Bespoke Website running costs

[JonRob]

Hello

I am looking into entering a new online venture after becoming disillusioned with the current climate of graduate positions available. As this suggests, I am a graduate, and have zero experience in setting up or running a business.

I am planning to set up a bespoke website, with one of the main features being an eCommerce functionality whereby customers can sell their product/material to other site users. Without knowing exact prices, I understand the development cost of a quite bespoke website with a large amount of functionalities is going to be quite expensive.

What I am not aware of is the running costs of a website such as this. What are the costs I WILL have to pay, other than the pure development cost and marketing costs. From reading various forums and websites, I understand that costs include,

-Domain name
-Hosting
-Maintenance
-SSL Certificates

Is there anything I am missing? I know a lot of these costs will scale to traffic (and maybe other factors) but I am unsure of how to calculate this, so that I can get an idea of my monthly and/or yearly costs that I will HAVE to pay to keep the website up and running. I am in a lucky position where the (I assume) one off development cost of the website should not be an issue, but I do not want to put myself in a position whereby I am unable to fund the monthly/yearly costs of running and maintaining the website.

Any information or advice would be greatly appreciated. Feel free to asks for further information if necessary.

 

[OldWelshGuy]

maximum of £150 a month and that is a dedicated server which you will only need if you are busy.

Maintenance is an odd one as people define maintenance differently. are you including adding functionality making changes etc? if so then it can't be answered. but if you are talking about general site /server maintenance, then look at the above

 

[fisicx]

Domain name: £10/year max
Hosting: anything from £30/year upwards. It depends on what type of hosting and what type of site.
Maintenance: 0 to zillions. Depends on how much you can do yourself.
SSL: you can pay next to nothing or you can pay thousands. It depends of type of certificate.

Answering your question accurately requires a lot more info about the type of business. For example, is a marketplace like etsy, is it UK only, will funds be held in escrow, who will administer and manage the site, who will mediate disputes and so on.

 

[marble_pars]

If you are going to outsource the design and development of your site you will ultimately have to ask the company you are dealing with about maintenance costs.

As you are starting out you don't need a dedicated server, a good VPS will do from a cloud provider such as Vultr. You can start off paying as little as $5 a month and you can easily add servers as your business expands. You can get free SSL certs also for now, absolutely no reason to spend hundreds before you know if the business will work.

Domain names can be super cheap or more expensive, it depends what you go for, some of the new TLDs can be overpriced but a good old .co.uk or .com is less than £10 a year.

 

[Chris Ashdown]

The main problem with starting a web site is the lack of knowledge of the owners, its easy to point to any site and state you want a copy as it looks nice and seems to bring in many customers, but many sites are over engineered at high cost and also the opposite is true, even a basic e-commerce shop is a minefield which is often left to a designer to do and with due respect to many designers they tend to look at all new bells and whistles and do not understand why a shop works even though they are experts in design

Our own knowledge at start up 13 years ago was zero but we brought a shop in a box and set up using one of the four templates provided

About 18 months later we understood exactly what we wanted, simple, easy for both sides to use, minimum key steps to select and buy a product and no bells and whistles, so we went to a couple of designers and told them what we wanted and picked the best solution

One of our main competitors is Alexandra.co.uk which if you go onto this mega cost site you will find its very slow and confusing to use and this is the biggest Workwear company in the UK which I think proves the point that not all designers understand the basics of e-commerce and what customers want

So my message is start small and find out what your customers want and what features you really want and ignore some of the bells and whistles that come out every month, most do nothing for sales or admin

 

[Biz Dev Agency]

The infrastructure costs are the least of your expenses. Sales and Marketing costs will dwarf the few hundred pounds you need to create the site. My advice is do your market research, build a solid business plan and pitch it to investors that know how much investment is required to launch a successful on-line business. Put your efforts into selling the idea and listen to their feedback whether or not you end up taking their money, its invaluable to look at your own company with the same eyes as an investor would.

 

[Matthelo]

It really depends on how much traffic you will get and complexity of your retail process. The costs of domain, SSL will come to less than hundred pounds but maintenance and hosting are big one. If you have a large shop with multi-currency, complex shipping calculators and several languages the cost of maintenance and keeping components up to date can be quiet steep.

If you are starting retailer and don't expect more than 10k visitors a month your hosting + maintenance cost can fit in £70 a month. There is more to much more to know before you spend money so PM me if you need more guidance.

 

[Alan]

Exactly £10 -> £200 a month depending.

If you want solutions, deatils, PM me or any one else asking for you to PM them

 

[David G Rees]

Good advice above,you dont need a great deal for a domain name or hosting to start with.
Also don't forget about SEO and the marketing aspect. If done correctly this can bring you in many more new customers and the ROI can be much better than traditional advertising. [removed]

 

[sunnyway]

How will this better than eBay, gum tree, facebook and a host of other sites offering the same service? Don't make the mistake I see many entrepreneurs make