Most conversations about website cost stop at launch. That is where the invoices are largest and where the attention naturally goes. But a website is closer to a vehicle than a piece of furniture: the purchase price is one number, and keeping it running safely is another.
This is what ongoing website costs actually look like for Canadian businesses, line by line.
Hosting: 10 to 500+ CAD Per Month
The spread here is enormous because the products are genuinely different.
- Shared hosting, 10 to 30 CAD per month. Your site shares a server with many others. Fine for a low-traffic brochure site. Performance is unpredictable because it depends on your neighbours.
- Managed hosting, 30 to 150 CAD per month. Tuned for a specific platform, with caching, staging and automated updates included. The sweet spot for most business sites.
- Cloud or VPS, 50 to 500+ CAD per month. Dedicated resources you control and are responsible for. Appropriate for e-commerce, applications and anything with meaningful traffic.
If Core Web Vitals matter to you, hosting is not a place to economize. Server response time sets the floor for Largest Contentful Paint, and no amount of front-end work recovers from a slow time to first byte.
Domain and SSL: 20 to 100 CAD Per Year
A .ca or .com domain costs roughly 20 to 60 CAD annually. SSL certificates are effectively free now via Let's Encrypt and are included by any competent host. If someone is billing you separately for a basic certificate, ask why.
Software Updates: 50 to 300 CAD Per Month
Content management systems, plugins, themes and libraries all ship updates, and a meaningful share are security patches. Skipping them is the most common route to a compromised site.
The work is not just clicking update. It is testing that updates do not break anything, which is why it needs a staging environment and someone paying attention.
Security: 20 to 200 CAD Per Month
A web application firewall, malware scanning, login protection and monitoring. Cheap relative to the alternative: cleanup after a compromise routinely costs several thousand dollars, and that excludes the reputational damage of being flagged as dangerous in search results.
Backups: 10 to 100 CAD Per Month
Automated, offsite, and tested. The last word is the one people skip. A backup nobody has ever restored is a theory, not a safeguard. Daily backups with 30 day retention is a reasonable baseline for a business site.
Content and Small Changes: 0 to 1,500 CAD Per Month
Copy updates, new pages, seasonal changes, adding team members, publishing articles. Some businesses handle this themselves, which is precisely what a good CMS is for. Others retain their agency for a few hours a month.
Whichever way, budget for it honestly. Sites that never change tend to slide steadily down search results while competitors publish.
What This Adds Up To
Rough monthly totals for a typical business, all in Canadian dollars:
- Small brochure site: 50 to 200 per month. Shared or managed hosting, updates, backups, occasional edits.
- Established business site: 200 to 800 per month. Managed hosting, active security, regular content, some ongoing improvement.
- E-commerce: 500 to 2,500+ per month. Higher hosting demands, payment and platform fees, more frequent updates, and real consequences for downtime.
A useful sanity check used across the industry is 15 to 20 percent of the original build cost per year. A 15,000 CAD site implies roughly 2,250 to 3,000 CAD annually to keep in good shape. That is a guideline rather than a rule, but it is a better starting point than assuming zero.
What Skipping It Costs
Deferred maintenance does not stay free. It converts into larger costs later, reliably.
- Security compromise. Cleanup, potential data breach obligations under Canadian privacy law, and a search listing marked as harmful.
- Silent breakage. Contact forms that quietly stop sending are remarkably common and can run for months before anyone notices the enquiries stopped.
- Compounding technical debt. Three years of skipped updates is not one big update. It is a migration.
- Ranking decay. Performance degrades, content goes stale, competitors publish. The decline is gradual enough to be easy to ignore.
Choosing a Maintenance Plan
Ask what is actually included, because plans marketed at similar prices vary enormously:
- How often are updates applied, and are they tested on staging first?
- What is the backup frequency and retention, and have restores been tested?
- What is the response time when something breaks, and does that include evenings and weekends?
- How many hours of content changes are included, and do unused hours roll over?
- Do I get uptime and performance reporting?
- If I leave, do I get my site, my data and my hosting account?
That last question is worth asking before you sign rather than after. If you are still working out the build side of the budget, our guide to website costs in Toronto covers what the initial project should run.
