The domain is your address —yourbusiness.es— and hosting is where the site lives. They are paid separately from the design, and they are two of the few things in this business with a fairly clear market price.
What each costs
| First year | From year two | |
|---|---|---|
| .es domain | €5 – €15 | €12 – €20 |
| .com domain | €1 – €12 | €12 – €18 |
| Shared hosting | €30 – €70 | €90 – €150 |
| SSL certificate | Included | Included |
That second-year jump is not a hidden trap: it is how the entire sector prices. The offer applies to the first purchase and renewal goes to standard rate. Worth knowing beforehand rather than when the charge lands.
Why nobody should charge you for SSL
The padlock in the browser comes from Let's Encrypt, which is free and which any decent host installs in two clicks. If someone is billing you €80 a year for "the security certificate", they are charging for something that costs nothing. Extended validation certificates are a different product that neither you nor almost anyone else needs.
The check almost nobody does
Find out whose name your domain is registered in. It is common for an agency to register it in theirs "to manage it more easily", and the day you want to move you discover you cannot take it without someone else's permission. Any whois lookup tells you in seconds, and it is fixed with a change of registrant.
What you can cut and what you cannot
- Cuttable: premium hosting. For a local business site with normal traffic, good shared hosting is plenty.
- Cuttable: defensive extensions. If you have the .es, the matching .com is optional unless your brand is at risk.
- Not cuttable: backups. Either the host includes them or you do them, but they have to exist.
- Not cuttable: the domain in your own name. If it is in your web designer's name, the site is not entirely yours.