I am in the process of having a website built for me, I have bought the domain name via the godaddy.com website and I thought I was paying for it to be hosted through them. The Web builder has come back and provided me with a price to build the site plus £6 a month for Web hosting
Is this normal?
Would this not be what I’ve paid for when I bought the domain name through godaddy.com?

Thanks

What did you select from godaddy? 6 quid sounds good if they (site builder) are also doing updates.

The web builder probably has some hosting they prefer to use. It tends to be better if you use their preferred supplier for hosting; they are all a little different.

Rachel

You should have hosting included with your godaddy. Maybe your web designer isn’t planning on using it. I’d be very wary of getting the designer to host it elsewhere. You are losing a lot of control and will be paying twice. For reference my host charges me £2 a month for hosting.

I’m not entirely sure!
I purchased the domain names for.com and.co.uk and assumed I then just needed someone to build the site and link in to the Web addresses

Wasn’t aware of an additional monthly hosting charge.

OK, so godaddy.com would have some sort of hosting including with it most likely. I thought that might be the case

Buying the domain and getting hosting are two different things – it’s like buying a custom license plate doesn’t get you the car.*

Often you get free hosting when you buy a domain, but there’s good reasons not to use free hosting especially if it’s for an important site.

*Bad analogy I know. Leave me alone, I’m out of coffee.

Who’s gonna be managing the site in future?

If you, I’d tell the dev you want it on your hosting package.

I think the licence plate analogy is actually a pretty good one. You’ve bought the right to use a name, but you’ve not paid to do anything with it.

£6 per month sounds a bit steep for a basic hosting account.

With hosting and domains it’s always worth checking what it’ll cost you in the 2nd year. The likes of GoDaddy often provide crazy discounts in the first year followed by inflated prices in subsequent years.

OK, that makes sense then now if regards to the number plate explanation! Thanks
But your saying £6 seems pricey. It’s just a fairly basic 4 page “brochure” website for my carpentry company. Just some information about us and what we do with some pictures of previous works etc. No ordering forms or fancy bits like that. So I’d imagine once working it shouldn’t need any upkeep or maintenance? As it won’t be having any regular changes

You can certainly get hosting much cheaper, if you’re prepared to sort it out yourself.

About £15 a year.

FWIW, our cheapest hosting package is £15.99 a month, some clients pat £240+ a month. It all depends on the need of the client.

However, we only host sites we developed ourselves on our servers which means they are very secure, have very little downtime and we have 100% control over them which obviously means they cost more than the likes of GoDaddy.

For a simple ‘brochure’ website as you describe then you should get away with the cheapest package but there will always be some monthly/yearly charge (as I mentioned, mine is £2 a month for hosting, registration and email). It shouldn’t need much maintenance but you may need some. If you leave it all to the web designer you risk getting a bill every time you want to update an image or tweak some text. A simple wordpress site will do everything you want and give the option to make simple changes yourself. Its not too hard to set it up yourself but you may benefit from some professional design but find a friendly designer who will set something up that you can tweak yourself.

Most people just use Godaddy just for for domain registration and host elsewhere.

They offer you many options inc WordPress hosting during checkout which you may have signed up for – check your account. This is £3/m yr one, rising to £6/m after for their most most basic service.

If you are semi technical you can get cheaper and manage yourself somewhere like: https://www.tsohost.com/web-hosting/wordpress-hosting (no affiliation / link – many similar, just Google). If you are more technical you can get some great free credit deals with Amazon.

As an SME / indie Dev offering a non technical user a service / support £6/m IMO is fair / inline with Godaddy standard pricing.

Make sure you have server / WPadmin access / credentials in case he disappears / you wish to transfer elsewhere.