Website hosting costs break down into a few tiers based on infrastructure and performance. Shared hosting runs $3–$15/month and works for blogs or low-traffic business sites under 10,000 monthly visits. You share server resources with other sites, so expect slower load times during traffic spikes. VPS hosting sits at $20–$80/month and gives you dedicated CPU and RAM slices, suitable for sites pulling 20,000–100,000 visits monthly or running custom applications. Managed WordPress hosts like WP Engine or Kinsta charge $30–$300/month but handle security patches, caching, and backups, which saves developer time. Dedicated servers start around $80–$500/month and make sense once you hit 200,000+ monthly visits or need strict uptime SLAs. Cloud hosting on AWS, Google Cloud, or DigitalOcean scales with usage, typically $10–$200/month for small-to-medium sites, but can spike if you don't set billing alerts. Domain registration adds $15–$30/year per domain, and SSL certificates are usually free via Let's Encrypt on most modern hosts. The real cost driver is support level. Budget hosts offer ticket-only support with 24–48 hour response times. Premium managed hosts answer in under an hour and proactively monitor server health. At Ottawa SEO, we run 500+ domains across a mix of cloud infrastructure and managed WordPress hosts. For client sites, we typically recommend $20–$50/month managed WordPress plans for businesses doing under $500K annual revenue, then migrate to cloud or dedicated once traffic justifies it. Watch out for renewal pricing that jumps after the first year and bandwidth overage fees if you host video or large PDFs. Always factor in staging environments and backups, which some hosts bundle, others charge $5–$15/month extra.