 Hosting essentially is like online storage like Dropbox or Google Drive. This is where the money comes in. Right, there's a low-end model and a high-luxury model. Because we know what comes to mind when I think about hosting. What's that? It was a great party site for all. All right, nearly. I'm a small business, which also means I have a budget. Right. So I want to know what is this going to cost me? Right, so I think it helps to really understand what hosting is. And you can think of hosting as online storage for your website. So you need files to make up the site itself. You need somewhere to put it. That's where hosting comes in. And there's different types of hosting and different costs associated with that hosting. All right, so we're going to go with the house analogy. So all the way from apartment to owning a house. So shared hosting usually ranges under about 200 bucks a year. That's the apartment. That's basically the first step that a lot of small business owners go to. Because it's affordable, it has what they need. So they don't have a ton of traffic just yet. So it's kind of that first step. Wish my apartment cost that much a year. Same. Now business hosting is that kind of next step. It's like renting a house. You get all the amenities of having a house, the bigger yard, the dedicated resources, all those things. But if anything breaks, what happens? You got to take care of it yourself. No. Oh, that's the one. Just kidding. Now with renting a house, if something were to break, what happens? I don't have to deal with it. Right. You call your landlord. Absolutely. They can fix your AC that went out or whatever happened. Yeah. Same thing with business hosting, right? If something were to happen to the server itself and more technical stuff, not your problem. And business hosting can get a little bit more expensive because of that. It's usually at least a couple hundred dollars up to a thousand or $2,000 a year. But you're getting the performance, again, of having that house and those resources for your website without having to deal with the back end stuff, a VPS or a virtual private server. This is like owning a condo, right? You don't have as many neighbors and that condo is yours. So you can repaint the walls, you can do whatever you want inside of it, but you can't necessarily knock down walls because that's your neighbors and I want to be very nice. They wouldn't appreciate that very much. Don't recommend it. So a couple of costs with this and potentially hidden costs, right? If you're not technical, the server itself ranges, I don't know, from like a couple hundred dollars a year to a couple thousand dollars a year. But because it's a virtual private server or like owning a condo, if that AC breaks or something happens, it's on you. You've got to fix it. So that's either you going in and figuring out how to do it yourself or hiring a pro to do it. And it could get a little costly. And then last but not least, dedicated hosting. This is like the creme de la creme at the top of the top, right? Is this my house? This is your house. You can do whatever you want to your house. Knock down walls, you can add some stuff, build a treehouse in the backyard, whatever you want to do. Skate ramp, pizza, brick oven, pizza everywhere. So with that hosting and that server, that dedicated server, again, hidden costs there, if anything goes wrong, it's on you to fix or hire a pro. The server itself could be at least a couple thousand dollars a year because you're getting the top of the top. This is like top 100 type businesses are using these to make sure that they get a ton of traffic. Make sure that it gets there. So most small business owners won't touch this, but it's good to know that it's that kind of that next level. In case your business ever booms from a small business to an enterprise, right? That's the dream. Right. What other costs are associated with hosting? Now, if you just need a site, you want to build it yourself. Those are the costs associated. But if you want some add-ons, like maybe you want security on your website, like an SSL, anywhere, there's some free options out there. There's some paid options, anywhere from like 80 bucks a year or something like that. Then there's security for your site, like a malware removal and firewall, anywhere from like 50 bucks a year to a couple hundred dollars, depending if you want that mode around your house to keep out the riffraff. And then maybe don't have time to build your website, maybe you need to hire someone. That's an extra cost and most designers charge anywhere from a couple hundred dollars to thousands of dollars, kind of depending on what you're needing from your site. Ecommerce is definitely going to be a little bit more expensive of a cost. Why is that? There's just a lot of moving parts that go into building e-commerce site. It's super time-exensitive. Got it. So that's just an added cost there. Yeah. It's starting to add up. Yeah. All right. So that's all we have for you on how much this hosting costs for your small business really depending on where you're at in your journey. Yeah. And be sure to comment below. What was the favorite thing that you learned today? Also click like. Share the video. I'm sure there's another business out there with similar questions that you have. Also be sure to subscribe. And ring that bell so you'll be the first to know about the next video and all of our notifications. This is The Journey. Bye.