Pricing
How much do a domain and hosting cost in Colombia?
A .com domain costs between $45,000 and $90,000 COP a year. Decent hosting for a business site, between $120,000 and $500,000 COP a year. Anything much beyond that without a clear reason deserves a question.
But the price is the easy part. What really decides whether this ends up cheap or expensive is whose name it's in, and that appears on no price list.
They're not the same thing, and the difference matters
It's the most common confusion and it takes two sentences:
- The domain is the address.
yourbusiness.com. You rent it by the year from a registrar. It's yours as long as you pay, and it's the only item here that can't be replaced: lose it and you lose the address your customers know and the years of ranking attached to it. - Hosting is the land. The computer where your site's files live. Change provider tomorrow, move the files, nobody notices.
Put another way: hosting gets changed on an ordinary Tuesday; a domain gets lost forever. Rank your worries accordingly.
The prices, in pesos, this year
| What | Per year (COP) | What you're paying for |
|---|---|---|
.com domain | $45,000 – $90,000 | The address. The same at any serious registrar. |
.com.co domain | $60,000 – $130,000 | Same, but it signals you're Colombian. Useful if you only sell here. |
| Shared hosting | $120,000 – $350,000 | Fine for most business sites. |
| Hosting for an online store | $350,000 – $1,200,000 | More resources, because there's a catalogue, a cart and payments. |
| SSL certificate (the padlock) | $0 | Free these days with Let's Encrypt. If it's billed separately, ask why. |
| Email on your domain | $25,000 – $130,000 per mailbox | hello@yourbusiness.com. Almost always a separate service. |
The ranges are wide on purpose. Hosting at $120,000 and hosting at $350,000 do the same thing 90% of the time; the difference shows up the day something breaks and you need someone to answer.
The question that decides everything: whose name is it in?
This is the part of the article that matters, which is why it gets a heading of its own. When someone builds your site, there are two ways to set this up:
- Domain and hosting in your name, with your credentials. You're the registrant, you hold the password. Your provider works there as a guest.
- Everything in the provider's name. They're the registrant. You pay a "maintenance fee" and have never seen a control panel.
The second is comfortable right up until the day you want to leave. That's when you find out your business's address on the internet isn't yours, that the transfer depends on the goodwill of somebody you've just fallen out with, and that starting over on a new domain means losing every bit of ranking you built.
This isn't a technicality: it's who holds the key to your shop. And you ask before signing, not after.
How to check today, in a minute
Search Google for "whois yourdomain.com" and open any of the lookups. Look at the registrant. Many domains have privacy enabled and you'll only see the registrar — in that case, log in to your registrar account. If you don't have an account, that's your answer.
"But they gave me the first year free"
Usually true and usually fine. Plenty of providers include the first year in the price of the site, and it's a legitimate courtesy.
What to ask is what happens in year two. Three specific things:
- What the renewal costs, as a number, before you sign.
- Whose name the domain ended up in, per the section above.
- Who gets the expiry notice. If it goes to an inbox nobody checks any more, the domain lapses on its own. I've seen sites lost that way, and not through anyone's bad faith.
An expired domain doesn't switch off overnight: it enters a grace period and then redemption, where getting it back costs considerably more than renewing would have. Set auto-renew and a calendar reminder. Both, not one.
How I do it, so you have something to compare against
The domain and the hosting go in your name, with your credentials, from day one. That's not generosity: it's that if we stop working together tomorrow, I want you to be able to take the site without asking my permission. A provider who holds the key is competing on how hard it is to leave, not on their work.
The annual renewal — domain, hosting, certificate and backups of the delivered site — costs $290,000 COP. It's a fixed price, not a "from", and it's on the pricing page like everything else.
What isn't included there, and I say so to avoid the surprise, is next year's content changes: those get quoted when they come up, or they don't arise at all because the site was built for you to edit — which is how I build them.
Where this fits in the total cost
Domain and hosting are the small line in a website budget, but they're the only one that repeats every year. Adding it in from the start avoids the awkward conversation in month thirteen.
The full breakdown — what the site costs, what's almost never included and what drives the price up — is in how much does a website cost in Colombia. How long it takes, in how long does it take to build a website. And what I do for that price, with what's in and what's out, in web design.
If you're still before that decision — whether you want a site at all or the Google listing and social will do — start with does my business need a website?