What it costs to keep a website running every year

This is the floor. A working website that nobody is actively looking after still costs this much. Prices are US, approximate, and correct as of September 2026, so check rather than quote them at anybody.

So the honest floor is roughly $250 to $900 a year, depending mostly on whether you are on WordPress or a builder, and how many email accounts you need. That is a website that stays up and does nothing else.

You do not need to know anything technical to ask these. Send them in an email so you have the answers in writing.

Question one: what happens to my website if I stop paying you?

One sentence, and it does more work than any audit.

If the answer is that the site keeps running and you keep the domain, you own your website and you are paying for services on top. That is a normal arrangement.

If the answer is that the site goes away, you are not buying a website. You are renting one. That is not automatically wrong, plenty of businesses are happy renting, but you should know which one you are in, and most people find out at the worst possible moment.

An owner on a contractors' forum suggested testing this by simply stopping the card payment and seeing how fast the phone rings. It is revealing and I would not do it. You risk your site going dark, a contract penalty, or a bill in collections, and you can get the same answer by asking.

Question two: can I see what was done last month?

Any fee sold as maintenance, care or management should produce a list. Not a dashboard full of graphs. A short list of what a person actually did.

The same contractors' forum put it well: you should get some level of update as to what is done.

If the answer is vague, that is the answer. One owner's entire complaint about a company charging real money every month was this:

"they have not been able to provide any information regarding where my marketing spend is going"

Question three: what am I locked into, and how do I leave?

Ask for the notice period, the end date, and what happens to the domain and the website when it ends. In writing.

This is where most of the anger in this industry actually lives. Owners describe being told a remaining balance was still owed after trying to end a contract early, being renewed for another two years by an account manager after saying not to, and not being able to cancel online at all.

None of those are about price. They are about being unable to leave.

The sharpest thing anybody said in all of this came from a one-man remodeling contractor, working out why his phone had gone quiet:

"my site had not been updated in 220 days. I believe that's why I not getting calls."

He was paying monthly for a site nobody had touched in seven months.

You can check this yourself in about a minute, and you need no access to anything. Look at your own website and ask when anything on it last changed. Not the design. The content. The prices, the services, the staff, the opening hours, the last post.

If you are paying somebody a monthly fee and nothing on your site has changed in six months, you are not necessarily being cheated. Some maintenance is genuinely invisible: updates, backups, security patches. But it is a fair question, and the answer should come back specific rather than reassuring.

One review said something more revealing than any complaint about a high price:

"they dont have set prices"

That is a different fear from being charged too much. It is the suspicion that the number was chosen by looking at you, rather than by looking at the work.

There is a simple defense. Ask for the price of the same thing twice, in writing, a few weeks apart, and ask what it includes. A real price sheet produces the same answer. A number invented for you produces two different ones.

And when you get a quote from anybody, ask for it broken into lines. Hosting, domain, maintenance, changes, advertising. A supplier who will not itemize is telling you something.

If you want one figure to plan around, here it is.

A small business site you look after yourself: roughly $300 to $900 a year. Domain, hosting or a builder plan, and email.

With someone maintaining it properly: add $600 to $3,000 a year on top, depending on how much is actually being done.

With marketing bundled in: $3,600 to $18,000 a year. At that level you are buying a service, not a website, and questions one, two and three above are not optional.

What it should never be is a number you cannot explain to your accountant. If you cannot say in one sentence what this month's payment bought, that is worth resolving before the next one leaves your account.

Take ten minutes and write down four things: what you pay, to whom, what it covers, and when it renews.

Most owners cannot do this from memory, which is the whole reason these bills go unexamined for years. Once it is on one page, the awkward questions ask themselves.

If you are earlier in the process and still deciding what to spend, the companion to this page is the guide to what a website should cost to build, which covers the one off side.