Most affordable website hosting packages in South Africa

Having an online presence is critical for businesses in the modern age, and a MyBroadband analysis has revealed that local businesses can get a basic website hosting package for as little as R39 per month.

Offering low-priced hosting packages isn’t easy for South African hosting providers. Absolute Hosting managing director Jade Benson recently told MyBroadband about the challenges local providers face.

He highlighted overall power costs, associated costs to ensure uninterrupted power supply, and connectivity interruptions as the biggest challenges.

Despite the extensive and ongoing load-shedding break in 2024, many areas of South Africa still suffer through bouts of load reduction.

“Power costs are the biggest challenge affecting hosting providers in South Africa, particularly as our business model requires 24/7 uninterrupted power,” said Benson.

“Unlike traditional brick-and-mortar businesses, which operate during set business hours, we don’t have the luxury of closing shop after hours.”

These costs increase rapidly with demand reduction interventions like load reduction and load-shedding.

Benson said data centre providers must increase their capacity to stay online during these outages while hosting providers that use their facilities must either absorb the associated costs or pass them on to customers.

He added that hosting providers have to plan and anticipate failures related to connectivity outages, with fibre outages being a relatively common occurrence.

“These interruptions have a direct impact on the cost of operation,” said Benson.

“We have had to design our network with multiple layers of redundancy to ensure that we remain online all the time.”

The Department of Communications and Digital Technologies also highlighted these challenges in its National Policy on Data and Cloud, published in May 2023.

The document revealed the government’s decision to abandon its data centre plans. It previously planned to establish a High-Performance Computing and Data Processing Centre to consolidate the data centre industry.

Basic website hosting shootout

South African businesses can choose from several basic website hosting packages for less than R100 per month, the most affordable of which is Absolute Hosting’s cPanel Palladium plan.

MyBroadband compared basic website hosting packages from prominent local providers, including Absolute Hosting, Afrihost, Axxess, Domains.co.za, Xneelo, and 1-Grid.

While Absolute Hosting’s Palladium is the most affordable at R39 per month, it offers the lowest email account allocation of the lot at 10. It matches Afrihost’s Silver package for the lowest storage allocation.

However, upgrading to the Osmium package, which costs R21 more monthly, significantly increases the storage, email, and MySQL database allocation.

Axxess’s S package is the next most affordable option of the packages we compared. It offers 3GB of storage, 200 email accounts, and 10 MySQL databases, for R59 per month.

Local businesses can get Afrihost’s Silver package for R69 per month. It provides 1GB of storage, 50 email accounts, and one MySQL database.

The above three packages include a free website builder and one free domain.

1-Grid’s Small plan costs R89 per month and offers 10GB of storage, 100 email accounts, and one MySQL database. It also offers a basic website builder plan that includes hosting for R119 per month.

Domains.co.za’s Web Hosting Basic package offers the highest storage allocation of the lot at 25GB. It also provides 25 email accounts, 10 MySQL databases, and five free domains for R99 per month.

It charges R49 per month to add a website builder.

Also priced at R99 per month, Xneelo’s Basic package provides 5GB of storage, 100 email accounts, five MySQL databases, and 10 free domains. Customers can add a website builder from R39 per month.

The table below compares basic website hosting packages from prominent South African providers.

Feature	Absolute Hosting cPanel Palladium	Axxess S	Afrihost Silver	1-Grid Small	Domains Web Hosting Basic	Xneelo Basic
Storage	1GB	3GB	1GB	10GB	25GB	5GB
Email accounts	10	200	50	100	25	100
Traffic	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited
MySQL databases	5	10	1	1	10	5
Domains	1	1	1	1	5	10
Site Builder	Free	Free	Free	Separate package	From R49/month	From R39/month
Price	R39	R59	R69	R89	R99	R99