Domain, hosting and SSL — what you actually need, and what it costs

Hi, I'm Logi. These three words frighten more people than anything else in website-making, so let's sort them out once and for all.

The analogy that works:

• The domain is the shop's street address.
• The hosting is the shop itself — where the stock sits.
• SSL is the lock on the door and the sign that says it's safe inside.

Now the details.

The domain — the one thing you definitely buy

The domain is the name people type: yourbrand.com.

What it costs. A .com: €10–20 a year. Country domains: €20–35. Paid annually, renewed automatically unless you turn that off.

Where you buy it. From a registrar. There are dozens. They all sell the exact same domain — the difference is price and how aggressively they upsell.

What to watch for:

• The first year is bait. You see "domain for €1", then year two costs €25. Look at the renewal price, not the promo.
• The domain must be in your name. If someone "gifts" it to you as part of a service, check who is listed as the owner. Otherwise one day you'll want to switch providers and discover your address isn't yours.
• Don't delay the purchase. If you like the name, take it today. It costs about the same as dinner and it's the only thing here that genuinely can't be undone if someone else grabs it.

Hosting — you probably already have it

Hosting is the computer your site's files live on. Here's the good news for 2026: if you use a builder, hosting is included. You buy nothing separately.

You only need separate hosting if you're building on WordPress or writing your own code. In that case €5–12 a month of shared hosting is plenty to start. You do not need a VPS and you do not need "100 GB SSD" — your entire website weighs less than three photos from your phone.

Red flags in hosting offers:

• "Unlimited traffic" — no such thing, there is always fine print.
• A three-year contract paid upfront, before you've tried the thing.
• Hosting "with SEO included" — SEO is not something a server includes. That's a sales trick.

SSL — don't buy it

SSL is what makes the address https:// instead of http:// and puts the padlock in the browser. Without it Chrome shows "Not secure" and half your visitors leave.

In 2026 SSL is free. Let's Encrypt has been handing certificates to the entire internet for years, and they are technically identical to paid ones. Every decent host and every builder turns them on automatically.

If someone wants €60 a year for "an SSL certificate", they are selling you something free. The only exception is the special EV certificates banks use — you are not a bank.

Email on your own domain

ivan@yourbrand.com looks serious. ivan_1987@hotmail.com — less so.

Options:

• Google Workspace / Microsoft 365 — €6–8 per user per month. Works flawlessly, has everything.
• Email from your host — often included free. Fine if you get ten messages a day.
• Forwarding — the cheapest: mail to ivan@yourbrand.com lands in your personal inbox. You reply from the personal one though, and it shows.

To begin with, forwarding is entirely enough. Move to real email when you start sending invoices.

The realistic budget

Here's what a normal small business pays in year one:

• Domain — €15 a year
• Hosting — €0 (bundled with the builder)
• SSL — €0
• Email — between €0 and €90 a year

So: between €15 and €105 a year. Not €800.

If someone sends you a "starter package" quote of €300–600 a year, ask them to itemise it. Nine times out of ten it contains a paid SSL, some "optimisation", and hosting you already have elsewhere.

The order of operations

1. Pick a name. Check it's free.
2. Buy the domain. In your name, with your email.
3. Build the site. With a builder, hosting and SSL arrive on their own.
4. Point the domain at the site. In Brandolog that means copying two lines into your registrar's panel, and the system checks for you whether it worked.
5. Wait. DNS changes sometimes take a few hours. That's normal, not broken.

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If something still feels foggy, ask me in the help center — there are step-by-step articles there for connecting a domain. And remember: the only thing you genuinely shouldn't postpone is buying the name. Everything else can wait until tomorrow.