Basic website hosting price comparison - January 2024

[Jan]

Basic website hosting price shootout

South African businesses can get a basic website hosting package from prominent South African providers for as little as R33 per month, a MyBroadband analysis has revealed.

More people prefer to shop online than ever before in South Africa, making an online presence essential for South African businesses.

 

[Swa]

It we're talking basic static websites Cloudflare pages is free and you can upload any zip file as an instance and have access to all old instances of the site.

 

[vanderhost]

Greetings

Maybe one day MyBroadband would consider our company VANDER HOST in one of these shootouts

We would fit nicely in the middle of that pricing table, with a website hosting starting price of R69 / month.

ALL our hosting packages include the following:

• cPanel Control Panel
• SiteBuilder
• Softaculous App Manager
• Databases (e.g. WordPress)
• FREE SSL Certificates
• Unlimited Email Addresses
• Unlimited Domain Aliases
• Unlimited Traffic

We offer free website & migrations from other providers and we offer top notch support.

View our plans here: https://vander.host/web-hosting/

 

[Progenix Oj101]

I'm genuinely curious why EliteHost never features on these articles. Their support is amazing, and their prices are fair. Not that there's anything (that I know of) wrong with any of the hosts listed, but EH is a pretty big player in the market and always excluded.

As an example,

Feature	Personal Unlimited	Business
Storage	Unlimited*	10GB
Email accounts	Unsure	Unlimited
Traffic	Unlimited	Unlimited
MySQL databases	Unsure	Unlimited
Domains	1	1
Site builder	Free	Free
Price	R45	R100

* there are T&Cs, such as mails being removed after a year, unread mails being removed after 6 months, all stored data has to be an integral part of the website, etc.

Business unlimited = unmonitored traffic, and as many emails and databases as you can fit within your storage quota.

 

[Swa]

I'm genuinely curious why EliteHost never features on these articles. Their support is amazing, and their prices are fair. Not that there's anything (that I know of) wrong with any of the hosts listed, but EH is a pretty big player in the market and always excluded.

As an example,

Feature	Personal Unlimited	Business
Storage	Unlimited*	10GB
Email accounts	Unsure	Unlimited
Traffic	Unlimited	Unlimited
MySQL databases	Unsure	Unlimited
Domains	1	1
Site builder	Free	Free
Price	R45	R100

* there are T&Cs, such as mails being removed after a year, unread mails being removed after 6 months, all stored data has to be an integral part of the website, etc.

Business unlimited = unmonitored traffic, and as many emails and databases as you can fit within your storage quota.

That isn't bad if it's truly unlimited. Most of these come with conditions that limit content heavy websites even if it's related to the site. So for instance the question is if you have say a photography website with tens of thousands of pictures if that would fall within accepted usage or like other hosts they call you out for hosting a download site?

 

[Progenix Oj101]

That isn't bad if it's truly unlimited. Most of these come with conditions that limit content heavy websites even if it's related to the site. So for instance the question is if you have say a photography website with tens of thousands of pictures if that would fall within accepted usage or like other hosts they call you out for hosting a download site?

RE: photography site. For business hosting, unlimited doesn't have strings attached. For the personal hosting I can't see it being an issue, as how many hits will you get per day? A few dozen? At what, around 150KB per photo (nobody shows pages of 12MP photos - if anything they'll be thumbnails that you click for the larger version or your visitors are going to have a terrible experience especially if on mobile data).

I think hosting a download site might be a grey area even on business hosting - you'd have to ask them. I can't really see it being an issue though, as you have a limited amount of resources (CPU, RAM) allocated.

 

[JustAsk]

Lol...i'll give you 1gb of storage, 1 db, and unlimited traffic. That'll show 2005 who's the boss.

 

[Swa]

RE: photography site. For business hosting, unlimited doesn't have strings attached. For the personal hosting I can't see it being an issue, as how many hits will you get per day? A few dozen? At what, around 150KB per photo (nobody shows pages of 12MP photos - if anything they'll be thumbnails that you click for the larger version or your visitors are going to have a terrible experience especially if on mobile data).

I think hosting a download site might be a grey area even on business hosting - you'd have to ask them. I can't really see it being an issue though, as you have a limited amount of resources (CPU, RAM) allocated.

That's the thing. High quality licensed versions can be anything from 10MB. The issue is most hosts will catch you with a clause where only content integrated into the site is allowed and the licensed content is seen as a download. I see this as a bit scummy like the all you can eat buffet that limits it to 5 plates when the fat guy walks in.

 

[Illuder]

I feel compelled to comment here as I recently experienced difficulties in local website hosting.

Yes, Absolute Hosting is the cheapest, but 'you get what you pay for'. Whilst on that service, I've experience good speeds, stability and ease of use on the cPanel platform, their support service was 'absolutely' lacking. I would suggest that one takes a priority support package if/when signing up with them, but then, they're not the cheapest anymore.

Sadly, my hosting with them lasted less than 6 months as the frustration in lack/slow support service meant loss of clients due to website downtime. The lower price just wasn't worth the larger scale loss of income. Having said that, instead of the owner attending to my frustration of receiving no response to my support tickets, his first response to a few days old downtime ticket was to close my account because I updated it with a rude message as to why I wasn't being attended to after so long.

Only a search about their service afterwards made me realise that I wasn't the only one. A few reviews website also had complaints of the owners arrogant behaviour (if I learnt anything in life is that there's always someone bigger, smarter and better than me, specially in the sys admin world) .

Nevertheless, they dutifully sent my backup after closing the account which I appreciate. So take their premium support package if you're considering them.


On the other hand, my long term support for 1-grid and axxess met the total opposite.

1-grid offers nothing else but personal 1st class support, prompt responses, even phone calls back to check if everything is OK after the fix. Highly recommended. Just don't expect them to answer their phones. These youngsters prefer the ticket route.

My Axxess patronage goes back since their inception, one of their first clients, and to date, never disappointed. Their self-help portal does almost everything, and their support is pro and prompt. A bit pricier, but their stability is worth the extra.

The cPanel option is more expensive, but worth every cent, this opinion after hosting my own servers for decades using various options from Plesk, ISP config and some others (I'm a veteran sys admin).

The landscape has changed now, it's easier to host locally than Dallas and let the youngsters today do the hard work.

 

[Jade @ Absolute Hosting]

Hi @Illuder

I feel that I need to chime in here and provide some context and defend ourselves given that you have provided a very narrow perspective of what transpired and it serves to only tarnish our reputation which is unfair.

I remember this incident given that we supplied you with a backup of your website files and I was able to link this to your account

Nevertheless, they dutifully sent my backup after closing the account which I appreciate. So take their premium support package if you're considering them.

Sadly, my hosting with them lasted less than 6 months as the frustration in lack/slow support service meant loss of clients due to website downtime.

The above statement is seemingly false as I have taken a look through all of your tickets and our responses were typically within an hour with a few exceptions where the ticket was either logged after hours - below is a break down of the tickets logged and first time to respond
12th October 2023 at 16:34 - responded at 12th October 2023 at 16:37
12th October 2023 at 20:30 - responded at 12th October 2023 at 22:25
13th October 2023 at 04:01 - responded at 13th October 2023 at 04:46
13th October 2023 at 03:33 - responded at 13th October 2023 at 04:45
8th January at 10:07 - responded at 8th January at 10:09
8th January at 12:14 - responded at 8th January at 12:20
8th January at 19:45 - responded at 8th January at 21:11
At no point did you ever log a high priority ticket and the responses were within a reasonable time frame - I'm sorry if these dont meet your expectations.

You mentioned a loss of income and I am sorry if this is the case, but based on your words you were under pressure to get your services up and running within very short notice. When issues did arise and you made us aware we were there to assist you and resolve those issues.

The only downtime that I am aware of is after services were suspended, and shortly after you had issues connecting to our client portal to make payment.

During this time we ensured that our responses were being sent to you and we advised on how to resolve the issue relating to you not receiving an OTP on our portal.

Over and above all of this, the important part to highlight is that you became increasingly hostile, abusive and swore profusely in your ticket responses to us.

No amount of money in the world warrants putting up with this conduct and no one deserves to be treated like this, hence we decided to cease any further interaction with you.

If this is the way that you conduct yourself with the other hosting providers and they are willing to accept that kind of behavior then kudo's to them, but I cannot allow my staff and myself to be spoken to like this.