What is website hosting and why is it paid every year?
What website hosting is, what the yearly fee covers, how it differs from the domain, and what our hosting includes.
A website is a set of files that has to be available to every visitor, day and night. Hosting is the service that keeps those files on a server connected to the internet. Without it, the website is not online.
Hosting and domain are two different things
- The domain is the address, for example your-business.gr. It is registered for one or more years and renewed. It should always be in your business’s name.
- Hosting is where the website lives. The domain points to it.
You can change hosting provider and keep the same domain.
Why it is a yearly cost
The server, its electricity, its security updates and its backups are ongoing costs for the provider, so hosting is paid as a subscription. A good hosting setup also includes:
- an SSL certificate, so the address starts with https and browsers do not warn your visitors
- backups, so the site can be restored if something goes wrong
- updates and monitoring, so the site keeps working as browsers and servers change
Our hosting
With us, hosting costs €180/year + VAT with an established hosting provider. It includes an SSL certificate and daily backups, and each month you can send us up to one request for small changes, such as new text, a photo, a price or your opening hours.
- For Tier 1 it is optional. At launch we hand over everything you need to host the site yourself.
- For Tier 2 it is included, because your editor, the saved versions of every change and the backups run on it.
- For larger projects with customer accounts or an online shop, hosting is priced in the written scope.
If we register the domain for you, it is billed at cost with no markup and its renewal is added to the yearly hosting invoice. You can find all the details on the websites page.
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