how much does an internet site cost to run?

[Mystic Muse]

the title says it all. how much do you have to pay for your own website and are there ways to avoid paying? legally of course.

[adanedhel9]

Depending on your exact needs, you might be able to get away without paying anything. There's a variety of sites that will do free web hosting, so long as you play by their rules (which can include ads, layout, web address, and even content limitations).

But if you want a real hosting solution, it'll really depend on how much you want to do yourself and how much load you expect to use.

I pretty much do everything myself for a very small load. I pay the electric bill and the internet bill (both of which I would be paying anyway, only the electric is slightly higher), plus the opportunity cost associated with maintaining the whole thing myself. That's about as low as you can go.

If you don't want to host yourself, the minimum plan at GoDaddy is about $5/month. But if your site gets popular, the minimum plan isn't going to cut it for long - and much like Rich, you'll have to spend a fair amount of money to maintain an ever-escalating set of servers and pipes.

And that's all before you put anything on the site. A professionally-designed site will probably cost you some as well, though I have no idea how much. Again, you can do this yourself, depending on your level of skill, interest, and time.

[Prime32]

You get what you pay for, basically. There are free services, but it's impossible to run a large, professional site on one for many reasons.

[AstralFire]

For a basic site like mine, I pay $5/mo for hosting and $10/yr for the domain name. It's pretty cheap. I can't do anything more advanced than PHP or MySQL with it, though, like running it as a server for anything that needs root access.

[factotum]

What it largely comes down to is bandwidth. If you want a nice small site that's not going to get much traffic then you can use a free hosting site, or you can do it on the cheap like AstralFire. Once your site gets popular and starts using a lot of bandwidth (not to mention a lot more horsepower on the web server), THAT's when you start paying the big money.

[AstralFire]

I believe I get a terabyte of bandwidth monthly, which is hardly low unless you're an extremely popular or color-image-dominated site. Just takes some hunting. :D CPU processing power is really more of a restriction than bandwidth these days unless you're in the big boys club, and even then - GitP's technical issues were CPU, not bandwidth.

[valadil]

It depends on what you're trying to do. A simple homepage can be had for free. You can host your own server and then the only cost is an ISP and electric bill.

Any real site will have its own domain name. Registering that is usually $10 per year. I think you can find a nameserver for free or get that included with the purchase of a domain name. This is the part that says that myawesomesite.com points to your server's IP address.

I used to leave my desktop on all the time and use that as a server but the electricity cost for that was higher than just buying space on a server elsewhere. I give dreamhost $10 a month and they give me 300gb of space to store my sites. They're limited to php and mysql (and maybe Ruby but I haven't really tried that yet). If that's all you want they're pretty reasonable, but if you're interested in writing your own server software they'll shut you down after a couple days.

[Mystic Muse]

I was thinking of using the site as a simple means of getting people to read a book I'm going to write and allow comments to see if it's any good and what needs changing.

[Fri]

Why don't you simply have a blog? I used to have a small site, but maintaining it was such a bother. A blog is much easier to mantain.

[Mystic Muse]

because my internet-fu is terrible and I know nothing about blogging.

I feel embarrassed. I know absolutely nothing about the internet.

[factotum]

I was thinking of using the site as a simple means of getting people to read a book I'm going to write and allow comments to see if it's any good and what needs changing.

Do you have any plans to get this book published at some point? Because if you have, putting it online for everyone to read (even in a very early form) would immediately kill those plans--a publisher is going to want first publishing rights for your work, and they can't have that if it's already effectively in the public domain.

[Mystic Muse]

Do you have any plans to get this book published at some point? Because if you have, putting it online for everyone to read (even in a very early form) would immediately kill those plans--a publisher is going to want first publishing rights for your work, and they can't have that if it's already effectively in the public domain.

possibly. haven't decided yet.

okay. off topic question. how much does it cost to publish a book?

[valadil]

because my internet-fu is terrible and I know nothing about blogging.

I feel embarrassed. I know absolutely nothing about the internet.

Nothing wrong with that. I think a blog would be a better place for you to start. Basically running a blog is a lot like posting in a forum except that you're the only one allowed to make posts and everyone else gets to comment. I'd suggest getting an account with blogger, blogspot, or wordpress and going with that.

If you intend to publish your book, you may not want to put too much online as has been pointed out. Do you have any other writing samples you could start with instead?

[Zencao]

okay. off topic question. how much does it cost to publish a book?

Absolutely nothing. If you send it to a publisher and they like it, they pay YOU :D Amazing isn't it?

Any publisher that asks for money from you is a scam. Don't trust them.

[Prime32]

Absolutely nothing. If you send it to a publisher and they like it, they pay YOU :D Amazing isn't it?

Any publisher that asks for money from you is a scam. Don't trust them.

See Vanity Publishing.

[Mystic Muse]

hmmm. I see a problem.

it says the publisher buys the rights to the material. does this mean they get to control what happens to my book? I realllllllllllllllllllllly don't want that to happen if I decide to publish it.

[PhoeKun]

hmmm. I see a problem.

it says the publisher buys the rights to the material. does this mean they get to control what happens to my book? I realllllllllllllllllllllly don't want that to happen if I decide to publish it.

Self-publishing is always an option, but that does have printing costs inherent to it, and comes without the benefit of a publishing company's ability to make people aware of your book. It also, from my understanding, makes publishing companies somewhat wary of future business with you.

There's a give and take. You can't have someone else print your book and not give them any sort of control over the property to prevent you from running to another company and having them print it, too.

[shadzar]

I pay $20 per year. That gives me the domain name, and DNS.

That only works with having your own server.

You could also take the godaddy route, and get the domain name for $10 per year, and 2 gigs a month bandwidth from their hosting for like $20 per month.

It doesn't cost too much these days.

It can be free if you find a place that still offers free hosting and don't mind all their injected ads onto your pages.

How many SQL dayabases do you need? How much bandwidth per month? What kind of website tracking tools? How many servers do you need?

All these things really matter to tell what you are doing as to how much it would cost.