Member-only story

I Have Paid Almost Nothing for Website Hosting in Over 15 Years. This is How I Did It.

Miguel A. Calles
Serverless CISO
Published in
5 min readJan 3, 2025

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Photo by Christin Hume on Unsplash

I started paying for website hosting in the early 2000s. I assumed this was the only way to get a custom website without a drag-and-drop builder with restricted templates.

I was under the impression that this was how it had to work. So, when I started a web development company, I followed the same model. I charged small businesses $20 per month to have their custom website.

I would install WordPress or Joomla on a PHP web server. I would buy a reseller plan from an established web hosting company. The company would give me a discounted price, and I would sell the plan to my customers at the full retail price.

I would also charge an upfront $300 price to create the website. After delivery, they would pay a $40 hourly rate to update the site in 0.1 increments. They could sign up for a monthly support plan that included two hours of updates.

I later realized I was overcharging my customers when I learned about a new technology.

Most small businesses would update their website once every one or two years. They were paying me for a support plan that they never used.

I started my business not to profit from my customers but to help them market themselves online.

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Serverless CISO
Serverless CISO

Published in Serverless CISO

We explore the benefits and cybersecurity of serverless computing. Serverless allows startups and large enterprises to build some amazing things by providing on-demand, event-based, and low-cost computing.

Miguel A. Calles
Miguel A. Calles

Written by Miguel A. Calles

Author of Mastering AWS Serverless · AWS Community Builder · Specializing in CMMC, SOC 2, serverless & engineering.

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