According to DomainTools, currently there are total of 140 million active domain  with 34k new domain registered daily. This number grows every day. I believe the major contribution to this grow is from online business. There a lots of benefits of doing business online, i.e:

• Minimal start-up costs.
• Faster to setup and execution
• Can operate 24×7
• Possible to reach customer globally
• No office space required

…and many more.

So what are the potential products or services that you can offer online? You could selling physical products (i.e. gold, silver, clothes), affiliate products or net services (i.e. blogging). In this post, I will not talk about how to make money online. Instead, I will talk about the start-up cost – how much it cost you to start an online business and make money online.

Laptop / Notebook

First of all, you need to have a laptop or notebook. A good laptop with sufficient specification would have a price range from RM1,000 to RM2,500. Of course they are many laptop selling beyond that price, but you no need to have higher spec of laptop to running your online business, as you are not hosting the website/blog on you laptop. Unless you are running online business on games review for example that required higher specs (i.e. memory, graphic card) to run your games smoothly. The other option with lower price is Netbook.

Hosting

I started blogging with free blog-hosting services, blogger.com. If you create a blog with blogger.com, your blog will be namely like this, xxxxx.blogspot.com. Blogspot offers user friendly tools with a lots of ready widgets that you can pick anytime you want. You can place ads on your blog which is good in giving you an extra income. However I feel the response time is slower especially when you have more visitors to your blog. This is due to the limitation of bandwidth.

After using blogspot for a while, I switched to another free blog-hosting services called wordpress.com. Interface in wordpress.com is very user friendly, with faster response compared to blogspot. It also offers better SEO than other free blog-hosting. I used wordpress.com for quite sometimes until I realize that there is no way for me to make money from it since Ads is not allowed in this free services.

So I decided to put some investment and buy hosting package under web hosting company. There are many web hosting companies available, either locally or globally. The package offered also varies, from limited space and bandwidth, until unlimited websites. It was hard to make a decision, but my baseline is simple. I need unlimited bandwidth and space, with reliable background. Believe me, once your online business grow, you will not accept any downtime even for 1 hr / year as you are expecting the online business to running 24×7.

After much consideration by referring to my friends and forum, I chosen global web hosting company instead of local. The package was USD 3.95 per month with minimum subscription of 1 year. So my initial cost for hosting at that time was USD 47.4 or around RM142.

Depending on the package and web hosting companies, the hosting cost would range from USD 4 to USD 10 per month, equivalent to RM144 to RM360 per year (USD1 = RM3). Usually the minimum subscription period is one year.  With paid hosting services, you could enjoy unlimited space and bandwidth, unlimited domains as well as 24×7 technical support.

Domain

Usually a paid hosting package will come with a free domain. But again, it depending on the package subscribed. In case it is not included the package, it will cost you USD 11.99 (RM36).

So in total, how much do you need for a start-up? Probably RM1,500 of laptop (Dell / ASUS), RM250 for hosting and domain. If you already have a laptop, then the initial cost is only around RM250.