The Annual Cost of a Website: Domain, Hosting and Maintenance

Website budget conversations usually focus on the setup fee. But once a site goes live there are recurring costs every year, and if nobody asks about them at the quote stage, the first renewal invoice comes as a surprise. For a small corporate site, these costs can vary across a wide range depending on your choices.

Apart from Kodyva's own maintenance package, we don't give specific prices in this article; domain, hosting, licence and email fees vary by provider, promotion and exchange rate. Check the relevant providers' current price lists for exact figures.

Short answer: five recurring costs

A website's annual cost comes from five items: domain renewal, hosting (server), SSL certificate, maintenance and updates, and any paid licences and subscriptions. Many businesses add business email too. Some items are mandatory, some optional; but listing them all once and seeing the yearly total removes surprises.

Domain renewal

A domain is renewed every year. The fee depends on the extension (.com, .com.tr and so on) and the registrar; with foreign registrars, prices may be in foreign currency, so the TL cost can change each year.

Two things to watch. First, domains sold at a promotional first-year price can renew at a noticeably higher price; check the renewal price when buying. Second, the domain must be registered in your name, in an account you can access. Missing the renewal date means your site and email stop working one morning. Turn on auto-renew and make sure the saved card is current.

Hosting and SSL

Hosting is the server where your site's files live. For a small corporate site, shared hosting is usually enough. Sites with more traffic or online stores may need a VPS or managed hosting; these are often billed monthly and can total noticeably more than shared hosting over a year. We compared hosting types in a separate article.

First-year discounts are common in hosting too. Ask for the first-year price and the renewal price separately.

An SSL certificate shows the padlock in the address bar and encrypts data in transit. Many hosting companies now install and renew free SSL certificates like Let's Encrypt automatically; a small site usually doesn't need a paid certificate. But check that auto-renewal really works. An expired certificate shows visitors the browser's warning screen.

Maintenance and updates

This is one of the most neglected items and one that makes a big difference. Maintenance covers software, theme and plugin updates, backups, security checks, form tests and small content changes.

There are two routes. If you do it yourself, you pay nothing but need a few hours a month and enough knowledge to fix things when they break. If you buy a maintenance service, you pay a monthly fee depending on scope. The price range for Kodyva's monthly maintenance package is 2,500 to 7,500 TL, or 30,000 to 90,000 TL a year. The exact price is set in the quote based on scope. We covered what drives maintenance pricing in detail in a separate article.

Even without a maintenance service, don't write this item down as zero. The one-off fee for an expert called in for a problem once or twice a year should have a place in the budget.

Licences and plugin subscriptions

Some themes and plugins used on off-the-shelf content management systems are paid and run on yearly licences: a premium theme, the pro version of a form plugin, a security or backup plugin, e-commerce add-ons. These are often priced in foreign currency. Individually they look small, but several together can add up to a serious yearly figure.

The way to keep this in check is to keep a list of which paid licences are on the site and when each renews. A plugin whose licence lapses often keeps working but may stop getting security updates, which is a risk.

Business email can be considered under this heading too. Services like Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 usually charge per user; check current prices on their own sites. For a small team, the yearly total can be higher than hosting.

Sample budget table

To work out your own yearly budget, you can use this formula:

Annual cost = domain + hosting + SSL (often 0) + (monthly maintenance × 12) + licences + (email users × monthly fee per user × 12)

Let's take a hypothetical example. Say a 3-person accounting office has a 6-page corporate site:

• Domain: your registrar's renewal price.
• Shared hosting: your host's renewal price.
• SSL: 0 TL if a free certificate is used.
• Maintenance: 0 TL if done in-house, plus an allowance for support called in once or twice a year; at least 30,000 TL a year with Kodyva's maintenance package.
• Licences: 0 TL if built with free plugins; otherwise the yearly licence fee of each premium theme or plugin.
• Business email: 3 users × your chosen plan's per-user fee × 12.

In this example, the office doing its own maintenance has a noticeably lower yearly total than the one with a maintenance package; in exchange, the responsibility and time for maintenance stay with the office. Which is right depends on how critical the site is for the business and whether someone in the office has time for this work.

When filling in the table for your own site, ask the company quoting you for the renewal price of each item and whose name it will be registered in. If the setup quote doesn't state this in writing, your yearly cost is uncertain too.