How Much Does Your Website Cost You?

If you are making a website for profit it is a good idea know how much it is costing you month on month. There are two reasons for this.

The first is that you now have a concrete goal to shoot for when it comes to monthly earnings from the site, to be in profit you naturally need to be making more than what it is costing you.

The second is that we can see where we might be able to make savings to bring the cost of the website down per month. This is something that is often overlooked but can be huge - it is way easier to move down a hosting plan to save £50 a month than it sometimes is to earn an extra £50 a month on a new website.

What I do and what I advise you do is create a spreadsheet and for each of the following items jot down an estimated price per month;

• Hosting Costs - This is how much you pay your hosting company monthly.
• Domain Registration Costs - This is often forgotten as it is usually paid up front for a year or more, but some TLDs are mighty expensive!
• Other Hosting Costs - Perhaps you have additional email servers, things like that
• Backup Costs - If these aren’t rolled into your hosting costs you should take a note of them.
• Staff Costs - If you employ anyone to do anything on the site put down how much you pay them per month.
• Time you spend on the site - This is a major one, give yourself a modest hourly rate, then work out how often you spend on the site or answering emails about the site or doing anything related to the site on a monthly basis.

Here is an example spreadsheet that I use.