This month marks a special milestone – the 5-year anniversary of STEM Changemaker! To commemorate this occasion, I’d like to give you a behind-the-scenes look at what keeps this site running smoothly. Each year, we incur two essential expenses to maintain and improve this website: one for about $51 and one for $19.

Let’s dive into the details of what each of these annual costs enables us to do.

WordPress.com Starter Plan

We annually pay about $51 for the WordPress.com Starter Plan which is $48 annual and then tax. There is a lot included in this Starter Plan! First it includes WordPress hosting and everything else included in the free version of WordPress.com. With this annual plan, I also got our domain free for the first year. Without a paid plan, the site’s primary domain includes .wordpress.com at the end of the site address. If you already own the domain name you wish to use with your website, you are able to transfer your domain registration to WordPress.com for free with your annual plan.

Included also in this price is an SSL certificate. An SSL certificate is like a safety stamp for your website. When your website has an SSL certificate, it will load with https before your domain and the browser will display a padlock icon in the address bar that tells visitors your website is safe and can’t be turned off.

We also get access to an Activity Log for the past 30 days with ability to filter events by type and date. The free sites do still have access to the 20 most recent events. This also includes some great perks like an Ad-Free with a paid plan, the ability to upload audio, and up to 6 GB of storage for images and other documents. We also get 24/7 access to WordPress support.

Domain Registration

We annually pay about $19 to renew our domain. While a Standard Domain Registration for .org is $12 a year, ours is a bit more expensive because it has been classified as a premium domain. Premium domains are typically short, memorable, and have a higher perceived value, which makes them more expensive than standard domains.

There are many different extensions you can look into for your domain, including .com, .net, .org, and many more.

$70 a year is a small cost to pay to help the next generation of STEM Changemakers! What questions do you still have about these annual costs? Feel free to reach out to us at DaniTheEngineer.Blog@gmail.com with any other questions or suggestions.