Somehow rumor has it that running a website is easy.  No one is sure how or why that bad information got disseminated, but it couldn’t be farther from the truth.  Running a successful website takes hard work.  The experience needed and the skillets required is what can help your success.  A few things to consider:
Web hosting.  Who will host your website?  Choosing the right company for this important component of your website is like laying the foundation of your home.  This is where all the information about your site will live.  It must be accessible or it doesn’t do anyone any good.   If the web hosting goes down, which it will, you may actually be able to access the website but it is unusually slow and becomes unusable.
Keeping your website current is crucial to its success.  You may need to respond to comments add new content or products and you will want to update the design periodically.  If this becomes too daunting of a task, you may need to hire a resource.  It may be that your time is of more value focusing on other things and spending a few bucks to keep your site current would be of value. Promoting your site is another time consuming piece of running a successful website.  You will also need to spend time or have someone spend the time creating links to your site as well as ensuring you are represented on all the popular social networking sites.
Once your site has taken off and has proven successful, you may start to see other websites that look suspiciously familiar; almost just like yours.  You can take this as a compliment as they must think you’re doing something right and want to have a successful website like yours.  You may want to consider working with the competition and offering to sell them advertising space on your website.  You may also want to consider selling your site to them or purchasing their site to grow your market share and reduce the competition.
The cost of running a website can be quite variable.   Creating the website can be a large expense depending on who is doing the work for you.  If you are able to do most of the work yourself, obviously this will help to cut down on expenses.  We spoke about web hosting earlier.  There is a monthly cost for web hosting and this cost will vary depending on how large your site.  The more servers you have to host, the more it’s going to cost to host.  And speaking of servers, the cost of maintaining the servers will also vary depending on how many you need to effectively support your site.  There is also a small cost associated with the name of the domain you have chosen for your site.  Although this is a small cost in comparison to some of the others, there is a huge variance in what some companies charge for a domain name versus others.