Web "hosting" costs are very much the same as
costs that you may incur for a land based shop or office. Each month or year you
can expect to pay a certain amount in rent. Also, depending on usage, you may
pay more or less electricity, water rates etc.
As with land based establishments, "high street"
locations cost more.
On the world wide web (www) you can expect to pay more for:

high availability / reliability; and

high speed.
The web can be a very unforgiving market place. If your web site
takes too long to load, or is not available at the instant someone is looking
for the services you offer, it is quite probable that you will never
see that prospect again.
Attempting to save money in this area can prove a false
economy. People need to find your site and have it load quickly.
There are a number of ways to promote your website.
These range in price dramatically from nothing - to thousands of dollars.
Some of the most effective ways to promote your web site, do not involve
the internet (eg. you can include your web site name on your business
card or in advertising material).
One of the keys to successful, free promotion on the internet
is good web design. Pages must not only be attractive to the humans that read
them, they must also be easily readible by the 'robots' that 'crawl' the
internet as they build web directories. We discuss this in greater detail
on the following page.