On average, most domainers pay upwards of $120-$360/year for dedicated hosting.
I am, of course, speaking about domainers who have chosen to take the path of domain development and not those who have chosen the well-beaten path of domain parking. Domain parking is FREE. You just need to find a good Parking Program and then sit on your domains. If you like FREE, we suggest Fabulous. Not because we have some sort of arrangement with them where we make money if you go there (notice no embedded affiliate number in our link), but instead because we park a number of our domain names with them and have been happy with their service and our results.
I am also not speaking about domainers who have chosen the path of the “mini-site.” We’ve never worked with any mini-site providers so we don’t have any suggestions based on previous results, but we can point you in the direction of providers that we have heard of – though they all seem to be arguing with each other over who offers the best value for your money. If someone was twisting my arm and begging me to suggest a mini-site provider, I would have to go with ChefPatrick, and that is just because I like his style.
Lots of ramble so far to get to the domainers that I am talking about… right? I’m talking about Domainers who have taken the true path to development; those who are developing their domains into full-fledged businesses and websites. These domainers need more than just a Parking Program, more than just a mini-site full of stock photos and mass-produced “unique” content. Domainers that are developing domain names need a dedicated hosting program.
Recently, I have been hearing from many friends and associates who have been paying $10-30/month for hosting. I asked them why they would pay so much and each time I received a reply along the lines of, “I needed something right away and it was the first thing I could find for the price I was willing to pay.”
Well I’m glad that I have been able to take some extra time before finding the host that I wanted to use – especially since a number of these friends are paying as much for multiple websites!
It’s no secret that we use GoDaddy to host our websites. I mean come on right? We’ve plastered their banners all over our website! Well, I have heard from people who have had issues with GoDaddy and I have had issues with their hosting and domain registration services myself. But every time I’ve had an issue I’ve been able to call them up and speak with a customer service representative who was able to either assist me with my problem or direct me to someone who could.
So quickly I’ll just simply nod and state, “Yes we use GoDaddy as a host”, and here are their prices (rounded up to the nearest dollar):
$5/month – basic economy hosting – which is good if you only plan on developing one domain
$30/month – virtual dedicated economy hosting – great for developing many domains
We use the basic economy hosting for websites that have been developed to be separate from the pack. Websites that we either don’t ever want to go down if the virtual dedicated server needs to be restarted, or need to keep separate for billing reasons.
We use the virtual dedicated server for websites that can be developed alongside the pack; websites that sometimes contain more static than dynamic content. We currently host 55 domain names and their content on this dedicated server and are free to add more as we develop them. This means that we are paying roughly 50 cents per domain name hosted.
That is great savings!
So why pay hundreds for domain hosting guys? When you can host the domain names that you want to develop for much, much less.