The honest yearly bands
Hosting is where Indian web budgets quietly leak. Intro offers mask renewal prices, and "free hosting with our plan" locks your site to your vendor. The honest yearly bands from the calculator's infrastructure assumptions:
| Hosting tier | Yearly band (INR) | Fits |
|---|---|---|
| Domain (.com, .in) | ₹800 – ₹4,000 | Everyone, in your own account |
| Shared hosting | ₹2,000 – ₹8,000 | Brochure sites, low traffic |
| Managed WordPress/cloud | ₹8,000 – ₹25,000 | Business sites, stores, staging included |
| Cloud (scaled) | ₹15,000 – ₹1,00,000+ | Apps, high traffic, custom infra |
The renewal-price trap
Indian hosting intro prices run ₹99–₹200/month and renew at 3–5×. The ₹99 offer becomes ₹599. Always price the renewal, not the offer, and prefer hosts whose renewal is close to their intro. The same trick applies to domains: first year ₹199, renewal ₹1,500. Check the renewal before the checkout page does.
Whose name is the account in?
The single most common hostage situation in Indian web projects: the agency bought the domain and hosting in their own account. When the relationship ends, your website is their asset. Rule for every engagement, stated in the quote: domain, hosting, analytics and email accounts are created in your name, with your card. A developer who resists this is planning your dependency.
Shared vs managed vs cloud, honestly
- Shared: fine for brochure sites and first versions. You share a server with neighbors; their traffic spikes become your slow pages.
- Managed: worth it for any business site or store. Staging environments, real backups, better stacks. This is what "care plan plus hosting" should mean.
- Cloud: for apps and scale. More control, more ways to misconfigure. Needs the developer to manage it, which is part of a care scope.
Email: the hidden hosting decision
Professional email on your domain (you@yourbusiness.in) needs either your host's mail or a provider (Google Workspace ~₹1,700/user/year, Zoho from free tiers). Deliverability is a real engineering concern: see the email deliverability page before choosing free mail on a shared host.
Total infrastructure budget, first year
Typical business site: ₹800–₹4,000 domain + ₹8,000–₹25,000 managed hosting + ₹0–₹20,000 email = roughly ₹9,000–₹49,000/year, outside the build. The cost calculator states these assumptions inside every estimate so the build and the running costs are never confused.