Full Transcript
LAUREN: Alright, so I'm talking to a friend of mine, they're a small business owner. They say that they're paying like 200 bucks a month for their website. And I'm wondering, as someone who is website challenged, internet unsavvy... what is that $200 a month getting them?
HONOR: Welcome to the 805 Web Minute with Lauren and Honor... We make interwebs and website stuff make sense... Let's get into it.
HONOR: So, I am assuming they already paid off the design, which is a pretty common thing a lot of agencies or freelancers do. If they've already paid their design, there are a few things that they might be paying for. Let's talk about the basics... like the bare minimum that they will pay for.
HONOR: Number one: domain name. Number two: website hosting. Number three: SSL certificate.
HONOR: And I'll talk about each of these. The domain name is just the dot-com... or dot-net or whatever. Like, Lauren's...
LAUREN: Lauren's awesome dot com.
HONOR: Lauren's awesome dot com. Yeah. And that... that shouldn't cost anything more than 15, 20 dollars a year.
LAUREN: Oh!
HONOR: Yes. So this is just the name service. I mean, this is a very important service that you should be owning, but also it's one of the cheaper parts of these things.
LAUREN: Okay, so in terms of the per-month fee, it's pretty negligible.
HONOR: Correct. The second part is the website hosting. So, a good way of thinking about this is... it can be anywhere from 10, 20 dollars to 40, 60 dollars, to hundreds of dollars.
HONOR: Think of the cheapest one as a shitty motel where you share all of the resources of the motel, all of the staff of the motel, and it's slow. I mean, motels can't be slow, I guess.
LAUREN: Well, I mean, it could be slow if like you've only got one person that's doing housekeeping and the motel is full, right? So you're not getting your needs met.
HONOR: Yeah. Right? Yes. And also you're not getting support either. And it's kind of in the sketchy territory because you're sharing your motel with people that you don't know, with websites that you don't know, and sometimes when they do something shady, you might be also getting penalized for that.
LAUREN: Okay, so the lady next door is using all of the outlets, right? She's like blow-drying her hair and then she blows a fuse and then... no power in your room.
HONOR: Excellent, excellent example. I love it. Yeah. And then there's more decent hosting like 30, 40, 50 dollars a month. These will have enough resources, these will have enough people to help you, and they will have decent speed for the user. For small businesses, that will be enough.
LAUREN: Okay, alright. So like the multiple hundreds option you were talking about... that would be for a more maybe sophisticated website or larger business, maybe?
HONOR: Yeah, large businesses that expect a lot of customers daily or like some other functionality, yeah.
LAUREN: Okay, so so far it sounds like the hosting makes up, I don't know, a quarter of the cost that my friend might be paying. You mentioned some sort of certificate thing.
HONOR: Oh, the SSL certificate, yeah. That's the little padlock that you see when you go on a website.
LAUREN: Okay.
HONOR: And your website absolutely has to have it. If it doesn't have it, your browser will say, "This website is not secure" or...
LAUREN: Ooh, you're the sketchy website.
HONOR: Right. Or over time Google will put you down in the list, so people won't be able to find you.
LAUREN: You're like page 20 of the search.
HONOR: Right. So you have to have that. And it can cost anything from zero dollars to a hundred dollars per year. But it should cost zero dollars per year. Anybody who tries to sell you an SSL certificate in 2026 is a red flag.
LAUREN: Alright, so if my friend were to show me their itemized invoice for their 200-dollar website, the SSL shouldn't even show up on it.
HONOR: Right. So what your friend might be getting might be a maintenance plan or an update plan... like every month you get one hour of website updates or whatever... but they should get an itemized list and see what they're really getting.
LAUREN: So, alright. It sounds to me like the moral of the story is: ask for an itemized receipt. If you're paying more than 50 or 60 bucks a month, make sure you understand what extra you're paying for. And if you don't know that you're getting your money's worth... give us a call! Try YouGrow!
HONOR: Yeah. The short plug we could do here is we do 79 dollars per month, month-to-month, no upfront costs for the design. You get a custom website, it's not just like an "everybody has the same template" thing. It is secure by design, it is accessible by design, and you get unlimited reasonable edits. That's it.
LAUREN: Sounds rad.
HONOR: Thank you.
LAUREN: Alright. Well, this has been 805 Web Minute. Thanks for listening.