How much does a website cost per month in South Africa?

What a website costs per month, line by line

Every website runs on up to four monthly bills: the domain, hosting, email and someone to look after it. Most owners pay all four without knowing which is which, or which of them they could drop.

A .co.za domain: about R9 a month

Your address, yourbusiness.co.za, is the one cost every website has. xneelo charges R110 a year to register a .co.za and R110 a year to renew it, about R9 a month. Register it in your business’s name, not your web designer’s: whoever holds the domain holds your website and your email.

Hosting: R0 to R450 a month

Hosting is the computer your website lives on. At South Africa’s big hosts a business plan costs R99 to R439 a month at xneelo and R109 to R369 at Domains.co.za, VAT included, and budget plans cost less. Those plans run WordPress, online stores and email, which is why most websites pay for one.

A site built in code doesn’t need any of that. Cloudflare serves its pages from its own network for free, with no limit on visitors, and that’s where we host every website we build, so a once-off Clevex site has no hosting bill at all. A custom build with a backend, such as an online store or customer logins, can need paid hosting: we quote it with the build.

Email at your own address

The hosting plans above come with mailboxes, so email is often what people are really paying a host for. On Cloudflare, mail to you@yourbusiness.co.za can be forwarded free to the inbox you already use. Mailboxes of your own cost from R69 a month for ten at Domains.co.za.

Maintenance: R200 to R3 500 a month

Maintenance is someone keeping the site updated, secure and current. In South Africa it’s sold as a monthly retainer: about R200 to R500 a month for a simple site, and R1 500 to R3 500 for regular changes. A WordPress site needs it, because its plugins need updating every month. A site built in code has no plugins to update, so most of what a maintenance fee buys is changes and someone to call.

One small business website, three monthly bills

The same five-page site costs very different amounts to keep, depending on where it lives and who looks after it. These are the bills once it’s built.

Before any of these, someone builds the site: you on Wix, or a web designer for a once-off fee (what web design costs in South Africa). Ours is R5 500 for up to six pages, and then the site costs you R9 a month to keep, or R159 with Care looking after it.

Website builders: R280 to R640 a month

A builder bundles hosting, a template and the editor into one plan, and charges it for as long as the site is up. Wix lists Light at US$17, Core at US$29 and Business at US$39 a month, billed yearly, before tax: about R280, R475 and R640 a month at R16.43 to the US dollar. Core is the cheapest plan that takes bookings or payments.

The plan is the cheap part. The design, the words, the photos and every change are yours to do, and the site can’t be moved off Wix if you outgrow it. What a website builder really costs over two years.

Monthly website packages: renting or paying it off?

A monthly website package puts the build, hosting and the domain into one fee, from about R300 a month. Two plans at the same price can be very different deals, because of one question: whose website is it?

Renting

You pay every month for as long as you want a website, and it never becomes yours. Stop paying and it goes offline, and you start again from nothing.

Paying it off

Each payment pays off part of the build, and after the last one the site is yours. You pay for a set number of months, then only for what you keep using.

Ours is the second kind. Each payment is a twelfth of the once-off price plus Care, with no deposit and no setup fee: R599 a month on Starter, R899 on Growth and from R1 399 on Custom, with hosting, the domain, updates and small changes included. After the 12th payment the site is yours. Keep Care at R150 a month on Starter, or drop it and pay only for your domain, as a once-off site does.

Paying monthly costs more in the end than paying once (the two side by side). It’s for keeping cash in the business. See how our pay-monthly websites work, or every package on our pricing page.

Which monthly costs are worth paying?

Pay for what keeps the site working for you, and stop paying for what you only pay out of habit. These earn their place:

• Your domain, every year, in your own name.
• Hosting, when the site runs on a server: WordPress, an online store or customer logins.
• Maintenance, when it covers updates you’d otherwise skip and changes you’d otherwise wait for.
• A monthly plan, when cash in the business matters more than the lowest total, and the site becomes yours.

Question a hosting bill for a five-page site that could be hosted free, a maintenance fee that never turns into a change you can see, and any plan where the website is never yours.

Already paying R150 a month for hosting?

Add it up. R149 a month is R1 788 a year, and over three years R5 364: about what a new Starter site from us costs once-off, R5 500, after which the hosting is free. If your monthly bills are higher than your site deserves, rebuilding it can cost less than keeping it.

Check yours first. Our free website check runs ten tests on your own site in a few seconds, and if it’s time for a new one, we redesign it from a blank page and host it free on Cloudflare.