Yes, maintaining a website costs money, and those costs are ongoing. At minimum, you're paying for domain registration (typically $15–$30 CAD/year) and hosting ($5–$50/month for shared hosting, $80–$300/month for managed WordPress or VPS). That's your baseline even if you never touch the site again. Beyond hosting, functional maintenance includes updating your CMS (WordPress, Shopify, etc.), plugins, and themes to patch security vulnerabilities. If you're doing this yourself, it's time. If you hire someone, expect $50–$150/month for basic monitoring and updates. High-traffic or eCommerce sites often run $300–$1,000/month because they need performance monitoring, database optimization, and faster response times when something breaks. Content and SEO maintenance add another layer. Search rankings decay without fresh content or technical upkeep. We typically see clients spending $200–$800/month on content updates, page optimizations, and fixing crawl errors. Sites that ignore this for 18+ months usually see traffic drop 20–40% as competitors refresh their content and Google shifts toward newer, more relevant pages. Security is non-negotiable. Budget for SSL certificates (often free via Let's Encrypt, but premium certs run $50–$200/year), malware scanning, and backups. A single hack cleanup costs $500–$2,500, far more than prevention. Managed WordPress hosts like WP Engine bundle some of this, which is why their $30–$80/month price point makes sense for business sites. At Ottawa SEO, our clients in the 500+ domain portfolio typically allocate 8–15% of what they originally spent building the site annually for maintenance. A $10,000 site might cost $800–$1,500/year to keep healthy. Sites that generate revenue justify higher maintenance budgets because downtime or security issues directly hit the bottom line. If your site is a business asset, treat maintenance as insurance, not an optional expense.