800website is a Dubai web design agency. This is the list we go through with clients before they sign, because a build price is not an annual budget.
What are the hidden costs of a website in the UAE?
Six recurring items sit outside most build quotes: hosting, domain renewal, maintenance, content, payment gateway fees, and third-party tools. Together they typically add AED 3,000 to AED 8,000 a year to a site that was quoted as a one-time cost.
None of these are dishonest omissions — they are genuinely separate services. The problem is that a quote reading “AED 3,500, complete website” invites the reading that AED 3,500 is the whole number, and it is not.
Our published figures: premium hosting AED 2,400 a year, domain AED 200 a year, maintenance from AED 299 a month after the included support window, content writing AED 250 per page, and payment integration AED 2,500 one-time.
How much does website hosting cost per year in Dubai?
Anywhere from AED 300 to AED 5,000 a year depending on what you buy. Our premium hosting is AED 2,400 a year, which covers a managed environment with a CDN, caching, SSL and backups.
Budget shared hosting at AED 300 a year is real and it is where slow UAE websites come from. The symptom is time to first byte — how long the server takes to respond before anything renders. Under 600ms is healthy; oversold shared hosting routinely sits above 2 seconds, and no amount of front-end optimisation fixes it.
Location matters less than people assume. A good CDN serves cached pages from an edge node near the visitor regardless of where the origin sits. Server response time and caching quality matter more than whether the server is physically in the UAE.
How much does website maintenance cost in the UAE?
From AED 299 a month for a standard business site. That covers WordPress core, theme and plugin updates, backups, uptime monitoring and small content edits.
It is the cost most businesses skip and the one that causes the expensive failures. The most common route to a hacked WordPress site is an unpatched plugin left alone for a year. Recovering from that — cleaning the infection, restoring from backup, and dealing with Google flagging the site as unsafe — costs multiples of the maintenance you avoided.
Our packages include 30 days of support on Business and 90 on Premium. Maintenance is what happens after.
What else should I budget for?
- Payment gateway fees. A percentage per transaction plus a fixed fee, paid to the gateway, not your agency. Separate from the AED 2,500 integration.
- Content refreshes. Prices, services and team pages go out of date. AED 250 per page if you outsource it.
- Extra pages. AED 400 each beyond your package.
- Additional languages. AED 1,000 per language, and Arabic is worth budgeting for in this market.
- Email hosting. Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, per user per month.
Add it up before you commit. A realistic all-in first year for a UAE SME site is AED 6,000 to AED 12,000, and roughly AED 3,000 to AED 6,000 a year after that.
See the full cost breakdown or the published packages.
Talk to us
800website is a Dubai web design and development agency with published fixed prices. Send the details and you get a fixed scope and a fixed price back — no hourly billing. Contact us, message us on WhatsApp, or call +971 58 578 5380.
