If you want to start making money online, one of the first barriers you’ll encounter is the cost of web hosting for a website. You can start a free blog with WordPress, but they have rules against affiliate marketing and pretty much anything that would actually make you money.
If you host your own website, then you own your content, and you can do and say what you want (within reason). You can sell your own products, participate in display advertising, affiliate programs, and all the other ways you can make money.
Web Hosting costs are funny in that there is a huge range of prices. You can go big and spend $200 per month on dedicated hosting, but only an enterprise-level company website would really need that kind of server. Shared hosting plans are where you want to start out. You can go from $1 per month all the way up to $20 per month for most hosting plans.
But because you’re just starting out, web hosts will offer massive discounts to you to get you to sign up with them. If you use a GoDaddy promo code for their economy hosting plan, you’ll get 1 year of hosting for $12, plus a free domain name registration.
Now the fine print with that deal is that it will renew at the regular price of $120 or so next year. Maybe you’re making so much money by this time next year that the renewal rate won’t matter. If you still want to keep costs down, we have some strategies below you can use to save money too.
How To Save on Hosting Renewal Costs of Your Website:
1. Order multiple years upfront.
Because you’re a new customer, you’ll get the best discounts when you first sign up. So if you use a 50% off coupon, you can lock in 3-4 years upfront (if you can afford it) and the total cost of hosting for all 4 years will be significantly reduced.
Using GoDaddy for example, the 1st year is $12 and the renewal rate is $129, so the total cost over 4 years would be: $399 (excluding domain renewal rates).
If you use a 50% off coupon for all 4 years, then the total cost over those 4 years is: $258. The 50% off promo code would also apply to the domain registration for 3 of those 4 years, so you would save even more.
2. Move Between Hosts
Most web hosts would be quite angry at me for suggesting this, but we’re not on their side: we’re on yours. If you’re willing to migrate your website, you can keep using new customer coupon codes on new web hosts each year.
This used to be quite difficult. But now there’s a plugin that makes it easy: All-in-one WP migration. It’s 100% free. Here’s what you do:
- Install the plugin in your WordPress site (we’re assuming you’re using WordPress here).
- Click on ‘Export’, and create a file. It will download a file to your computer that is your entire website.
- Next, sign up with a new host and install a new version of WordPress.
- You’ll need to change your nameservers to the new web host, so there may be downtime of an hour or two (best to do it on weekends or off-peak traffic times).
- When the nameservers propagate, go to your blank WordPress website. Install the all-in-one WP migration plugin again, and click on ‘Import’.
- Import your new file. The file may be too big, but you can adjust memory settings in your cPanel of your new host.
- And that’s it: upload the file and it will recreate your website exactly as it was: database, files, images, everything.
We admit: it’s sneaky. But in a pinch, it’s a cheap way to keep web hosting costs way down. And we don’t work for any hosting companies, so we can say things like that.
3. Threaten to Leave.
When your hosting renewal date is coming up, you can request to cancel your account with your existing provider. They may offer you a deal to stay. This tactic does come with risk: they may say ‘okay!’ and cancel your account. So make sure you have a backup of your website before you try this.
There you have it. We didn’t give you any tips on how to make the website you’re creating make money, but that’s for another day. With all the cash you’ve saved, you’ll start making money memes of your own.