Where it lives, and what it costs to keep it there.
Two separate numbers, kept separate on purpose: what the provider charges you, and what I charge to keep the thing healthy. No markup sits between them.
Care plans
What I charge to keep it running.
Monitoring, patching, backups and a block of small changes each month. Cancel with 30 days' notice, and the accounts stay yours either way.
For a marketing site or portfolio that needs to stay up, stay fast and stay patched.
Uptime monitoring, checked every minute, with alerts to me first
Weekly dependency and security patching
TLS, DNS and domain renewals watched so nothing lapses quietly
Monthly backup and a restore test every quarter
30 minutes of content or copy changes each month
Provider costs billed to you directly, typically R0 to R350 a month
Runs on
Static or hybrid hosting, usually Cloudflare Pages or Vercel
Response
Two business days
BusinessMost taken
R1,450
per month
For CMS-backed sites and small stores where a bad hour costs real money.
Everything in Launch
Daily backups with a documented restore path
Error tracking and a monthly note on what broke and why
Quarterly performance and accessibility check against the original budget
CMS support for your editors
2 hours of changes each month, rolled over once
Runs on
Vercel or Cloudflare, with a CMS and a database behind it
Response
One business day
Application
R3,400
per month
For products with users, data and money moving through them.
Everything in Business
Separate staging environment kept in step with production
Database backups with point-in-time restore, tested quarterly
Production incidents jump the queue at no extra hourly cost
Capacity and cost review each quarter, with the invoice explained
4 hours of changes each month, rolled over once
Runs on
Staging and production, with a managed database and queues
Response
Four business hours
Self-managed
R0
you run it
For teams with their own engineers who want the keys and the runbook, nothing more.
Accounts created in your name and handed over in full
Written runbook: deploys, environment variables, backups, rollback
A recorded walkthrough with your engineers
Architecture diagram and dependency list
Support billed at R850 an hour when you want it
You can move to a care plan later at no setup cost
Runs on
Whatever you already have
Response
Best effort
Provider costs are on top of these and are paid by you, directly, at whatever the provider charges. All prices exclude VAT. Invoices are in rands, payable by EFT within seven days. International clients are billed in dollars or euros at the spot rate on the invoice date.
Comparison
Seven hosts, compared honestly.
These are the ones worth considering from South Africa. Each is genuinely the right answer for something, and genuinely the wrong answer for something else.
Hosting providers compared on cost, location, strengths and drawbacks
Fine for a brochure site on a tight budget. Not where a product should live.
Where it runs
South African data centres
Strengths
Cheap, local, bundles domain and email, and the support line is answered by someone in the same country.
Watch for
Entry plans ship 2GB of storage, which a WordPress theme and a few product photos will fill.
Prices checked 31 July 2026. Provider prices are billed in dollars or euros and converted here at R16.50 to the dollar and R19.04 to the euro. The rand moves, so treat the converted figures as indicative and the foreign amount as the real one.
Recommendations
What I would actually put you on.
Hosting decisions are made once and paid for monthly for years. These are the defaults I reach for, and the point at which each stops making sense.
01
Portfolio or landing page
Cloudflare Pages, or Vercel on the free tier
Static output, unmetered bandwidth, and nothing to patch. The domain is the only real cost.
R0 – R120/ month
02
Business site with a CMS
Vercel Pro with a hosted CMS on its free tier
Preview deploys for every edit and an editor experience your team will actually use.
R330 – R700/ month
03
Store taking real orders
Vercel Pro, Supabase Pro, and a local payment gateway
Add gateway fees of roughly 2 to 3.5 percent per transaction. Below about 40 orders a month, a hosted store platform is cheaper.
R750 – R1,600/ month
04
Product with users and load
Vercel Pro with Supabase Pro, or Hetzner behind Cloudflare
The split depends on whether your traffic is bursty (managed wins) or steady and heavy (a VPS wins on cost).
R1,000 – R4,500/ month
05
WordPress or PHP you are keeping
xneelo Standard or Afrihost Bronze
Local billing, local support, and a stack these hosts are genuinely built around.
R99 – R279/ month
Running costs
The line items nobody puts in the quote.
Small individually, and together they are most of what a modest site costs to run. Budget for them up front rather than meeting them one renewal at a time.
Typical retail pricing for a South African business. All of it billed to your accounts, not mine.
.co.za domain
Registrar dependent, renews annually
R100 – R160 a year
.com domain
Worth owning alongside the .co.za
R200 – R320 a year
Business email
Google Workspace, or from about R25 on Zoho
From R110 per user a month
TLS certificate
Let's Encrypt, renewed automatically. Nobody should be selling you this
R0
Uptime monitoring
Free tiers cover most sites comfortably
R0 – R180 a month
Error tracking
Free tier is enough until you have real traffic
R0 – R450 a month
Payment gateway
Payfast, Yoco or Peach. No monthly fee on most plans
2 – 3.5% per transaction
Transactional email
Order confirmations and password resets
R0 – R350 a month
Ownership
Every account is in your name, from the first day.
Hosting, domain, email, database, monitoring and error tracking are created under your billing details and I am invited in. It is slightly more admin at the start and it means you are never negotiating with a developer for access to your own business.
You pay the provider their price. I bill for the work, not the infrastructure.
A runbook, not a phone call
Deploys, environment variables, backups and rollback, written down and handed over.
Leaving is a password change
Thirty days' notice, a call with whoever takes over, and nothing to extract from me.
Questions
Hosting, ownership and the local reality.
Running something already and want a second opinion on the bill? Send it to info@angelmaile.com and you will get an honest read, including when the answer is to change nothing.
Yours. Hosting, domain, email, database and monitoring are all set up in accounts you own and pay for directly. I get invited to them. If we stop working together you change one password and nothing breaks, which is the whole point.
No. Reselling hosting at a margin turns a service into a leash. You pay the provider at their price, and you pay me for the work of keeping the thing healthy. Those two numbers stay separate on purpose.
Yes, and increasingly it should be. Vercel runs compute in Cape Town, AWS has af-south-1, and Cloudflare has points of presence in three South African cities. For a static site the edge matters more than the origin, so most visitors are already served locally regardless.
It is not a hosting problem. Data centres run on generators and your site stays up while your office does not. The real local risks are a fibre cut between you and the CMS, and a payment gateway having a bad afternoon, neither of which is solved by hosting closer to home.
Not always, and I will say so. A static brochure site with no CMS can sit untouched for a year quite happily. Anything with a database, a payment gateway or a login rots: dependencies go stale, tokens expire, APIs change under you. The plan is insurance with some small changes bundled in.
From R6,500 for a straightforward site, including DNS cutover after hours and a rollback plan if the new setup misbehaves. Anything with a database or email needs a look first, because migrations are priced on how tidy the old setup is.
Thirty days' notice, and the handover is the same one every client gets: accounts already in your name, a written runbook, and a call with whoever is taking over. Nothing needs to be extracted from me.
Build pricing
Still working out what the build itself costs?
Fixed-price packages for landing pages, marketing sites, stores, web applications and mobile apps, with rates, add-ons and payment terms alongside them.
Most of the ones I see are either paying for capacity that is never used or saving R200 a month in a way that costs a day of downtime a year. Either way you will get a straight answer, and no obligation to move anything.
