How to ask the question so the answer is useful
"How much does it cost to build a website" has no single answer. And a person who gives you one number in one line usually leaves out one part of the cost.
That is because a site's cost does not come from one place, it comes from four. Two costs come back every year, one is needed once at the start, and the fourth is not written on any paper, yet when you count after five years it is often the biggest.
So change the question. Ask: how much in the first year, and how much for each year after that? With these two numbers in hand, you can tell for yourself from anyone's quotation whether it is cheap or expensive.
Below, we take the four costs one by one, then put the five-year totals side by side, and at the end there is a checklist you can keep in hand before you pay anyone.
Four items, four different people
| Item | Who the money goes to | How often |
| Domain | The domain company | Every year |
| Hosting | The hosting company | Every year, or once |
| Build fee | A developer or agency | At the start |
| Upkeep | The developer, and your own time | All year, in small pieces |
Notice that the money goes to four different people. Many people think you pay once in one place and it is over, and then are surprised by a bill in the second year. You can take all four from one company, but you still pay all four, just on one bill.
Domain: the address is yours as long as you pay the rent
A domain is the site's address, what people type in the browser. A .com domain usually costs ৳1,000 to ৳1,500 a year.
The most important thing here is that a domain is rented, not bought. You have to renew it every year. If you stop paying the rent, you have to give up the address, and after some time someone else can take it. The address printed on your business card then belongs to someone else.
Remember two things and the domain will never catch you out:
- Register it in your own name, with your own email. Open the account yourself and buy it yourself, then give the site-building work to anyone you like
- Put the renewal date in your calendar. A reminder on your phone a month before it ends, and if possible turn on automatic renewal
One more thing: no hosting company can waive the domain money, it is owed to the domain company. If anyone says "free domain", ask how much from the second year.
Hosting: this is the cost that comes back every year
Hosting is the house where the site's files and photos are kept. In Bangladesh, ordinary shared hosting comes to ৳3,000 to ৳6,000 a year.
Add two things to this number. One, the first year's price is often a discount price, and the renewal price is different, so ask beforehand what the second year will come to. Two, get in writing what is inside the price, especially backups. SSL or HTTPS, the padlock sign beside the address, is now free on almost every good hosting; if someone asks for money separately, ask why.
The number looks small, but when you multiply it the picture changes. In five years, hosting alone is ৳15,000 to ৳30,000, and in ten years ৳30,000 to ৳60,000. Even for a one-page catalogue site the number is the same, because the rent is not decided by the size of the site.
Build fee: the number nobody can tell you up front
There is no honest average in this item. A one-page introduction site and a ten-page catalogue are so different in work that giving one number would only confuse. So do not look for a number, look for questions.
Get written quotations from three places, and check whether each one says these five things clearly:
- Whether domain and hosting are inside the price or outside, and who pays from the second year
- How many pages, how many photos, and who will write the text
- How many free changes after handover, and then how much for each change
- In whose name the site files and the domain ownership will be
- The date the work ends, and what happens if it is late
The biggest cost is often not in the first bill, it is in the bill for every small change after. The price changed, a new product came, an Eid offer has to go up: each time a phone call, a wait and a bill. Even if it is four times a year, in five years that is twenty.
The cost that is not written in any quotation
The fourth item is upkeep, and it is the least discussed. It has at least five things in it:
- Keeping the information up to date. When a price changes, it has to change on the site too, or the buyer will see the old price, call, and an argument begins
- Small changes. A new photo, a new phone number, a new offer
- Your own time. Even once a month it is twelve times a year, and at half an hour each time that is six hours
- The cost of the site being down. If you forget to renew and the site is down for two weeks, you lost the calls and orders of that time, and yet you paid the bill
- Opening it yourself twice a year. Checking on your phone that everything is right and that the form works
Of these, "your own time" is something people never count in money, yet in a small business the owner's time is the most valuable thing. And there is one simple way to count "the cost of the site being down": think how many calls would have come in those two weeks.
Two traps, and both are very costly
Trap one: the domain in someone else's name. When a developer or agency buys a domain for you, it is often registered in their own account. During the work there is no problem. The problem comes the day you want to go to someone else, or the relationship goes bad. Then the address is not in your hands, and the address is your card, your signboard and everything collected on Google. What to do: your own account with your own email, and the account's password with you.
Trap two: the renewal date getting lost. The renewal letter goes to the email of the person who bought the domain, not to yours. So many sites go down one day on their own, and nobody understands why. What to do: put the date in your own calendar, even if someone else does the renewal.
A third small trap too. Know where the site's files are. If you do not have the files, when you change hosting there is no way but to build the whole site again, and that is the reason most people pay a second time.
What a small business site really needs
The biggest way to keep cost under control is not to pay for what you do not need. For a shop, clinic or small office site, here is what really helps and what gets oversold, side by side:
| What is really needed | What is oversold |
| Opens fast on a phone | Heavy animation and sliders |
| Who you are, what you sell, where you are | A ten-page structure |
| Phone number and WhatsApp at the top | A visitor login system |
| Prices and photos kept up to date | A live chat bot |
| Form details really reaching you | A design change once a year |
The first four on the left are on most sites, so there is nothing to bargain over. The fifth causes the most misunderstanding, so let me be clear: seeing a nice form on the site and the form's details reaching you are not the same thing. For the form's details to be saved anywhere, something has to sit behind it, and that is a separate cost. When you take a quotation, try this one question, "when I fill in the form, where will the information end up", and the answer will tell you a lot.
What the one-time hosting model is, and what it is not
In the last few years another kind of hosting has come, where the rent is once instead of every year. On BanglaCodes the fee for keeping a site on your own domain is a one-time ৳6,999, paid directly in money, in one step (bKash, Nagad or card). If you have enough Token in your balance you can pay with that too (2,449,650 Token). After that there is no renewal and no monthly bill. What each plan gives is laid out side by side in the post on choosing a hosting plan.
Honestly, what you get for this fee:
- A site on your own domain, and the HTTPS padlock is added by itself
- The site is served from many places in the world, so a visitor in Dhaka gets it from close to Dhaka
- You have no work with cPanel, updates or backups
- The site's code is yours, and you can download a ZIP at any time
And what you do not get for this fee is even more important:
- The yearly domain rent. That belongs to the domain company, and nobody can waive it
- The site is static, which means no PHP, WordPress, WooCommerce, Node or any database runs on the server
- Visitor login does not work, and one visitor cannot see what another visitor posted
- You cannot take card payments on the site's page itself
- Form orders come to the dashboard inbox, up to 25 a day, and email notice goes for the first 5 of them; if you need more, or more than 15 pages and your own code, there is Business hosting at ৳14,499 or Commerce at ৳23,999, and the ৳6,999 part is counted inside those prices, you do not pay it separately
- The text, prices and photos have to come from you in any arrangement
When you compare models, keep these two lists side by side. A one-time fee means the rent trouble is over, but the site's abilities do not change.
The five-year count side by side
When the numbers are put together, the decision becomes easy. Take an ordinary catalogue site that will run for five years.
| Over 5 years | Ordinary hosting | One-time hosting |
| Hosting | ৳15,000 to ৳30,000 | ৳6,999, once only |
| Domain | ৳5,000 to ৳7,500 | ৳5,000 to ৳7,500 |
| SSL | Usually free | Free |
| Difference in hosting only | 0 | ৳8,001 to ৳23,001 less |
The domain row is the same on both sides, because in both cases that money goes to the domain company. So the real difference is entirely in the hosting row, and it is ৳8,001 to ৳23,001 over five years.
But before you read the table and decide, keep two things in mind. One, the table above leaves out the build fee, because it depends on the scope of the work. Two, a smaller number does not always mean the right decision; if you need something that runs on a server, the cheap column is not for you. Match what the site can do before you match the price.
Now count what the site brings in
A cost count alone gives no decision, because the real question is whether the site is bringing in money.
The simple count goes like this. If the site brings ten new customers a year and the average profit on each customer is ৳700, that is ৳7,000 a year, which means the cost of ordinary hosting is nearly covered. If it brings twenty, there is profit. If it brings zero, it is all loss, and then whether the hosting is cheap or expensive does not matter.
So reverse the order. On BanglaCodes, once you publish the site, you get the address your-name.banglacodes.app free, up to three sites at a time. Put that address in your Facebook page bio, in your WhatsApp profile and on your business card, and run it for a month. After a month, count how many people visited and how many called. If it works, then buy a domain and think about hosting. If it does not work, not a taka was wasted.
The checklist to keep in hand before you pay
Before giving anyone the site-building work, match these ten things in writing:
- The domain will be bought in my own account, in my email, with the password with me
- I know the renewal date, and it is in my calendar
- What hosting costs from the second year, not the discount price, the renewal price
- Who takes the backup, how often, and where I can download the file from
- The site files will be given to me, as a ZIP or in another way
- How many free changes after handover, and then how much for each change
- Whether I can change prices and photos myself, or have to phone every time
- Exactly where the information will be saved when the form is filled, and whether that is a separate cost
- Working on mobile is part of the job, and on handover day I will open it on my own phone and look
- Who will give the text and photos, me or them, and what goes in if nobody does
Not one of the ten is small, but one to three save the most money. And one more thing: a good developer is not annoyed when you ask these questions, but is glad, because it reduces misunderstanding later.
How far you can go without money is set out in full on the free website page.
Questions and answers
Is it better to take domain and hosting from the same place? Taking them from one place makes the accounts easier to keep, but it is not required. If you take them from different places, you have to add one line in DNS to join the two, and that is the only extra work. The real point is that the domain should stay in your own name.
What is the problem if the domain is in the developer's name? The address is then not yours. If the relationship is good you will not notice anything, but if you want to change who does the work, or contact stops, you lose the name of your own business. Ask before you sit down to buy: in whose name is the registration being done.
If I pay for hosting once, is there really no other bill? With BanglaCodes one-time hosting there is no other bill to keep the site running, and no renewal. But domain rent is not inside it, and that has to be paid every year where you bought it. It is safest to think of the two as separate items.
Can I keep a business site on free hosting? It is fine for learning or showing. For a business it fails in two places: the address is not your own, and if the service shuts down there is no way back. A site that gets orders should have an address of its own.
If I have an old site, can I bring it here? If it is on your computer as a folder, you can import it; if a developer gave you a .zip file, you can give the zip itself (you do not have to unzip it); and if it is on GitHub, you can pull it in with the repo name. All three buttons are on the app page, beside the words "Or start from code you already have". The steps for building one from scratch without coding are in the post on how to build a website.
How much money should I keep aside each year to be safe? The yearly domain rent is a sure cost, so keep that aside. Beyond that, if the hosting is one-time, the rest is your own decision: how many changes will be needed, and whether you will do them yourself or have someone do them.
In short
- A site's cost comes from four places: domain, hosting, build fee and upkeep, and the money goes to four different people
- A domain is ৳1,000 to ৳1,500 a year, it is rented not bought, so buy it in your own name and keep the renewal date in your calendar
- Ordinary hosting is ৳3,000 to ৳6,000 a year, which means ৳15,000 to ৳30,000 for hosting alone in five years
- The build fee has no honest average, so take three written quotations and get the prices of later changes written down beforehand
- In the one-time hosting model the fee is ৳6,999, there is no renewal, but domain rent stays separate and the site stays static
- Form orders coming to the inbox are inside the ৳6,999, up to 25 submissions a day and 5 email notices; if you need more there is Business at ৳14,499 or Commerce at ৳23,999, and the ৳6,999 part is counted in them
- First publish free and run it for a month to see whether the site really helps, and then pay money
Whether you have to pay someone again and again for small changes is also a big part of the cost. The way to change things yourself is in the site management guide.