How Much Does it Cost to Start a Blog on the Internet?

How much does it cost to start a blog or a small static website is the first question most bloggers and small businesses ask. This guide takes you through the setup and recurring costs of setting up your own blog or a simple (WordPress based) website.

This guide assumes that you want to set up a blog with your own domain name and with a reliable (but not very expensive) web host. This also assumes that you will be using the platform of choice WordPress for your blog.

Blog Set Up Cost

The initial blog set up cost is broken down into two costs – one for getting your own domain name (e.g. petersdogcare.com) and the other for renting a place to host your blog. Most good domain registration and top web hosting companies offer heavy discounts for new users offering as much as 80% discounts. This guide considers blog set up costs as costs incurred for the first year of running your blog.

Domain Name Cost

You can get a domain name from a registrar like Godaddy.com at between $1-$2 for the first year. So the initial cost of registering your domain name is $2. Many hosts like SiteGround and BlueHost offer free domain names along with their hosting plans so this cost also gets eliminated.

Web Hosting Cost

You can get shared hosting from a good host like SiteGround for as low as $4 per month. The WordPress blogging platform is free and since you are a beginner, you can use free WordPress themes eliminating the need to buy premium themes like Genesis. So, the cost of web hosting for the first year will be $48 per month. When you buy an annual plan, you get the domain name free. Most hosts will offer you hosting extras like SiteLock and Domain Privacy, but again, as a beginner, you are better off not buying any of them till you really feel you need them.

Hence, the total cost for the first year for setting up your blog comes to be around $50 including both domain name registration and web hosting.

Recurring Costs for Running a Blog

It is usually a painful process to move hosts. Moving hosts can potentially damage your search rankings too. Since switching web hosts has its challenges, most people usually continue with their web hosts. That is one of the key reasons hosting companies provide huge discounts to new users. This also means that the recurring costs of running a blog increase significantly after the first discounted period is over.

Domain Name Cost

Domain names renew at $10-$15 depending on the type of domain (.com, .org, .info etc) and on your domain registration company. Again, some web hosting companies like SiteGround and BlueHost continue to keep domain renewal free as long as you are hosting with them.

Web Hosting Cost

Renewal of your shared hosting plan will cost you $10 per month. That works out to about $120 per year. Some web hosts allow you to purchase hosting at their initial discounted rates for a period as high as 3 years. It is worth going for this offer if you are confident that you will continue to host your blog with that hosting company. However, there is a downside to this – as the entire amount has to be paid upfront, you are left in a spot in case you decide to change web hosts.

So How Much Does it Cost to Run a Blog?

As we saw above, the first-year cost to start a blog (including domain name registration and web hosting) is around $50 and recurring costs from the next year onward tend to be $120 per year.

This estimate, of course, is true for a moderately successful blog receiving daily traffic of up to 10,000 visitors. If your traffic is more than this, then a simple shared hosting plan won’t suffice. You will need to invest in VPS hosting, Cloud hosting or dedicated server hosting.

We hope this guide helped you estimate how much it would cost to set up your first blog. For more details, you can review our Web Hosting Guide or read up on which is our recommended web host for beginners.