Hosting costs money because someone has to maintain the physical or virtual infrastructure that keeps your site online around the clock. That server sitting in a data center consumes electricity, needs cooling systems, requires bandwidth to serve your pages to visitors, and demands security measures like firewalls and DDoS protection. Even if you're on shared hosting where hundreds of sites share one machine, those costs get divided among customers. The price range is massive. Shared hosting runs $3–15 CAD monthly and works fine for small business sites with under 10,000 visits per month. VPS hosting starts around $20–60 monthly when you need more control or handle 20,000–100,000 monthly visits. Dedicated servers or managed cloud hosting can hit $200–2,000+ monthly for high-traffic sites or applications that demand redundancy and guaranteed uptime. Bandwidth is a major cost driver. If your site serves large images, videos, or gets traffic spikes, you'll burn through data transfer allowances quickly. Storage matters too—e-commerce sites with thousands of product images need more disk space than a five-page service business site. Then there's the human cost: someone has to patch security vulnerabilities, update server software, monitor uptime, and restore backups when things break. Free hosting exists but comes with brutal tradeoffs. Providers inject ads into your pages, limit bandwidth to unusable levels, offer zero support, and can delete your site without notice. For any business, that's not a real option. At Ottawa SEO, we typically recommend clients budget $15–40 monthly for standard WordPress hosting through providers like SiteGround or WP Engine if they want hands-off management. For our portfolio properties, we use VPS setups around $60–80 monthly because we're running multiple sites and need SSH access for automation. The rule: pay enough to guarantee your site stays fast and online, because every hour of downtime costs you more than months of proper hosting fees.