WHAT THE TECH?
with Your Mate Matt
I launched a site for a local business last week. It looks good, it’s quick, the photos are theirs. None of that was the part they were most pleased about.
What they liked was that it now costs them under $50 a year to keep online, domain name included.
The old one was costing them a bit over $1000 a year. For that, they got a website they hadn’t logged into in five years. Nothing on it changed. The money kept going out anyway.
That’s not a one-off. I did the same thing for another business earlier this year. Same story, near enough. A grand a year, no changes since about 2020, and nobody quite sure what the money was for.
When you get a website through a lot of the builders and agencies out there, you’re renting, not buying.
The yearly fee covers the platform it sits on, a “maintenance” line that means someone might press an update button twice a year, if that, and the hosting.
Stop paying and the site goes dark. You can’t take it with you, because there’s nothing to take.
That model was built for businesses that need a lot from their site. Online shops, booking systems, thousands of visitors a day. Most small businesses around here aren’t that.
A tradie in Orbost needs a page that says what he does, a few photos of the work and a phone number. He doesn’t need the bells and whistles, and he’s nowhere near any traffic limit. But he’s often paying as if he were.
Think about how people use ChatGPT. There’s a free version and a paid one, and most people are on the free one because it does what they need.
Hosting is the same. There are free and near-free hosting options now that are perfectly good for a normal business website, and they’re fast. Faster than a lot of the paid platforms.
I’ll put my own cards on the table here. I build websites for a living and I don’t pay for hosting. Not for my site, not for most of my clients’.
The domain name is about $20 a year and that’s the lot.
The build itself isn’t free. Someone has to make the thing, and that costs money up front, same as it always did.
The difference is what happens after. You pay once for the site, then a trickle to keep it online, instead of paying for it forever.
So add up a year of payments you make to whoever looks after your website. Then ask when they last changed something on it. If the money’s going out and nothing’s coming back, that’s worth a conversation.
If it’s more than $50 a year, give me a call.
Matt Rowlands runs Your Mate Agency, helping regional businesses get found online. Get in touch at yourmateagency.com.au or 0478 101 521.
