This particular question is really based on how much people are willing to spend , or know how to minimize the cost. I will take my self as an example first then Ill go deeper on which cost person are you.

Me MySelf and I :

I spend about $6 for domain name a year and I spend about $40 for hosting this blog and thats it !

Most of my cost is the time, and research takes time !

Blog cost $1000-$500:

These are the people that don’t know ANYTHING I mean ANYTHING about internet and get screwed up ! So if you are one of those people I feel sorry right now

Here is what they could spend money on!

Hosting and Domain Name - $60+$200

Webdeveloper - Designer - $200-$400

Web Updates - $100-300

Advertising - $200-$500

Cost above only reflects on which route they are going to take. Believe me I have seen people paying 2.000 for website where I could do same for them for %95 less !

Blog Cost $200 - $500

These people know something or have heard about it but yet don’t know what to do.

No need for developer

Hosting and Domain Name - $60 - $100

Advertising $100 ( adsense , text link ads etc…)

Blog cost $8 - $60

No need for Developer

Found good hosting $60 w/o domain name $50

The rest of it is time consuming

Free Blogger $0

Hosted by blogger, typepad, wordpress and such services, has no domain name, and its only time consuming expense

Ok here are couple of tips tricks for those that pay a lot of money or want to reduce the cost of blogging

First of all do you have 1 pc that you don’t need ? If you do get your self something called WAMP and for Linux people LAMP its called windows apache mysql php that is all you need to run example of wordpress and similar software, then all you need to do is point your domain name to your pc ( required extreme pc and network knowledge )

Domain Names ? I have seen people paying $30 for 1 .com domain name, and i am like are you fu*** kidding me ? If you are one of them ARE YOU FKM ? go to godaddy and other domain providers buy domain for $6 -$8 do you need to buy their hosting ? NO YOU DO NOT! ( required some www knowledge for example changing Domain Name servers)

Hosting? Some of them are good some of them are not, I usualy test couple of them in last year, for example Globat they aren’t so bad but their customer service and others really is slow over all rating 7-8 then we got Lunarpages very fast domain name resolution, means site comes up right away and their servers are super fast as you can see my page loads very fast don’t it ? . I like www.lunarpages.com they offer free domain name and good hosting . They have also scripts that install wordpress and blogging software for free and there is really reading required and not techy stuff and even if you don’t know they tend to help you out .

I could go on and on about tips and tricks so to save some reading time ask me by commenting and I will answer your questions asap