Website and Hosting Cost Research
Research updated for 2026
How much does web hosting cost?
How much does a domain name cost?
Every registrar buys .com domains at the same wholesale floor, so each price difference above it is margin, promotion or an add-on. This covers first-year pricing, renewal pricing, and where the specialty extensions sit.
How much does it cost to build a website?
The same website can cost a few hundred dollars or several tens of thousands, and who builds it matters far more than what it does. This compares the DIY, freelance and agency routes on what each really costs.
How much does Shopify cost?
The plan fee is the part of Shopify pricing everyone quotes and the smallest part of what most merchants pay. This covers subscriptions, card rates, app spend and the transaction fees that change with how you take payment.
How much does Wix cost?
Wix runs a genuinely free plan alongside four paid tiers, with a gap between monthly and annual billing that catches people out. This covers what each tier includes, which one you need to sell, and what sits outside the plan fee.
How much does Squarespace cost?
Every Squarespace plan can sell online, but the transaction fee changes by tier and the monthly-versus-annual gap is among the widest in the category. This covers what each plan costs and where the fees land.
How much does cloud hosting cost?
Cloud has no sticker price, which makes it the hardest hosting model to budget for. This covers what compute actually runs at across providers, and why data transfer out is the line that surprises people.
How much does VPS hosting cost?
The jump from unmanaged to managed is the largest price step in VPS hosting, and what it buys is labour rather than hardware. This covers both ends of the market and where most plans land.
How much does a dedicated server cost?
Dedicated pricing moved in 2026 for reasons that had nothing to do with hosting margins. This covers budget bare metal through managed enterprise hardware, and why memory-heavy configurations rose fastest.
How much does an SSL certificate cost?
Most sites never need to pay for a certificate, yet paid options run from single digits to five figures a year. This covers what the paid tiers buy, who sells them cheapest, and why certificate lifespans keep shrinking.
How much does email hosting cost?
Business email spans free to premium suite pricing, and the cheapest workable option is often not the suite most people default to. This covers business suites, email-only providers and host-bundled mailboxes.
How much does managed WordPress hosting cost?
Managed WordPress is two markets sharing a name, separated by roughly a tenfold price gap. This covers budget host-branded plans, premium specialists, and the visit overages that sit outside both.
How much does a CDN cost?
For most websites a CDN costs nothing, which makes the paid tiers harder to evaluate than they look. This covers the split between flat-rate plans and per-gigabyte billing, and when each starts to make sense.
How much do web hosting resellers and agencies charge?
Reseller margins look extraordinary on paper and considerably thinner once support, billing and churn are counted. This covers what plans cost, what agencies charge clients, and what the model needs to work.
How much does WooCommerce cost?
WooCommerce is free, which is the least useful fact about what a WooCommerce store costs. This covers hosting, extensions, development and payment processing, and what a lean store spends against a growing one.
How much does website downtime cost?
Downtime cost is the figure that turns an uptime SLA from a technical detail into a business decision. This covers what an hour offline costs by company size and sector, and how much downtime each SLA tier permits.
These pages answer what things cost across the market. They are the right starting point when you are budgeting, benchmarking a quote or working out whether a price is reasonable.
When you have actual numbers to run, use a tool instead. The hosting calculators price a specific setup from figures you enter, including the renewal rates these pages describe.
Return to all research or browse the full calculator library.