Small businesses are routinely quoted ₹3,000–8,000 a month to “host and maintain” a five-page website that hasn’t changed since it launched. Sometimes that’s fair value. Often it isn’t, and the reason it’s hard to tell is that nobody itemises it.
So, itemised.
What the components actually cost
| Item | Realistic annual cost | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Domain (.com) | ₹900–1,400 | Registrar list price. Renewal, not the ₹99 first year |
| TLS certificate | ₹0 | Let’s Encrypt. Paid certificates buy nothing for a brochure site |
| Hosting — static site | ₹0–2,000 | Free tiers are genuinely sufficient; a small VPS if you want control |
| Hosting — CMS (WordPress) | ₹3,000–12,000 | Needs real PHP + database resources |
| Business email | ₹1,500–2,500 per user | Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 |
| Total, static site, 1 mailbox | ₹2,500–6,000/year |
That is the infrastructure. For a marketing site with a few pages, some photos, and a contact form, the true running cost is in the region of ₹300 a month, and a meaningful part of that is email rather than the website.
So what are you paying for in a maintenance retainer?
Legitimately, some or all of:
- Content updates — new pages, price changes, photos. Real work, reasonably billed.
- Security patching, if the site runs WordPress. This is genuine and non-optional: WordPress core, themes and plugins need regular updates, and an unpatched WordPress site gets compromised. If you run WordPress, someone should be paid to maintain it.
- Backups and monitoring, so a broken site is noticed by your provider rather than by a customer.
- Being reachable when something breaks.
Not legitimately: a monthly fee for a static site that nobody touches, where the underlying hosting is a free tier.
The question to ask a provider is simply “what does the monthly fee cover, itemised?” A straight answer is a good sign. “It’s for hosting and maintenance” for a site that hasn’t changed in two years is worth probing.
Where the WordPress decision really bites
Most small business sites are built on WordPress by default, and for a site that needs frequent content editing by non-technical staff, that’s a defensible choice.
But it brings a permanent maintenance obligation. A static site — content compiled to plain HTML files ahead of time — has no database to breach, no plugins to patch, no admin login to brute-force, and no PHP process to exploit. It is faster, it’s cheaper to host, and its attack surface is close to nil.
The trade-off is real: updating content means a developer or a build step, unless you add a content management layer back on top. If your site changes weekly, WordPress probably wins. If it changes twice a year — which describes most small business sites honestly assessed — static is the better answer and it removes an entire category of ongoing risk and cost.
This site is static, for exactly these reasons. It builds to plain HTML, ships in a container behind a reverse proxy that terminates TLS, and the running cost is the VPS and the domain.
What “fast” is worth
Site speed affects whether people stay, and it affects search ranking. The good news is that for a small business site, speed is mostly free — it comes from not doing wasteful things:
- Compress and correctly size images. This is the single biggest factor, and it’s the most commonly skipped.
- Don’t load five webfonts. Two is plenty.
- Skip the page builder plugins that ship 400 KB of JavaScript for a layout that CSS does natively.
- Serve over HTTP/2 with compression on — standard on any competent host.
A well-built small business site should load in under a second on a phone on 4G. Most don’t, and it’s almost never the hosting.