Short answer: yes, something. No website runs on nothing. But there's a large difference between paying R750 a month for hosting and upkeep, and paying R950 a month forever for a site you'll never own. Here's how to tell them apart.
What you're actually paying for
Three things keep a website alive, and they're separate from each other.
Your domain name. The address itself — yourbusiness.co.za. This renews annually and typically costs R100 to R200 a year. It's the cheapest and most important thing you own.
Hosting. The server your website lives on. Shared hosting for a small business site is genuinely inexpensive — often under R150 a month at cost. Anyone charging you R800 a month for "hosting" alone is charging for something else and calling it hosting.
Upkeep. This is the part people underestimate. Websites are not furniture. The platform releases updates, plugins need patching, security certificates expire, backups need running and checking, and forms quietly stop delivering email. A site left alone for eighteen months is usually either broken, slow, or compromised.
What a fair monthly fee looks like
For a small business site in South Africa, R500 to R1,500 a month is a reasonable range for hosting plus genuine maintenance. At the lower end you're getting the technical basics kept safe. At the upper end you should also be getting content changes, reporting and someone who answers when something breaks.
The test is simple: ask what happens in a month where nothing goes wrong. If the honest answer is "nothing", you're paying for insurance, and that's fine — just price it accordingly.
The arrangement to be careful of
There's a model where you pay a low or zero build fee and then R700 to R1,200 a month indefinitely. It's marketed as affordable, and for some businesses it is.
The catch is ownership. In most of these arrangements the site is built on the provider's own platform. Stop paying and the site disappears. You cannot export it, you cannot move it, and after three years you've paid more than a custom build would have cost while owning nothing.
That's not automatically a bad deal — it's a bad deal if nobody told you. Before you sign anything monthly, ask one question: if I leave, what do I take with me?
What we do
Our builds are once-off. You own the site, the domain and the files.
Care is R750 a month and covers hosting, SSL, daily backups, security monitoring, platform updates, uptime monitoring and one content change a month.
Care+ is R1,950 a month and adds performance reporting, Google Business Profile management, unlimited small content changes and a quarterly SEO health check.
Both are month-to-month. If you leave, the website is still yours and we'll help you move it.
Related reading: Our pricing · Website Care plans · Do I own my website?
Not sure what your current arrangement actually includes? Send us the details on WhatsApp and we'll tell you straight — no charge, no pitch.
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Software updates, security patches, backups, uptime monitoring, and someone to phone when something breaks. Month-to-month, cancel anytime.
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