Full Transcript
[0:00]
Welcome to the 805 Web Minute. And today we're talking about why many small business owners right here in Esselo County and the central coast are paying three times too much for their website every single month. It's a huge source of confusion. I mean, you see these monthly invoices, right? They're hitting 150, 200, sometimes even $300 a month. And you know you're paying for something. But the question is, are you actually getting $300 worth of performance and service? That is the core question. And often the answer is a hard no. So this deep dive is all about transparency. Our mission today is to break down the true non-negotiable costs. The stuff you absolutely have to pay for versus the, well, the highly inflated fees that get tacked on. Yeah, we want you to walk away from this knowing exactly what you should be paying for speed, for reliability, and for actual human service. Okay. So let's unpack this. Where do we even start? We have to start at the very bottom. The foundational things every single website needs because this is where the easy markups begin. The most basic thing has to be the domain name itself. Yeah. Your web address like dot your owner dot com. That seems pretty important. What should that actually cost? It is the absolute cheapest part of the whole puzzle. And you know, it's often the very first place a provider sneaks in a markup. Really? Oh, yeah. For most standard extensions, you know, a dot com, a dot net, you're looking at maybe 10 to 20 dollars per year per year. So we're talking about a dollar, maybe a dollar 50 a month. So if someone is charging you $50 a year, just for that address, they are pocketing over 30 bucks in pure profit for doing basically nothing. They'll call it an admin fee, but for you, the business owner, it's just money walking out the door. Okay. So that's markup number one. What's next? Security. I see that little padlock icon in the browser. You have to have that. Where customers get scared away. You absolutely do. It's called an SSL certificate and it's vital for trust. But what's fascinating is that it's usually free or very, very close to it.
[2:04]
An SSL certificate should cost you between zero and maybe $25 a year. There are nonprofits like Let's Encrypt that provide them at no cost to make the web safer. So if I see a line item on my bill for say $120 a year, just for that padlock, that is a, well, it's a fundamental misrepresentation of value. They're charging a premium for something that's either free or already bundled into their hosting package for almost nothing. Wow. So let's add it up the bare minimum domain, the cheapest possible hosting and a free SSL certificate. What's the floor? The absolute rock bottom cost is somewhere between six and 13 dollars a month, six to 13 dollars. Okay. Everyone keep that number in your head. Because now we're going to talk about the area with the single biggest markup trap. And that is hosting hosting. This is where your website's files actually live, right? Exactly. And it is the biggest point of confusion. And frankly, the biggest trap providers make it intentionally murky so you don't know what you're actually getting for your money. So for a small business, you really have two main tiers and they could not be more different. But let's start with tier one, the cheap stuff, right? Cheap shared hosting. If you bought it yourself, it would cost you maybe three to ten dollars a month. But there's a catch. Oh, there's a huge catch. Your website is crammed onto a massive server with hundreds, maybe thousands of other websites. Think of it like a really crowded apartment building. What happens if one of your neighbors has a really loud party? Everyone suffers. If one website on that server gets a big traffic spike or gets hit with a small time hack, every other site on that server slows to a crawl or just crashes. So slow, low times poor performance, unreliable. And this is often what those DIY platforms have built on even though they charge you a premium. Correct. And that poor performance, it doesn't just annoy your visitors. Studies show that if your site takes more than three seconds to load, you lose about half your potential customers. They just click away and Google hates it. Google absolutely penalizes slow sites in search results.
[4:08]
So that cheap hosting isn't cheap at all. It's actively costing you business. It's a hidden cost. Okay. So what's the alternative? What does the professional standard look like? That would be tier two performance backed, managed hosting. Now this quality infrastructure costs a bit more, maybe 20 to $50 a month. Still pretty reasonable, incredibly reasonable for what you get. The key difference here is speed and reliability. And the secret sauce to that speed is something called a CDN, a content delivery network. Absolutely. So let's make that concrete. If your site is not on a CDN, all of its files, the images, the text, they have to travel from one single server somewhere. Let's say it's in Texas. So a customer browsing in San Luis Obispo has to wait for the data to come all the way from Texas. It's a slow journey. But with the CDN, copies of your site are stored in little mini servers all over the world. So that customer in SLO gets the website data from a server that's geographically close, maybe in Los Angeles, but loads instantly instantly. It handles traffic spikes. It has monitoring built in. It's just a completely different world of performance. So here's the ripoff. This is the key insight. The true ripoff is when a provider charges you $150 a month for premium hosting. But what they're actually giving you is that cheap $10 a month shared hosting. That's a 15 X markup on infrastructure alone. And you're getting the terrible performance that kills your business. That's a staggering gap. So even if we account for the best infrastructure domain, SSL and that fast CDN backed hosting, we're still only at maybe 50 bucks a month max. That's right. So where does the rest of that $200 invoice come from? It has to be the human element. This hurts precisely. We're moving from the hardware cost to the cost of human labor. And this is where we find the next trap. We call it the $100 an hour update trap, the old agency model. The data shows the median web designer charges somewhere around $93 an hour. Many agencies here are charging what $150 to $100.
[6:08]
And look, for complex custom work, that rate can be justifiable. But the model completely breaks down for simple everyday maintenance. We're talking about things like updating your holiday hours or swapping out a photo on the home page. Because of how they bill, they often have a minimum, like half an hour or a full hour. That simple five minute text change can instantly trigger a 50 or even $100 invoice. So you change a couple little things in a month and your bill just explodes. The worst part is the consequence for you, the business owner here in SLO County. That high cost per change actively discourages you from keeping your site current. You hesitate. You absolutely hesitate. You think, is it really worth a hundred bucks to post this week's special? And you just don't do it. And what happens then the website, which should be your best 104 seven sales person, turns into a liability. The information is stale. The hours are wrong. It's out of date. You paid thousands for it only to let it wither because it's too expensive to maintain. So what's the better way? How do you keep it fresh without that hesitation? The solution is to pay for service, not per edit. Updates should just be included in a reasonable flat monthly fee. It's a total shift in mindset. You're paying for peace of mind, knowing you can just email a change and it gets done without another bill showing up. Exactly. It makes your website an asset again, but we do need to be clear about what legitimate ongoing services actually look like because some fees are fair. Okay. Like professional email. Yes. If you want an email address like you at your business.com, that's a separate service, usually through something like Google workspace, that's a legitimate add on. Maybe six to $12 per user per month. It's worth it. And what about real security monitoring? What should you be getting for that? Say 10 to $30 fee. This is really critical distinction. Real security means proactive human intervention, not just some automated software. Okay. What does that look like? First, it's active monitoring for hacks. Second, it's uptime monitoring, making sure your site never goes down.
[8:11]
But most importantly, it's running tested backups. Wait, what do you mean by tested? Isn't an automated backup enough? See, this is where providers can get really passive and automated backup just copies the files. It costs them basically nothing. But if your site goes down, that backup file is useless. If you don't know for sure that it's clean and recoverable. So you're not just paying for a copy of the files? No. You're paying for the insurance policy. The guarantee real service means a human being is regularly testing those backups to verify that your entire site can be restored fast if something goes wrong. That's a huge difference. It's the difference between peace of mind and a false sense of security. Okay. We've covered infrastructure, labor traps and legitimate service fees. Let's give people on the central coast a rule of thumb, a way to benchmark their monthly costs. Okay. Here's a good one. Budget about 15 to 25% of the initial website build cost annually for all ongoing maintenance and updates. Let's make that real. If you paid, say, $5,000 for a professional website, you should expect to spend about $750 to $1,250 a year to keep it running perfectly, which breaks down to roughly $6,000 to $100 a month for everything, fast hosting, security and updates included. Exactly. So if you are paying significantly more than that and you're not getting all that service included, something is fundamentally wrong. It's time to demand some transparency. And that leads us to the action plan. These are the key questions every single business owner should be asking their provider right now. Question one, the most important one. What exactly does this monthly fee include? You want a detailed itemized list. If they get weird about that question, that is a huge red flag. Question two, get to the heart of performance. What tier of hosting am I on and is my site on a CDN? Make them prove you're getting the premium product they're charging you for. The third question is about service. How much are updates? Are simple texts and image changes included or does every little thing trigger an hourly bill?
[10:16]
You need to know. And the final test, the proof. Can you show me my site's actual low times and uptime? If they promise premium speed, it has to be measurable. Look, at the end of the day, transparency matters. If your provider gets defensive or tries to make these simple questions sound too technical for you to understand, that is the clearest sign you are overpaying for cheap service. And your business deserves better. That's the quick tip for today. If you want a professional website without the agency price tag or the DIY headache, here is the better way. At Ugrow.pro, we build it, we manage it, and we handle every update forever, all for just $79 a month. There is zero setup fee, no contract lock in. And it is strictly month to month, so there is zero risk. We're local here in AG, and we can have you live in days, not months. Want to see what your site could look like? Go to Ugrow.pro right now, and we'll design three custom mockups for your business, completely free. No strings attached. Thanks for listening and keep growing.