Costs You Cannot Escape

Published July 5, 2011 |

You already know how much you pay you monthly Internet bill, and we have spoken about the cost of the domain name, but what are the other costs that you cannot escape if you are to have your website. Surely website hosting and if working with the content management systems, the basic website maintenance.

Website Hosting

Quite often, your Internet Providers would also offer web hosting services. Quite often, they are not specialized in working with community organizations. If they offer cutting edge services for large corporations and e-commerce, they will have a lot of characteristics that are not essential for nonprofits, which can make the price be a bit too much for many. Usually, those prices start from 15$ of 19$ per month.

Be sure to look for a company, local if possible, that will understand your needs and funding, and start with decent packages from 4.99$ per month. What is a decent package then? You should discuss the website requirements with your web developer, but you should have:

- free Domain Name

- at least 1 data base, since all content management systems need those;

- at least 1 Gig of Disk Space for your data;

- supports automatic installation for the CMS of your choice

- some free services such as free Control Panel with web statistics, free anti-virus spam, free Webmail, free technical support and free daily backups

You can also choose among those that are trying to minimize their footprint and that run their servers with the least possible negative impact on the environment. See here for Canadian Web Hosting Review s or recommended hosting companies by TechSoup Canada.

Free and shared hosting

For start-ups on the Web, you might get offered free or shared hosting. The free hosting services come with a different kind of price. Either the services they offer are too limited in terms of space and data flow or they automatically include their advertising on all the pages of your website. The shared hosting gives benefits of shared cost and peer-support, but the security remains low and control panel options are sometimes limited for the software that can be installed or web statistics.

Free web pages

If your website will stay a simple presentation for a long time where you only want to update your events and news, then there are web-based services that do not require you to have a domain or a rented server space for your website. You can make your web pages on blogging engines such as Blogger or WordPress. WordPress especially offers more and more applications, additional software that makes websites highly dynamic and adaptable.

Website Maintenance

Content management systems need to be updated all the time. With new versions of the software not only its features improve but the overall security gets better. Someone needs to make those software upgrades for you if there are no volunteers or staff that know enough about it.

What we have encountered, as we are sure you did too, is that life with technologies is sometimes full of unpredictable situations. Websites got hi-jacked for spamming, backup quotas have been exceeded, domain names expired, and while the unpredictables are getting resolved, you want to make sure that the last version of your website is safe and secured.

It is wise to pay monthly or yearly minimum fees and keep your web technician handy – starting as low as 100$ per year covering at least two software upgrades and website backups as frequent as needed.

Staff Contribution

If you have one or two staff working on regular updates of your web pages – the minimum you will have to budget is 10% up to 30% of their salary on an active website or social media page.

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