A company website costs money not only when it is being built. After launch, the second and longer part of the budget begins: hosting, domains, certificates, email, updates and someone’s time to react when things break. In our cost audits we keep seeing the same patterns - and the same places where companies pay more than they need to.
What maintenance costs consist of
A typical set of recurring fees around a company website looks like this:
- Hosting - from a few euros per month for shared hosting to much more for a VPS or dedicated server.
- Domains - yearly renewals; the price depends on the TLD and registrar, and after the first promotional year it often grows severalfold.
- SSL certificates - usually available for free today (e.g. Let’s Encrypt), yet some companies still pay for certificates they do not need.
- Company email - bundled with hosting, at a separate provider, or in Google Workspace / Microsoft 365; price differences are significant and the choice also affects deliverability.
- Updates and backups - the CMS, plugins, theme and database need regular work; without it, the risk of outages and break-ins grows.
- Technical care - someone’s time: an internal employee, a freelancer or an agency.
Each item looks innocent on its own. The problem is that in most companies these services accumulated over years across different providers, and nobody sees them together.
Where companies overpay most often
After reviewing dozens of setups, we see a few recurring scenarios:
Hosting mismatched to scale
A small brochure website on an expensive, unmanaged VPS - or the opposite: a growing store on the cheapest shared hosting that chokes during every ad campaign. The price itself is not the problem; the missing link between price and need is.
Orphaned services
Domains bought for a long-forgotten campaign, premium certificates renewed out of inertia, hosting add-ons activated once and abandoned. This is usually a few hundred per year doing nothing.
No single owner of the topic
The most expensive scenario is not on any price list. When the domain sits with one provider, hosting with another, email with a third, and a former employee holds the passwords - every outage turns into an investigation. The cost is then counted in days of downtime, not in monthly fees.
How to calculate your own maintenance cost
A simple starting routine:
- Collect invoices for hosting, domains, SSL, email and any website-adjacent services from the last 12 months.
- Add time - who handles updates, backups and outages, and how often.
- For every line item answer one question: what would happen if this service did not exist?
If there is no good answer for an item, it is the first candidate for simplification.
Not everything is worth cutting
To be fair: the cheapest setup is rarely the best one. Backups, monitoring, reliable email and someone on technical duty are costs that pay off exactly at the moment of failure. The goal of cleaning up is not the lowest invoice, but a situation where you know what you pay for and why.
If you want to check your own costs without digging through provider panels, send us a service list or invoices - within 3 business days we return a PDF: what to keep, what to simplify and where the real risks are. No obligations.