Image Credit: stockgiu @ freepik
I wanted to talk about what it costs to run all my different websites/projects that I have setup, since I had to do a lot of research myself before jumping into this. I’m coming at this from the hobby perspective of someone who is willing to spend some money on this since I like the idea of having my own space on the internet, and I’ve always found making websites generally fun.
The main “websites” I currently maintain are:
- pomnavi.net -> my home page
- blog.pomnavi.net -> personal blog
- ranobe.pomnavi.net -> a light novel blog
- medialog.pomnavi.net -> a media log of regular books and games reviews
- fanfic.pomnavi.net -> a fanfic archive
- photos.pomnavi.net -> a photo archive
- now.pomnavi.net -> a status log or microblog, not sure
To run all of the above, I use the following websites and tools:
| Product | Cost |
|---|---|
| Carrd.co Pro Standard Plan - Used for my homepage | 19/yr with annual holiday deals |
| Namecheap .net domain (1) | 14$/yr (costs generally increase with time/inflation, this started at 12) |
| Publii Blog CMS (Light Novel Blog) - I only use the free themes and plugins. This desktop app uploads my blog straight from my computer onto Netlify hosting. | 0$ |
| Github - Code storage for every project that’s not my homepage or light novel blog | 0$ (for now) |
| Netlify - Used to deploy and host my site from github, allows you to use custom domains. | 0$ (for now) |
| Notepad++ - Free code editor that I use to edit some of my static sites. Usually good practice to make changes on your computer first, but sometimes I work directly in Github | 0$ |
| Melon’s Gallery Maker - This is used for my photo gallery | 0$ |
| Total | 25$/yr |
As you can see from my breakdown above, the main things I pay for are a domain and carrd.co services. I decided early on that I didn’t want to pay for blog hosting platforms, if it could be done for free. There are free ones out there (see the list I linked), but most free platforms don’t allow you to link a custom domain unless you pay a fee or subscription. And many of the cheaper paid services don’t allow much in the way of easy customization of themes, or you have to be quite experienced with CSS in order to style your blog. And I also wanted to make sure it had the option to use tags, and/or categories. Therefore, I choose the following options:
For the sites I host for free, I either:
- use Publii Blog CMS, which is very user friendly, but only works on your local PC
- use a static site generator like Astro (Github + Netlify) with a theme I like. This could be Hugo or any other SSG as long as it has a theme you like, since all posts are written in markdown and mostly portable.
- use an HTML template with some hand coded changes, and upload directly to Netlify
Technically, I could change out my carrd homepage for another static page and cut down my costs even more, but I think it’s a reasonable price for the amount of customization and ease of use it offers.
The most important thing to have is a domain. Even if you change hosting or decide to go with a paid service, you can always point your domain to your new location.
You could probably find one that’s even cheaper, but most domains are somewhere between 10-20$/year depending on the TLD (.net, .com, etc) and the rarity or availability. There are some really fun or creative ones like .moe, .art, or .blog so there’s plenty of room for experimentation.
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@arimamary glad you found it helpful! And that's a good idea, I'll update the table when I can.
@navi Ohhh, this was really interesting to read. I'm not paying for a domain name quite yet as my sites are fairly new and I've never done it before.
May I suggest a row at the end of the table with the final or approximate value?
This was super helpful. Thank you for sharing! Will link it to my resources link in my site. I'm sure there are other people who might be interested in this.