how much does it cost to develop and maintain a website?

[lithiumx4]

i want to start a website...we'll say that it will work like facebook or myspace, with accounts and people networking....my question is how much time and money will it take to maintain it (other than the yearly payment to keep the domain)...also, if there will be a lot of people on it, how hard will it be to maintain it, and how much will it cost?...and the last question.....how much will it cost to have someone develop a website (like facebook/myspace for instance)
thank you

[George Edison]

It can all be done for on cost if you have a lot of time to invest. Download Dolphin Community Builder and install it on your web server and you will have something similar to Facebook.

[jwenting]

once you get to the size of sites like the ones you mention, you're talking hundreds of thousands in hosting cost per year.
And that doesn't include the cost of the people needed to maintain order, hunt down people breaking the rules, trying to keep spammers and criminals out, building new versions of the software (which alone can cost hundreds of thousands a year), etc. etc.

Total cost for such sites runs into the millions if not tens of millions per year.

[Rokas]

As i am a websites creator and developer its not hard question, first, if you don't own a design and will have to buy it add about 1000$ if you want it to be not unique or just not so good, add just 200$ then if you plan a lot of connections and a lot of visitors, you should be planning more expensive web hosting witch would be about 50$ month, and at last developing, if you will do it by your self then its free, but if you will want someone to develope it for you, like in my company it cost 12$ a day, dependoing on work of course the 12$ is about middle. Hope i helped.

[Peter Kevin Reeves]

Millions of dollars were invested in developing both Facebook and MySpace. Facebook has several dozen developers on staff, in addition to all the companies involved in developing apps for their platform.

Let's assume you aren't anywhere near that ambitious.

A basic data driven web site, written in PHP, sitting on top of MySQL, with authentication and data driven pages can be whipped up in a couple of months. Assuming you don't makes changes in the site too often, maintenance can be limited to a few hours a week.

At a minimum of $50 an hour at 40 hours a week for two months, you're talking approximately $20,000 to develop the functional site.

Or you can always learn how to code yourself and save on the development expenses.

[Tactical Illusion]

Domain name is maximum 5 bucks a year.
To develop something like myspace or facebook you are looking at anywhere from 5 -20 thousand. Which doesn't include maintenance.
You need to have people making sure website is safe to you dont get hacked. 32 thousand a year.
Myspace has 200 servers in Santa Monica. Each server is around 3 -5 thousand dollars. They also have 50 backup servers just in case a server crashes so it wont be down.
Then there are server maintenance. Now you will have to have someone monitoring your servers so they dont get hacked another 32 thousand a year.

lets add this all up.

32,000 (minimum stop hackers server vulnerability)
32,000 (minimum stop hackers website vulnerability)
05,000 (minimum for design website)
50,000 (minimum for website maintenance)
20,000 (minimum for server maintenance)
00,005 (domain)
60,000 (Fiber Optic Service Internet very fast to support users)
500,000 (cost of servers i'm not including space and cables and staff)

So the minimum is 700 thousand a year. Thats for sure for Myspace. 20th century fox owns myspace and facebook so they probably share servers but that's the ball park price.

[Bob L]

First, that type of website would be very costly if someone else does it, secondly if you are asking that question you currently do not have the knowledge of HTML, CSS, PHP, SQL, etc to develop such a site yourself. Please try to learn a few things and create a simple site to start with and grow from there. Start with a good editor such as Dreamweaver or find free (HTML-Kit, fo instance) ones on the web. Good luck but remember to have fun and enjoy doing it as it will take hours.

[adil h]

If you want to develop a website like facebook (REPLICA) it would cost you around $20,000 as i have developed a few of them.