Building a website is not hard. Pricing one is, because the range is so wide: a few hundred RMB at the low end, tens of thousands at the high end, and no standardised way to compare the two. The market has not matured to the point where most companies can be served quickly and to a standard, which is exactly why the numbers look arbitrary.
First, the sequence. A site needs a domain, a server, development, design, filing, deployment and promotion. Development and design are paid once. The domain and the hosting are not — those are annual.
1. The domain
Domain pricing is not fixed and the spread is enormous, from free to thousands. In ordinary commercial use, a company spends under 1,000 RMB a year, and that is the number to plan around.
2. The server
There are two routes: a dedicated host, or cloud service. A dedicated host is the more expensive, at twenty to thirty thousand RMB a year — and that figure covers only the machine. A 1U server also carries data centre hosting fees, which is where the real cost lands.
Cloud servers are much easier to accept: a few hundred RMB a year at entry level, up to around 3,000 at the higher end, billed monthly if you prefer, sized to demand, and upgradable or downgradable as traffic changes.
3. Development
Hard to pin down, because it ranges from free to the million-RMB scale. What it costs depends entirely on what you decide you are buying.
4. Design
A single page can be priced at 10,000 RMB, and there are designers who will do it for 300. Both are real prices for work described with the same word, which is the part that confuses buyers most.
5. Filing
Filing costs nothing but time. That is the whole line item.
6. Deployment
Simple: do it yourself and the cost is your own labour; have the development company do it and it is normally included rather than charged separately.
7. Promotion
If the site only needs SEO, promotion can cost nothing. Most sites need more than that, and promotion budgets can exceed anything else on this list by orders of magnitude.
Which is the honest summary of the whole exercise: the costs are not fixed, and the useful question is not what a website costs, but which of these seven lines you intend to spend on — and why.
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