Social media is important for every company, yet in the rough and tumble changing landscape it’s also important to maintain a website. While small and medium-sized businesses may find it tempting to have just a Facebook or Twitter page for their business, such an assessment is at best, foolish. Therefore any company should consider a web strategy as a greater part of their social media strategy.

As with our past posts, we’ll be looking at the high, middle, and low end of web management available to any company.

The High End

Who: Private Hosting Companies, Hosting Your Own Personal Server

How Much: Depending on the amount of data and space used, $30 and up per month + your blood, sweat, and tears.

Why So Much: While data storage has dropped immensely in the past 20 years since the inception of the Internet, running your own website is still a costly activity, and involves your blood, sweat, and tears to keep up the costs of maintenance. Those interested in this area must also take into account the possibility of cyber attacks, which have become more automated than ever. Scalability, hiring programmers, and managing all of the content and traffic are also a major issues any company should take into account as well.

You Would Go This Route If: This is not for the faint of heart, unless scalability and cost are things that you are willing to play with. If you’re a growing business with customers and revenue, there’s no issue going this route. If your business started this yesterday this is something that may want to wait.

The Middle End

Who: Traditional hosting sites (GoDaddy, NameCheap, et al) + paid sites like SquareSpace

How Much: $4 to $16 a year depending on the type of domain + $10 per month and higher depending on the service provider.

Why: Domain names used to be expensive but can now be had for anything from the cost of a sandwich to a low-end steak dinner. If you are interested in going into business for yourself there is no doubt that the affordability is there. Just append your URL with a little work to whatever site you are working on and you are good to go. Most hosting sites also work with content management systems like WordPress and SquareSpace.

You Would Go This Route If: You wanted to start a content-based blog (Like Curatti) or wanted to augment your personal brand online. It’s so cheap nowadays, so why not? Paying a little more, unlike the low end, also affords you extras like plugins for WordPress sites, for example.

The Low End

Who: Free websites like Blogger and WordPress, among many others.

How Much: Just your time, blood, sweat, and tears

Why: There’s really no reason to go this route. Maybe you’re just really lazy, or aren’t committed to a website but still want to have some presence.

You Would Go This Route If: You really shouldn’t… but like the previous paragraph said, maybe you just aren’t that committed.