run (so I qualify). I haven’t had to look since 110mb.com has been pretty good to me, but if you look around you could probably still find some decent free hosting.

For pictures, there are lots of free options out there. I started with picasa (free with space limitations), but I was going to outgrow it, I thought about flickr (the free account didn’t cut it for me), and ended up with Zooomr (its free account meets my needs, but I like the service so much I might upgrade to a pro account in the future to support them). Truth be told, there are lots of free places to host pictures, your host might even give you enough space to host it on your own site (I could do that here, but I prefer to have it separate).

Hosting video’s was an interesting one. I was going to go with Youtube.com but the quality of the video was really really bad. I looked at Vimeo which looks like an up and comer, and a good quality one at that. In the end I went with blip.tv. You can upload different file formats so people can get them in whatever format they want (good quality, mediocre quality, quick small little just play it on the web instantly streaming but still better than youtube quality). I like that people can download the video and have it, if they want to. It will be a good way to get first moments in video, and sharing it with family. They even offer itunes feeds, so people can subscribe to me in itunes, and everytime itunes launches it will check to see if I uploaded a new video, if I have it will download it for them automatically, it doesn’t get easier than that. To top it all off, you choose if you have commercials in your videos, and if you do they split the money with you 50/50. I’ll be commercial free of course, its nice to not have commercials forced on you though. Oh yeah, the price is good too (free).

So if you are interested in making your own website, you can do it, and it doesn’t have to cost a lot.

Tag: go daddy