What a Website Really Costs Before It Pays You a Cent

Every article about starting a website quotes the same figure: about three dollars a month for hosting. It is not wrong, and it is not the number that decides anything. What decides whether you are still doing this in month fourteen is a different set of figures, and almost nobody publishes them together.

This page puts them together. Each one is read off the company's own page on the date recorded beside it.

The part everyone quotes

A .com from Porkbun is $11.08, and the renewal is the same $11.08 a year, made of $10.26 registry wholesale plus the $0.20 ICANN fee. That last detail matters more than it looks: it means the price is not a promotion, so year four costs what year one costs. Most registrars do not work that way, and the cheap first year is how they get you.

Shared hosting from Namecheap starts at $5.88 a month. A static site does not need it at all: Cloudflare's free plan costs nothing and will serve a site indefinitely, with paid website plans starting at $20 a month if you outgrow it. Going the other direction, a Hetzner AX42-1 dedicated box is EUR 97.30 a month plus a one-off EUR 49.00 setup fee, which is a decision you make later for a reason, not a cost you take on at the start.

So the honest floor for year one is roughly eleven dollars. That part of the standard advice holds.

The part nobody quotes

Here is where the arithmetic changes.

WordPress.com's free plan gives you 1 GB of storage on a WordPress.com subdomain with their ads on your pages. Running your own ads at all requires a Premium plan or higher. Read that again: on that platform the site has to pay before it is allowed to earn.

Then there is the gate at the ad network, and this is the single biggest fact in the whole exercise. The gates are nowhere near each other:

AdSense charges nothing to join and sets no traffic floor, and publishers receive 80% of the revenue Google collects. Monumetric asks a USD 99 one-time implementation fee and starts at 10k pageviews a month. Raptive requires a site that consistently receives at least 25,000 pageviews a month. Mediavine requires a minimum of $5,000 in annual ad revenue, which is a much higher bar than a pageview count and is usually reached long after the others.

Nobody who tells you a website costs three dollars a month also tells you that the good ad networks will not talk to you until you have an audience that took a year to build.

Then you wait again

Qualifying is not being paid. Add the payment terms on top:

Mediavine pays NET sixty-five days after the end of the month the revenue was earned. Monumetric runs Net 60. Raptive submits to its payment processor within 45 days of month end. Amazon Associates pays about 60 days after the end of the month the commission was earned.

So a site that qualifies for Mediavine in January sees that January money in April. Take the gate, add the terms, and you have the real gap you are funding out of your own pocket.

Amazon has one more clock nobody mentions at signup: three qualifying sales must be referred within 180 days of applying, or the application is closed. The clock starts when you apply, not when you are ready.

Read what ends it

Both of the largest income sources available to a small site can be switched off at will.

Google can cut ad serving or disable an AdSense account at any time for policy breaches. Amazon can end the Associates agreement at any time, with or without cause, on 7 calendar days' written notice, and every licence granted under it ends with it.

That is not an argument against using them. It is an argument against having only one of them, and against building anything whose only asset lives inside somebody else's account.

The number that makes the rest worth it

A website is one of the few things in this branch that can actually be sold, and the brokers publish their floors.

Empire Flippers requires at least $2,000 a month in net profit, averaged over the last 12 months, before it will list a business. Flippa charges sellers from a $29 flat fee for a 60-day entry listing in the sub-$10K bracket, and reports a median time to close of 15 days under $50K. Motion Invest takes 20% under $20,000 on a tiered seller commission.

Those figures are the reason the slow route is worth walking. A survey site pays you for the hour you spent and owes you nothing afterwards. A site that clears $2,000 a month in profit is an object with a price, and that price is a multiple of the monthly figure rather than equal to it.

What a realistic first eighteen months looks like

Months one to three you spend eleven dollars and a lot of evenings, and earn nothing. Months four to eight you have enough pages that AdSense is worth switching on, and it pays you an amount that will feel insulting relative to the hours. Somewhere around month twelve, if the topic was chosen well and you did not quit, one of the mid-tier networks becomes reachable and the per-visitor rate roughly triples.

The people who make this work are not the ones who found a cheaper host. They are the ones who were still publishing in month nine, when the numbers still said this was not working.