How much does website hosting cost in South Africa?
Hosting prices differ because the products differ. Here is what sets the monthly price, what is billed on top of it, and what our own hosting costs.
What does website hosting cost in South Africa? It depends on what the monthly price includes, because hosting is not one product. Space on a shared server with nothing done for you sits at the low end. Hosting where somebody backs up, secures and watches your site costs more. Our managed hosting is R450 a month incl. VAT.
This article shows what sets the price, what is usually billed on top of it, and how to put two quotes side by side.
What sets the price of website hosting?
Three things set the price: how much of a server you get, how much your site uses, and how much work the host does for you. A small site sharing a server, with no backups or support, costs the least. A site with its own server, daily backups and a person on call costs the most.
How much of a server you get. On shared hosting your site shares one machine with many others. On a virtual or dedicated server, a set part of a machine, or all of it, is yours. Mozilla’s guide to what doing something on the web costs puts the choices as questions: whether you want redundant servers in case yours goes down, whether you need professional, around-the-clock service, and whether you need dedicated servers or “can cope with a slower, shared machine”.
How much your site uses. The same guide says hosting providers charge according to how much bandwidth your website consumes, and that this depends on how many people and web crawling robots access your content and how much server space your content takes up. It warns that what counts as “reasonable” bandwidth usage on a plan is “defined differently from one hosting provider to another”, and adds: “There is no such thing as ‘unlimited’ bandwidth.”
Size is something you can change. Big City Life, a photographer’s site, was referred to us running very slowly, and we reduced the website from roughly 85GB to about 4.5GB. The whole hosting account, website and email together, is now about 17GB on our servers. The Big City Life case study has the story.
How much work the host does. What managed WordPress hosting is sets out the jobs and who does each one on a managed and an unmanaged plan.
For scale: as at 2 October 2026, Mozilla’s guide says reliable, paid, personal hosting can cost around ten to fifteen dollars a month. That figure is for a personal site. Mozilla’s guide to what a web server is says hosting services range from free to thousands of dollars a month.
What is billed on top of the hosting price?
Often the domain name, email, backups and restores, the move from your old host, and updates to the site itself. Some hosts include several of these and some charge for each one. Two plans at the same price can be very different products, so list the lines before you compare the totals.
| Cost line | How it is usually billed | What to ask |
|---|---|---|
| Domain name | Once a year, through a registrar | Who renews it, and what does the renewal cost? |
| SSL certificate (https) | Included, or once a year | Is it included? |
| Email mailboxes | Included up to a number, or per mailbox | How many, and how much space does each one have? |
| Backups | Included, or an extra each month | Are they in the monthly price, or an extra? |
| Restoring a backup | Included, or per restore | Is there a charge when I need one? |
| Moving the site in | Once | Is the move included, and who does it? |
| Updates to WordPress, plugins and the theme | A separate maintenance plan | Are they included, and who fixes what an update breaks? |
| Paid plugin licences | Once a year, to the plugin’s maker | Which does my site use, and whose account holds them? |
The domain name is not hosting. Mozilla’s cost guide says a domain name has to be purchased through a registrar, and that your hosting provider may also be a registrar. It is a yearly charge of its own. We register and renew domains, including .co.za, and quote the price on request.
An SSL certificate need not cost anything. Let’s Encrypt’s About page says anyone who owns a domain name can use Let’s Encrypt to obtain a trusted certificate at zero cost. If a quote charges for SSL, ask what the charge buys.
Hosting is one of several running costs: the running costs nobody quotes covers the rest.
Can I host a website for free?
Yes, but a free host is rarely the right place for a business website. Mozilla’s guide to what doing something on the web costs says free hosting providers may add advertising to your content, beyond your control, and that paid hosting is the better choice because your files are easy to move and most paid hosts guarantee uptime.
An advert you didn’t choose, on a page that carries your name, can cost you more than the hosting you saved.
How do you compare two hosting quotes?
Compare what each one does for the money, line by line. Write down what each quote includes from the table above, mark what is billed on top, and add up a full year for both. The lower monthly price can turn out to be the higher yearly cost once the missing lines are added.
Four questions find most of the difference:
- Is this the price at renewal, or only for the first term? Mozilla’s cost guide notes that most hosting providers give a large discount to start with.
- What are the limits on space, traffic and mailboxes, and what happens when I pass one?
- Which lines from the table are included, and what does each of the others cost?
- What does it cost to leave: is there a notice period, or a charge for moving the site away?
Get the answers in writing, then work through the longer list of questions to ask a host before you sign in our guide to managed WordPress hosting.
If your site is slow, test it before you pay for a bigger plan: how to test your website’s speed explains what to measure.
What our hosting costs
Our managed hosting is R450 a month incl. VAT (R5,400 a year). It covers daily off-site backups (restore included) and uptime monitoring, with up to 15 GB per site, website and email; more space is quoted separately. Updates are left to a care plan: our managed WordPress hosting page lists what is included and what is not.
If you want the updates done too, our basic care plan is R975 a month incl. VAT with the hosting included. A care plan needs our hosting. Website maintenance and care plans lists each plan’s contents.
Besides updates, these lines from the table above are billed apart from our hosting:
- The domain name, quoted when you ask.
- The move. Our Professional website package includes the migration from your existing site. On the Business package, moving an existing site’s content across is quoted separately.
- A paid security licence, if you want one. Wordfence’s free version runs on every site we host. A paid upgrade is licensed to your own account at your cost, or supplied by us with a small markup.
We don’t compete on price, and there is hosting that costs less than ours. We have built and run websites since 2001, and what we sell is a site that is backed up and watched. You are not locked in: your website and its content are yours, and you can move them wherever you like.
Our managed WordPress hosting page shows what the hosting and each care plan include. Tell us where your site is hosted now and what you pay for: Get a quote.
Frequently asked questions
How much should it cost to host a website?
Decide first which jobs you want done for you: backups, security, monitoring, email, updates. Then compare plans that do those jobs. A price that looks low because it leaves out backups is a different product, and somebody still has to do the missing jobs. Ours is R450 a month incl. VAT, with backups and monitoring included and updates left to a care plan.
How much is 1 year of hosting?
Take the monthly price times twelve, then add what is billed once a year: the domain name, and any paid licences. Ask whether the first year is at a starting discount, because the second year is the figure to plan on. Our hosting is R450 a month incl. VAT, and the domain is quoted separately.
Can I host my own website?
Technically, yes. Mozilla’s guide to what a web server is says you could host the files on your own computer, but that a dedicated web server is far more convenient: it is typically more available, always connected to the internet, can keep the same address all the time, and is typically maintained by a third party. For a business site, that upkeep is what you pay a host for.
Is it expensive to host a website?
It depends on the site: how large it is, how much traffic it gets, and how much of the work you hand to the host. A small site that shares a server costs the least. A large or busy one, or one where the host does the backups, security and monitoring, costs more. The section on what sets the price, above, explains each one.