I do a little web hosting on the side. Only for friends or companies that are run by friends, though. Depending on what they want I charge somewhere between 10

I do a little web hosting on the side. Only for friends or companies that are run by friends, though. Depending on what they want I charge somewhere between 10 and 40 euros a year. If you don't know the dollar/euro exchange rate, just assume it's 1:1 for now. I've also built several web-hosting (static HTML and PHP/MySQL) systems for ISPs (years ago) along with the management and backup solutions to go with them. I make a small loss doing the hosting I do for friends, but that doesn't bother me. I over the years I've often been asked by the people buying my services why I am more expensive than a lot of advertised hosting services. Ha! More expensive, now there's a joke. The key word is 'advertised'. I basically re-sell capacity below cost and re-sell domain registration at cost plus one euro a year for administrative overhead (read : the cost of sending a yearly invoice through snail-mail). My hosting services are 'expensive' because this is what the actual cost is. If I'm running this at a loss in my spare time on a good-will basis, why are there parties out there with full-time staff charging less for (superficially) identical services? Well, let's see.. Registering a domain with a random party is generally a bad idea. For example, some hosting companies put themselves in the registrant information (as owner). In other words, the domain doesn't belong to you and you do not have control over it. Not something a non-techie will know or understand (unless you explain it to them). The price for registering a domain is generally lower when you go with a big hoster, because these organizations have bulk registration deals, which lowers the price they have to pay to register an individual domain. Buy 1 domain at 10 euros, buy 1000 at 1000. Some hosters also play bandwidth games. Ooops, you got linked from a major site and that's caused a spike - which is why your site is now shut down. Please wait 24 hours or upgrade to 'premium'. Pay extra for email. Oh yeah, this is a popular one. Besides not having proper forwarding facilities (or a POP or IMAP server - forward to one address only), many providers will store any email on their own systems and charge for it. Bonus points for "adding email addresses to your domain", which will cost more (of course).