A small business website in India has two running costs after launch. The fixed bills are a domain, hosting, an SSL certificate and email. For a 5-page site those can stay under US$150 a year, plus Google Workspace for each person who needs an address. The other cost is work: updates, backups and checking the contact form still sends. You do that yourself or pay someone.
What are the fixed costs of a website each year?
Four bills arrive whether or not anyone touches the site. Every price below is a list price from the vendor's own page, checked on 3 November 2026. Where the vendor publishes in US dollars we've kept dollars, because that is what your card gets charged. Your bank converts it at its own rate, and GST is extra on all of them.
Domain renewal
OVHcloud's Asia site lists a .in domain at US$7.99 a year, for both the first year and renewals. A .com costs US$9.99 for the first year and US$16.49 a year after that. The renewal price is the one to look at, because you pay it every year the site stays up. We used OVHcloud because it publishes both prices in dollars on its own pages. We haven't compared every registrar Indian businesses use, and GoDaddy or Hostinger India may charge you something else.
Hosting
Hosting ranges from free to a server you run yourself. These are the cheapest tiers each vendor lists.
Tier Example Listed price What to know Shared hosting Hostinger Premium US$1.99 a month if you prepay 48 months (US$95.52 upfront), then US$10.99 a month on renewal Runs PHP, so it suits WordPress. Plan your budget on the renewal price. VPS DigitalOcean Basic Droplet US$4 a month for 512 MiB of memory, or US$6 for 1 GiB You patch the operating system and the web server yourself. Free static hosting Netlify Free US$0, with 300 credits a month Bandwidth costs 20 credits per GB. Paid plans are US$9 (Personal) and US$20 (Pro) a month. Free static hosting Vercel Hobby US$0 Vercel says Hobby is "for personal, non-commercial use". A business site belongs on Pro, at US$20 a month. Netlify and Vercel host sites built as static pages or with a framework such as Next.js, which is what we build in. A 5-page brochure site should sit well inside Netlify's free credits, but we haven't measured that against any one site's traffic, so check the usage page after the first month.
SSL certificate
Let's Encrypt, run by the Internet Security Research Group, issues trusted certificates "at zero cost" to anyone who owns a domain. Most hosts set one up for you. If a host tries to sell you a paid certificate for a 5-page site, ask what it gives you that the free one doesn't.
Business email
Google Workspace's India pricing page lists two entry plans, before tax. Base is ₹99 per user per month. Starter is ₹270 per user per month. The page shows these under its annual-commitment heading, and it also lists a new-customer offer on Base. Two people on Base comes to ₹2,376 a year plus GST.
What work does a website need after launch?
Updates and security patches
On WordPress that means core, the theme and every plugin. On a VPS add the operating system. A static site has far less to update, mostly the build tools, and only when a security fix comes out.
Backups
Keep a copy of the files and database somewhere other than your host. Restore it once, so you know it actually comes back before the day you need it.
Uptime monitoring
UptimeRobot's free plan watches 50 monitors at 5-minute intervals and says it is good for commercial projects. Its cheapest paid plan, Solo, is US$9 a month billed yearly. One free monitor on your home page is enough for a small site.
Content edits
New prices, changed timings, a new branch, an updated product list. Each one is small. Left for a year, they pile up until the site says things that are no longer true.
SEO upkeep
Fix broken links, check Search Console for errors, and keep your Google Business Profile matching the site. Our post on SEO-friendly website development covers what a site needs from the start.
What breaks if you skip maintenance?
The domain expires
This usually happens because the card on file expired or the renewal emails go to someone who left. Your email stops along with the site, since both run on the domain. OVHcloud gives a .in domain 30 days' grace before suspension and a .com only 5. After that comes a 30-day redemption period, and restoring a .com in it costs US$56.60.
A WordPress plugin gets exploited
Patchstack counted 11,334 new vulnerabilities in the WordPress ecosystem in 2025. Of those, 91% were in plugins and 9% in themes, with 6 low-priority ones in core. Patchstack also found that 46% had no fix from the developer by the time they were disclosed. Updating on time won't cover those, so delete plugins you don't use and replace ones nobody maintains.
The contact form stops sending
Forms usually fail silently. The visitor sees a thank-you message and the email never arrives. A host move, a changed email password or a spam filter can each cause it. Send yourself a test enquiry once a month.
PHP reaches end of life
WordPress runs on PHP. According to php.net, PHP 8.1 reached end of life on 31 December 2025, and PHP 8.2 gets security fixes only until 31 December 2026, eight weeks from now. PHP 8.3, 8.4 and 8.5 are still supported. If your host still runs 8.1 or older, nobody fixes its security holes any more. Moving up can break old themes and plugins, so owners tend to put it off.
What does KodeThat's Website Care Plan include?
The Website Care Plan is ₹3,000*/mo. Our pricing page lists what it covers:
- Hosting, backups & security updates
- Uptime monitoring, we aim to respond the same working day
- Monthly content & image changes
- Speed & SEO health checks
- Priority WhatsApp support
- Works even if we didn't build your site
Details, and how we take over a site someone else built, are on our website maintenance page.
What does a 5-page site cost to run for a year?
This is an illustration built on our assumptions, and your own figures will differ. We assumed a 5-page site with a contact form and no shop, a .in domain, WordPress on shared hosting, and two people on Google Workspace Base. Prices are the list prices above, before GST. We kept dollars and rupees in separate totals, because adding them would mean picking an exchange rate and your bank will use its own.
Done yourself
| Item | Based on | Per year |
|---|---|---|
| .in domain | OVHcloud renewal | US$7.99 |
| Shared hosting | Hostinger Premium at the renewal rate, 12 months | US$131.88 |
| SSL | Let's Encrypt | US$0 |
| Uptime monitoring | UptimeRobot Free | US$0 |
| Email for 2 people | Google Workspace Base | See below |
| Your time | Our guess of 2 hours a month | About 24 hours |
That comes to US$139.87, plus the email bill of ₹2,376 a year, plus GST, plus about 24 hours of your time. The 2 hours a month is a guess. It covers updates, a backup check, a test enquiry and a few text changes, and it assumes nothing breaks.
With a care plan
| Item | Based on | Per year |
|---|---|---|
| .in domain | OVHcloud renewal, in your name | US$7.99 |
| Website Care Plan | ₹3,000*/mo for 12 months | ₹36,000* |
| Email for 2 people | Google Workspace Base | Same as above |
| Your time | Sending change requests on WhatsApp | A few minutes a month |
We assumed the hosting sits inside the plan, since the plan lists hosting. Confirm that for your own site on the first call. So you are weighing the plan fee against the hosting bill plus your 24 hours, and against whether those hours really get spent. To see what building the site costs in the first place, read our website development cost in India guide.
Our take
For a small Navi Mumbai business building a new site that changes a few times a year, Ravi and Zaid would skip WordPress. Build it as a static or Next.js site and host it on Netlify's free plan. There is no PHP to upgrade and no plugin to patch, and the upkeep is close to an hour a month, which is our estimate and not a measurement. Our post on website builders versus custom development covers that choice in more detail.
If you already run WordPress with a handful of plugins and nobody has logged in for three months, pay someone to look after it, us or anyone else. Almost half of the vulnerabilities Patchstack counted had no fix at disclosure, and PHP 8.2 support ends this December.
Whoever looks after the site, keep the domain in your own name, under an email address you will still read in five years, with auto-renew switched on. If the domain lapses, your email goes with it. And don't put a business site on Vercel's Hobby plan, because Vercel's own pricing page says it is for non-commercial use.
Where these numbers come from
We checked every source on 3 November 2026. Prices change, so check the vendor page before you buy.
- .in and .com registration, renewal, grace and restore prices: OVHcloud .in page and OVHcloud .com page.
- Shared hosting promo and renewal prices: Hostinger web hosting.
- VPS prices: DigitalOcean Droplet pricing.
- Free and paid static hosting: Netlify pricing and Vercel pricing.
- Free SSL certificates: Let's Encrypt, About.
- Business email per-user prices in India, before tax: Google Workspace India pricing.
- Free and paid uptime monitoring: UptimeRobot pricing.
- WordPress vulnerability counts for 2025: Patchstack, State of WordPress Security in 2026.
- PHP support and end-of-life dates: php.net supported versions and php.net end of life.
