True cost of maintaining a website

[aroomofherown]

I want to start a niche business that involves a website that generates traffic with a forum, and a space to upload/download documents to share - this is free so I don't know how much security there needs to be here, just for the login data I guess.

It will make money through selling on it too and also with advertising its own recruitment service (and possibly other ads). The market is at its largest around 300,000 people - although obviously I don't expect to have everyone on it - maybe 5% - 10%?

Does anyone know how much this will cost to maintain? I am hearing that it will cost £1m per year but I just can't see how. And that's money I don't have

Am I being naive about the costs here - are they just simply prohibitive?

Dh design and a chat forum for the charity I help with. We are able to run a forum, post events and have ads down the side.
Hosting and such costs about £80 a year.

The other charity he helped build the site for is going for massive funding so has decided to pay a proper designer and builder for grand total of £2000. Then these hosting costs of about £100 a year BUT staff at charity will maintain information on the site and post updates as it will be written in SMS.

Thank you lisad123.

I think this person has a touch of the madness or else sees ££££ from my idea. At least I hope she's not right.

£100 a year - even £1000 a year doesn't phase me.

£1m a year?

The service I use costs £89 per year. I've had to design it myself, but the templates are really good. But I can add any amount of widgets and gizmos, including a forum, ecommerce, etc. £1m a year is just bonkers.

I pay £145 a year for hosting. Mine's a pretty simple website though, no forum.

Thank you everyone. I had a sleepless night over this!

£1m a year?!

I've been a web developer for a long, long time and have worked with some big blue chip clients, but I've never seen an annual maintenance cost even close to £1m.

As others have said, your hosting costs are unlikely to be massive (I currently pay £3.30 per month and host umpteen websites on that one account). You'll have a build cost assuming you don't build the site yourself. Then if you don't make the updates yourself (e.g. changes to pages, making new pages), you'll have ongoing developer costs as well. But there's no way it'll be anywhere near £1m a year!

I'll bet you'd love it if it did get up that high

I'm going to get it built and then update it myself, so the main cost is going to be the build. I consider the hosting cost a bit like coffee cost, probably wouldn't really miss it!

I pay £5 for my URL. I love my dh for being a Graphic designer/ programmer/ geek!

It depends on the type of files you are planning on hosting/sharing.

A forum would require a bit more standard maintenance and bandwidth than a bog standard brochure type website.

If you are planning on hosting other people's videos that is going to be v expensive, if its other peopl'e word docs, that's fine.

£1m is ridiculous,(I think in the book for NOTHS they say they launched the website for £80k) but the website you are suggesting does sound quite complex.

Look around different hosts and get some quotes.

Methinks whoever indicated £1m was trying to put you off!

Your requirements sound fairly complex but certainly feasible. However, it would need a fair bit of scoping to get it to a place where the developer could give an accurate figure to set up the site. And hosting costs will depend on... Well, lots of different factors. What are they including in the maintenance service??

Best thing is to approach more companies with as much as a detailed brief a possible.

I've a quote for £2000 (inc VAT) for the build, which seems ok to me. Does that sound about right? It includes free hosting for a year. Equally my brother is in IT security so says he can help sort me out with hosting if I wanted a different host.

Maintenance service though? No-one has mentioned or offered any maintenance service. Should that be standard and should I request it?

Sorry, I have no idea if that quote is good or not... As have no idea what the exact brief is. To me it doesn't sound like a great deal of £££ for a bespoke site with a lot of functionality.

Re maintenance, I only mentioned this as it was in your thread title. I would think that you'd be able to update the site yourself, so no need.