What R39/month actually includes
The full feature list for the Starter plan — nothing here is an upsell, and nothing here is removed at renewal.
What it does not include: a free domain. That starts on the Business plan at R79/month — on Starter you bring a domain you already own, or register one separately.
Cheap hosting has a catch. Here are the four to check.
Worth running these past any host you are comparing us against, ours included.
The renewal price
The intro rate is the headline; the renewal rate is the real price, and in this industry the second is often well above the first.
Every shared plan lists "No Renewal Price Hikes" as a feature. R39/month is what you pay in year one and in year three.
Backups as an add-on
Cheap plans often exclude backups, then charge a restore fee on the day you actually need one — which is the worst possible day to find out.
Daily off-site backups are included on the Starter plan, restorable yourself from DirectAdmin.
SSL billed separately
A site without HTTPS gets flagged as insecure by every browser, so a certificate is not optional — but it is often a line item.
A free Let's Encrypt certificate is installed and auto-renewed on every plan, including the cheapest one.
Servers on another continent
The lowest per-gigabyte price is usually offshore. Every visitor from South Africa then pays for it in latency, on every request.
Local infrastructure and support in SAST — the cheap plan sits on the same servers as the expensive ones.
Cheapest first
Starter at R39/month is the entry point. Paying annually brings it to R33/month.
Billed monthly, no contract
Billed monthly, no contract
Billed monthly, no contract
All prices in South African Rand (ZAR) and include VAT. 30-day money-back guarantee on all plans.
When the cheapest plan is the wrong call
Starter is the right plan for a lot of sites. It is the wrong one for these, and finding that out after you have migrated is worse than paying a little more now.
You need more than one website
Starter covers 1 website. The Business plan at R79/month covers five, plus the free .co.za domain.
You are running a busy store or a high-traffic site
Shared hosting splits a server between accounts. Once traffic is steady, dedicated CPU and RAM stop being a luxury.
You want root access or your own stack
Shared hosting does not give you that at any price. A VPS does, and starts lower than most people expect.
You are hosting sites for clients
Reseller hosting gives each client an isolated account under your brand, which shared hosting cannot do cleanly.