How Much Does Website Maintenance Cost?

You wouldn't buy a storefront and then never clean it, fix the lock, or update the sign. Yet that's exactly what most businesses do with their websites the day they launch. Here's what maintenance really costs — and what it's really worth.

The going rate

Professional website maintenance in the US typically runs $75 – $300+ per month, depending on what's included. Ours starts at $75/month for hosting, monitoring, updates, security and support. For most businesses, that's less than the cost of one hour of unplanned downtime — and a fraction of what a single lost customer is worth.

What the money actually buys

• Hosting. Your site lives on servers that are fast, reliable and looked after. This alone usually runs $10–30/month retail.
• Monitoring. Someone notices when your site goes down at 2 AM — and fixes it before your customers do.
• Updates & security. Software, plugins and dependencies get patched. Security issues get handled, not discovered by a breach.
• Content changes. Prices, hours, menu items, news — the small edits that keep your site true. This is the part businesses underestimate most.
• Backups. A working copy of your site, ready to restore if anything goes wrong.
• Support. A human who knows your site and answers when something breaks.

Why the $0/month website is the expensive one

The "we built it, it's done forever" approach has a hidden price tag:

Outages. Sites go down. Without monitoring, you find out from a customer — or never find out at all. Every hour down is lost business.

Stale content. A site with last year's hours or last season's menu destroys trust faster than a broken site does.

Security. Unpatched websites get hacked. Recovering from one costs far more than years of maintenance would have.

Bit rot. The web moves. Browsers change, standards change, your site slowly falls apart — imperceptibly, then suddenly.

What about doing it yourself?

If you're technical and your site is simple, you can handle some of this — for a while. But your time has a price, and website care is a steady drip of small tasks that busy owners stop doing. That's the entire point of a maintenance plan: your website shouldn't become your problem.

What should you look for in a plan?

• A clear list of what's covered — no vague "support".
• A real human to talk to, with response times you know up front.
• No lock-in. You should own your site and be able to leave with it.
• A plan that scales — because next year's website will need more than this year's.

That's exactly how our PTG Care, Grow and Pro plans are built. Take a look — the cheapest plan costs less than one hour of your time per month, and it buys a website that works when you're not looking.