A Four-Leaf Clover
The tricky part of websites is that there are four pieces involved:
- Your domain or URL
- Hosting the site, or where the files live
- Email using your site’s domain address
- The site itself, which a designed usually provides
Domains
Your domain or URL (Uniform Resource Locator) is what you type into an address box of a browser to bring your site up. Examples include:
You must purchase a domain from a Registrar, which is a for-profit company that will charge you roughly $10-15 per domain per year. Examples of registrars include:
And many more…
Your domain account should be in YOUR name, not your webmaster. We recommend you set up your own account. Your domain name is way too important to your business, especially after several years of built-up web traffic to it. We’ve had all sorts of problems when a previous webmaster had the domain in their name. We even had a client have to wait until the company that owned the domain got out of bankruptcy.
Be sure to keep your domain renewed each year. Losing it and trying to get it back will cost about $100 — IF you can get it back. If you fail to renew and your grace period ends, someone else can register that domain. A little trivia: I used to own CPELink.com a long, long time ago.
Hosting
Your website needs a “home” and a hosting company provides the servers that your website files and database are stored on. We use www.HostGator.com , and if you choose to set up a WordPress site, we recommend it exclusively. (We can’t get a good backup on just about any other hosting company, especially GoDaddy.com).
You can have two different companies for hosting and domain. In your domain control panel, you change the nameservers to point to the hosting server, and that’s how they “know about each other.”
You should expect to pay anywhere from $100 per year if you do this yourself or about $200 per year for the very basic of sites with email and some support thrown in. (YES, most of you are paying too much if you are “renting” your site!). If you need more space or special requirements, the fees can go much higher. We have one client who pays a little over $1,000 per year, but this is very unusual.
Your hosting company provides email services. In your hosting control panel, there is a place to add your email accounts. Then you can set them up in Outlook or your email software.
However, more and more of you are choosing third-party email providers, such as Office 365 or Outlook.com, or you may have your own Exchange servers. In that case, there is another place within the hosting control panel you can set (called MX – mail exchange- records) so that it points to the third-party provider. Your third-party should provide instructions to your hosting company (or IT person) because sometimes, you’ll have more domain-related records (Like CNAME and TXT) you need to set up.
The Website Itself
The website itself is a set of files that reside on the hosting server. You access them through your browser by entering your URL or domain. Hopefully, your visitors can find your site if they know the domain name or by searching for your name, company name, city, or service.
Your site might also have a CMS or content
Your site can be coded in lots of different languages or platforms. We use and recommend WordPress (wordpress.org, not wordpress.com). It has a great dashboard, serving as that CMS I mentioned above. It has a blog built in, and the search engines rank it higher over other sites because it’s considered a blog, and blogs rank higher than regular sites.
The cost of a website varies greatly. A starter site with little customization could go for an initial $750 fee. A site that will really start to pay back for you will go for about $2,500 one-time fee including the copywriting. Ongoing maintenance can range from nothing to hundreds of dollars a month.
Putting It All Together
When you have a website, you’ll have vendor relationships with a registrar, a hosting provider (which could be through your webmaster as it is with us), a webmaster (which could be someone on your staff), and optionally, a third-party email provider.
As you’re budgeting for your website, it’s good to keep in mind these cost components. And if something goes wrong with your website, it’s good to know a little bit about who does what and how they all interact.