: High cost of making a website? There was a rumor about the US's HealthCare website costing around 0 million to create. I looked online, and found that to be a myth, and the real number

@Heady270

Very little of the cost of a website typically goes into hosting. Websites can be hosted for as little as per month. For a ballpark of how much hosting is going to cost, see What kind of website can be run on AWS for 10, 100, 1 thousand, 10 thousand, 100 thousand, 1 million dollars per month?

The main costs for websites are usually:


development
content creation
marketing
management overhead
hosting


In the case of the health care government website, most of that went into development and management overhead. For 0M you could have 3000 developers working for a year on the project.

Some big websites now have a ton of employees:


Google - nearly 50,000
Twitter - over 2,000
Facebook - nearly 5,000


Clearly if you are employing that many people, your costs are going to be very high.

Marketing is another area in which the sky is the limit. Many websites have taken out superbowl ads at millions of dollars for a 30 second slot. Even marketing at a more modest scale such as pay per click web advertising can add up to some real dough.

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