If you attempt to lower your own investment in these services you run the risk of poor support, downtime and even losing your service providers, and, even worse, your customers.
There are a multitude of hosting centers today and you typically cannot find anything cheaper than $5.00 a month with any kind of decent support. So, by the time you add the costs involved you're spending $60 - $300 a year on these services.
Is there a way to do this for free? The answer is 'yes'. Use a Blogging service. If you think about it a blogging service is just a hosted site with pages being your entries. There is no reason to think that you can't create entries that mimic a classically hosted site. Yes, you might find yourself constrained with some design freedom - but the payoff is much higher. Why?
1. Blogging services like Blogger.com and Wordpress.com are free and are built on massively parallel and high scaled architectures that are a dimension greater than 95% of any hosting provider. The downtime is very low.
2. You get automatic content management tools that help you deliver content faster (that's what Search Engine Optimization is all about) and spend less time worrying about your design or paying for designers.
3. You get the latest and immediate publishing services such as RSS feeds, Blog submissions and search engine submission.
Some have asked me if it is possible to get a hosted blog domain that is shared such as blogspot ranked in the search engines. The answer is an absolute 'yes'!
Search engine care the most about content and quality links. In fact to help answer this question I decided to create a test blog to see if I could manipulate it's ranking as easily in Google. After 8 weeks of optimization it was ranked #5 for my primary search term and #7 and #8 for my secondary terms.
So, if you don't have time to worry about designing a site and managing it's content I would strongly suggest using a blogging service. My personal pick is Blogger only because of the freedom they give you to add scripts and modify the templates to your liking.
Wordpress has better layout options and more complete blogging features but will not allow scripts. There are some newer blog tool options as well that I haven't tried yet such as new Microsoft Live Spaces.
Whatever your solution just remember that one way to start making money is not to spend it.
