Someone once asked me to write a post on Blog Overheads and Costs.
I thought it might make an interesting open mike question for some discussion so I’ll throw it over to you the ProBlogger community to write this post in comments below.
What costs do you have in your blogging business?
Time and about £4.00 a month hosting.
My costs are low, only the annual cost for TypePad’s pro level, at this point $150 per year, though I think I pay a few dollars less because of getting a subscription break when I signed on initially.
Additional costs are only my DSL connection charges, which I’d have anyway, and whatever I invest in computer equipment, which I’d be buying anyway.
The software I use for images, Fireworks, I’ve had for years and not upgraded. I did buy Ecto, but don’t use it much yet.
The biggest cost of a blog is time. The amount of time dedicated to putting together The American Moderate Party is tremendous – it is something you have to be passionate about.
I love politics and sharing my POV, so The American Moderate Party works for me.
You can do everything else with a blog for free, using a free host like Blogger.
My costs (all us dollars):
Typepad hosting: $89
Libsyn Podcast hosting: $50
Domain name (Go Daddy): $9
Of this, I might be able to get rid of the Libsyn when my current arangement ends. Might also increase to a Pro Account if I make some money to open more blogs and podcasts.
One question on an off topic: Does the Multiple Authors of the Pro account mean you can create multiple users? (Dumb I know but it seems like a strange offer. Why not get multiple people together and buy one account as the blogs are unlimited?)
Molly
PS. Peter: Whats the name of your blog? You should really mention it. ;)
http://www.mollyzine.com
My costs so far are the hosting plus movable type install.
Somewhere between $130 and $150.
Other than that it’s the time I spend learning the “ins & outs” of blogging. The time I spend posting isn’t much of a cost to me. It’s a long awaited outlet and I enjoy it :)
P.S. Molly would you please ask Peter to let me know what the name of his blog is. I’m just dyin’ to know. HA (sorry couldn’t resist)
Biggest cost for me is time; I use blogger so the hosting and domain is free.
I’m considering shifting to an independent domain and getting real hosting, which would probably up my costs to 10 to 15 dollars per month.
http://gentrysherrill.blogspot.com
the snacks i’m eating while i’m blogging
About $120 per year, plus the time to research and find interesting & relevant material.
Time is currently my major expense for blogging. Since my blog is a personal finance blog, I guess I would consider Money Magazine and Kiplingers “costs” as well.
I am currently using Blogger, but will be looking into other options shortly. Hopefully, whatever I choose for hosting will be Young Professionals Financial Blog
For me, the biggest investment and costs have been the time I spend researching for my posts. Since mine is a technical blog, I have to do a considerable amount of research which requires time before I can post. As far as other costs go, cost of blog script etc I think they are too minimal to even mention.
http://www.big4guy.com
These are my recurring monthly costs:
TypePad Pro – $14.95*
SBC DSL – 19.95**
TOTAL 34.95***
* At this price, I find TypePad Pro a bargain because I can have multiple weblogs (independent of each other) with only one account.
** Of course, this price covers my personal internet use as well.
*** This is paid off by my Google earnings.
I try to use all free services (eg. Blogger), so the only expense is from my ISP, and actually using the internet.
I would say that it costs me in time, just like everyone else, but my time is worthless…
Time, to produce content, and work with the css and php with wordpress.
Moneywise, 10$ for domain name at GoDaddy, and a few beers for the friend who hosts my site for free (for now)…
brem
WordPress: free
Domains: $200 USD a year
Internet Access: $800 AUD a year
Hosting: $1200 USD per year
Blogging: priceless :-)
$120 in yearly hosting
$8 for the domain name
Wordpress in free
Of course, I did spend an initial $200 in blog design, but that is a one-time fee.
$130/mo Pro VPS linux server plan
$50/mo backup
$27/yr domain renewals (two domains)
At this point just time and a domain name I am about to move to. Have a few more things in mind for the near future…
I spend approx US$200/year for hosting 5 blogs (running on WordPress). Time is probably the biggest cost factor.
Like the previous commenters I think “Time” is the biggest cost in blogging. But for the record the other costs are:
Domain Names (I Have Two): $10 (http://www.vasanthdharmaraj.com) and &17 (http://vasanth.in) per year. Country specific domains are expensive.
Web Hosting: $10 per month.
That comes to about $150 per year. And incidentally AdSense brought in $150 last year. So I broke even. ;-)
Well, let’s see…it’s near midnight here and I’m still writing. I published my first post at 430AM.
What’s the question again?
Time is the ONLY one that matters. Other costs do not mean anything!
I use only open-source for my project because I’m a bit fan of it.
Goddady Domain 2$ + Godaddy Hosting 4$/month + WordPress Free = something like 50$/year.
From AdSense I get about 10 to 100 times that amount back so I find it a good deal.
Like that guy before me only time is the only price of blogging. It takes all my free time.
BTW. Check Ubuntu ;)
My costs:
~ $150/month for a dedicated server
~ $10 per domain per year
~ $30/month DSL connection
~ $10/month for electric bill
Costs of hosting my other sites are around £140 per month at present, however, that is due to rise as I set about making the infrastructure a bit more solid. Not bad though for around 1.2Terrabytes of bandwidth per month! Hosting the new blogging site on current servers, so it’s not going to cost any more than it already does. I spend about 4 hours an evening on the site at present, too, and time is precious, but somewhat free to some extent at least.
$25/ year for 650MB & 20 GB Bandwidth, but i have a subdomain and not a domain, so i’m gonna upgrade soon, hopefully moving a domain won’t hurt my stats =
A.H
Because I am using Blogger I don’t have to spend a penny on reliable hosting :)
Of course (as already mentioned) the biggest cost for me is time.
$200/month for dedicated server and server administration service. I currently have something like 40 domains/sites on this server, though most are not blogs. That fee includes patching the server, upgrading or installing needed software, etc. when I need it.
$99/month for synchronous DSL (fast uplink)
$75/month for laptop replacement every 2 years.
Of course, I’m also a full-time web developer and use all of this for more than just blogging, so my costs are higher than most.
However, the dedicated server lets me do things like having one set of WordPress plugins that I can tap into from any blog on the server and a lot of other perks that I would be hardpressed to do without.
I’m going to take a slightly different slant on this and say that blogging doesn’t cost any time at all.
I’ve probably always counted time as a cost of blogging, but sitting here thinking about it I thought I’d take a different approach to it and see how it pans out.
Time spent blogging can only be considered a cost if you are eliminating another income stream while blogging. That is, if you are blogging instead of selling newspapers from a stand, which would normally earn you an income, time spent blogging is costing you what you would make selling newspapers.
If on the other hand, you are blogging instead of sitting watching the television, playing with the kids, socialising with friends, then the cost is not time but the other interests you are sacrificing to continue blogging.
I hope that makes some form of sense, for me personally, I like blogging, enjoy the research, blog when there is nothing more important to do, so therefore is almost a recreational passtime much like reading or watching the television.
Actual costs are hosting and bandwidth, both negligable in the grand scheme of things.
I JUST put up my site.
I agree with Peter (#3) and EngLee(#21). The biggest expense is time.
Total money: $120 with hosting and domain name ($30/qtr)
I built my own site (hence, the time expense) from a template of an existing client.
There ya go, Darren…future post…Differences between building your own blog and going pre-built. :-)
(Come to think of it…I better get writing).
I agree about time costs. But for hosting expenses, I’ve a good scheme that works for me (might work for some of you): I have a hosting business. It’s not big, I have around 60 clients and the cover my costs preety well, even I can create as many blogs I want.
In fact I’m going to write some guides about it.:)
Can we count aspirin for the headaches caused by free Blogger hosting? LOL
I don’t mean this in a condescending way at all, but for those of you using Blogger, I just want to let you know that making the switch to WordPress last year was the best move I ever made…it takes some work, but it’s well worth it.
At the very least you should own your own domain name instead of using a blogspot domain, because putting the kind of hours in that it takes to make a successful blog is kinda’ crazy if you don’t even own your own domain – you’re entirely at the mercy of Google (who owns Blogger, of course.)
Just my 2 cents…learned the hard way. It’s much better to make the switch early on, when your blog is still small and you won’t take that much of a hit.
One you get to WordPress you’ll never look back :)
This was a very timely topic for me to be reading.
I am contemplating moving from free Blogger to — well, that’s what I’m trying to figure out — what is the best choice for me. So reading everyone’s comments was quite helpful.
Still don’t think I have the BEST answer (for me) yet, but I’m going to keep on topic of all these comments and try to come up with a decision in the next week.
Well, the biggest part of cost would need to be assigned to the factor time. For the true hosting etc part:
– Blogengine: WordPress 2.0 – free
– Dedicated server (AMD Opteron beast…not only for my blogs though, but for all sites…) – 69 Euro/month (around 80 dollars)
– Design of the blog(s) – free (if you don’t count time invest)
Cary, I have a domain name, but no technical skills – LOL
I don’t know how to get WordPress onto my domain, or transfer all of the current blog to it.
But thanks for condescending and making me feel extra-stupid (just kidding…I feel extra stupid without your help – LOL! )
I’m teasing! I’m teasing! Don’t get the villagers and pitchforks! You were very nice to offer that advice, thank you.
I’m just in an onery mood today. Sorry. I’m a serial apologist too. Sorry. LOL
I spend $8 a month on hosting including wordpress maintenance
$9 a year for my domain
I’ve also purchased $100 in recording equipment specifically for my blog
My blog is on picking up women, so I’ve also spent a small fortune in night clubs and on parking fees.
I sold my soul to blogging.
Thankfully, I wasn’t using it anyway.
I’m going to disagree with this point of view from an earlier comment:
If on the other hand, you are blogging instead of sitting watching the television, playing with the kids, socialising with friends, then the cost is not time but the other interests you are sacrificing to continue blogging.
Time is finite, and as such always has value. What you’re doing is placing a different (non-monetary) value on your time, but it still is a “cost” even if it’s not a monetary cost. Now if someone could figure out how to give me even just one extra hour a day… heck, I would take an extra hour a week…
My financial costs are zero because I don’t blog for the general public. I blog for family and friends. I already manage several web sites, one of which makes more than enough in revenues to offset my monthly hosting of $180 US for a dedicated server. Being that it’s a dedicated server, I can put out as many domains as I want. My tiny little blog does not use anywhere near the resources of the larger sites.
My domain that I host my blog under is already paid for; I don’t have a specific domain for my blog. I use example.com/blog to host my wordpress installation.
In short, I have zero dollar costs for my blog, but I don’t blog for the same reasons as many. FWIW, I found this site (and continue to return) by looking for adsense tips. While many of the tips and posts here are specific to blogging there’s plenty of information that can be used for general website maintenance as well.
Hmmm… lets see. My costs are pretty expensive considering most of the price for blogging is time. Time is the most valuable thing a person can have and blogging requires a lot of it. But when talking about money, my blogging is very inexpensive!
Really awesome unlimited-domain-names hosting (and practically unlimited bandwidth and disk space) – $36 a year
4 Domain Names – $4.50 average (many are .info)
It looks like a Mastercard commercial script! LOL
I’m with John who said “blogging priceless”:
WordPress: free
Domains: $197/year
DSL plus required phoneline that has no phone attached: $815.40/year
Hosting: $660/year
Hardware: $1000/year
Software: $500/year
Memberships/dues/subscriptions: ~$300/year
Miscellaneous: ??
Side notes – Everyone is mentioning that they’d have internet access anyway, so I should mention that I was buying domain names years before I started blogging. Turning those domains into blogs entirely or adding blogs to them just made them more useful and effective.
I did put a couple of blogs that I didn’t want to devote a domain purchase and bandwidth to on Blogger and Blogsome. My experience is that their traffic is lower in number and quality. For those who say they have zero cost, I’d wager that their income is below its true potential, too.
I’m running a small network of a single domain split into multiple sub-domains, and the costs work as follows:
$1 / mo for the domain
$20 / mo for business hosting
$30 / mo for internet service
$50 / mo for bandwidth surcharges
[$500 / mo for my own labour]
= $101 / mo for basic blogging
Of course, I don’t really count the work that I put into it, or any of my guest bloggers.
Time.
As I run a hosting company I don’t have those costs :)
Nobody remebered to consider the Starbucks factor!
Domain/Hosting – 130 a year
Coffee – about triple
Hey great information from everyone,,,I’m a new blogger and started using Squarespace..its been simple and costs about 200.00 per year. I’ve been blogging for several months and really enjoy the resources on this site thanks Darren!
http://www.retirementthink.com
Thus far just a lot of time. I’m on blogger to start off, so no hosting or domain costs. I know this costs me revenue & traffic, but that’s ok. Once i get to the point where I’m able to cover the costs of hosting /domain, then I”ll move that direction. I just don’t have much of a stomach for risk, so I need to be sure that I can make a bit off this, before I actually invest money. Until then, it’s just a blast :)
Just starting out as a pro-blogger, I consider internet access and hosting costs to be sunk — I use the internet for plenty of other stuff, paid for my DreamHost package years ago.
While I spent $10 on a domain name (glasgowexplorer.com), the largest element of the cost of running Glasgow Explorer is the time taken.
Still, I don’t think I fall into the ‘time sacrifice’ category that Dave mentions above — I tend to blog in idle moments, so don’t consider the cost of my time when blogging to be very great at all.
I do webdesign so blogging is just something as a free time activity but the costs of all my domains and stuff are 120$/month. Even though I got quiete a few readers I never used ad sense or anything else in the past years…. lol
about $160 per year
about $100 a year.
The cost answer is sort of like the Walmart movie – “The High Cost of Low Prices” – Blogging costs are actually fairly low, but the cost of not blogging is fairly high – in my first month of blogging, my seven sponsors have forked over $3,500 in pre-paid advertising. How could I afford not to blog?
Pierre Cutler
The Sacramento Executive