What does it cost to keep a media portal running?
Keeping a media portal running costs between 99 and 1,199 EUR per month including VAT, depending on how much operational risk the portal carries. The figure covers continuous availability monitoring, security updates, coordination with hosting and a defined number of technical hours per month, from 30 minutes at the entry level to 10 hours at the top. Development work, migrations, redesigns, hosting itself and third-party licences are agreed separately and are not part of that figure.
Most publishers can name what their portal earns. Fewer can name what it costs to keep available, because that cost is usually spread across a hosting invoice, an occasional developer, and the hours a newsroom loses when something breaks during publishing. This is an attempt to put a number on it.
What is actually being paid for?
Three things, and they are separable. The first is knowing that the portal is down, which is monitoring. The second is keeping it from going down, which is security updates, certificate and domain renewals, and checks on extensions and integrations. The third is having someone answer when it does go down, which is response time and technical hours.
A portal that only needs the first can be covered for very little. A portal where an outage stops the newsroom from publishing needs all three, and needs the third with a priority attached to it.
What do the packages cost?
- Pulse Basic
- 99 EUR per month, 30 minutes of technical work
- WebMaster Care
- 249 EUR per month, 2 hours
- WebMaster Ops
- 599 EUR per month, 5 hours
- WebMaster Command
- 1,199 EUR per month, 10 hours
All four prices include VAT. Work beyond the included hours is charged by the hour: 60 EUR for a standard technical hour, 85 EUR for a priority intervention, 120 EUR for an urgent intervention outside business hours.
What is deliberately not included?
The exclusions matter more than the inclusions, because they are where a maintenance agreement usually turns into an argument. These fall outside every package and are agreed separately:
- Redesign of the portal or any part of it
- Migration to another platform or another host
- Development of large new modules
- Advertising operations
- Entry of daily editorial content
- Search engine optimisation
- Hosting itself and third-party licences
A publisher who expects a redesign inside a monthly maintenance fee and a supplier who never said otherwise will disagree about it eventually. Writing the exclusions down in advance is cheaper than that conversation.
How is the work reported?
Monthly, and in figures rather than adjectives. A report covers availability, the number and length of outages, average response time, security updates applied, certificate and domain status, whether a recovery check succeeded, requests resolved, and how many of the included hours were used.
A month with no incidents produces the same report as a month with three. That is the point: a maintenance agreement that only produces a document when something goes wrong gives the publisher no way to tell the difference between a quiet month and an absent supplier.
How much should a portal spend?
The honest answer is that it depends on what an hour of downtime costs, and that number is different for a local portal publishing six articles a day and a regional daily whose obituary section is a revenue line. A portal that loses nothing measurable during an outage is over-served by the top package. A portal where the newsroom cannot publish is under-served by the entry one.
The question worth answering first is not which package to buy. It is what actually happens, in money and in editorial time, the next time the portal is unreachable for four minutes during the evening publishing window.