What a website actually costs to run per year in India

Clients budget for the build and forget the bills that follow it. This is every one of them, with what it costs, what it should cost, and what makes it go away.

The domain

Your .in or .com name renews yearly at whichever registrar you use. It should be registered in your account, in your name, with your card. A domain held in a vendor's account is the most common way a business loses its own website. Registrars publish their own prices; the point here is that it is a small, unavoidable yearly line, and it must be yours.

SSL

Free. There is no reason in 2026 to pay for a standard SSL certificate. Let's Encrypt issues them free and most hosts renew them automatically. On AWS, public certificates from AWS Certificate Manager are free when used with services like CloudFront and Amplify. If a quote lists an annual SSL charge, ask what it is for.

Hosting

This is where the build decision shows up on the bill.

A static site (HTML, CSS, JavaScript served from a CDN, which is what a custom-coded React site is) has no server to rent. On AWS Amplify hosting the free allowance is 1,000 build minutes, 5 GB stored and 15 GB served per month; above that, storage is 0.023 USD per GB per month and data transfer 0.15 USD per GB. A typical business site with a few thousand visits a month sits inside the free allowance or a few dollars over it.

A WordPress or other server-rendered site needs a server or managed hosting plan, priced monthly, plus somebody to keep PHP, the CMS and its plugins updated. The hosting itself is not expensive; the patching is where the retainer comes from.

Email

Business email on your domain (you@yourcompany.in) is a per-user monthly subscription from Google Workspace, Zoho Mail or Microsoft 365. It is separate from the website and should also be in your own account. Budget it per mailbox.

Licences

Only some sites have these. Premium themes, page builders, form plugins, sliders, security plugins and SEO plugins are typically yearly renewals. Lapse one and its feature stops working or stops updating. A custom-coded site has none. If you are on WordPress, list every paid plugin and theme and add up the renewals; that number is often larger than the hosting.

Maintenance and support

What a site needs depends entirely on how it was built:

• Static custom site: almost nothing. Dependencies get updated a couple of times a year; content changes are edits and a deploy. There is no server to patch and no plugin to break.
• CMS site: monthly updates of the CMS, theme and plugins, backups, and a security check. Skipping them is how sites get hacked. This is a real, recurring cost, whether you pay a vendor or spend your own time.

Ask any vendor for the yearly support number and what it covers. See the twelve questions for the rest of that conversation.

Analytics, Search Console and the rest

Free. Google Search Console, Google Analytics and a Google Business Profile all cost nothing and should be set up at launch in your own Google account.

Putting the year together

The build cost is the same conversation as the running cost, because the build decides most of the lines above. That is the reason UgeWorks includes domain setup, hosting on AWS, SSL, analytics and Search Console at launch rather than billing them as extras: they are cheap or free, and they belong to you.

Questions people ask

Sources

1. Let's Encrypt — free, automated certificates
2. AWS Certificate Manager pricing — public certificates are free
3. AWS Amplify pricing — free tier and per-GB rates
4. Google Business Profile