Preface After reading a few posts from fellow bloggers about how much it costs them to run their site, I am intrigued as to how much I am actually paying for this passion project of mine! Check out the last section for more examples. Note The requirements for hosting a personal site and a commercial one is vastly different. Everything mentioned on this page applies to the former. There’s also a multitude of ways to host a blog, and everyone’s tech stack is different, so keep that in mind. Lastly, the currency conversion is only a rough estimation. Costs with a ? means I forgot how much I paid for it and ~ means approximate. Overview Items listed below include the how I create content for BurgeonLab, my main site, and two of my other sites which are relatively inactive as of Q3 2026. Hardware Capital Most of these are not exclusively used for blogging. Any computer will do if you want to start a site! Item Cost ($HKD) ~ $USD Raspberry Pi 4B (8GB) w/ power supply 710 90 UGREEN 2.5" SATA USB Enclosure (Pi boot drive) 100 13 Samsung 870 EVO SATA 512GB ? Mac Mini M1 2020 16GB/1TB (second hand) ~5500 700 Dell U2415 ~2400 300 OWLAB Spring (second hand) ~800 100 Kensington Orbit Trackball 320 Total capital: ~ $10000 HKD / ~ $1275 USD (This is just a reference value.) Electricity The residential electricity rate as of Aug 2026 is ~ $1.55 HKD/kWh / ~ $0.20 USD/kWh. I used this electricity calculator to work these out. Item $HKD ~ $USD RPi 4B (15h/d @ avg 5 W)1 27/y 3.5/y Mac Mini M1 (24h/d @ typical load, avg 20 W)2 270/y 25/y Dell U2415 Monitor (15h/d @ avg 20 W) 100/y 13/y Internet Access I am still quite shocked at the amount we’re paying for Internet. Item $HKD ~ $USD ISP 5000Mbps Fibre 600/m 77/m Software I believe every piece of software I use in my blogging workflow is free and most (if not all) are open source! 🎉 See the table on the /⁠colophon page for the software stack used to run this site. The only one that will cost something (one-time fee) will be my forms provider—they do a deal: $25 USD for 50k submissions which will last me a lifetime. Services Item $HKD ~ $USD Web hosting + CDN (BunnyStorage & CDN) 8/m 1/m Email hosting (Mailbox.org Standard tier) 325/y 42/y SourceHut Git (Paid Amateur Hackers tier for CI/CD) 157/y 20/y Domain name #13 100/y 12.52/y Domain name #2 85/y 11.08/y Domain name #3 85/y 11.08/y DNS (Free from domain registrar) 0 OVH S3 Bucket (Media store) 04 The web hosting plan for my secondary site (WordPress) on Hostinger will be expiring next month. I have not included it in the calculations on this page. Recurring Costs Three types of recurring fees: services, electricity, and ISP. Frequency $HKD ~ $USD Comment Per Year (Only Services) 848 108 Per Month (Only Services) 71 9 If you only have 1 domain, don't need email or CI/CD; it's just $9 HKD or $1.15 USD per month! Per Year (Excl. ISP) 1245 158 Electricity: $397 HKD / $50 USD Per Month (Excl. ISP) 104 13 Electricity: $33.08 HKD / $4.17 USD Per Year (ISP Only) 7200 917 Other Examples From the Smallweb Hardcore IndieWeb: Run your own website 100% independently for only $0.01/day | Neatnik The Cost of Blogging in 2026 | Roger Edwards How Much Does It Cost To Run This Blog? | Kev Quirk How much it costs to run this blog ? | Hyde Home Server - Bill of Materials (BOM) | Matthew Turner Website costs | James IndieWeb Wiki: Costs Affiliate Links I have affiliate links for some of the services mentioned on this page, like Bunny.net, Hostinger, and Mailbox.org. If you like my content or found anything useful here, I’d appreciate it greatly if you use my links! I get a small kickback and will use the credits to fund BurgeonLab! Thank you. Raspberry Pi Power Consumption ↩︎ Mac Mini M1 Power Draw ↩︎ My favourite domain registrar is Porkbun. ↩︎ I haven’t really used the AWS S3 bucket yet (less than 2Mb total). Surprisingly, they’ve not actually billed me for usage since I created the bucket. It’s currently only stores the few photos from Indiekit photo posts. I was testing it out and waiting for Bunny.net to release their S3 Object Storage—which is currently in public preview. I’ll switch over in due course and I predict it will be very affordable ~ $1 to 5 USD/m. ↩︎ [For up-to-date content, visit BurgeonLab directly (XML feeds don't fetch updates in real-time). For topic-specific feeds, visit /subscribe. Thanks for reading my blog using a RSS reader!]