The general basic costs of owning your own site

As a general rule you can expect to pay around $50 to $100 a year
for the average website. This is counting only basic hosting and
domain name registration and a brief look at software.

This will give you a general idea of your costs…

Hosting: Prices tend to vary from host to host depending on
what kind of hosting package you get. on average the lowest
price is around $3 to $4 USD for a month but many hosts offer
lower prices for paying by the year and some even give deeper
discounts if you buy several years worth of hosting in advance.

Domain name registration: On average you will pay around $10
to $15 per year for a .com. One service most registrars offer is
a private domain name. This means that you own the name
but you pay a modest fee (usually around $9 a year) for a
company like Domains by Proxy to protect your private
information by listing their address and contact information
instead of your’s. Some people argue that using a service like
this is not a good idea but I disagree with them. Anyone that
knows where to look can perform a WHOIS on your domain name
and get your private information without you being any the
wiser. However if they have to come to your site you do at
least have a log showing that someone was looking for how
to contact you.

Software: With the wide variety of open source software
available it is doubtful that most people would need to buy
their software unless they are looking for specific features
that are only available in some paid softwares. This blog
and the other software used on this site are all open source
and free for anyone to use. Now if you want to buy your
software the prices can vary greatly. A Flashchat by tufat.com
costs $5 whereas some more sophisticated “scripts” can run
well into the hundreds.