October 08, 2026
The bill for keeping a website running in India has two parts, and only one of them is fixed. The fixed part is the domain at 800 to 1,500 rupees a year, shared hosting at 3,000 to 15,000 a year, and an SSL certificate that is free with Let's Encrypt or 1,000 to 10,000 a year if you buy one. The variable part is the maintenance plan, the person or studio who keeps the site patched, backed up and changed when you need it, and that runs from 1,000 to 10,000 rupees a month depending on what it covers.
The gap inside each range is wide because the same word, maintenance, describes anything from a quarterly backup check on a five page brochure site to daily attention on a store that takes orders. This article breaks the bill down, lists what a plan should and should not include, gives a rough picture by site type, and explains how to tell whether a monthly retainer is worth paying or whether you'd be better off paying per fix.
We build and host sites for businesses across India from Rajkot, and the maintenance conversation is the one most owners have not had when they arrive. The build was quoted. The running cost was not.
Three things renew every year whether anyone is looking after the site or not.
The domain is the cheapest and the most dangerous to forget. A .in or .com renewal is 800 to 1,500 rupees a year at most Indian registrars. The first year is often sold at a discount, so budget on the renewal price, not the price you paid. If the domain lapses, the site and every email address on it stop at once, and after the grace period someone else can register it.
Shared hosting is 3,000 to 15,000 a year. The bottom of that range buys a slot on a crowded server, an old PHP version and support by ticket. The top buys an Indian data centre, current software, daily backups on the host's side and a person who answers. For a site that earns enquiries, the difference over a year is less than one lost lead.
SSL is the certificate that gives you the padlock and the https address. Let's Encrypt is free and most decent hosts renew it automatically every 90 days. Paid certificates at 1,000 to 10,000 a year make sense when the host does not support the free one, when you need a wildcard covering many subdomains, or when a bank or client requires a named certificate.
These three renew on different dates and often from different accounts. Put them on one calendar and make sure every one of them is registered in the name of the business, not the developer's.
A maintenance plan in India costs 1,000 to 10,000 rupees a month. Here is what sits at each end.
At the bottom you get the minimum a site needs to stay safe: a backup taken and stored off the server, software updates applied, the SSL renewal checked, and a couple of small text or image changes a month. That is the right level for a brochure site that changes a few times a year.
At the top you get a site that is watched: daily backups with a tested restore, uptime monitoring with an alert to a phone, a security review, a set number of hours of changes each month, tests that the forms and payment gateway still deliver, and a short written note every month on what was done. That is the right level for a store, a portal or any site where an hour offline costs real money.
Size is not what moves a site up the band. How much can go wrong is. Four things push a plan towards the top: content that changes every week, custom code that needs a developer rather than a button, integrations such as a payment gateway, Tally or the WhatsApp Business API that break when the other side changes, and a need for someone reachable the same day.
Above 10,000 a month you are no longer buying maintenance. You are buying development on retainer, and it should be quoted as that, with a scope.
A plan is only worth the money if the following are written into it. Ask for each one by name.
Anything with a beginning and an end. A redesign, new pages, a new feature, a language edition, SEO work, content writing, photography and ad management all have a scope, so they should each get their own quote. Bundling them into a monthly fee hides what you are paying for and, more often, hides what you are not getting.
Be careful in particular with plans that include "SEO" for a small extra amount. A retainer for a small business that does honest SEO runs 8,000 to 25,000 a month on its own, and packages under 5,000 usually mean an automated report and bought links. If the maintenance plan claims to do it for a fraction of that, it is not doing it. Our SEO service page explains what monthly SEO actually involves.
A plan should also never lock you in. The hosting account, the domain and the source code stay in your name. If you stop paying, the site keeps running on your hosting; you simply lose the person looking after it.
The fixed costs barely change between site types. The plan is what changes.
Brochure site, 5 to 10 pages, content changed a few times a year: domain, shared hosting, free SSL, and a plan at the bottom of the 1,000 to 10,000 band, or pay per change with backups and updates still done by someone on a schedule.
Business site with a blog and enquiry forms: the same fixed costs, and a plan in the lower to middle part of the band, because forms need testing and articles need adding.
Shopify store: Shopify's Basic plan is around 2,000 rupees a month on annual billing in India (check the current price), plus paid apps and payment fees. The maintenance plan on top covers theme updates, app conflicts and product changes, usually the middle of the band.
Custom ecommerce store, portal or internal tool: the top of the band or a separately agreed retainer. It has a database, integrations and users who notice a fault within minutes.
Count last year's incidents. If the site changed fewer than four times and nothing broke, pay per change, but still pay someone a small monthly amount for backups and updates, because those are the two things that go wrong quietly.
If the site takes orders or brings in the enquiries your sales team works from, run this test: what does one day offline cost you in lost orders and calls? If that number is bigger than a year of the plan, take the plan. For most businesses that sell anything through the site, it is.
There is one more thing that per fix work rarely includes. Nobody is looking at the site between fixes, so a broken form or a missed renewal is found by a customer, not by the person you pay. A retainer buys the looking.
The failures are all ordinary and all avoidable. The domain expires and the website and email vanish on a Tuesday. The SSL certificate lapses and every browser shows a red warning before the page. The host retires an old PHP version overnight and the site throws an error on every page. The contact form stops sending because the host changed its mail rules, and for three months nobody notices that enquiries are going nowhere. An old plugin with a known hole gets used to plant spam links on your pages, and Google notices before you do.
Each of these costs more to put right than a year at the bottom of the plan band, and the last two cost you customers you will never know about.
Ask six questions and get the answers in writing.
What exactly is included, in hours or in number of changes? Where are the backups stored, and when was a restore last tested? Is the hosting in my name? What is the response time for a broken site and for a small change? What happens to the site if I stop paying? Will I get a monthly note of what was done?
At Asket Studio, hosting is set up in the client's own name from the start, the client owns the source code and every credential at handover, and a monthly plan for updates, backups and fixes is offered on top, agreed separately from the build. The development service page describes the build and handover; the contact page has a form if you want a plan quoted for a site we did not build.
A maintenance plan runs 1,000 to 10,000 rupees a month. Backups, updates and a couple of small changes sit at the bottom; monitoring, security review, integration tests and set hours of changes sit at the top. Domain, hosting and SSL are paid yearly on top of that.
You can handle the renewals and small content changes yourself if the site has a simple admin. Updates, backups and security are worth paying for, because the cost of getting them wrong is the whole site.
No. Maintenance keeps the site running as it is. SEO changes what the site says and how it is structured, and is a separate monthly retainer with its own report.
If the domain, hosting and code are in your name, any other developer can take over in a day. If they are not, get them moved now, while the developer is still answering the phone.
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